A freedom writer is born

This is the story of Dr Kamal Qadir, who was born in a small village south of Hawler in South Kurdistan in 1958, and immigrated to Austria in 1978. There, he studied law at the Vienna Law School, and got a PhD in international law. He belongs to a family in which eleven members were martyred in the course of the Kurdish struggle for independence and justice in Iraq. Dr Qadir has always been sensitive to injustice and tried both through his writings and actions to use law and intellectual argument to fight injustice everywhere, especially in his homeland of Kurdistan.

When he went back to Kurdistan to teach at Salah-al-Din University in 1999, he was shocked to see the political parties controlled the universities and academic institutions, and corruption and injustice were destroying Kurdish society. He left Kurdistan and went back into exile with feelings of despair and anger. He began to publish articles against corruption on independent Kurdish websites. Several of his articles written in English were published in www.kurdishmedia.com.

Until six months ago few people in Kurdistan knew of Kamal Sayid Qadir. Today he is the most well-known and talked about Kurdish writer, not only in Kurdistan, but internationally. His name has become inexorably linked with the cause and campaign for free expression, freedom of the press, human rights and civil society in Kurdistan. How did this quick and quintessential transformation happen?

We can say Kamal’s intervention was Socratic. In that I mean it has everything to do with saying or striving to say the truth whatever the cost, to assert the right of reason and the prerogative of the writer to say the unsaid and to trivialise the taboos of power. In short what Kamal has reasserted is the perennial struggle between pen and power, between conscience and self-interest, between freedom of speech and fear of being outspoken. This struggle to assert freedom in its most rational humane form has been long settled in democratic countries with freedom of expression and freedom to criticise political power.

Kamal Sayid Qadir began a startling, radical and courageous legal and intellectual challenge to the established tribal-political power in Kurdistan, which took every one by surprise. Many did not take his words and actions seriously. And the whole intervention would have perhaps passed quietly as the antics of a lunatic writer had the Kurdistan political powers not reacted in the way they did: by railing against his challenge and words and thereby revealing the seriousness of his initiative.

This was what many Kurdish writers, fed up with corruption and thirsty for genuine freedoms of genuine civil society, were waiting for.

In a way Dr Qadir’s intervention represents a post-modern challenge to a pre-modern, one could even say pre-historic, anomaly in parts of Kurdistan.

The Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), which controls the present capital of South Kurdistan, is a tribal-political organisation. It is historically established around the leadership and authority of the Brazani family. The most famous Kurdish leader was Mustafa Barzani who led Kurdish revolt from 1961 until it collapsed in 1975. Then he went into exile in the US and died of cancer there in 1979. His sons remained in Iran and were reorganised, financed and armed, by both the Shahs of Iran and the Khomaini regime, in order to preserve their central role and their claim to the leadership of the Kurdish movement.

They have been involved ever since, in both an apparent struggle for Kurdish rights but also in fighting against the Kurdish movement in all parts of Kurdistan, supported by the occupying regimes of those countries. Their last notorious act was to collaborate with Saddam and invite his army to invade the Kurdish city of Arbil on August 31, 1996. It is thanks to Saddam’s tanks and the Turkish army that they have been controlling Arbil since then. I mention this not just as an historical narrative but also to highlight some few recent historical facts as the backdrop to Dr Kamal’s saga.

Power hates truth. Truth provides knowledge about the reality of how power functions and the relationships which can be recorded, reproduced, diffused or destroyed, silenced or tabooed. Societies which fail to read their truth fail to recognise their identity and humanity, and so can never taste or even dream of genuine freedom. That is why the power that fights the truth simultaneously fights the very soul of humanity.

In South Kurdistan there are many newspapers, local and satellite TV channels, radios and other media outlets. And obviously millions of words are written and published every week. There are writers who talk about Hegel, post-modernism, Derrida, Foucault, and the clash of cultures. There are certain organisations whose sole function is, apparently, to promote dialogue, democracy and civil society. And then there is an odd entity called “parliament”.

I was in Kurdistan for 50 days at the end of last year and I am sad to say that all the apparent media coverage is a fake. Just like in Saddam’s time, and to some extent worse than then because of the lack of any real opposition, all newspapers are in fact just one newspaper published in different versions. The millions of words are just the words of the same discourse, which in different ways assert and serves the interests of ruling tribal political parties. These words mislead people into forgetting recent tragedies and cause them to become brainwashed and drugged so as not to feel their present pain: nor to grasp the freedom - both national and individual - they have made possible with their blood, sweat and tears.

You need only to ask one question to know whether a society is democratic or fascist. Who controls the media?

When political parties own and control all media and channels of expression, then this society is definitely either fascist or potentially fascist.

The Ba’athist regime has gone but the worst form of Ba’athism is alive in Kurdistan with its family oligarchy; control of wealth, land and any chance of a livelihood for people; control of media, community organisations and the economy. The two political parties are based around two family oligarchies and a corrupt group of people calling themselves the political bureaus of the two parties. They have divided up all the posts in Baghdad and Kurdistan, and even those in embassies and party and government offices abroad, among themselves and close family members. These families make all the decisions and control all aspects of life without reference to any constitutional or legal authority or any sort of accountability, rational planning, consultation or community involvement and feedback.

