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Dr Kamal Mirawdeli – prominent writer, intellectual and former KRG presidential candidate – was interviewed by Harem Karem. This is part two of three.
HK: Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have condemned human rights abuses in Kurdistan, including the killings of demonstrators in Sulaymani. What needs to be done?
KM: It is sad that, for exposing a Baathist style party system based on wage slavery and the denial of basic freedoms such as holding demonstrations and setting up independent civil society organisations or having the right to work and life opportunities free from party control and abuse, we must depend on occasional reports by such bodies. Of course, I highly appreciate their role and we always need them to internationalise human rights abuses. What I am saying is about our own society and our intellectuals. 20 years after Saddam, we should by now have a thriving civil society with hundreds of free, independent, active human and civil rights organisations producing accurate, reliable data, reports and strategies for the protection and promotion of civil rights and exposing any violations.
Even the opposition parties have not supported the emergence of such independent effective organisations. The abuse of man, life and work that is happening in Kurdistan goes much wider and deeper than can be grasped by occasional reports by any outside body. I must stress that the Kurdish people had, and still have, more and stronger reasons than the people of Egypt to revolt against the ruling parties who, in their 20 years of barbaric exploitation of the people, have strengthened, deepened and perpetuated what I call the ‘anfal state of Kurdish society’. I refer to the state of slow death, alienation, loss of individuality, uprooting of Kurdawari (culturally conditioned Kurdish society), destruction of countryside and native economy, lack of basic human rights, immense injustice and discrimination, cruel and unaccountable totalitarian Baathist-style party rule (based on theft, illegitimate appropriation of land, property and wealth), monopolisation of opportunities, posts and resources, politicisation of the economy and imposing of wage slavery, lack of the rule of law, interference with all aspects of life, trivialisation of education and government institutions, and working as colonial agents of external interests and powers.
All Kurdish society, and especially young people – the generation without work, role and hope – are victims of this totalitarian neo-Baathist regime. I can never recognise my city Sulaymani, which was the city of culture, intellectual vigour, national identity and pride, love and respect for women, resistance and freedom. Now it is a city of bricks and mortar, defaced and debased, overbuilt and overcrowded, without soul, identity or hope and ruled – together with its district and sub-district towns – by illiterate mountain party apparatchiks and Mafioso interest groups linked to party officials and their families for whom nothing is sacred and forbidden as long as they can enrich themselves further and faster.
If we have independent Kurdish intellectuals abroad, and if they can come together on a non-party basis and work for genuine democracy, civil liberties and justice in Kurdistan, they can become an effective pressure group.
HK: As the main competing candidate for the Kurdistan Region’s presidency in the 2009 election, what is your view of President Barzani’s reform?
KM: If President Barzani calls his initiative a reform project this means that he, along with his advisers, has not understood or does not want to understand the meaning of either ‘reform’ or ‘project’.
Any reform plan must be based on certain principles such as:
1. Scientific analysis and review of the current situation: outlining the background, context and extent of corruption, maladministration or any other factors that entail reform and then drawing up a credible reform plan supported by data, facts and figures and timed and monitored action plans. We don’t have any of these. The President’s reforms happen in a vacuum and in his mind only.
2. Law and legislation: as the highest legal authority in the land, the President should not have made his initiative as a personal gesture. He should have asked parliament to decree a reform law and established an independent commission to ensure that the needed reforms are implemented within a defined time scale and in all the necessary areas.
3. Democracy and consultation: the President’s alleged free-form plan came out of the blue, without any prior consultation with anybody, especially people, parliament, opposition parties, civil society, media and public opinion in general. His initiative is treated separately from other initiatives at a time when there were meetings and negotiations with opposition parties for a general reform plan and process, with different reform projects being presented by the three opposition parties on the one hand, and by the KDP and PUK. This means that the President, rather being a central authoritative figure bringing together all parties for the public good, behaves like an autocrat with his own agenda, thus causing further dysfunctioning of an already chaotic and dysfunctional system of governance.
