KurdistanObserver.com

Kurdistan Offers a Happier Picture of Iraq liberation
By Jack Fairweather in Irbil
Dec 18, 2004

The Telegraph

A wedding is being held at the newly built Sheraton hotel in Irbil. The Kurdish bride and groom sit blinking into a video camera, their family clustered around. In the background, American contractors are drinking Turkish beer.

This place of smiles and shining marble is the Iraq that was meant to be after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

It existed for a brief moment after the invasion when American soldiers were at first greeted as liberators. Now the only place still deeply grateful for getting rid of the dictator is in the north of the country, in Kurdistan, a sanctuary for contractors, Baghdad officials and lost American ideals.

Western businessmen move freely around the region's capital, Irbil, and American soldiers eat in restaurants without their body armour. In the crowded foyer of the Sheraton, Kurdish businessmen and politicians discuss reconstruction work.

After the 1991 Gulf war, the Kurdish areas - long victim of Saddam's Arabisation policies - lived in turbulent but slowly prospering autonomy, protected by the no-fly zones enforced by Britain and America. They are now booming.

Since the 2003 invasion the regional economy has had more than £100 million in investment, channelled mostly into building houses, roads, water-treatment systems, and two new university campuses.

Most of the money has come from the regional government, although western firms have also moved north from Baghdad looking for reconstruction contracts.

A British businessman, Richard Hadler, said: "I recently told a business seminar in London: "You can come to Kurdistan. There are dangers involved, but on the whole it is stable. And there's a lot of work to be done.' "

But the success of the Kurdish region comes at a price. There was a three-year civil war between the two main political groups, before a grudging peace and a two-party electoral system.

Officials say the success of the 1998 elections for a Kurdish regional assembly is another reason for accepting the US occupation.

There has been only one serious bombing in the city, in January, when 15 people died. The violence further south in the country only exacerbates the sense of separateness among a people with a distinct language and customs.

The Kurdish flag now flies over police stations in place of the Iraqi one. Iraqi government officials, many of whom come north for a break from the violence, are treated with disdain or confusion when they try to implement edicts from Baghdad.

A recent petition of Kurds asking if they wanted full independence was signed by 1.7 million people in a region of five million.

"People look to the south and see people's heads getting cut off, and think, 'Do I really want to be associated with that?'," said Hiwa Othman, who runs the Institute for War and Peace reporting, which trains local journalists.

"The new generation that has grown up with 12 years of freedom, are not prepared to rejoin Iraq on the old terms of subservience to the central government. Instead the new Iraq should join us."