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This week Kurdistan Regional Government President Masoud Barzani announced his resignation: "After November 1, I will no longer exercise my functions, and I reject any extension of my mandate,” he stated. Although Mr. Barzani will of course remain active from within the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iraq (KDP), as will his family members, the presidency’s powers are now being apportioned out between the Prime Minister, parliament and provincial authorities within Kurdistan.
For Mr. Barzani’s detractors, the resignation could not come soon enough. Parties and elites, especially in Sulaimani province (a traditionally anti-Barzani part of Kurdistan), blamed him for just about anything and everything going wrong in Kurdistan. Gorran party officials railed on about corruption and poor governance, as if they themselves had nothing to do with any of these problems. Gorran is a splinter party founded by high-level members of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which governed half of Kurdistan since 1991 and was a partner of the unified Kurdistan Regional Government after 2005.
Some Kurdish intellectuals with no party affiliation (again, especially those in Sulaimani province) likewise joined Gorran in blaming Barzani for all the nepotism in Kurdistan, for the failure to shift the economy away from oil dependence, for the economic woes in Kurdistan after 2014, for the referendum that sparked such harsh reactions from Baghdad and neighboring states, for initial difficulties in defending against ISIS, for insufficient democratic and civil rights in Kurdistan, and for many other things in a very long list. They claimed that Mr. Barzani held Kurdistan’s first referendum for independence on September 25th as part of a ploy to hold on to his position as president of the KRG even after the expiration of his term. Perpetual critics of the Iraqi Kurds abroad as well their enemies in neighboring states echoed the same accusations relentlessly.
All of this strikes your humble columnist as unfair. For self-proclaimed democracy warriors to criticize former President Barzani for holding a democratic referendum on Kurdistan’s independence seems more than a little ironic. Some ninety-three percent of Kurdistan’s voters, with a turnout rate over seventy percent, voted ‘yes’ to independence for Kurdistan. Mr. Barzani’s critics could not even offer a hypothetical, realistic alternative point in time for holding such a referendum. If the short-term after-effects of the referendum have been painful for Kurds in Iraq, it is because Baghdad and neighboring states will never willingly acquiesce to Kurdish independence. Iraqi Prime Minister Abadi’s moves against Kurdistan were coming eventually, one way or another, with or without a referendum. At least now the entire world has solid evidence regarding what the people of South Kurdistan, including the disputed territories, actually want.
It is also hardly Mr. Barzani’s fault that factions of the splintered PUK broke the united Kurdish front to cut a deal with Baghdad and Iran and hand them back control of Kirkuk. With close to half of Kurdistan’s fighting forces retreating without a fight, Mr. Barzani could do little else but fall back as well. Judging from this incident alone, it should not even be President Barzani who resigns, but rather the PUK leaders who betrayed a national cause clearly voiced in the referendum.
If Mr. Barzani truly had held the referendum as an excuse to remain in power, he would not have resigned this week. The pressure on him to resign was not coming from within his party or the “Kurdish street.” Rather, it seems that a combination of bitter disappointment at the fissures within Kurdistan, and a recognition that Kurdistan’s national interest might be better served if Mr. Barzani withdrew himself (so as not give such an easy target to the Kurds’ enemies and to make post-referendum negotiations easier), most likely motivated the resignation. And the referendum’s story is not over yet.
The other criticisms of Barzani likewise seem overblown. Corruption and poor governance are hard to measure. This columnist believes corruption is a problem in Kurdistan because everyone says it is. The only corruption I have personally witnessed, however, was during a dinner with a Kurdish friend in Sulaimani who spent hours complaining about the KDP and PUK’s corruption. At the end of the dinner, he asked if I could help him get a contract to provide aid to refugees in the region, for which he and I would pocket ninety cents of every dollar: “It’s easy,” he said, “and everyone is doing it!” Corruption, in short, tends to be a society-wide problem rather than the fault of one man. The same people who ask KDP and PUK leaders for a job for their brother or niece then go around complaining about nepotism and corruption.
Judging by the number of people the KRG employed, the relatively good state of its roads, the infrastructure built there since 2003, an electricity grid that works most of the time, the schools built since 2003, and the high level of security in the region, Kurdistan under Mr. Barzani has been a lot more generous, a lot less corrupt and a lot better governed than Baghdad and the rest of Iraq. When one looks at all the minorities, from Sunni Arabs and Turkmen to Christians, Yezidis, and others, who took shelter in Mr. Barzani’s KRG, one can also point out that the governance in question was also tolerant and generous – especially compared to what occurs in the rest of Iraq.
In this columnist’s view, President Barzani -- whatever his faults and shortcomings – did his very best to safeguard Kurdistan’s security and interests. When autonomy looked increasingly impossible within an Iraq determined not to respect its own constitution, he did what he always promised to do since 2003: He tried to steer Kurdistan towards independence. He extended his own presidency a second time in 2015, under dubious legal justifications, out of lack of trust in other Kurdish parties and leaders to steer the right course towards independence (a distrust not without warrant given some PUK leader’s actions in Kirkuk a few weeks ago).
For these efforts alone, many Kurds should be grateful to him.
David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since 2010. He holds the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and is the author of numerous publications on the Kurds and the Middle East.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.
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