On November 5, the day Saddam Hussein was
sentenced to death, Jalal Talabani, the longtime Kurdish guerrilla leader, who
is currently Iraq's president, was in Paris, on a state visit. He was
installed in the sumptuous presidential suite at Le Meurice, a gold-and-marble
Louis XVI hotel on the Rue de Rivoli, overlooking the Jardin des Tuileries. I
watched the verdict with Talabani in his suite, on a large plasma-screen
television tuned to the satellite channel Al Arabiya. He sat in a gilded
chair, and his expression betrayed nothing. Soon, after a few curt words,
Talabani got up and wandered off to his bedroom. One of his aides tiptoed
behind him. The aide reappeared a moment later to say that Talabani was
sitting in an armchair, deep in thought.
Saddam's death sentence put Talabani in an
awkward position. Saddam had been convicted for the mass killing of 146 people
in the Shia village of Dujail in 1982. If he was executed, he would not face a
second trial, for the 1988 Anfal campaign, in which as many as 186,000 Kurds
were killed. Talabani was on the record as being opposed to capital
punishment, but, according to the Iraqi constitution, one of his duties was to
approve death warrants. In public statements, he had finessed this problem by
saying that he would respect any decisions made by Iraq's judiciary. Still, he
was in a predicament.
After a while, Talabani returned, in a better
mood. He sat down next to me, but we were interrupted by the arrival of two
superbly dressed Frenchmen carrying large shopping bags from Façonnable and
Ermenegildo Zegna. They approached Talabani, bowed deferentially, and took a
pair of dark suits from the bags. One man brandished a measuring tape, and
explained that they needed His Excellency to remove some of his clothes for a
fitting. Talabani stood up and began struggling to take off his jacket. A
valet rushed over to help.
Talabani, who is 73 and has the fat cheeks,
brush moustache and large belly of a storybook pastry chef, is renowned for
his political cunning, his prodigious love of food and cigars, his sense of
humour, his unflagging optimism, and his inability to keep a secret. He is
known as Mam Jalal, which means Uncle Jalal in Kurdish. It is a term of both
endearment and cautious deference; Talabani has a mercurial personality, with
extreme mood swings. He has survived in Iraqi politics largely owing to an
ability to outfox his opponents and, sometimes, his allies. Over the years, he
has made deals with everyone from Saddam Hussein to Ayatollah Khomeini and
both Bush presidents. He is probably one of the very few people in the world
who can claim, truthfully and unapologetically, to have kissed the cheeks of
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.
Talabani refers to George W Bush as his "good friend" but regards Mao Zedong
as his political role model.
Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a Shia politician who is
Iraq's national security adviser, told me, "He's very difficult to define. If
you are an Islamist, he brings you Koranic verses; if you're a Marxist, he'll
talk to you about Marxist-Leninist theory, dialectics and Descartes. He has a
very interesting ability to speak several languages, sometimes" - he laughed -
"with a very limited vocabulary. He has a lot of anecdotes and knows a lot of
jokes. He is an extraordinarily generous person, and he spends like there is
no tomorrow."
Rubaie mentioned a period in the 60s when
Talabani was allied with Saddam. "One day he was a good friend of Saddam, and
then he became a staunch enemy," he said. (In fact, Talabani flirted with
Saddam twice more.) Rubaie saw nothing contradictory in this; Talabani, he
said, was the ultimate pragmatist.
No other Iraqi politician has Talabani's
experience, contacts, and savvy. As a result, he has made the presidency,
which was meant to be more ceremonial than the prime minister's job, a
powerful post. Yet this role, too, carries contradictions. After spending
decades fighting for "self-determination" for Iraq's Kurds, Talabani finds
himself defending Iraq's unity. He now has a choice to make: either he can be
a founding father of the "new Iraq" - the elder statesman who will help rescue
it from civil war - or, if Iraq falls apart, he can be a founding father of an
independent Kurdish state. As always, Talabani has hedged his bets. "I am a
Kurd from Iraqi Kurdistan, but now I am responsible for Iraq," he told me.
"And I feel my responsibility." In another conversation, he said, "It's true
that I am an Iraqi, but in the final analysis I am a Kurd."
Under Saddam, the Kurds "were facing a
dictatorship in Baghdad that was launching a war of annihilation against the
Kurdish people," he said. "We were in need of all kinds of support from
anybody in the world. When war starts, and you participate in it, you will
need support from anyone. There is no supermarket where you can go and choose
your friends in a war."
