By Alexandra Di Stefano Pironti
BARCELONA, Spain – Ailing Kurdish leader Jalal Talabani, recovering in Germany from a stroke last December, is recuperating well and is able to speak, move and read, a representative of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Spain told Rudaw.
“I am a very good friend of one of his sons and I talk to him often. He said that Talabani is recovering and doing better than before and he can talk, move and read,” Daban Shadala said during a short visit last weekend to Barcelona from his base in the Spanish capital of Madrid.
Talabani, who celebrates his 80th birthday in November, is Iraq’s president and leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). The party’s shock defeat in the September 21 elections, for autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan’s own legislature, is blamed partly on Talabani’s forced absence.
“It is not so easy to recover so fast at this age,” said Shadala, who also belongs to the PUK. “He is in a rehabilitation center in Germany and gets the information about Kurdistan and Iraq. But the family wants to avoid having him start emailing and talking to people about work,” he explained.
Talabani has not been heard from since the stroke, and for months there has been a virtual blackout on information about his condition from the party, the family or his personal physician.
The only information for months was when Iraqi Vice President Khodeir al-Khozaei said in early August that Talabani was no longer in critical condition. “The president can now move, stand up and sit, and he has also started to talk,” he told the Arabic Al-Hayat daily.
“We badly need him. He is a key figure for Iraq,” Shadala said about Talabani, who for decades has been a towering figure in the Kurdish struggle.
Since Iraq’s Kurds gave up warring among themselves until the 1990s and turned largely to politics to settle their differences, Talabani’s charisma and the respect he yields among the Kurds enabled him many times to bring differing parties around the table to work out problems.
“Iraq is going through a difficult and complicated process and nobody trusts anyone else. Talabani was the person in the middle to bring the ethnic and party groups together on the table to negotiate peacefully,” Shadala remarked.
In the parliamentary polls, the PUK lost to the rival and breakaway Change Movement (Gorran). That unseated the PUK as the Kurdistan Region’s second-largest party, and intensified the crisis inside the already leader-less party.
The issue of who should replace Talabani as PUK leader has still not been discussed internally, members say, indicating the party still remains largely rudderless. The PUK says it will be discussed at the next party convention on January 31.
A recent Rudaw poll on the Internet showed that 65 percent who voted online believed that Barham Salih, PUK’s deputy secretary general and former prime minister, was the most suitable person to lead the party. Salih, 53, has been an outspoken critic of his party’s shortcomings and has urged fellow leaders to chart a new course.
But Adil Murad, head of PUK’s central committee, told Rudaw recently that his party’s older leaders should take a step back and give the young ones a chance. PUK sources say that the party’s old guard has realized the need for new blood, and that changes are in order.
They say that Talabani’s 36-year-old son, UK-educated Qubad, is among the top names being considered for the PUK’s leadership post. He served as the KRG representative in Washington DC before returning home to become minister of coordination and follow-up.
