Instead I interviewed everyone in sight, and their stories overflowed. After one lunch I called the restaurant owner over for a chat and found that he was a former pesh merga from Kifri, on the southern tip of the safe zone. Because he had served as a bodyguard to a high-ranking official with the KDP, he couldn't go home to see his family, who were deep inside the PUK area. He said life was fine and salaries were much better here in the north than in the rest of Iraq. But he gave perfunctory replies about a lasting peace that conveyed his disgust for the war between the Kurdish parties. His family came across the cease-fire lines to visit about twice a year.
The other line that had people worried was the green line I had driven in across—the border with the government of Iraq, or GOI as those in the U.N. community called it. The three Kurdish provinces in the north made a contorted shape, reaching widely around Mosul to go from Erbil to Dohuk in the north. Traveling on the main highway between Erbil and Dohuk, through GOI-controlled Mosul, would have taken only a couple of hours, but that was a no-go area for many Kurds, and forbidden to any journalists or NGO workers in the north without Baghdad's permission. Anyone who might have problems with the regime had to drive a long, bone-jarring route to the north and then over toward Dohuk and Zakho. Even locals sometimes get lost, and making a wrong turn could have fatal consequences, as Sarteed Kakai, a medical school professor, explained to me.
Kakai was vice chancellor of Hawler University. His family had roots in Kirkuk, but he worried that talking about them could mean trouble for his relatives still living there. Like most people of prominence in the north, he couldn't safely travel back to Kirkuk or anywhere in Iraqi government territory. But the crossings weren't always well marked or patrolled.
One morning in July 1999, Kakai had set out with his young son and daughter from Erbil to visit Dohuk University. His driver took a wrong turn where the route skirts around Mosul, and before Kakai knew it, their car had rolled up to an Iraqi government checkpoint. The white license plate on their car gave them away as VIPs in the Kurdish region—Kakai had stepped into the bear trap with both feet. He and his children soon found themselves in a Ba'ath Party office in Mosul.
At first, Kakai received a small mercy. The clerk at the party office was a Kurdish Yazidi; in fact he recognized Kakai as the doctor who had treated his cousin in Erbil. He quickly tried to help the doctor, throwing out the paperwork on Kakai's children and sending them to shelter with his family in Mosul. But when the Yazidi returned for the doctor, he stiffened—Mukhabarat agents had arrived at the party office. He had done all he could, and Dr. Kakai feared the worst.
The Mukhabarat agents took Kakai, now praying quietly to himself, to their security office. It was getting to be late afternoon. They hardly needed to threaten the doctor—he knew what happened in offices like this one. Kakai carried some mild medicine with him for hypertension; he swallowed all of his pills. The director of the Mukhabarat brought him a confession to sign, admitting that he worked with the American corrupters in northern Iraq.
"I told myself good-bye," Kakaki remembered. They took him to a basement room full of other luckless men. Ropes hung off pipes in the ceiling, and blood made the floor sticky under his shoes. Greeting Kakai and the agents, a huge muscular guard asked, "So this is the newcomer?"
Kakai heard women screaming somewhere in the building, then silence, as he waited some hours in dread. But before his torture session could begin, an agent opened the door and asked which one was Kakai. Praying it meant something good, Kakai raised his hand. His children had contacted their mother back in Erbil, she had been able to alert the KDP, and Masoud Barzani himself had intervened. At midnight the Iraqi agents hustled him out of jail to a prisoner swap in the dark, and by morning he was reunited with his family.
"Tell me now if you love freedom," Kakai said.
As long as he stayed on the Kurdish side of the line, Kakai thought times had never been so good. He bragged about the greatest level of academic freedom he had ever known. Under Saddam, of course, Kurdish studies were unheard of, and all serious education was conducted in Arabic. Now the Kurds were studying their own history in their own language. Both the KDP and PUK broadcast from satellite television stations in the Kurdish language, airing pirated Hollywood movies with crude Kurdish dubbing. Kakai saw something as simple as a children's cartoon with Kurdish voice-overs as a major step forward for his people.
AS WE LEFT Erbil after a few days, I had Abu Soran stop the car at an intersection. The KDP had raised a statue there for Gad Gross, the young German freelance photographer killed covering the uprising in Kirkuk in 1991. Seeing the Kurds' appreciation for the journalists who get their story out encouraged me for a moment, but it also made me a little paranoid about returning to Baghdad from the north. Besides the apparent execution of Gross during the war, Saddam had hanged British journalist Farzad Bazoft in spring 1990—in peacetime.
