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Comment and news from The Kurdistan Tribune:
A group of MPs in the Kurdistan Parliament is campaigning to change the way the KRG allocates budgets to political parties. These MPs come from across the political spectrum but mainly from the opposition.
According to Kurdistan constitutional law, every party has the right to get a grant from the government if it has representatives in Parliament and more than 500 members. At the moment the main share of these contributions goes to the PUK and KDP. In 2007, according to the local papers, their budget from the government was 30 million dollars per month each.
Last year the KRG allocated 90 million dollars as an ’emergency fund’ for the political parties while the new law on political funding was being drafted. However, the KDP and PUK withdrew 115 million dollars – 25 million dollars more than the total amount allocated for all the parties.
The budget for political parties in the south of Kurdistan is still the main source of corruption.
How else could it be possible for parties like the KDP and PUK to spend many thousands of dollars each year on their anniversary celebrations, organised all over the world to entertain their members and supporters?
The group of MPs wants the Kurdistan Parliament to be more transparent about the monies that have been paid to the KDP and PUK.
Hama Saeed Ali, on the Kurdistan Islamic Union MP list, said the PUK and KDP “can draw any money from the government they want, as they like”. Furthermore he accused the two main political parties of controlling the budget for parties in Kurdistan.
Prime Minister Dr Barham Salih asked MPs in the Kurdistan Parliament to work harder to determine the best law for financing political parties in Kurdistan, even though he said he believes the parties should not take any money from the government – as in Europe. Probably that is ok for older parties such as the PUK and KDP, because they now have so much invested all over the world, in different names and ventures. The main telecommunications company in Kurdistan, for example, is owned by the PUK and KDP.
So it would not be difficult for them to survive without further government funding. But newer and smaller parties argue that, without funding it is impossible for them to compete fairly with the ruling parties which have taken so much money over the years.
Kuestan Mohammed, an MP on the Gorran candidate list, told the local reporters that: “This year’s budget to help political parties was 200 million dollars, but we don’t know how much has been paid out, and to which parties”. She asked the government to explain its criteria for granting monies to political parties.
To take the example of the Gorran Party: it has 25 seats in Parliament – not that much less than the PUK or the KDP – but their budget from the government has never been properly allocated and now it has been frozen for months under pressure from the general secretary of the PUK, Jalil Talabani.