In the current war, some of his unreconciled
friendships have been troublesome. Iran was once one of the Kurds' greatest
allies, and Talabani had planned to fly from Paris to Tehran. But he abruptly
postponed the trip at the request of the Bush administration: he would have
arrived in Tehran on November 6, and the prospect of pictures of America's
Iraqi ally visiting Iran the day before the midterm elections made the White
House uncomfortable.
In Baghdad, Talabani lives in a yellow- brick
mansion on the eastern shore of the Tigris river, outside the Green Zone.
Until April 2003, when Talabani seized it, the mansion belonged to Barzan al-Tikriti,
Saddam Hussein's half brother and the former chief of the secret police, who,
like Saddam, was sentenced to die for his role in the Dujail massacre. (Barzan
was executed on January 15, but his hanging was bungled when the rope ripped
off his head.) The presidential offices are next door, in a palace that once
belonged to Saddam's wife, Sajida.
Talabani's complex sits on the north side of
the ramparts of the Jadiriya Bridge; on the south side is the home of his
political ally Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the Shia leader of the Supreme Council for
Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Hakim's house is where Tariq Aziz, Saddam's deputy
prime minister, once lived. The approaches on Talabani's side are heavily
guarded by Kurdish peshmerga ("those who face death") fighters - Talabani
commands some 50,000 peshmerga in the militia of his party, the Patriotic
Union of Kurdistan, or PUK - and on Hakim's by militiamen of the Badr
Organization, his party's armed wing.
The two leaders and their militias work
closely on political and security matters, though in other ways the Kurds, who
are largely secular, and the Shias, who are very devout, present a sharp
contrast in styles. During weeks spent in Talabani's company, I never saw him
or any of his aides pray. Talabani is not averse to alcohol, either, and he
enjoys playing cards with a small group of his cronies.
Talabani's wife, Hero, does not live in
Baghdad with her husband. She stays in their home city of Sulaimaniya, where
she runs a foundation and a television station, and publishes a newspaper. She
and Talabani have two sons: one, Bafel, runs the counterinsurgency wing of his
father's party; the other, Qubad, represents the autonomous Kurdish government
in the US.
At home in Baghdad one morning, Talabani
invited me up to his private quarters. It was early, and he was still dressed
in loose-fitting pyjama bottoms and an immense yellow-and-blue striped rugby
shirt. A valet brought us Nescafé stirred with sugar into a creamy mixture. (I
later learned that this was "Mam Jalal style".) Talabani lit a cigar. (He
favours the long ones known as Churchills.) The day before, two suicide
bombers had blown themselves up at a police recruitment centre just outside
the Green Zone, killing 38 potential recruits. It was the latest incident in
what almost everyone but Talabani acknowledged was an accelerating sectarian
war. "I don't think Iraq is on the eve of a civil war," he said stubbornly.
"Day by day - and this is not an exaggeration - Sunni and Shia leaders are
coming close to each other."
Iraq's main problem was not sectarianism, he
said, but a terrorist war waged by Ba'athists and foreign forces such as al-Qaida.
Without losing his habitual equanimity, he added that the situation had been
made worse by American ineptitude, arrogance and naivety, saying: "I think the
main one responsible for this was Rumsfeld" - Defence Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld, who had resigned days earlier. (Talabani has since welcomed
President Bush's plan to send an additional 21,500 American soldiers to
Baghdad in a so-called "surge". He said in a statement that it showed "a new
effort to improve security in Iraq" and that it "concurs and corresponds with
Iraq's plans and ideas" - although some members of the government had been
openly sceptical.)
After breakfast, Talabani went downstairs to
deal with the affairs of the day. Half a dozen senior personnel were waiting,
as they do each morning. When Talabani has an appointment elsewhere, he is
driven in a BMW 7 Series armoured black saloon, preceded and followed by a
sizable fleet of white Nissan Patrols carrying peshmerga guards. But, more
often than not, people come to Talabani. It is a measure of his ascendancy
that Nuri al-Maliki, the prime minister, usually comes to Talabani, rather
than vice versa. Maliki is the third prime minister since 2004, while Talabani
has been a constant fixture. Maliki does not have Talabani's access to
American and other foreign leaders, and must often work through him. In
public, Talabani tries to defer to Maliki, and he appears to wish him to
succeed.
One source of Talabani's power is his wealth.
Together with his old rival Massoud Barzani, who is the president of the
autonomous Kurdish region, Talabani is believed to have amassed many millions
of dollars in "taxes" on oil smuggled out of Iraq through Kurdistan between
1991 and 2003, when the country was under UN sanctions. And Talabani
obsessively dispenses gifts, trades favours, and buys allegiances, on the
assumption that, in Iraq, the richest suitor has the best chance of winning
the bride.
