As a Kurd, how I remember Thatcher

Thatcher was finally forced to resign in 1990

By Mufid Abdulla:

The news of the death on Monday of former UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher has made headlines around the world. Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979 and, from the time I came to the UK aged 23, I remember her rule vividly like today.

She was very stubborn and radical in her economic reforms and liberalisation of the whole banking system. She sold off many UK state assets such gas, electricity, water and telecoms. She introduced a poll tax on the poor, waged a war without bullets against the coal miners, closing hundreds of pits and preferring to import from abroad.

Due to her radical reforms, war also broke out between her chancellor Nigel Lawson and her economics advisor Alan Walter. She was a staunch advocate of Milton Friedman’s monetarist economics. Nigel Lawson resigned and Michael Heseltine also resigned from her cabinet. In the end 152 of her Tory MPs voted against her in 1990, forcing her to resign.

For me as a Kurd, I had fled from my native country due to the Iran-Iraq war and the abuse of human rights by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Those days the Tory party had no policy on the Kurdish issue. However, the Tory government and British arms companies were one of the main suppliers of weapons and ammunition to the Iraqi government in their war against Iran, notwithstanding Saddam’s terrible record.

Margaret Thatcher’s government kept quiet about the atrocities against the Kurdish nation for so many years. In fact they assisted Saddam because it was profitable to do so. In 1988, when Saddam gassed Halabja, UK foreign minister Geoffrey Howe told the BBC, “We are gravely concerned”.

That was the only response of Margaret Thatcher’s government to the massacre of 5000 people by a regime that it had armed!

Today Margaret Thatcher’s legacy can be seen in the streets and housing estates of Liverpool, Manchester, London … and in the city of Halabja. The poor of these places made different kinds of sacrifices but have one thing in common: they have all suffered the consequences of greed. For this reason, her memory will stay alive with me forever.