APPG Kurdistan

There was precious little discussion about foreign policy at the two main conferences. There were the usual packed receptions for friends of Israel, the Arab States and Azerbajan and keynote speeches by William Hague and his Labour counterpart, Douglas Alexander but few fringe meetings. A major exception to this was provided by the KRG, which organised two fringe meetings on the UN’s Responsibility to Protect doctrine which allows for international actions if states don’t protect their own people. The meetings also highlighted the campaign to recognise the Kurdish genocide and focused on lessons from the Kurdish experience for Syria and the Middle East.

Read more at http://www.rudaw.net/english/science/columnists/5312.html

Gary Kent remembers a weekend in Baghdad and makes the case for federalism in Iraq.

Four years ago I joined a Labour Friends of Iraq (LFIQ) delegation to Baghdad. We took a military flight from Kuwait and a Puma helicopter from Baghdad airport to the Green Zone. The chopper flew low and fast over Baghdad to prevent rockets arming themselves before hitting us. An armoured bus took us to the Embassy for a sobering security drill. We already had our flak jackets and helmets. I am a professional coward so self-medicated to get me through the first night in a pod with sandbagged roofs to stop mortars but which was rather flimsy against rockets on a horizontal trajectory.

Our first day was punctuated by a dozen mortar rounds, one of which came very close. By the time we met the PM and Islamic Dawa Party Leader, Mr Nouri al-Maliki we were slightly rattled but an accidental mistake broke the ice.

The translator unknowingly described Maliki as the General-Secretary of the Ba’ath Party – former owner Saddam Hussein. The leader immediately interjected “Dawa.” The translator looked puzzled but not scared. Mr Maliki then quipped that the interpreter would have been executed for this in the old days.

This vignette came back to me on reading the Guardian’s recent editorial, Iraq: back to the future, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/10/iraq-nouri-al-maliki-editorial?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter which said that the Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s authoritarianism has some way to go before he matches Saddam Hussein’s terror – but the charge sheet is growing.

Continue reading at http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/gary-kent/iraq-saddams-ghost-and-a-federal-future_b_1883476.html

Gary Kent taks a personal look at the meaning of the Hillsborough inquiry, the notion of Bliarism and why people should recognise the genocide against the Kurds in his Rudaw column.

One Saturday 23 years ago I tuned into a major football match at Hillsborough between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. I had decided to give football a try. It wasn’t a good choice because the cameras soon turned to the terraces where spectators were in trouble and I watched in horror as 96 Liverpool fans were crushed and suffocated.

As if that weren’t bad enough it now appears that the police, who made serious crowd control mistakes, colluded with an MP and a major newspaper to switch the blame to the fans. They concocted black propaganda that portrayed the innocent fans as drunk or robbing and abusing the dead. It caused outrage in a distinctive British region and there has been a campaign for truth and justice ever since.

Last week the Prime Minister and the Opposition Leader apologised for the failure of successive governments to break the silence and establish the truth. It was a festering sore and now we know. Nothing will bring back the dead but those who lost loved ones can live with themselves better now. Guilty parties may be punished.

I am sure you can see where I am going here. The Westminster debate reinforced my view that it is morally and politically vital for the UK and the wider international community to recognise other events that finished 24 years ago. I am referring, of course, to the genocide against the Iraqi Kurds which began in 1963 and culminated in the use of weapons of mass destruction, most notoriously at Halabja in 1988.

Read the rest at http://www.rudaw.net/english/science/columnists/5205.html

A fascinating debate from the excellent Frontline Club on Iraq: Escalating violence and sectarian division is at http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/25338503Iraq: Escalating violence and sectarian division

Kurds are becoming a major new factor in the Middle East and could overcome old injustices and fashion new alliances for the better.

A generation ago the plight of the Kurds was dire in all four countries where they mainly live – Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria following the failure to allow them an independent state in the aftermath of the end of the First World War and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. It is, as I have often been told, a tough neighbourhood.

The worst fate befell the Iraqi Kurds who faced systematic efforts to eliminate them from the early 1960s to the late 1980s. A spiral of increasingly vicious measures, particularly under Saddam Hussein, culminated in the flattening of thousands of villages and nearly 200,000 people killed in the late 80s. The most powerful symbol of this was the slaughter of 5,000 people at Halabja by weapons of mass destruction.

The APPG on the Kurdistan Region is supporting an epetition urging the UK Government to recognise the genocide. It can be found at http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/31014

But the Kurds have bounced back, especially in Iraqi Kurdistan since its uprising in 1991 and the successful intervention that was the no-fly zone policed by America, Britain and France.