In many ways, Talabani's behaviour and his
lifestyle are those of a clandestine party boss. His private quarters are
cramped, poorly lit, and undecorated, with counters cluttered with satellite
phones. His indulgences are food and a large personal staff. He and the US
ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad have regular meetings over kallapacha, an Iraqi
dish consisting of the head and stuffed intestines of a sheep. Twice a month,
Talabani sends consignments of Kurdish yogurt, cheeses, honey and handmade
sweets to foreign ambassadors and leading politicians.
Several of Talabani's aides told me privately
about men in his entourage who, they suspected, profited from government
contracts that they steered toward their friends. In this, Talabani's circle
is not unusual. Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish MP, is close to Talabani but is
scathing about the entire government's profligacy, corruption and moral
cowardice. "How does the government expect to have respect when it is closed
off?" he said. "The leaders live in Saddam's palaces, and in the Green Zone,
and they never go out. The prime minister and the president have discretionary
funds to spend as they like of a million or more dollars a month. I think the
corruption is widespread and systemic and comes from the very top . . . All of
this is against a reality in which the families of killed soldiers or police
are given pensions of only $100 a month."
In Maliki's government, cobbled together
after four months of tortuous negotiations following the December 2005
parliamentary elections, Talabani helped make sure that many of the high-level
jobs that didn't go to Shias went to Kurds. (A number of them are Talabani's
friends and relatives.) One of the two deputy prime ministers is a Kurd, and
Kurds head several ministries, including the foreign ministry; the minister of
water resources is Talabani's brother-in-law. From the American perspective,
there is simply an abundance of qualified Kurds - or, at least, many with whom
the US feels comfortable.
Talabani, like many senior Iraqi politicians,
views Moqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shia militia leader whose militia is known
as the Mahdi army, with a mixture of condescension and contempt. The key to
weakening Sadr, Talabani said, was Iran. "If the Iranians will calm down the
Mahdi army, if there will be no assassination, if these - what do you call
them? - 'death squads' will be no more, then only the terrorists will remain.
And if Syria will be silent, only al-Qaida will remain, and we can defeat al-Qaida
very easily."
Talabani went on, "One of the main mistakes
the Americans have made in fighting terrorism is tying our hands and the hands
of the Shias, while at the same time the terrorists are free to do what they
want. If they let us, within one week we will clean all Kirkuk and adjacent
areas." (Talabani's implication was clear: "to clean" is a euphemism for
wiping out your opposition, for killing or capturing your enemies.) Talabani
then adopted a high-pitched, whining voice, to mimic the Americans: "'No-o,
Kurds must not move to the Arab areas, this is sensitive.' If they let the
Shias clean the road from Najaf to Baghdad, they can do it within days. If
they permit the people of Anbar to liberate their area, they will do it, but
they say, 'Ah, no, this is another kind of militia.' They don't understand the
realities of Iraq. From the beginning, we have had this problem with them." He
added, "Wrong plan, wrong tactic, and wrong policy."
Talabani has been involved in politics since
1946, when, at the age of 13, with Iraq still ruled by the British-installed
Hashemite monarchy, he joined an underground Kurdish student organisation. It
was part of a Kurdish independence movement that had taken shape during the
breakup of the Ottoman Empire, after the first world war, when the victorious
European powers failed to give the Kurds their own state. The division of the
empire left the Kurds spread among Iraq (with an estimated four million Kurds
today, or between 15% and 20% of Iraq's population), Turkey, Syria, and Iran;
the greater Kurdistan envisaged by some separatists would encompass parts of
each of those countries.
Talabani was born in the village of Kelkan,
in south-eastern Iraqi Kurdistan; his father was a local sheikh. By 18,
Talabani was the youngest member of the central committee of the Soviet-backed
Kurdistan Democratic Party, led by Mullah Mustafa Barzani. He studied law in
Baghdad (interrupted by a period spent in hiding) and completed his obligatory
service in the Iraqi army. Then, in 1961, Talabani joined an armed uprising
launched by Barzani.
Three years later, Talabani split with
Barzani to join a splinter group founded by Ibrahim Ahmed, the father of his
future wife, Hero. Ahmed did not like the terms of Barzani's negotiations with
the central government. This was a period of violent political instability in
Iraq, with four presidents in the space of 10 years. After a Ba'athist coup in
1968, Talabani made a deal with Saddam, who was then the deputy president, to
obtain more rights for the Kurds and to get his help in fighting Barzani -
only to reconcile with Barzani when Saddam switched sides. It was the
beginning of a dizzying sequence of schisms within the Kurdish rebellion, for
which Talabani bears significant responsibility, and which, for a time,
strengthened Saddam.
