Talabani: Arab voice in Kurdish skin?

By Mufid Abdulla:

Over the past decade Talabani has often surprised his friends and enemies alike. Since the 2003 American invasion and his appointment as Iraq’s president, Talabani has adopted increasingly strange positions, considering that he was the leader of the Kurdish liberation movement from 1976.

Beneath his Kurdish skin, Talabani today acts almost as much of an Arab nationalist as the Iraqi prime minister Nuri al Maliki. But at one time the Kurdish people were devoted to Talabani and called him Mam Jalal, meaning ‘Uncle’.

One of his former close friends told me: “I am glad he didn’t die ten years ago”. By this he meant that the people would not then have known the truth about Talabani and they would have considered him a hero.

One of the hottest questions in Kurdish politics is how to create a Kurdish state. Yet several times Talabani told reporters that a Kurdish state is “a poetic dream” and most observers believe our enemies benefited from that statement.

Talabani’s position on the execution of Saddam and his henchmen also raised eyebrows. He told reporters that he could not sign for the execution of Saddam because he was a lawyer and had human rights concerns.

Yet he has given no explanation for almost five years of civil war in Kurdistan when so many lives were pointlessly lost and there were so many human rights abuses.

When he left the PUK, Nawshirwan Mustafa – his former close friend and comrade of the armed struggle – told a journalist that: “Talabani made so many promises to reform in the past and he never delivered”. Today Nawshirwan Mustafa basically doesn’t want to know Talabani. Despite several calls from Talabani, he wants to avoid him at any price.

Talabani’s position on the current disputes between the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and the Iraqi state doesn’t surprise me at all. He is more interested in playing political cards than in the Kurdish cause. Even though, as we all know, the new Iraqi state is more impressed by the Saddamist style of rule than by democratic government.

For starters he failed to implement Article 140 concerning the normalisation of Kirkuk and other disputed territories.

Recently he has taken sides with the Iraq government in its dispute with the KRG over the fugitive Iraqi deputy president Hashimi. Talabani backs Maliki even though the Iraqi PM is breaching the Iraq constitution. And now, instead of focussing on the Kurdish political situation, he is spending more time engaging with the Arab summit and Maliki’s government in Baghdad.

Muayd Taeb MP, of the Kurdistan coalition, told Sumar News that: “Talabani is not speaking like a Kurd”.

Clearly, over the past nine years Talabani has played no positive role on issues vital to our future. The fact that he doesn’t like the Barzani family has nothing to do with the Kurdish cause which is concerned with more important matters such as Article 140 and the oil and gas contracts.

Finally, it is evident that Talabani – although unsophisticated, inarticulate and devoid of charisma – is leading Iraqi and Kurdish politics into dangerous uncertainty.