Here they have embraced democracy and have gone from dirt poor to a coming place thanks to about 3% of the world’s known oil reserves under their territory. Iraqi Kurdistan could produce 1 million barrels per day by 2014 and 2 million in 2019. However, the landlocked region is reliant on its neighbours to turn these assets into revenues.

Sadly, Baghdad is antagonistic to the Kurdistan Region and the federal settlement agreed in 2005 has yet to be fully implemented. The main issues concern whether the Kurdish military forces are funded by federal or regional funds, the status of territories that the Kurds say should be part of their region (the forcibly Arabised city of Kirkuk is a key flashpoint), revenue-sharing and a law governing the exploitation of energy resources.

The quantity of often easily available oil and gas in a safe environment and without the sluggish and unsafe miasma of the rest of the country have made Kurdistan an attractive proposition for oil companies.

The decision of four of the world’s top ten oil majors to enter the Kurdish market is a significant vote of confidence but has enraged Baghdad which has blustered but has been unable to force the companies to recant.

It may not be long before most majors are in Kurdistan which would put considerable pressure on Baghdad to compromise with rather than confront Kurdistan.

I hope that Tony Hayward, the former head of BP and now Genel Chief Executive is right in saying that “Over the next year or two, Kurdistan production capacity will grow towards 1 million barrels a day – that’s too much oil to be shut in as a consequence of a political dispute. So one way or another, it’s going to get resolved.”

But Baghdad oil can only be exported via a pipeline controlled by Baghdad which receives all revenues and can withhold the Kurdish share. If the Kurds cannot export they have to sell the oil to the domestic market at much lower prices.

However, in May the Iraqi Kurds and the Turks announced oil and gas pipelines from the Kurdistan Region to Turkey. The first pipeline is due to be completed in August 2013.

The Kurds could then export energy without Baghdad’s approval, supply the fast-growing  economy of Turkey which could become an energy hub and a positive part of the European energy equation. And the whole question is becoming a live part of the ancient enmity between Sunni and Shia Islam, accelerated by the Syrian crisis.

Baghdad supports Assad, as does Iran, but Turkey now favours regime change in Syria, as do the main Sunni Arab states. The equation is massively complicated further by the 28 year war between the PKK and Turkey, which has killed up to 40,000 people.

The Kurdistan Region President, Massoud Barzani has also been instrumental in forging unity between the divided Syrian Kurdish forces, which favour federal arrangements similar to that of Iraqi Kurdistan. Turkey fears that the PKK will use this territory to pursue its war.

The APPG and the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee have drawn parallels with the Northern Ireland peace process. One similarity with Northern Ireland is that the shape of the deal has long been clear. The PKK and Turkey cannot achieve their aims through military action. Turkey can best guarantee its borders by generously tackling the causes of Kurdish discontent. The PKK can best achieve autonomy and cultural rights within Turkey if it lays down its arms.

This leaves Baghdad’s antagonism to the Iraqi Kurds. Iraq gains much from the autonomous Kurdistan Region which shows a potential future for the whole of the country and supplies many leading figures in the government. My hope is that the federal settlement can encourage new relations, based on mutually beneficial economic self-interest, to overcome old divisions between these neighbours.

The Kurds have come far since the dark days of genocide and will need all their skills and international support to bring this benign scenario into being. A more confident Iraqi Kurdistan could be also a key actor in boosting the hopes that the Arab Spring will mean freedom, pluralism and economic progress at last.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/gary-kent/the-kurds-and-their-neighbours_b_1868257.html

Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s views of Tony Blair and the Iraq war are not new. Very little is in the debate between those who supported intervention in Iraq and those who opposed it.

There was also very little in the Archbishop’s case that justified it making headlines. But I suspect we will see more in this vein as we approach the vexed tenth anniversary in the Spring of 2013 of the intervention in Iraq.

The tenth anniversary also coincides with the 25th anniversary of the use of weapons of mass destruction at Halabja which was the most notorious part of a long-running genocide against the Kurds.

I backed the intervention and have visited Baghdad twice and Iraqi Kurdistan nine times since 2006. Many Iraqis supported the intervention, although they were appalled at the mistakes made in the aftermath of the successful ousting of Saddam Hussein. Others preferred other means of ridding themselves of fascism.

They all want to go beyond this debate and rebuild their country, which needs international support. Despite much reduced but still terrible massacres by Al Qaeda in the Arab part of Iraq, Iraqis have freedoms far beyond anything they had under Saddam.

