Kurdistan or barbaristan?

Instead, what makes him sleepless at night is the bad conditions of Chemical Ali and Sultan Hashim in their prisons. These are the people who need protection and care. They were so dignified that they did not even express regret or apologise for eliminating 200,000 Kurds and 4,000 Kurdish villages, perhaps in collaboration with Talabani himself.

The only semi-independent newspaper in Kurdistan is Hawlati. The most usually critical piece of writing in this paper is a small column in its final page called “hanasa”. This means breath, a small tiny corner of free breath in a jungle of lawlessness, theft, thuggery and daily abuse of power against people. Yet even this is too much for this great democrat, lawyer, humanist veteran leader Talabani, who was too sensitive and kind to sign the death sentence of Saddam or allow the murderers of 200,000 of “his own” people to meet with justice decided by proper legal and judicial processes - which he as lawyer always upholds!

Last year two of Hawlati editors were forced to resign as a result of pressure by PUK authorities whose illiterate partisan “judges” shamelessly used Ba'thist Saddamist laws to punish journalists - as if we had offered half a million martyrs to end Saddam’s and Arab occupation only to be ruled instead by Kurdish incarnations of Arab Ba’thists.

The owner of the paper was publicly beaten and humiliated in a club. Another journalist from Halabja - the site of a poison gas attack in 1988 by Saddam Hussein - was kidnapped, beaten and left on street after he wrote a critical article of Talabani. Editors of a magazine in Hawler Bzaw were forced to close it down after it published an analysis of Talabani's conduct during a visit to Cairo.

This is the model of democracy that the Bush administration has given Kurdish society. Once Colin Powell and Paul Bremer boasted of taking the example of PUK/KDP democracy to the rest of Iraq . Now after four years of American control in Iraqi politics, this fantastic model has been consummated. Perhaps that is what Mr Friedman, a columnist for the New York Times, calls the Kurdish secret. He writes: “The Kurdish autonomous zone should be our model for Iraq. Does George Bush or Condi Rice have a better idea? Do they have any idea?” (New York Times, September 3, 2007.)

No they don’t. If this Kurdish model cannot inspire them, what ever can? Perhaps that is why Mr Bush seems so dull! Perhaps Mr Friedman should advise Bush and Rice to apply this Kurdish model to American society before they leave office.