The three-hour drive east to Sulimaniya followed the road toward Koi Sanjaq, passing the cease-fire line at Degala. This time our papers were in order and the KDP pesh merga quickly let us pass over to their PUK counterparts on the other side of a rocky field, where a Kurdish artist had painted the rocks with peace signs. As we drove around the mountains toward Lake Dukan, I marveled at the colored lines in the hillsides—the cliffs along the lake looked like they had been painted by Jackson Pollock, with dark stains of water leaking from the rocks' endless lines of layered pigment. At first I mistook this for natural beauty, but I started to catch on when I saw rows of little pine trees planted along the hillsides in neat lines to reforest the countryside after the desperation of the early 1990s. The landscape's striking features came from horrible deforestation that had stripped away all the topsoil, leaving the bare bones of the earth showing. I started to feel differently about the beauty of the cliffs.
The welcoming committee in Sulimaniya was a good deal warmer—the PUK seemed much more attuned to the international media as a lifeline. I arrived in the late afternoon and met with a group of PUK politburo members, who said they would be happy to set up a meeting with Mam Jalal Talabani. They invited me to a late lunch, and instead of the usual tea with cardamom served after every meal, they offered Johnnie Walker Black Label. They assigned a young college student to guide me around the city and promised to show me anything I wanted. When they saw my Kurdish driver, they kissed him on both cheeks and exchanged a few jokes. After Abu Soran pulled away to return to the hotel, I asked Adil Murad, one of the politburo, to explain.
"Yes, he's a spy but he's our friend," he said with a shrug. I must have looked a bit surprised, and Murad laughed. "He's a good guy. Hey—he's got a job to do," he said.
Sulimaniya suits the PUK: the city is freer with itself, people more often dress in Western clothes, and it has been the center of dissent in Iraqi Kurdistan for generations. On a clear day the snowy mountains to the north frame the city's few attempts at a skyline (two dumpy concrete hotels at the time). The climate is a few degrees colder than Erbil, and well into the spring a whiff of chilly air floats down from the mountains. Ha-jar Arif, the college student assigned to guide me, started off the tour by sitting me down with a group of his friends at Sulimaniya University. Most of them had been barely teenagers the last time Saddam controlled this city.
"I was a child, but I could understand what was happening around me," Hajar said, admitting that his taste of the regime and his memories of the entire nation fleeing across the mountains in 1991 kept him from taking the new Kurdistan for granted. "I appreciate this freedom and it's like food to me—saying, writing whatever you think."
Hajar had been living with his family in Zakho until the Kurdish civil war sent them fleeing to the PUK side in Sulimaniya. He would have been of military age during the civil war, but neither Hajar nor any of his college friends had fought; it wasn't a cause they took any pride in, unlike the struggle with Saddam's regime. Yet none of them laid on false bravado about that either, even lounging in the safety of the university c
ampus. If Saddam came back, they said, everyone would head for the hills. Baghdad was just too strong. But they also peddled the notion that the world had somehow evolved beyond hanging the Kurds out to dry. "Saddam is stronger than us. But this is the age of globalization, and everyone hopes to live in peace and let other nationalities live in peace," Hajar reflected.
The next morning we drove toward Chamchamal, the last town under PUK control on the road west to Kirkuk. Along the south side of the highway a few thousand tents were set up—New Kirkuk refugee camp. I had expected to collect accounts of refugees who had been evicted from Kirkuk during the Arabization programs in the 1980s or had been living here since the 1991 uprising. After interviewing a few families living in the heavy canvas tents, I noticed a group with chairs, pots, and blankets in front of their tent, stacked neatly to keep them from the mud. A wiry man with jet-black hair stood at the door of the tent, looking a bit bewildered. He introduced himself as Azat Omar. I asked what year he had fled Kirkuk. He looked around at his belongings and then at me, as if I were mad. The Ba'athist government in Kirkuk had kicked his family out the previous night.
