SULAIMANI, Kurdistan Region— Hundreds of teachers took to the streets in Sulaimani and Erbil on Tuesday after declaring a week-long strike earlier this month over delayed salaries.
Representatives of the protesting teachers told Rudaw they refused to go back to work before receiving their full salaries, which have been withheld since July.
Teachers in many other cities including in Halabja and Rania showed solidarity with their colleagues and gathered in central parts of the cities to protest against the overdue wages.
“It’s not about salaries, it’s about justice and equality,” said one protester while holding a sign in bold Kurdish letters reading “I want my pay.”
“In the 1990s, teachers worked for a year without getting paid because we felt it was our duty, but now it’s really different,” another teacher told Rudaw. “We were more equal then, but now there are humiliating inequalities,” he added.
The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has asked civil servants for patience and vowed to solve the crisis and pay its employees.
The KRG says the ongoing war with ISIS militants, the influx of over 1.3 million refugees and Baghdad’s freezing of the KRG budget since February last year have coupled with falling oil prices to contribute to the unprecedented crisis.
“But we sell our own oil now, [so]why haven’t we been able to solve the problem?” said another protestor who claimed financial conditions were more stable when KRG sold its oil through the central government in Baghdad.
As disputes over revenue sharing deepened between Erbil and Baghdad earlier this year, the KRG started exporting its crude oil to Turkey’s Ceyhan port largely independent of Iraqi government.
Authorities announced Tuesday that some 620,500 barrels per day (bpd) were exported in September. Some experts feel that number reach 1 million bdp by 2016.
The KRG has relatively heavy state expenses including over 1 million government employees who receive the bulk of it budget, over 75 percent by some official estimates.
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