Kurdish Enclave Shows How Iraq Could Prosper

On the edge of this bustling Kurdish city, a little oil refinery assembled from the cannibalized parts of cement, sugar and soft-drink factories noisily pumps out 3,000 barrels a day. Its slogan: “Where there’s a well, there’s a way.”

Like the refinery, the people of Iraq’s craggy northern mountains also have reconfigured the bits and pieces of their society in the last three years to create one of the world’s unique political entities, an autonomous statelet inside Iraq that may set an example for the future.

With each step, however, the scrappy Kurds, isolated by their own country as well as the outside world, have had to defy enormous odds.

Persecuted for decades and cut off by Iraq in 1991, Kurds have had trouble getting passports. So the prime minister of the northern enclave has become a Brit, the minister of education a Swede, and the ministers of human rights and reconstruction are Germans. Other officials, converting time as students or workers abroad into citizenship, have become Belgian, French, Italian, Spanish, Austrian and Swiss.

“I don’t think there are any Portuguese among us,” mused Minister of Defense Sherdl Hawezey of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, which runs the eastern sector of Kurdistan.

Excluded from political experience in Baghdad, the Kurds also have been imaginative in adapting skills to needs. PUK intelligence chief Khasro Mohammed is a former veterinarian who specialized in poultry.

“Both jobs require research and investigation,” he said with a chuckle.

And hard hit by U.N. and Iraqi sanctions, the Kurds have generated new revenue by turning the tables -- and taxing smugglers who ferry oil and other goods on behalf of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Kurds earn $1 million a day from levies on illicit trade, according to U.S. officials.

“Our dinar -- the old one, without Saddam’s picture on it -- is now stronger than the currency in the rest of Iraq,” said PUK Prime Minister Barham Salih.

Kurdistan has done so well in the last three years that many Kurds like to boast that the north, an area twice the size of New Jersey, could be a model for the rest of Iraq in a post-Hussein era. “Kurdistan has traditionally been the least developed part of Iraq, economically, politically and socially. If we could achieve this in Kurdistan, we could easily achieve it in the rest of Iraq,” Salih added.

But the Kurds, who make up 15% to 20% of Iraq’s 23 million people, are also the most sensitive issue when it comes to Iraq’s future. They’ve been fighting for self-rule from Baghdad since 1961. Iraq, Turkey, Iran and Syria have long feared that their Kurds, who together make up the world’s largest ethnic group without a state, would eventually attempt to break away -- taking valuable lands and creating political upheaval in the process.

Kurdish leaders say otherwise. Their goal is now a democracy that allows them self-rule, like an American state or Swiss canton, in a federal system.

“We are a picture of the future of Iraq. We’re now a fledgling democracy by Mideast standards,” said Sami Abdul Rahman, deputy prime minister of the Kurdish Democratic Party, which runs Kurdistan’s western sector.

Kurdistan is certainly the antithesis of Iraq -- and much of the Islamic world.

The newspaper Hawlati, or “the Citizen” in English, has become the bane of local politicians since its launch in 2000 -- on a 1967 printing press and two aged computers.

An early investigation by the newspaper linked a Kurdish military commander to the kidnapping and murder of a local woman, leading to his arrest. The paper has published -- and challenged -- secret government communications. Its editorials have blasted officials for inefficiency, using party influence and corruption. It exposed a PUK commander engaged in corrupt business deals and illegal kickbacks on government contracts. And it has uncovered the death toll in intra-Kurdish fighting.

“Every week, someone comes through my office asking me to do something about the papers,” Salih said with a sigh. He has opted to let the press have its say.

“Politicians understand that allowing criticism is more important than stopping criticism -- no small thing in Iraq. Allowing this paper to publish gives them benefits too,” said Aso Hardi, the Citizen’s editor, who trained as an engineer.

Kurdistan has dozens of newspapers, some independent like the Citizen and many tied to local parties. “But at least we have a lot of parties,” Hardi added.

Kurds also have launched several television stations -- some with satellite links beaming to the United States and Europe. One station airs an equivalent of “Saturday Night Live” with irreverent pokes at Kurdish politicians.

To compensate for having no postal system, dozens of Internet cafes have opened in the last three years. Unlike the censored Internet in Iraq, Kurds have cheap, unrestricted access to the World Wide Web. In turn, satellite dishes have brought in the outside world -- and transformed the horizon, perched atop mud-brick homes in the countryside and dangling with laundry off apartment balconies in cities.

Kurdistan’s transformation is particularly striking after the devastation during Iraqi rule. To quash rebellious Kurds in the 1980s, Hussein’s army razed 90% of their villages. Thousands died in chemical weapons attacks and 180,000 disappeared in government roundups, according to human rights groups.

Hussein struck again in 1991, when Kurds heeded Washington’s call to rise against Baghdad after the Persian Gulf War. To escape Iraq’s retaliation, more than 1 million Kurds fled to the borders. When U.S. and British warplanes began protecting a northern “no-fly” zone, Hussein pulled out and imposed economic sanctions to starve the Kurds, already under the U.N. embargo on all Iraq. Landlocked, the Kurds were cut off -- with no functioning economy.

That’s when the stubborn Kurds slowly began to rebuild.

Salih, the erudite, British-educated prime minister of the PUK sector, likes to cite the vast former Iraqi military compound in the city he now governs as a sign of change. He did time there when he was detained in 1979. So did his father in 1963.