Azat's family had been in Kirkuk for generations, but during his lifetime it became impossible for Kurds to live in the city. He had worked as a driver and had owned his own car. As his family grew to a normal Kurdish size—eight children—Azat tried to buy land and build a bigger house, but the municipality denied him permission, unless he agreed to officially switch his nationality to Arab on his identity documents. Azat refused. In the year before he left, he had tried to sell his house and was told that, as a Kurd, he couldn't be the legal owner—in fact there was an Arab family coming to live in the house and he would have to leave. When the final eviction order came, the authorities wouldn't allow Azat to take his car out of Kirkuk with him. He paid to rent a small flatbed truck to carry his family and all they owned to Chamchamal. There the PUK displacement committee had allotted a twelve-foot tent in New Kirkuk for his family of ten.
The term "ethnic cleansing" had entered my vocabulary only a few years earlier, a 1990s catchphrase for an ancient crime.14 The PUK told me that about forty families moved to their side of the Kurdish region every week. They didn't have an exact breakdown of who came for pure economic reasons and who came looking for a place where they could be first-class citizens, educate their kids in Kurdish, and generally escape the dreadful Ba'athist administration. For those without families in the north to take them in, it couldn't have been an easy choice. The Oil-for-Food program had pumped up the Kurdish economy, but that was only relative to the terrible years after the uprising. Laborers in Sulimaniya hardly welcomed Kirkuk's refugees into the competition for scarce jobs. The politicians didn't really want them to assimilate either—for that would mean that the regime had won and Kirkuk would become Arab. People from Kirkuk were the Palestinians of Kurdistan—most of them would never accept another home, and their leaders didn't really want to take the pressure off by building them one.
Azat Omar got tired of my questions quickly. Besides the trauma of his predicament, he was fresh from Saddam's Iraq and still jumpy about journalists. The stories at other tents fell along similar lines—men hiding from the authorities as their family members were harassed or arrested until eventually they couldn't bear it. The food ration helped, but as in southern Iraq, it was pretty meager for these Kurds with no other source of income. There had been deaths in the camp, some from disease, a few when kerosene heaters set tents alight. A Japanese NGO, Peace Winds, came three times a week, listening to the refugee's grievances and helping them lobby the PUK in Sulimaniya.
Hajar took me back to Sulimaniya in time to meet with Kosrat Rasul, the PUK general who was now serving as prime minister for this side of Kurdistan (his nemesis, Nechirvan Barzani, was KDP prime minister). Meeting Kosrat for the first time was slightly unnerving. It might be his one lazy eye, or his reputation for ferocity in a country where everyone considers himself a fighter, but even when Kosrat smiles, he looks like he might tear you in half with his bare hands. He tore into the Washington Agreement instead.
"None of it has been implemented!" he said. Kosrat spoke as though the two sides were still at war. He charged that the KDP was happy with Kurdistan's divided status quo, making money off Saddam's black market oil trade with Turkey. "I'm concerned about a day when there are no sanctions on Iraq," Kosrat said, getting to the paradox of the Kurds' condition. As with so many times in their history, Kurdish prosperity was a side effect of greater powers' policies and conflicts. As soon as the international community stopped punishing Iraq with sanctions, said Kosrat, the world would stop providing Kurdistan with extra help and probably let Saddam have his way with the north. Many Kurds expressed the same irony: as much as they hated Saddam, they wished him a long healthy life so the world's opprobrium would keep helping them rebuild. Kosrat said Kurdistan needed to keep showing America and Europe that there was democracy growing here, so they would continue to be shamed into protecting the north.
"There are no permanent allies, only permanent interests," Kosrat said, ending with a paraphrase of Britain's Lord Palmerston. He sent me around the town that afternoon with his personal translator, Kawan, to show me the wonderful things the PUK had achieved, first among them the oil refinery they had built out of sugar refinery parts. Taking crude from the few wells north of the no-fly line, they now produced a small quantity of diesel and gasoline for domestic consumption. The PUK claimed they had had no help in setting it up.15 There is no stronger symbol of independence in the Middle East than oil wealth, and the PUK proudly showed off this token amount of petro-power.
Kawan, my guide, had something of a split personality. As Kosrat's translator, he fully expected to work under some rough conditions—when we passed into the refinery grounds, he checked his Makarov pistol at the gate—but the job he loved was being chairman of the English Department at Sulimaniya University. Our discussion on the drive around town ranged from Saddam to Shakespeare, and he asked for help with the precise definitions of a few English words. After the oil refinery we took in Sulimaniya's amusement park—a long boardwalk along a canal with a zoo and a small Ferris wheel. People were taking leisurely walks along the water, including some young couples. My "plight of the Kurds" story had just wandered into the fun-fair and fed the ducks.
