A Road Unforeseen

by Meredith Tax

  Iraqi Kurdistan has huge oil and gas reserves, as many as 55 billion barrels of oil, a quarter of the reserves in the whole country.54 Thirty-nine different oil companies from nineteen countries moved in; China even set up a consulate in Erbil. Since the region was still part of Iraq, however, oil revenues were disputed from the moment the autonomous region was created, with Baghdad claiming a percentage. The issue came to a head in October 2013, when the KRG defied Baghdad by building a pipeline through Turkey to the Mediterranean, bypassing the center of Iraq. In response, Baghdad stopped government salaries and other KRG expenses. This caused an economic crisis in the region, since an estimated 1.4 million people, out of a total population of five to eight million, were on the government payroll.55

  Between 2006 and 2014, more than $38 billion in foreign investment flowed into the KRG, but most of it went into construction, where investors could get a quick return, rather than into manufacturing and agriculture, where real wealth could be produced. As a result, the economy remained dependent on oil, which meant the fall in oil prices after 2004 hit the KRG hard.

  Corruption also took its toll on the economy. While some people had to work two jobs to survive, others didn’t bother to show up for any job. In a 2008 BBC report, a Kurdish businessman admitted that a $2 or $3 million dollar contract to build a road would be given to a relative of some political leader, regardless of whether the relative had the capacity to actually do the work. The relative would then subcontract to someone who would subcontract to someone else until eventually the contract would reach a real construction company, by which time half the money would be gone. A 2015 report by the Carnegie Middle East Center called the system sultanistic: “Sultanism is a particular form of rule that is based on cronyism, clientelism, nepotism, personalism, and dynasticism.”56

  The corruption of the Barzani and Talabani clans was legendary; as a local journalist put it, they turned Kurdistan into a “two family region—Barzanistan and Talabanistan.”57 But journalists had to be careful what they said, particularly about the Barzanis. At least two journalists were gunned down, while another was sentenced to thirty years in jail for writing about the clan’s hold on the economy.58

  Despite such attacks, journalistic criticism continued. Seval Sarukhanyan, an Armenian researcher, wrote in December 2015, that, while “family states” are common in the Middle East, the degree of overlap between state and family in Iraqi Kurdistan was something special. President Masoud Barzani refused to resign after two terms in office, as required by the law adopted by the Kurds. His nephew, Nechirvan Barzani, was prime minister. Barzani’s elder son, Masrour, was minister of intelligence and another son, Mansour, was a general in the Kurdish army, as was one of Barzani’s brothers. His nephew, Sirvan Barzani, was said to be the richest man in the country. And, solidifying his ties with Baghdad, Barzani’s uncle, Hoshyar Zaberi, was Iraq’s minister of foreign affairs from 2003 to 2014, when he became finance minister.59

  Based as it was upon tribalism, a strong security apparatus, and “traditional values,” the KDP was not friendly to either democracy or women’s rights and, while the PUK was more progressive in words, it was not very different in practice. In 2009, a new anticorruption party called Gorran (Movement for Change) was started by people who had split from the PUK. In 2016, it remains to be seen whether it would or could make any difference.

  Thus it was not remarkable that, even when activists managed to get a 25 percent quota for women in decision-making bodies, business continued as usual. When government posts were allotted to fill the quota, they were given to women “based on their political affiliations or familial and tribal connections and not because of their suitability or interest in women’s issues and gender equality,” wrote Choman Hardi. “These women are specifically chosen because they are not a threat to the system.”

  In Parliament, there were few women on important committees—and no men at all on the Women’s Committee because “women’s issues are considered women’s problem and they are left to deal with them. The burden of combating gender discrimination is put on women activists who are blamed every time a woman is killed. This mentality fails to recognise that the responsibility of securing better rights for the various social groups (women, the poor, people with disabilities, ethnic and sexual minorities, etc.) must ultimately lie with the government,” wrote Hardi.60

  In 2011, popular dissatisfaction with the Kurdistan Regional Government boiled over and, as in other places during the Arab Spring, thousands of young people took to the streets in Suleimaniya, demanding more transparency and democracy from the PUK. (There were no such demonstrations in Erbil because the KDP did not allow protests.) These demonstrators sent shock waves through the Kurdistan Regional Government.

  As Kawa Hassan wrote in a report for the Carnegie Middle East Center, “They renamed the city’s central square Saray Azady (Liberation Square, after Tahrir Square in Cairo), demanded an end to economic monopolies and human rights violations, and called for social and economic justice and the democratization of the political system. A remarkable characteristic of this protest movement was that different forces—Gorran, Islamist parties, and civil society—jointly organized the demonstrations.”61

  At their peak, the demonstrations attracted thousands and they continued for two months. Then security forces surrounded the demonstrators and opened fire, killing at least two and wounding forty-seven, according to one reporter. Another put the toll at ten killed and more than five hundred injured. In retaliation for the protests, government supporters and security guards attacked independent press offices, and burned down both the independent NRT television station in Sulaymaniyah and the Gorran radio station in Erbil.62