There is a long way to go, especially in the Arab part of Iraq which has had less time to overcome its past than has the Kurdistan Region, which successfully rose up against Saddam in 1991. With this extra time, they Kurds have managed to modernise their infrastructure with, for example, nearly continuous electricity compared to just a few hours in Baghdad.

Other areas are deeply disturbing. Take civil society, for instance. I am privileged to be an honorary member of the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions (though I miss branch meetings). The unions were all but liquidated under Saddam. They still face great restrictions on their rights – Saddam’s ban on public sector unions is still in force. Their offices are raided and there is a long way to go before Iraq complies with international standards. But they are not imprisoned and executed in their thousands.

My hope is that myriad Iraqi voices are part of future discussions. I also hope that these debates will rise above the level set by Archbishop Tutu.

His weakest argument made was that “Leadership and morality are indivisible. Good leaders are the custodians of morality. The question is not whether Saddam Hussein was good or bad or how many of his people he massacred. The point is that Mr Bush and Mr Blair should not have allowed themselves to stoop to his immoral level.”

It surely matters much morally to know what Saddam did and to recognise that the man who modelled himself on both Hitler and Stalin was a monster.

As Oliver Kamm rightly argues in his riposte to the pontiff in the Times: “Saddam was not merely a bad man. He was a tyrant unlike any other. It was well said that under Saddam’s despotism Iraq was a charnel house above ground and a mass grave below.”

Kamm mentions the often overlooked treatment of the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs and adds that “Saddam was not a wronged party in the Iraq war. He was a psychopathic, kleptomaniacal butcher in serial violation of UN Security Council resolutions. Intervention to overthrow him was not a war crime but a judgment born of a changed assessment of the risks to Western security after 9/11.”

Bayan Sami Abdul Rahman, the Kurdistan Regional Government High Representative to the UK says that “The Kurds of Iraq are especially grateful to Tony Blair, and John Major who established the no-fly zone in 1991 which saved us from extinction. We lost hundreds of thousands to Saddam’s genocidal campaign to exterminate us. We are now free to comment and contribute to debates like this and to respectfully disagree with Archbishop Tutu about ignoring the evils of Saddam.

It is partly because of misconceptions such as Archbishop Tutu’s that an e-petition has been launched calling for the genocide against the Iraqi Kurds to be recognised.”

Bayan then adds: “We were Saddam’s victims, as were other Iraqis who did not applaud his rule, and we all know that he would have continued his campaign of oppression and killing had he been allowed to. Things are much better for us and for the vast majority of Iraqis now, even if mistakes were made by the Coalition after its intervention in Iraq.”

I leave the last word to Bayan: “I know that differences on Iraq are very deep in the UK and elsewhere. I only ask that our views on our country are heard. But by far the most important task is to encourage deeper and broader cultural and commercial connections for mutual benefit and to help us build a democratic and federal Iraq so that the sacrifice of so many in Britain and in Iraq is not wasted.”

Gary Kent writes in a personal capacity

The petition can be signed at http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/31014

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – This week, the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) Council of Ministries established a Women’s Rights Monitoring Board.

KRG Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani led the board’s first meeting. Types of violence committed against women were addressed during the meeting, specifically honor killing. Discussions focused on possible approaches to tackling the issue in Kurdistan.

The meeting was attended by Pakhashan Zangana, head of Kurdistan Women’s Council and Dr Nazand Begikhani, Senior Research Fellow on Gender and Violence at the University of Bristol, who is advising the government on gender issues.

Several government ministers, the head of the public prosecution office and representatives from women’s organizations were also in attendance.

The meeting identified shortcomings in the judicial and education systems and police departments, and urged improvements to overcome the problems. The implementation of a domestic violence law was another topic of the meeting.

The aim of the monitoring body is to improve the government’s policies towards women’s issues and provide a safe and happy environment for women within their families. The KRG prime minister will lead the monitoring body meeting once a month.

In a press conference after the inaugural session, the prime minister insisted that his administration is determined to tackle violence against women, especially honor killing. “In Kurdistan, no religion or tradition tolerate such acts,” he said.

Barzani said that KRG has long been working to overcome violence against women by establishing shelters and offices in every province of Kurdistan.

He admitted that nowadays violent cases appear to be increasing because in the past there was no data and people were not vocal about these types of issues. Barzani emphasized the importance of bringing the issue to the public’s attention, adding that no one is immune from the law, regardless of their social or government positions.

According to the prime minister, his administration is also working with parliament to draft a law preventing carrying weapons without permission. Furthermore, the KRG has signed contracts with some telephone companies to help reduce violence against women relating to cell phones.

