.jpg)
By Mufid Abdulla:
In its final effort, perhaps the KDP leadership offered Gorran’s leaders incentives to take posts in the new cabinet. But their efforts were in vain, making the KDP leadership something of a laughing stock in south Kurdistan. As we reported, the Gorran party has continued to refuse these overtures.
Like all good theatrical productions, the new prime minister Nichervan Barzani’s visit to the Gorran headquarters offered moments of high drama and ripe comedy. At a press conference afterwards, he answered questions from journalists about corruption in Kurdistan. “Corruption is part of the culture and will take several years to root out”, he declared.
Nichervan wants to play politics. But a sound reform policy, not politics, is key to understanding the roots of corruption. The KDP leadership and the President of Kurdistan want Nichervan to be more partisan. But his more subtle style is not working either.
Dr Johann Graf Lambsdorff, from the Centre of Globalisation and Europeanization of the Economy, has researched how corruption in government affects public welfare. “In many underdeveloped countries … the damaging effect (of quantitative controls) has been serious”, he says. ”The system tends easily to create cancerous tumours of partiality and corruption in the very centre of the administration, where the sickness is continuously nurtured by the favours distributed and the grafts realized”.
Ordinary people in south Kurdistan know that the tumour of the corruption cancer is to be found in the leadership of the two ruling parties.
Nichervan acknowledged that he needs to find ways to deliver an effective project to combat corruption. However, if your prime minster tells people that corruption is part of the culture, this is nothing but an excuse for the tribal families to hang onto power forever and terrorise their own people – nothing else. Why, when you were a prime minster before, did you rule but nothing changed?
If you are serious about corruption you can start from yourself and those around you, including advisors and cronies. Now for the first time in Kurdistan we have Kurdish Oligarchs.
I would like to ask our readers: what do you think?
Copyright © 2012 Kurdistantribune.com
If a politician calls corruption the culture it is simply a willingness and an effort to justify himself living in sin. He must repent.
Corruption is a sin and must be stopped and removed from Society. It is stupid calling corruption a culture.
From Willem Hekman a reader from Tangerang, Indonesia
you xxxx xxx better from indonesia, you should know first what corruption means
from Nürnberg Germnay
I think he’s right!
After 1991 when KDP and PUK took over power in Kurdistan, the culture of corruption was born. Anyone who was born, let’s say, before 1970 has seen the purity of Kurdish culture even under Saddam because the Kurds wanted to maintain their culture in defying to Saddam and Arab rule. Not only Kurds but people around the Kurds such as Arabs were proud of Kurdish culture in term of truthiness, humanity, morality, tolerance, forgiveness and less opportunistic. However, after the KDP and PUK took over the power, Kurds are no more difference than their neighbors. If anyone lives in Kurdistan now know the fact that the Kurds are becoming much more greedy and materialistic, deceiver, opportunistic, less tolerance and finally bunch of liars. Those Kurds who escaped to exile before 1991 are the true Kurds and maintained their cultural purity and you can find those people all over the Europe and the U.S.
Obviously Nechirvan said that to defend himself. He knows that he’s more corrupted than anyone else in Kurdistan because he’s the richest person in Kurdistan, even richer than his uncle (Masoud). Just recently Nechirvan annihilated Said Akaram, the man who was in charge of Ibrahim Khalil, claimed that the daily Ibrahim Khalil tariff goes to Nechirvan’s pocket.
You are totally right. We lost our culture. I was born in 1969. I know what you are talking about. I dare say that Saddam was less brutal than these parties. At least he did not ruin our culture.
Corruption started from the top, with leaders and officials stealing in public and in private. Who has the ultimate aurhority to ask Nichervan and the rest of the Kurdish officials about their wealth? How did they earn all that? Who has justified it for them?
Just because you are a prime minister or even a president, there is no automatic justification for suddenly obtaining a wealth worth billions! When the general public notices the stealing and corruption, they are either taken by hopelessness and stop caring for change, or they are taken by their weak human nature and therefore engage in this culture of corruption to satisfy the leaders and in return get their own personal gains.
How can anyone explain the fact that so many people in Kurdistan suddenly become wealthy? Why is it Barzanis and Talabani love to mention how corruption is there and exists and needs to be taken out, but yet show no effort to stop it. A wise and true leader will start with himself, family, and relatives before putting the hammer down on the poor public.
I am pretty sure if our Prime Minister comes on TV and announces that he is giving up his wealth (whatever he obtained from the public property) and if he announces that he will then run down the list of Barzanis and Talabanis and take away all their unlawfully-obtained wealth. Let him say that: and you will see how the general public will hit the streets chanting his name and raising his photos, and then and only then can you see corruption starting to change. Enough of this public display of sincerity with no true efforts to fix things.
The current opposition parties continue to participate in the government because they don’t believe true change will happen, and the mere fact that these opposition groups are being pursued individually and offered high posts is a form of corruption in itself. Enough is enough. Let people live the life they dreamed of for half a century, the life that 5000 Halabja people died for. Please have mercy on people. Remember history will write everything down.
I think one of the causes behind rampant corruption in the region is cultural issue. In other words, there has not been culture of obeying laws, respecting regulations and protecting public services in both Iraq and Kurdistan region. Unfortunately after the 1991-uprising the Kurdish leaders have done nothing to change these customs and understanding