  The PUK reaped the fruit of its repression in the next election for Parliament in 2013. Gorran got one third of the votes and became the second largest party, ahead of the PUK. And the KDP came under intense pressure again in the fall of 2015, with weeks of protests because teachers and government employees had not been paid for three months and Barzani refused to call new elections or step down even though his term extension was up. Shenah Abdullah, an anthropologist in Suleimaniya, wrote in mid-October of 2015: “Two years of financial and political uncertainty have led to widespread hopelessness. This week marks the third week of strikes in many government sectors in the Suleimani, Halabja and Garmyain districts. Teachers and government employees have refused to go back to work and demand to be paid three months of overdue salaries. . . . The KDP has refused to come to a consensus with the other four political parties due to [its] insistence on extending the president’s reign, which ended on 20 August of this year. Their grip on power is reaching a frightening stage and they threaten to dismantle the parliament. . . . For the past two years, the majority of people have survived thanks to sustenance and loans from relatives and friends. That lifeline has thinned out and is nearing its limit. In the meantime, the ruling elite and a growing affluent class feeding on capitalist investments and oil revenues lead lives of luxury inconceivable even to their counterparts elsewhere. The gap between the classes is alarming and it is making people furious. . . . while American and European officials boast of this shining democratic example, which they have been nurturing for decades.”63

  Many Kurdish feminists joined Gorran because of their inability to get the Kurdistan Regional Government to deal with increasing levels of violence against women. Even when new laws were passed, they were not enforced. In 2013, a feminist NGO called One Voice presented a letter to the government demanding better enforcement. It quoted statistics for 2011 and 2012: “74 women were killed and only 16 people were punished, 709 cases of [alleged] suicide were recorded and only 3 were investigated, 1,681 cases of domestic violence were recorded and no one was charged, 279 women were raped and only 2 men were punished. In other words, a total 2,743 cases of violence against women were recorded and only 21 people were brought to justice.”64

  Much of the work of the women’s movement in Iraqi Kurdistan
has centered on issues of violence against women, particularly “honor killings,” forced marriage, domestic violence, and FGM. There has been entrenched opposition to change in any of these areas, particularly “honor killings,” which both the KDP and PUK have claimed are part of Kurdish culture. In 2009, when a law was drafted on gender equality, Barzani refused to sign it. In 2011, he also refused to sign a law banning FGM, although it eventually passed without his signature.65

  Local advocacy work on violence against women has suffered from the problems of women’s rights advocacy everywhere—financial instability and donor driven programming. In places where the government has no interest in combating violence against women—or, more accurately, is hostile to women’s equality—the work is often carried on by NGOS that are dependent on external funding. Since such funding is generally given on a project-to-project basis, with no provision for organizational sustainability, NGOs tend to follow whatever issue is fashionable, switching from one program to another every few years to please donors. Choman Hardi and Shahrzad Mojab addressed these problems in the Iraqi Kurdistan women’s movement, but they are endemic to women’s rights work everywhere, as documented by the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID).66

  And while NGOs can help in individual cases—setting up shelters, helping young women escape forced marriages—and do political lobbying and advocacy, broader cultural questions like violence against women require consistent political education and social intervention. The rising strength of Islamism in Iraqi Kurdistan has only added to the difficulty of making that happen.

  Hardi has shown how a history of violence has compounded many of the problems women face. On top of the Anfal, in Saddam’s time, “the Iraqi government through the use of imprisonment, torture, widespread surveillance, and public executions in the main cities had made political violence part of everyday life. Throughout the Iran-Iraq war the Iraqi TV stations broadcast a programme called Swar min Al-Maaraka (Images from the battlefield) which proudly showed images of the broken and mutilated bodies of Iranian soldiers as a symbol of . . . success. In this sense cruelty in Iraq was normalised and the society was brutalised. Similarly in the 1991 popular uprising, the Kurds showed no mercy when killing members of the Iraqi security and intelligence offices. These people were not only killed but parts of their bodies, such as ears, fingers and penises, were cut and they were exhibited on the streets and in the main squares for days. This should have been a warning signal to tell us that the new community which was just beginning was going to be as brutal and merciless as the one it was replacing.”67

  A feminist, democratic, people-centered cultural revolution is needed. While such a revolution has not yet come to Iraqi Kurdistan, it has blossomed across the border, in the Rojava cantons of Syria. It began in Turkey in the 1990s, when the PKK began to change its strategy and Leyla Zana began to speak up for peace and democracy and women’s rights.

  Funeral after a Daesh suicide bomb attack on YPG-YPJ in Sinjar, 2015.

  CHAPTER 4

  The People Take Up the Struggle

  THE PKK’S FIFTH CONGRESS in 1995 was a turning point in its development, at which it reversed policy decisions made at the Third Congress in 1986, notably the policy of drafting and taxing Kurdish peasants. In a major step forward, it made a commitment to uphold the Geneva Convention, meaning it would no longer attack civilians, only the military and police—a commitment that was not matched by the Turkish government.1 The Congress also advanced a startling new position on women’s liberation, essentially saying that women, not the working class, were the motive force of revolution: “In today’s world, women represent the strongest revolutionary dynamic force in the society.”2

  What had happened between 1986 and 1995? A mass movement had been born.