“For decades, it was the most feared place in town, the place people were tortured and executed,” he recalled.

When Kurds returned from the borders in 1991, thousands converged on the facility and tore it down. Today, it’s an entertainment park where on weekends Kurds ride the Ferris wheel, listen to youth bands in an open-air amphitheater and walk in gardens of red gladioluses and pink roses above what was the army’s underground bunker for ammunition.

The Kurds owe much of their success to the no-fly zone and the U.N. oil-for-food program launched in 1996. Kurds now receive 13% of Iraq’s oil revenue, all of which is channeled through the United Nations back into the country. U.N. sanctions still apply, but Kurds can use funds for reconstruction and humanitarian needs.

“For all its shortcomings, oil-for-food rescued our people. Everyone now gets a food basket for a whole month every month. It’s often worth more than the income of a family,” said Abdul Rahman of the KDP. “With that oil income, we’ve built schools and clinics, developed agriculture, paved roads and planted some 3 million trees. Kurds now have a sense of security.”

In Irbil, the KDP capital, a gray-and-white marble Central Bank just opened, and a pink-and-white marble Justice Ministry is almost finished. On a dramatic ridge, a five-star hotel is going up, and new “hanging streets,” or overpasses, reflect one of Kurdistan’s latest problems -- traffic jams from hundreds of new cars.

The make-over has gradually eliminated Baghdad’s influence. Unlike the rest of Iraq, there are no statues or billboards heralding Hussein’s 23-year rule. With 65% of the Kurds younger than 25, many don’t even remember Hussein.

“I only know about him from stories my father tells. We were just children when he ruled here,” said 19-year-old Sawsan Ali, a freshman at the University of Irbil, where students learn in Kurdish rather than the Arabic of the rest of Iraq.

The Kurdish experiment still has serious problems -- and flaws.

A Bush administration official said the north had made “impressive progress.” But the official challenged past elections and the accountability of current political structures. “The results in 1992 were largely fixed in a back room when neither side liked the outcome. The KDP and PUK ended up splitting most of the vote,” the official said.

Friction between the two political rivals derailed the experiment during two years of fighting that ended only when Washington mediated a truce in 1998, although the two Kurdish leaders in the U.S.-backed opposition are now collaborating in broader efforts to plan for the post-Hussein era.

“Our main political problem today is that neither party wants to be No. 2, and in a real democracy, everyone has to be No. 2 at some point,” said Hardi, the editor.

Economically, Kurdistan remains in limbo. A new fast-food outlet complete with golden arches has introduced Big Macs and Happy Meals -- but as MaDonal’s. “I have to wait until sanctions end to make it the real thing,” said owner Suleiman Kasab, a former hamburger flipper at a McDonald’s in Austria.

Politically, Kurds are not empowered to change laws, so they still live under Iraq’s constitution. “Press freedoms hang by a thread because we don’t have laws and institutions that support them,” Hardi said. “This whole dream could collapse at any moment.”

Or face even worse from Hussein’s army and artillery visibly poised on the border. Repeatedly quashed by Baghdad and betrayed when America reneged on promises of support in 1975, 1991 and 1996, the Kurds are especially wary of what lies ahead. They feel more vulnerable than any other sector of Iraqi society, particularly from the danger of Hussein lashing out against them in a preemptive strike to divert attention from U.N. weapons inspections.

Yet most minorities and women in Kurdistan say life today is far better than in the rest of the country.

The right of Christians in the region to have their own schools and media has led to the revival of Assyrian, a modern version of Aramaic, the language of Jesus, according to Zadook Adam of the Bet Nahrain Democratic Party. Assyrians, who have been in Iraq since before Christ, share five seats reserved for Christians in the Kurdish National Assembly.

A Catholic leader says Chaldeans, the other major denomination in Kurdistan, are “protected and respected” in the north. “In Baghdad, we have no rights, and relations are strained among the religions,” said Archbishop Yacoub Scher of St. Joseph’s Church in Irbil.

For women, the PUK government has banned polygamy, while the KDP allows multiple marriages only when the husband gets the first wife’s written permission and registers it in court. And the National Assembly has outlawed honor killings throughout Kurdistan.

The hottest issue is the status of the Turkomans, Kurdistan’s largest minority. The Turkoman Front boycotted the 1992 elections and is now trying to negotiate for a share of seats in parliament and the KDP administration.

“The Arabs consider Iraq as part of the Arab nation, and the Kurds see this area as part of greater Kurdistan. Both consider this their home and not a country for us all,” said Sanan Ahmed Agha, the Turkoman Front’s president.

Nevertheless, with six licensed political parties, Turkomans take advantage of the new openings. They also have 15 schools, eight newspapers, four magazines, six radio stations and two television stations, according to the Turkoman Cultural Center in Irbil.

Perhaps ironically, the Kurdish experiment has led vast numbers of Kurds to see their future in Iraq -- not in an independent Kurdistan uniting the world’s 25 million to 40 million Kurds.

“We’re proud of what we’ve done with 10 years of self-government, but it has its limitations, so we realize there’s nowhere to go from here,” Salih said. “Our interests will be best secured working with other Iraqis to build a new government. To safeguard our future, we want and need to be in Baghdad too.”