KurdistanObserver.com

Kurdish Nationalists Defend Coalition

By NICHOLAS BIRCH
Special to The Globe and Mail

Jan 6, 2005

ERBIL, (Southern Kurdistan) -- There are still more than three weeks before Iraqis are scheduled go to the polls to jostle for spots at the country's new political table. But for the Kurdish minority parties in the north, Jan. 30 will hardly be a democratic feast in the making even if the vote comes off. For them, the results are already known.

That Kurdish groups should agree to set up a coalition was only to be expected. With few friends in the rest of the country, the Kurds see a united front as their only hope of getting what they want from the new constitution.

But on Dec. 1, Kurdish leaders went a step further, announcing that their two main parties, plus half a dozen smaller organizations, had agreed to form a joint list for the Kurdistan regional parliamentary elections, which are due to take place on the same day as the wider vote. The agreement, negotiated in secret, allots 80 per cent of the coalition's seats equally between the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan; the smaller parties get the rest.

Both PUK and KDP leaders described their decision as a response to public demand, and indeed, many Kurds say they approve of their leaders' decision to strip them of almost all influence in the shaping of their new government.

"It would be nice if the democratization of Kurdish society could go hand in hand with the strengthening of our position within Iraq. Unfortunately, the situation in Iraq right now makes that impossible, and national rights must come before individual ones," said Stran Abdullah, editor of the Sulaimaniyah-based newspaper Asso.

"The Kurds have to show the Arab world, the U.S. and the Europeans that they are united on the Kurdish issue," agreed Fuat Hussein, a deputy member of the Governing Council that ruled Iraq immediately after the toppling of the Baathist regime. "How can parties in coalition for the national elections possibly fight a Kurdish election as rivals? That's absurd and self-defeating."

There are some who are not convinced by the patriotic rhetoric.

"What we are facing now is not a democratic election, but a sort of single-party referendum," said Assos Herdi, editor of Hawlati, Iraqi Kurdistan's only independent newspaper.

"It's like George Bush and John Kerry running together against Ralph Nader," added Said Mohamed, a student in Sulaimaniyah, the capital of the southern, PUK-controlled half of Iraqi Kurdistan. "I hope they win 99 per cent of the vote, like that other expert at democratic elections, Saddam Hussein."

But apart from the websites of the more radical diaspora groups, such discontent with the Kurdish leadership is not widespread. Many say the joint list offers a solution to an issue close to every Kurd's heart: the need to end their society's deep political divisions.

Briefly united in an uneasy power-sharing arrangement after the de facto secession of Iraqi Kurdistan in 1991, the KDP and PUK were fighting each other by 1993. Northern Iraq has since been divided into two zones of influence, each with its own party-controlled ministries, budget and military. Even the 2001 decision to reconvene the regional parliament after an adjournment of eight years was made under international pressure and failed to hide the fact that real power lay with the party leaders in their separate fiefs.

Kemal Khambar, who heads the Erbil branch of the newly formed electoral commission, insisted that the so-called closed-list electoral system the United Nations chose for Iraq will change that.

"In the past, leaders were able to fire deputies at will," he explained. "They can't any more. It's a first foothold for a real parliamentary opposition."

But such arguments don't convince Mr. Herdi, the Hawlati editor. He said the real reason for the coalition is the constitutional inability of Kurdish leaders to lose gracefully, and dismissed as naive those who argue that vote-sharing has prevented further civil strife.

"This agreement doesn't solve anything," he said. "Frankly, it would be better for tensions between the parties to come to the surface now, with Iraq weak and the coalition forces on hand."

Others spread the blame to international insistence on the need to legitimize an Iraqi government as soon as possible, and to the pretence that Iraq is a unified country.

"If elections were purely regional, Iraqis would vote for people they approve of," Sulaimaniyah-based journalist Hiwa Osman said. "As it is, Kurds will vote for Kurds, Shiites for Shiites, and Sunni for Sunni.

"These elections are nothing to do with democracy. They're all about domination, and that merely consolidates the power of people who are a model of bad governance."