Talabani was a Marxist, and then a Maoist,
attracted by "Mao's idea of popular war, of fighting in the mountains against
dictatorship". He was also drawn to the anti-colonial Arab nationalist causes
of the day. On trips during the 60s, he made important contacts - with Gamel
Abdel Nasser of Egypt, King Hussein of Jordan, Muammar Gadafy, Yasser Arafat,
and President Hafez al-Assad of Syria. (In Talabani's office, there is a
single photograph on the wall, of him with Assad. "He was very, very kind to
me," Talabani said.)
In the mid-70s, Talabani spent time in
Beirut, working with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a
Marxist Palestinian guerrilla organisation. It is a murky period about which
Talabani says little, but Kurds close to him suggest that he was then at his
most radical, and at one point became involved in a Palestinian plot to hijack
an American plane in Europe. He is said to have abandoned the scheme when a
contact warned him that Mossad planned to assassinate him.
"We considered the US the enemy of the Iraqi
Kurdish people," Talabani told me. Through the 80s, the US, for its part, saw
the Kurds primarily as troublemakers and as pawns of Syria and Iran. In
Turkey, America's Nato ally, Kurdish separatists had been waging a remorseless
guerrilla war, to which the Turkish military responded with a vicious
counterinsurgency campaign; thousands of Kurdish civilians were killed.
At the height of the Iran-Iraq War, Talabani
once again allied himself with Saddam, then opposed him and helped Iran.
Saddam's next move was the genocidal Anfal campaign. Saddam razed thousands of
Kurdish villages, primarily in Talabani's territory. In the town of Halabja,
between March 16 and March 17 1988, 5,000 Kurdish civilians were killed when
planes dropped a lethal chemical cocktail that reportedly included mustard gas
and nerve agents such as sarin, tabun and VX. Although these attacks later
became part of the current Bush administration's case for overthrowing Saddam,
the Reagan administration, which was supporting Saddam in his war with Iran,
paid little attention; when the news of Halabja broke, the White House blamed
Iran.
After Saddam's defeat in the first Gulf war,
in early 1991, Shias in the south and Kurds in the north carried out
uprisings. Talabani led his forces into Sulaimaniya and Kirkuk. With the US
looking on, Saddam dispatched his army against them. Hundreds of thousands of
Kurds fled, in the midst of a harsh winter, provoking a humanitarian crisis.
The US and its allies declared a safe haven in the north; Talabani and Barzani
(who had temporarily reconciled) began negotiating terms of settlement with
Saddam.
There is an unfortunate photograph from this
period that shows Talabani kissing Saddam on the cheek. "But, you know, at
that time the Kurdish people were in danger of being annihilated," Talabani
told me, by way of explanation. "Fighting is not playing ping-pong," Talabani
said. "Fighting is killing each other. When we were fighting Saddam, we killed
them, they killed us. It's something ordinary. It's war. And when we stop the
war both killers sit down to receive each other. And this happens all over the
world. Mao, he sat down with Chiang Kai-shek! Chiang Kai-shek killed his wife.
His son! . . . But when the time comes to talk peace, they must sit down with
each other. This is the process of life."
As the Kurdish "safe haven" developed into a
"no fly zone" policed by US and British warplanes - a de facto Kurdish
autonomous zone, beyond the authority of Saddam Hussein - Barzani and Talabani
fought for pre-eminence. One dispute was over revenues from oil smuggling.
"Jalal is at his best when he is down, and is
prone to making mistakes when he is up," a longtime friend of Talabani's told
me. "In 1991, he was emerging as a statesman of the Kurds, internationally
renowned. Instead of moving to become the nation builder that he was supposed
to be, he moved into battle, playing with fire, undermining all that he built.
"
In 1994, a civil war broke between the armies
of Talabani and Barzani. In the midst of the fighting, Talabani provided a
base for a CIA task force, and for Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile leader, who
were involved in various failed coup plots. Hundreds of people died in these
efforts. Talabani continued fighting Barzani, who at one point, astoundingly,
invited Saddam's army into the north.
When President Clinton signed the Iraq
Liberation Act, in 1998, promising American support for Iraqi opposition
groups, Talabani and Barzani went to Washington and settled their differences.
By then, several thousand Kurds from both sides had been killed.