He mentioned an incident in the Garmiyan area where a brother recently killed his sister. “There will be a serious investigation. Today I personally heard details of the incident. The government will send a committee to thoroughly investigate the situation and report the results to the public,” he said.

In the incident, the woman had just left a shelter and was killed at home. “We must make sure that women will enter a safe environment and not be physically hurt before sending them home,” Barzani said, pointing to the board as a way of coordinating support efforts available for women.

The prime minister said that the most important part of implementing a law is educating people about it. “The previous administration worked hard toward this goal; however, this cannot be done overnight … it must become part of society starting from the education system and schools,” he said.

Barzani also cited the media as important in this regard, saying that they sometimes interpret events when reporting to the public. “Someone killed his sister and burned her later in Sulaimani,” he said as an example. “The man who committed the crime regretted it. Unfortunately, the media exaggerated the report and tried to stir the public’s opinion.”

Barzani said that violence against women is not only occurring in Kurdistan, but is a worldwide problem. However, the focus has to be on what can be done here. “Women are the main component of Kurdish society. They have fought alongside men in past revolutions. Women were the main victims in the Anfal campaign,” he said.

The prime minister added, “It is unjust to accuse them alone of causing family problems and killing them. That’s why educating people should be the priority of government and civil organizations.”

Barzani maintained that the domestic violence law is an important piece of legislation. “During the meeting, I urged the minister of justice to implement the law thoroughly and assured him he has our support.”

Many social issues in Kurdistan end up being resolved through family settlements, but the prime minister urged people to rely on the court. “Honor killing is a crime and we will not allow it. The courts in Kurdistan will punish anyone who commits this crime,” he said.

“We do not deny our shortcomings, however the KRG is determined to eradicate this issue. We ask civil organizations and religious leaders to cooperate with us in this plan,” Barzani added.

http://www.rudaw.net/english/kurds/5070.html

“A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” Stalin apparently said this to Churchill on the news of the death of a close friend of the British Premier.

The cynical saw speaks to a wider truth concerning human tragedies. We find it difficult to understand death on an industrial scale.

This is especially true of genocide which is defined as “the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group”.

The Iraqi Kurds are trying to encourage the world to understand that a decades-long process of genocide killed hundreds of thousands of people and that it remains a living legacy that affected almost all people in a region just twice the size of Wales, or about the same size as Holland.

But talk of how nearly 200,000 people died in just the last stages of the genocide is difficult for many people to take in.

Joanna Hunter of the Hull Daily Mail has brought part of this to life. She focuses on the abduction and murder of 8,000 men and boys from the Barzani tribe of Kurdistan in 1983.

She has interviewed Dawood Yahya Barzani, who was just nine at the time and “watched in horror as the men in his Iraqi village were rounded up and taken away by the army.”

Dawood tells her that “They arrived early in the morning, about 4am. They were terrifying but we were used to seeing them. It usually meant a beating or an execution. But this time there were hundreds of them. They started searching all the houses, telling us that Saddam had called a meeting and all the men were to go. My father and brother suspected it was a trick and hid.”

Hannah Arendt wrote of the banality of evil concerning the Holocaust and this observation from Dawood puts it in the Kurdish context: “The soldiers had a measuring stick and no matter how old you were, if you were taller than the stick, they took you.”

She describes how Dawood’s cousin, Jemal who was just 15 but tall for his age, was loaded onto a truck along with his uncle and four other cousins. The men were taken from their families and taken to southern Iraq.

The women and young boys left behind were never to see any of them again: “the camps had no men left, only women screaming and wailing, surrounded by small children. We never saw my relatives again. There was no human rights there and I was only a boy. I couldn’t do anything.”

Hunter points out that last year, the Iraqi Supreme Court found six former Baath Regime officials, including former Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz, guilty of murdering the men and boys, some of whom were as young as 13.

The court ruled this mass slaughter was an act of genocide. The Justice For Iraqi Kurds campaign urges the British Government to follow suit.

Dawood told the Hull Daily Mail: “I do know that what happened to them was genocide and I ask everyone to sign the petition for recognition. If the British Government recognised this it would mean I was being treated like a human being again. If they accept it, it will give us the right to tell our story. I think if they look at it they will accept it, it’s not like we are lying or making it up. I want to let everyone know how the Barzani tribe was treated.”

Bayan Sami Abdul Rahman, the Kurdistan Regional Government High Representative to the UK, said: “We need international recognition of the horror endured. Recognition is the first step towards prosecuting those individuals who were responsible for the genocide in Iraqi Kurdistan. As well as mass shootings, the Kurdish people were attacked with chemical weapons. The companies that sold these weapons are still operating and still need to be brought to justice. Saddam Hussein was never tried or convicted for the genocide. He might be dead but justice has not yet been done. Now we ask the British Government recognise formally the genocide which took place so Kurdish people in Iraq get the justice they deserve.”