“the best and most honest way for the President was to start with himself”
4. Transparency: the president’s reform is supposed to be dealing with corruption and abuse of position for personal interest, but we know nothing about anything. What, where, when, who, why and what has been done for what purpose! There is no independent monitoring and reporting, no clarification, no legal action, no transparency, no reporting to parliament or to any accountable body. As I said, everything happens inside the president’s mind and only he and God know his intentions and actions. I think the best and most honest way for the President was to start with himself. To declare his own, his family’s and his party’s property and wealth and to declare their source. It is clear to everyone in Kurdistan that corruption is a top-down crime: the whole system that Barzani presides over is based on theft, illegitimate appropriation of land and property, abuse of power and position, discrimination and party monopoly, conflict of interest and lack of equal opportunity. Barzani is at the heart of this corrupt, self-sustaining system. We don’t know the legal status even of his residence: Is Sari Rash a public or a private property? Is it a presidential palace/office or a private home of his family? How much is the President’s salary? How many properties and companies do he and his clan own and where and how did he get his wealth? How much does he take from public money for his party’s officials? Who funds his frequent trips abroad – the purpose of which no one knows anything? The President’s reform is a sick joke.
HK: Despite the systematic and widespread irregularities reported during the last election, would you stand for this post again in the next election?
KM: As you have stated there was systematic fraud in the July 2009 elections, especially in the presidential elections and in the areas controlled by Barzani’s party. The KDP and PUK together got 53 per cent of the votes but Barzani supposedly got 70 per cent. Where did he get this extra 17 per cent? He had definitely lost and stayed on only by virtue of fraud. I think in the next elections it will be worse. If Barzani manages to change Arbil into a big prison for its people and prevent even small demonstrations by anyone for any issue, then how can people be confident to vote freely and not be punished or not to have their votes rigged?
Both parties have intensified the practice of buying people with money, positions and privilege as they are not accountable to anyone and they can do any criminal activity with impunity. However, if I find any chance to support democracy in my country and help to establish a system based on constitution, democratic institutions and justice, I will definitely stand again.
HK: What outcome do you want to see from the talks between the KRG ruling and opposition parties? Do you see the opposition parties as part of the solution or the problem?
KM: Sadly I must say I am pessimistic. It will not make any difference whether the meetings and negotiations resume or not. The opposition parties are not different from the ruling parties in their philosophy, history, background, structure, relationships and values. Like the KDP and PUK, they have one single eternal leader, their leadership stays forever, and there are no democratically accountable structures, no transparency about their finances, policies, decision-making mechanisms, and the same style of party politics. They follow the same Stalinist politics of extending party ideology to all sections of society: students, workers, professionals. They do not believe in or support independent civil society and independent organisations. Like the KDP and PUK, they have their own TVs, radios, newspapers and party organisations and centres and have occupied public property for their party offices.
They are part and parcel of this system and historically have contributed to its development into the present monster. It is impossible to change anything if, even when you can replace it, you are the same. You cannot oppose what you yourself repeat. You cannot claim difference if you are the same. The opposition parties do not have any constitutional/legal or political strategy to challenge the status quo. They do not challenge the two basic political structures of the party system: wage slavery – enslaving people through politicisation and monopolisation of finances and economy; and budget slavery – enslaving political party leaders through illegal funding from public money. They do not challenge the theft, crime and treason committed by party leaders and officials for over 20 years. Human rights and the safety and life of people is the least and last on their agenda. They are involved in persistent party politics and demagogy of exploiting people’s suffering, emotions and hopes through their biased party media. They do not believe in transparency, criticism, dialogue and freedom of expression for people who do not agree with them.
They do not want to challenge the massive abuse of power by the KDP and PUK and their illegal and criminal appropriation of large chunks of Kurdistan’s budget for their own party organisations and activities. They do not use the opportunity of the KRG’s stopping their budget, to ask and work for an end to the pillaging of Kurdistan’s budget by political parties: their sole aim is to become part of this abusive system and benefit from public money to fund their party structure and activities.
Opposition parties are also responsible for the lack of independent media, independent think tanks, independent information and analysis, independent dialogue and public debate. They have not bothered about Kurdistan’s lack of a Constitution and accountable structures. They do not challenge the arbitrary powers of the President and the abuse of power by his family. They do not challenge or criticise Talabani’s drive to develop the same autocratic family structure and the concentration of most of the PUK powers and interests in the hands of his wife. Whatever crimes are committed against people, including their own ordinary members, this will never be a cause for the opposition leaders to review their positions and attitudes to the KDP/PUK leadership and draw red lines or stick to certain principles and values. For example, the so-called five-parties’ meetings started at a time when all the principles of democracy and human rights had been trampled upon, when the street was silenced by brutal military power, when the right of demonstration was crushed, when people were chased, arrested and tortured for their participation in demonstrations, while the party officials who were suspected of murdering demonstrators were rewarded. There was no right condition for dialogue and the KDP/PUK leaderships have never been serious about dialogue or believed in it.