Talabani agreed to an interview the next day at Qalaat Chowlan, his old hideout above the city. One of his aides took me into a study crowded with books and papers where he sat behind a cluttered desk. Larger than life, Talbani draws you in with his warm smile and jovial demeanor. He is never without books and can digress easily into any number of topics, often contradicting his own arguments along the way. A few years worth of Oil-for-Food money to throw around had agreed with Talabani, and he shied away from picking fights over arrangements with the KDP. True to his reputation as an internationalist, Talabani seemed more interested in talking about Washington than Kurdistan.
"There is a law in the U.S. to overthrow the government of Iraq," he started in, "but Congress is more serious than the Clinton administration." I agreed with him. The Iraq Liberation Act was on the books, but it looked as though Clinton had inherited the Iraq problem and was hoping to pass it along cleanly to his own heir. The White House had spent about 2 percent of the ninety-eight million dollars approved and had provided nothing more lethal than a fax machine. Talabani thought it was a joke. "They are ready to give you computers. They will pay the salary in London of the Iraqi National Congress. It is not serious. In Iraq people are laughing when they hear this. They must cooperate with real opposition forces inside the country to remove the dictator," he said.
Given the lack of attention so far, I asked him if he wasn't worried the United States would lose interest in protecting the Kurds and withdraw their jets. "We have not received one dollar or one bullet from the U.S. If the U.S. disappears, we will still be here," Talabani said, and then he laughed and pointed out the window. "Maybe not here but in that mountain."
Talabani added that he didn't think Saddam's army was such a great threat these days—their morale was dismal, and the officers so poorly paid that the PUK could buy assault rifles directly from the Iraqi units across the front. He brought the conversation back to Washington again, claiming that the United States was still fixated on its one-bullet policy, and not the federal Iraq solution that the Kurds had been pushing. He worried that the United States really wanted another Arab strongman. But then, like the lawyer he once was, Talabani argued the other side.
"You know the United States wants a new Iraq. This century is different—this is the time of democracy, human rights. Even the U.S. Department of State has a department for promoting democracy in the world. The U.S. cannot blind its eyes. It cannot repeat like the time of cold war, with the U.S. supporting dictatorships. Even in Saudi Arabia they have an assembly now."
I asked if he wasn't better off just keeping the status quo, milking the world's anger at Baghdad, but Talabani, at sixty-seven, was the same age as Saddam, and hoping to outlive the Iraqi dictator. "Nothing lasts forever—even your president lasts for only four years," he said. I asked whom he was betting on in the 2000 elections. Talabani didn't rise to the bait.
Talabani said the Kurds, and the entire region, were ready to help take down Saddam, but only if Washington presented a real plan and gave solid guarantees they wouldn't pull out at the last minute. Fie said even the Iranians had sent him such signals. For the Kurds, they didn't expect to get independence out of it, but they were not moving backward. "No, my friend, I don't think Kurds will accept anything less than they have now. The big majority would refuse any kind of compromise," he said. He spoke as though he had run afoul of his own constituents before and knew he couldn't afford to do it very often.
We chatted for about an hour and then it was time for lunch. All the PUK lieutenants from my welcoming committee were there, and we tucked into a Kurdish banquet of turkey, lamb, stuffed leaves, white beans, okra, apricots, spinach, rice, and flat bread. The men all around me wore suits, but they still ate like mountain rebels who thought the next meal could be a while away. I was stuffed to the gills, but they chided me for my lack of appetite. That's usually a function of Middle East hospitality, a way to make sure that the guest eats his fill. But I hadn't been shy; I just couldn't compete with the pesh merga, and Talabani led them fearlessly from the head of the table. After lunch he had his official photographer take our picture together as he saw me to the door. I took a few shots with my own camera, but I intended to hide the film. When the photographer dropped off the photos later at the hotel, I thanked him and then surreptitiously tore them up and flushed them down the toilet—better not to drive back to Baghdad with an eight-by-ten photo of me with Saddam's least favorite Kurd.
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