To justify their totalitarian control, both parties draw on their past. They consider everyone who has died in the process of the “revolution” (of course including Kamal Qadir’s family) are martyrs. They consider that they “own” the martyrs and their surviving family members. They own everything that Kurds have done and achieved. They own the cities today because they were “mountain revolutionaries” yesterday.

But the Barzani family goes much further than this. They have created the cult of the leader “Barzani” and the ideology of “Barzanism”. This ideology, like any authoritarian totalitarian ideology, is based upon these principles:

• that the Kurdish movement was started by the Barzani family so they are legitimate owners of the movement;
• that the Barzani family had a central leadership in the Kurdish movement and so they are destined to keep this role. If, for whatever reason, they do not have central leadership power in any Kurdish movement, they consider it their legitimate right to oppose, fight and co-operate with any power against that movement;
• that the Barzani family represents the historical continuity of the Kurdish movement; and
• that Mustafa Barzani is a spiritual leader of Kurds and so all members of the Barzani family, especially his sons and grandsons, are sacred and must not be criticised or attacked whatever they do. They have eternal undisputed right to inherit leadership, control everything, own everything and make decisions on behalf of the Kurdish people.

When the Kurdish people first freely elected their parliament in 1992, many intellectuals demanded that all power should naturally and democratically be with parliament. To prevent the division between the authority of party leaders and parliament they suggested that the leader of Kurdistan Democratic Party would become “president or speaker of parliament”. The official reaction of the party, which was published and widely publicised in their official party newspaper, was that: “the leader was too sacred to be the head of parliament. If someone in parliament asked inappropriate questions this would affect (the leader’s) sacredness and this is something that the party never allows to happen.” The result of this thinking was five years of in-fighting and bloodshed.

When the party papers published this story many writers were talking about democracy, the role of parliament and civil society. But none considered this theory of power (that a tribal leader is more sacred than parliament) to be anything other than normal.

Even today, more than two decades later, it is inconceivable in Kurdish society if someone, even in exile, directly, courageously and unequivocally challenges and criticises autocratic leaders.

But Kamal Sayid Qadir did just that.

He used a subversive language intended to shatter the illusion of sacredness and centrality of power and to challenge the continuity of a medieval mentality: a mentality that accepts immorality and cannot tolerate criticism of the reality.

Before going back to Kurdistan Kamal wrote an open letter directly to the leader of Kurdistan Democratic Party, Mr Masu’d Barzani, in which he told him about his determination to go back to his home town and to face the Barzani family in court, in “a legal and civilised way”, and to expose their claims to patriotism and an uninterrupted history of struggle for Kurdish rights. This letter was published on the Kurdish website Kurdistanpost, putting the struggle between the revolutionary subversive Internet-based media and the Barzani family into the international arena.

In addition to his powerful exposition of the conditions of corruption, national treason and social injustice in Kurdistan, he presented direct challenges not just to leading figures in the Barzani family but to the principles upon which the ideology of Barzanism is founded. That is what worried the Barzani family most: consequently they invested massively in publicity and hired their own writers to assassinate the character of Dr Qadir by reducing all his arguments to the issue of slander and painting him as mentally-disordered. Dr Kamal Qadir was jailed.

Dr Qadir’s action was not impulsive, nor did he do it for fame. He has studied law and he knew he had a reasonable legal case. He knew what he was facing and he was prepared for it. But he was prepared in a civil and legal way: the way he has learnt, experienced and is accustomed to in Europe. And perhaps that is where he was naive.

He believed with Saddam gone, with Kurdistan supposedly free, and with all the talk about rule of law, democracy and human rights, he would be allowed to have a civilised open legal battle with the Barzani family (whom he accused of attempting to murder him in 2000). He would either win or lose but either way he would have been of service to the cause of truth and freedom in Kurdistan.

But it seems that this was exactly what Barzani family wanted to avoid. They could have ignored Dr Qadir upon his return to Kurdistan in October 2005. But instead they tried to kidnap and silence him - their own way. When they failed, they set up a court which took five minutes to sentence Dr Qadir to 30 years imprisonment.

Seemingly they found nothing wrong with this, not even their use of Saddam’s law of libel, which was designed to protect the inviolability of the dictator, to passing their verdict.

Then began a campaign on behalf of Dr Kamal Qadir, started by his two sisters in Germany, for his release. It achieved great success with over 500 Kurdish writers and intellectuals, mostly in exile and from all parts of Kurdistan, signing a petition against the Barzani’s party and applying for the freedom of Dr Qadir. Amnesty International and International Pen have taken up his case, the US and Austrian Government’s have directly intervened and the international media has reported his case.

The Barzani’s apparently gave in, tactically announcing that all charges against Dr Qadir had been dismissed by an appeal court, and he was free. But this was not true. A month later he is still in jail.