Talabani called the bipartisan Iraq Study
Group's report "unfair" and "unjust"; he compared it to terms imposed on a
"colony". But one recommendation that he had no problem with was that
President Bush begin direct talks with Syria and Iran. "It is in our interest
that relations between the US and Iran about Iraq be at least normal, and if
they have other differences let them take them to other parts of the world,"
he had told me a couple of weeks earlier. He was about to leave for his
delayed trip to Iran. He was also keeping the Americans informed. "We never
hide our relation with Iran from America."
Tehran was cold and grey on November 27 last
year, when Talabani and his entourage arrived. Several ministers and a clutch
of Iraqi journalists and photographers were on board. During our descent into
Tehran, one of Talabani's junior aides came down the aisles, handing each
person a form to sign. It was printed in Arabic, and, assuming it was an
official landing document of some sort, I signed it, whereupon he handed me a
thick envelope and moved on. Inside were 20 $100 bills. After we landed, I
asked the aide why he had given me money, and he said it was "a gift from the
president". I thanked him, but said that I could not accept it, and handed the
envelope back. He looked very confused. A senior aide translated my
explanation about "journalistic ethics", which left the man looking only more
mystified. The senior aide then opened his own envelope and, whistling,
counted out 50 $100 bills. "I think he's given me the same amount as the
ministers," he exclaimed. "He does this from his own pocket, you know." He
said that, on each trip, Talabani gives money to all those on board, including
the bodyguards, the flight attendants and the pilot. We calculated that during
the one-hour flight Talabani had given away about $100,000.
The contrast with Baghdad was striking. There
were no armed soldiers or blast walls and security barricades to negotiate.
Instead, we drove through street after street of brightly lit stores with neon
signs; the sidewalks were full of people. But what most caught the attention
of the Iraqis was the large number of women and girls out on the street; the
sight of women in public has become a rarity in Baghdad.
The next morning, Talabani awoke early and
visited the tomb of Ayatollah Khomeini. Then he met Ahmadinejad and the
Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Sources close to Talabani told me that
in their talks he requested a reversal in Iran's policy - specifically, that
Iran's leadership "control" Sadr's militia and ally itself instead with his
government, and that it persuade its allies, including Syria, Hamas and
Hizbullah, to do the same. Talabani then asked that Iran open up
communications with the multinational forces in Iraq, and cooperate with the
Iraqi and US governments in their security plan for Baghdad. And, perhaps most
controversial from the Americans' point of view - assuming that they knew
about it - Talabani proposed that Tehran and Baghdad exchange intelligence,
and that Iran help train and equip Iraq's security forces.
One of the Iraqis who attended the meeting
said that Talabani told Khamenei that Iraq was "at a make-or-break point and
needed Iran's help". He went on: "The Supreme Leader said that he understood
and would do everything he could. In return, he wanted the Iraqis to take more
control over their own security from the Americans."
At a press conference, Ahmadinejad said,
"Iraq is like a wounded hero." Talabani, standing next to him, said, smiling,
"We can only hope that he recovers." The crowd laughed; it was a classic Mam
Jalal moment. Ahmadinejad added, "The best way to support Iraq is to support
its democratically elected government." However disingenuous this may have
sounded under the circumstances, Talabani's officials took it as a further
sign that the Iranians were prepared to help. They told me it was the first
time that the Iranians had explicitly endorsed the current Iraqi government.
An Iraqi minister came up to me afterward,
looking enthusiastic, and said, "You see? I told you it was more than
symbolic!" After a short pause, the official leaned over and whispered
excitedly, "These guys even offered us weapons!"
That evening, a senior Iraqi official said
that he was worried about the "mixed messages" coming from the US. "I
emphasised with the Iranians that they should not just assume that because the
Americans were bogged down in Iraq they were incapable of taking action
against Iran; I said that they were entirely capable of it."
Saddam's execution, which came at dawn on
December 30, was a clumsy and brutish affair. As he stood on a scaffold with
the noose around his neck, he was taunted by some of his hooded executioners
and by spectators. Talabani was in Sulaimaniya. Hours before the execution, he
had found the perfect solution to his dilemma concerning the death warrant.
"It couldn't have been any better," Hiwa Osman, his media adviser, explained.
"He found that in cases of international war crimes the constitution did not
give him the authority to alter the court's ruling. In a way, it was a
blessing from the sky, and it solved his ethical dilemma."
As for Talabani's reaction to the execution,
Osman said: "Remember what he did in Paris when the death sentence was
announced, and he went into his bedroom for an hour or so? This time, it
lasted three or four days. No one saw him".
· Jon Lee Anderson is the author of
The Fall of Baghdad, The Lion's Grave: Dispatches from Afghanistan and Che
Guevara: A Revolutionary Life ©
