Iraqi Kurdistan Needs Stronger Institutions

I recently returned from one of my many trips to Kurdistan-Iraq.  This time I wanted to see if the culture of wasta – the need to know the right people and ask for their help to get anything done – remains as strong as ever there. If institutions and regular procedures have replaced wasta, then it should be possible to do things without asking for the help of a "fixer" or a well-connected personal acquaintance.  For a society to become healthy and more productive, it is important to try and get the culture of wasta under control. Average people without connections need to be able to function in society, and rationalized procedures need to replace the ad hoc approach of personal connections.

As an academic who works on and writes about the politics of the region, my task was to get an interview with a high official in the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). This really should not be so difficult for someone who writes a weekly column in this newspaper, who has published books and articles on Kurdistan, who teaches about the region, who consults for various companies and who gives talks to government agencies and the public. One would think that the officials of the government in question would be eager to get their side of the story out, to promote their people’s needs and their de facto state’s goals. The opportunity to do so should be all the more appealing when the person asking for an interview is a far cry from many of the rabid critics out there.

I know, for instance, that despite all its problems, Turkey has many solid institutions and a professional civil service relative to the rest of the region. In the past when I wanted to get interviews with Turkish government officials, all I had to do was e-mail the nearest consulate – Chicago in my case – and ask. Consulate employees whom I had never even met would assess my request, relay it back home and quickly get back to me with a reply and various options for the interviews. Despite the fact that I have in the past levelled some fairly strong criticisms at the Turkish government, they arranged interviews for me with ministers, heads of offices in the Foreign Ministry and the Foreign Minister of Northern Cyprus. The only people I could not get an interview with were generals in the Turkish military – which almost no one gets and for which the consulate apologized.

The equivalent approach did not work for me in Kurdistan, unfortunately. Asking one of the Erbil-based editors of this newspaper to help me get an interview with a different top official of the KRG also proved pointless. Almost anywhere in the world, the head editor of one of the most popular newspaper-TV outlets can get their columnist an interview with a political leader. When I asked, however, the question was “Don’t you have anyone else you could request help from for this?” I also e-mailed a top KRG leader at the e-mail address he gave me when he was a lower-level (and much more reachable) official. Since the e-mail did not bounce back, I assume it was received. I also assume this official no longer reads his own e-mails, but rather has a “gatekeeper” assistant who decides what information to pass along to their boss. I probably have never met this assistant personally, and I never heard back from this attempt either.

I therefore left Kurdistan without getting a quote or official view of the KRG regarding the issues I write about, which I should think is to the detriment of the Region (I suppose my ego also took a bit of damage from being ignored so much, but hopefully my ego is not too big or fragile, and will recover quickly).

But what if I was an average resident of Kurdistan trying to get a job or a business permit? Could it be that no matter how skilled and determined I was, I could not advance without knowing the right people (and in the case of business, perhaps giving them the right cut)? Could it be as a result that many of the people who do get the best jobs and business are not the most qualified? What if I was a foreign business with a great product at a competitive price, something needed by Kurdistan such as a new surveillance drone or computer software to organize relief aid for refugees? Without knowing the right people, without a “fixer” (who also takes a portion of any contract), would my product get to Kurdistan, or might an inferior, more expensive product from a better-connected company be bought instead?  A journalist based in Erbil told me how he never got anywhere when he tried to follow official procedures to get permission to visit refugee camps and the frontlines, while parachute journalists in town for a week (and still trying to learn how to pronounce ‘Ezidi) get permissions immediately just by having their fixer call the right person.

While there have been some encouraging signs of progress, such as Kurdistan’s post-graduate bursary program (which operated free of wasta) or the formation of several Peshmerga brigades under the control of the KRG (rather than the political parties), reforms have a very long way to go. Even checkpoints on the roads in Kurdistan still appear to be run by political parties, flying their flags and pictures of their leaders. If even the symbols and surface appearance of things are still lagging in the past, how intractable are the old mentalities?

Given all the challenges and threats the Region is facing, Kurdistan can also hardly afford to keep operating this way.

* David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since 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) and co-editor (with Mehmet Gurses) of Conflict, Democratization and the Kurds in the Middle East (2014, Palgrave Macmillan).

* The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.