Visit http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/ petitions/31014 to sign the petition, which urges the Government to recognise the genocide against the people of Iraqi Kurdistan.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/gary-kent/iraq-kurds-the-banality-of-evil-_b_1836533.html

Beyond Borders premiered the documentary Kulajo: My Heart Is Darkened this Wednesday 22nd August 2012, at the Edinburgh Filmhouse, as part of the Beyond Borders ‘Small Nations in Cinema’ season.

The event was sponsored by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and supported by the Justice4Genocide e-petition campaign calling on the British Government to recognise the genocide against the Kurds in Iraq prior to and during Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Ms Bayan Sami Abdul Rahman, the KRG High Representative to the UK, reiterating the importance of this campaign on behalf of the genocide victims and survivors, said, “The people of Kurdistan are forward-looking and optimistic but we will never forget what happened to our people. By signing this petition, British citizens will be giving their support to the men, women and children who were killed while the world remained silent. That silence can end now.

Ms Rahman added, “The support and recognition by the British Government will also enable us to get a step closer to the formal legal recognition by the United Nations, which is key to achieving justice, reparations, and healing our people’s wounds”.

Kulajo was one of the thousands of Kurdish villages targeted by Saddam Hussein during his murderous 1988 Anfal campaign. The documentary Kulajo: My Heart Is Darkened allows the people – mostly women and children – of one small community to tell their extraordinary stories. Anfal was a comprehensive plan for destroying all life in the rural areas of Kurdistan in eight stages of military operations; the focus of Anfal varied from one stage to another.

The documentary is Executive Produced by the Emmy-Award winning team of Gwynne Roberts and Sadie Wykeham, directed by ex-BBC award winning Director Helena Appio and produced by Joel Wykeham.

At the screening, film-director Gwynne Roberts and his team expressed their support for the epetition campaign. Mr Roberts said, “I have travelled all over the world to film documentaries, but the story of the Kurdish people is the one which affects me most, because of the sense of pain and injustice.”

He added, “The story of the Kurdish Genocide is highly significant for the world today as, for example, the attack on the village of Balisan in April 1987 was the first instance of a Government using chemical weapons against their own people, which the international community must learn from, especially given the current situation in Syria.”

Baroness Elizabeth Smith, Chairman of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and Hanzala Malik MSP attended the screening.

Hanzala Malik MSP for Glasgow, who has recently visited Kurdistan with the all-party group on the Kurdistan Region parliamentary mission, said, “It’s astonishing that we still continue to carry out barbaric acts against mankind. This was a deliberate, targeted military campaign based on ethnicity, and clearly we have not learned the lessons from the Holocaust. We need to formally recognise that this was genocide so that we can bring the perpetrators to justice, and we need to take responsibility for what happened so we can learn the necessary lessons.”

Two representatives from the Scottish-Kurdish community, Mr Kawa Ali and Dr Massoud Murad, assisted with the promotion of the e-petition after the screening.

The genocide of the Kurdish people in Iraq began in the 1960s and continued until the late 1980s. Independent sources estimate that more than 150,000 people were killed, as many as 100,000 women were widowed and an even greater number of children were orphaned during the Anfal campaign alone, orchestrated between 23 February and 6 September 1988.

This week, 25 August, marks the beginning of the final stage of the anfal operation which targeted mostly adult and teenage males of the Badinan district in the Zagros mountains of the Kurdistan region.

Sign the petition: http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/31014
www.justice4genocide.com

Ms Bayan Sami Abdul Rahman, High Representative to the UK of the Kurdistan Regional Government said: “Yesterday, President Obama’s warning that the use of chemical weapons in Syria would cross a red line sent a clear message that such barbaric attacks will not be tolerated. The Kurdish people in Iraq know what it is like to be subjected to chemical weapons; in one such attack in Halabja, March 1988, 5,000 people were gassed to death and many more were injured. Saddam Hussein was the last person to use chemical weapons against his own people as part of the genocide against the Kurds of Iraq.

We are seeking international recognition of this and have launched a petition to gather support: http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/31014. We said never again after chemical weapons were inflicted on the Kurdish people, but two decades later, we are discussing such weapons being used once more. This shows more than ever why the genocide against the Kurds must be recognised internationally to prevent such atrocities happening again elsewhere and to reinforce the commitment to the ‘Responsibility to Protect’.”