  In the eighties, the PKK was a small and fairly isolated group of militants focused on armed struggle and willing to use violence against civilians like teachers and the families of village guards. In the nineties, their message of Kurdish liberation was taken up by an increasing number of ordinary Kurds, and the struggle was gradually transformed by mass civil resistance as well as battles for political representation. In both these arenas, women were leading activists. And from the nineties on, these three forms of political struggle—guerrilla warfare, mass civil resistance, and parliamentary work—were linked and had a cumulative effect on the consciousness of people in southeastern Turkey. It was not so much that Kurdish activists all followed the PKK, as the Turkish government asserted, as that they were all part of the same movement, reaching for the same goals. The Turkish government itself bore much of the responsibility for this change.

  In 1996, Martin van Bruinessen wrote that the PKK’s apparent strategy of provoking Turkish repression in order to make Kurdish villagers take sides had been “dramatically successful, which was due largely to the brutality with which the Turkish security forces have operated in the region. Unable or unwilling to distinguish between PKK partisans and ordinary villagers, the military and special forces, hunting for guerrilla fighters, made life in many Kurdish mountain villages miserable. It was from such villages that the PKK recruited many of its new fighters.”3

  Turkish brutality towards the Kurds was nothing new, but it had begun to attract international attention and this affected the situation inside Turkey. The Kurdish diaspora in Europe had made people more aware of the ongoing repression. Also, in 1987 Turkey had applied for membership in the European Union, which requires that countries wishing to join meet generally accepted human rights standards. And, unlike the situation in the 1930s, when the British Ambassador refused to believe Ataturk was butchering the Kurds, there was now an international human rights movement keeping score. In May 1990, the European Parliament passed a resolution that, while condemning the PKK as terrorists, called on Turkey to recognize the political, cultural, and social rights of the Kurds.4

  That same year, Helsinki Watch (later Human Rights Watch) published the second of what would be many reports on Turkey’s violations of Kurdish human rights. “Kurds told us again and again that they want to be able to speak Kurdish officially, to read Kurdish books, to sing Kurdish songs, to dance Kurdish dances, to celebrate Kurdish holidays, and to give their children Kurdish names,” wrote Lois Whitman, who authored the report. “‘We want the government to accept us as Kurds,’ one businessman told us, ‘and to leave us alone.’”5

  But Turkish officials insisted this was out of the question. According to Helsinki Watch, “in May 1990, Ms. Fugan Ok, head of the human rights department of the Foreign Ministry, told Eric Siesby of the Danish Helsinki Committee that the Kurds are not a minority, since according to the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 only religious minorities are recognized. She also asserted that there is no discrimination against Kurds, but that such discrimination would exist if the Kurds insisted upon a separate language and a separate culture. Adnan Kahveci, Minister of Finance, also told Mr. Siesby in May that Kurds were not discriminated against, and that special Kurdish schools would create segregation and give rise to ethnic conflicts.”

  Finally, the Helsinki Watch report noted that, “support among the Kurds for the PKK (the Kurdish Workers’ Party, a separatist group waging guerrilla warfare against the Turkish government in the southeast) appeared to have grown a good deal. . . . Most people now sympathized with the PKK because of the killings, harassment and abuse of Kurds by the security forces. The tactics used by the Turkish government appear to have been counterproductive—to have driven more and more civilians into the arms of the PKK.”6

  The period between 1990 and 1995 was critical in the development of the PKK. In 1990, the focus was still on inner-party struggle. The party held its Fourth Congress in Iraqi Kurdistan that December. Though Iraq had invaded Kuwait and a US attack was imminent, the congress concentrated on the party’s military failures and the search for police agents in the ranks. One fighter after another was disgraced and led away for questioning in what participants described as
“an atmosphere of terror.”7

  For the first time, Ocalan was not present—he wanted the congress to be in Iraqi Kurdistan as a political statement, but could not leave Syria himself for fear of arrest. In his absence he put Mehmet Cahit Sener, a member of the party’s executive committee, in charge. Sener had spent eight years in Turkey’s Diyarbakir Prison for being in the PKK, then a year in Damascus working with Ocalan. By the time of the Fourth Congress, he had many criticisms of the way leading guerrillas were being targeted and, after talking with Sari Baran, another executive committee member, decided to express them.

  “Friends,” he told the congress, “the situation has been evaluated and every action has been judged to have been wrong. I think that those fighting can make mistakes, but to take a gun and go to the mountains is a courageous act . . . If what the fighters did is a crime, if the activities they carried out are crimes, then the party line itself must be looked at and judged.” He demanded an investigation into policies like the killing of civilians and recruits; he also proposed a structure of more collective leadership. All this was a direct challenge to Ocalan.