The KDP and PUK are happy to open the doors for the three opposition parties together or for any single one of them to join their government, receive increased budget and share the cake of corruption. And they want to achieve two aims from this: keeping the status quo and supporting the policy of suppression of any possible street protest through accepting the demonstration law and keeping quiet about the system’s abuse of human rights. The opposition parties just by their participation in the meetings in the circumstances explained above have implicitly accepted this condition.
The second commitment that the KDP/PUK want from the opposition parties is to silence or neutralise their media, especially the TV channels. That is why the only main point that they were concerned about and monitored during the four meetings was the statements made by the opposition and how their media behaved. The reaction of the opposition parties in Kurdistan is negative action (withdrawing, non-participation) because they do not believe in people’s power and do not have a positive, proactive alternative strategy and agenda to oppose and replace the ruling power.
“their passive position comes from their accepting the status quo”
Opposition in any democracy is a party or parties who oppose the ruling parties, trying to replace them in government through an alternative programme and policies and through democratic means inside and outside parliament. We do not have any defined opposition in Kurdistan in this sense. None of the three parties, singly or together, has the philosophy, policy and strategy and the ambition to replace the ruling parties and one day form their own government. Otherwise they would have developed a strategy for this purpose such as presenting alternative programmes, policies and structures of government such as forming a shadow cabinet and maintaining proactive oppositional activities inside and outside parliament in a way that would offer alternative democratic solutions and obtain the trust and support of people. Their passive position comes from their accepting the status quo with their maximum hope being to share in government on favourable terms or get big budgets to finance their leadership structures. This is why political discourse in Kurdistan is pathetically confined to what happens between classical party leaders. The issues of economy, market, national issues, and social issues – especially the situation of women, the education system and institutions, the situation of children and the elderly, the alienation of the young people, health and poverty, and the future of Kurds and Kurdistan in general – hardly appear as political issues. Without a radical transformation of the opposition parties into proactive parties with shared strategy and will to replace the current ruling parties, they will remain ‘undecidables’ in Derrida’s use of the term: neither opposition nor power, trying to be both opposition and power, both the same and different. For this lack of identity, they are not taken seriously by either the ruling power or the disappointed people. And this is the dilemma of Kurdish politics at present.
“there is no concept of nation, people, citizenship, community and country”
I think the next stage of Kurdish politics will be decided by expected and unexpected external factors. The indulgence of the KDP/PUK leadership in criminal corruption, their alienation of the people in Kurdistan at the same time as servicing Iraq and external powers, have made them blind to changing conditions and threats around them and, moreover, bereft of any sense of care and responsibility towards the well-being and future of their people. There is no concept of nation, people, citizenship, community and country in the Kurdistan Region. Instead of seeing young people, and especially the demonstrators, as our sons and daughters exercising their positive democratic rights to express their frustration and anger while making the ruling elite aware that it is sleepwalking to the abyss, they see them as enemies and deploy the peshmerga and security forces against them – while they shamelessly keep quiet about the daily bombardment of our people, the renewed regional conspiracies and alliances, and the deterioration of the situation of Kurds and their displacement in Jalawla and other places, and the looming dangers resulting from the withdrawal of the Americans.
Even at this moment their sole selfish criminal strategy is to keep their stolen wealth and maintain their corrupt family and party power and illegitimate privileges. Whether the demonstrations would start again or not, this leadership has long lost legitimacy and will have no future apart from joining their soulmates Hosni Mubarak and Bashar Assad.
I have profoundly delved into Dr Kamal Mirawdeli’s realistic views penned here in its entirety. Dr Kamal Mirawdeli enjoys broad public support both inside and outside Kurdistan. He is a well-known intellectual and political activist.
However, I could no come across the slightest indication to outlining any strategy to achieve/ declare our national independence right as a nation among his thoughts.
It would be interesting to learn about his take on this vital subject in his next interviews.
i also am quite interested in Mr Kamal Mirdawlis thoughts , however i am eager to know what are his stands for the rights of self-determination for South kurdistan and the necessary measures to be taken from now on for such matter .