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Last week I wrote about how some scholars and analysts see Iraqi Kurdistan through extremely biased lenses. While everyone has their biases, some people seem to surrender to them completely while others struggle with them all their lives, fighting to keep both eyes open. The author of the university textbook chapter on Iraq that I examined last week did not even appear to try and give an honest appraisal. Like other relentless critics of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and its main political parties, he could only speak of KRG “authoritarianism and corruption.” Last week I also promised, however, to try and provide a more objective, contextual and comparative account of the KRG’s faults.
To the extent that this is possible in one humble column, let me begin with political problems in the Kurdistan Region. A 2012 National Democratic Institute opinion poll showed that the population in Iraqi Kurdistan feels corruption and unemployment are getting worse there (79% felt this way for both issues). Corruption is hard to measure, of course, which is why Transparency International rates countries’ corruption according to opinion polls that measure popular perception of the problem. Iraq, including South Kurdistan, is the eighth most corrupt country on earth according to this measure. I know that whenever I am in South Kurdistan, I hear no shortage of complaints about corruption and nepotism. While unemployment looks like a real problem there as well, I see workers from east Asia now wherever I go in Hawler or Sulaimani.
Context and nuance however would have us compare Iraqi Kurdistan to the real world, rather than some imaginary ideal. Given recent news from Turkey, we are reminded that corruption is a problem in many places and must be struggled against relentlessly. 
Context and nuance however would have us compare Iraqi Kurdistan to the real world, rather than some imaginary ideal. Given recent news from Turkey, we are reminded that corruption is a problem in many places and must be struggled against relentlessly. Nepotism can also look a lot like the responsibility to provide jobs to friends, families and patriots who fought in the mountains and made great sacrifices. It’s simply hard to say ‘no’ to such people.
The even bigger problem for Kurdistan is probably uneven development and fast urbanization. The destruction of over 4000 Kurdish villages by Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist regime in the 1980s pushed many surviving inhabitants of the rural areas into Kurdistan's cities, and many of them have yet to find a socio-economic place there. As often happens in situations of fast growth and sudden influxes of high levels of foreign direct investment, the benefits of economic progress are spread unevenly and high inflation hits the poor especially hard. The inequality arises from some individuals being better able to take advantage of the changes and opportunities involved in the modernization process than others. This has been the process in every developing country I know of, and some of them such as South Korea, Taiwan, Brazil and Indonesia ended up doing quite well for themselves.
I think most people in Kurdistan (if not all scholars and critics) understand this context, which is part of the reason why the same National Democratic Institute 2012 poll found high levels of popular support for Kurdistani leaders – with Jalal Talabani (PUK) at 66% approval, Massoud Barzani (KDP) at 65%, Nechirvan Barzani (KDP) at 64% and Nawshirwan Mustafa (Gorran) at 41%. Western leaders would likely kill for those levels of popular approval. Many also felt that the KRG’s provision of basic services is getting better – the sentiments of improvement for water, electricity, security and housing were at 89%, 80%, 56% and 48% respectively.
With limited space in a single column, I would identify two other political problems in Kurdistan – freedom of speech and the economic and social hegemony of the various political parties. The two problems are related, I think. It seems every party, from the KDP and PUK to Gorran, the Islamists and everyone else has their own newspapers, TVs and magazines. While some are relatively good and open to a wide array of opinions (including my own on occasion), many are not so open. On two occasions, for example, KDP-owned publishers turned down my own work (a translation of my 2006 book and an article on female Peshmerga) because they disagreed with the analysis within it. Publishers are, of course, free to publish or not publish whatever they like, but the problem comes when few alternatives exist in Kurdistan.
I recall reading about how one of the region’s first independent newspapers, Hawlati, was founded: when around fourteen years ago the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan’s (PUK) party newspaper refused to publish an important news story that would put them in a bad light, they justified themselves by saying “this is a PUK newspaper.” So the founders of Hawlati decided to go and start their own newspaper. They are one of only a few very independent media outlets, with an additional number of newer, semi-independent and increasingly professional media emerging only in the last few years.
Such independent media can publish what they like, compared to countries like Iran and the Gulf states where doing so remains out of the question.
Such independent media can publish what they like, compared to countries like Iran and the Gulf states where doing so remains out of the question. Still, many of the independent media voices take risks when they attempt to criticize the ruling powers of Kurdistan. Whether or not their criticism is unfair remains irrelevant to the injustice they too often suffer for it -- finding themselves harassed with libel lawsuits, physically intimidated, their TV station burned to the ground or, in the case of two journalists in the last few years, disappeared and killed. Too many of the civil society organizations they should be able to turn to for help in such circumstances are only semi-independent at best, receiving a monthly stipend from the KRG or one of its dominant parties.
These are serious issues in Kurdistan, and I hope the region’s political elites take serious steps to address them. At the same time, when I describe Iraqi Kurdistan to others, these problems are not the things I start with. Despite all its shortcomings, in the Middle East I believe only Israel and Turkey enjoy healthier democracy than the Kurdistan Region – and just as both these states have serious problems to work on, so does Kurdistan. Given the context, I think the Iraqi Kurds have done an impressive job so far, which is why I hope they do not stop here.
David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since August 2010. He is the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and author of The Kurdish Nationalist Movement (2006, Cambridge University Press).
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