Elmo Has a Question: Who Voted For the Kurd?

Iraq is as famous for its Kurdish jokes and riddles as America is for its Polack ones. After the January 30, 2005 elections, Iraqis came up with a new riddle: If 60% of Iraqis are Shia, 35% Sunni, and 15% Kurds, who voted for the Kurd?

According to CIA’s World Factbook, the population of Iraq is 75%-80% Arab, 15%-20% Kurdish, and 5% Assyrian or other ethnicities. Yet Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, was chosen as Iraq’s president on April 6, 2005, becoming the first leader of an Arab country who is not himself an Arab. His leadership proved to satisfy both Sunnis and Shiites to such extent that he was reelected in April 2006.

“Did you ever imagine that one day you might be president of the Iraqi republic?” BBC’s Jim Muir asked President Talabani in April 2005.

“No,” President Talabani responded. Of course he didn’t. Kurds are an Iranian ethno-linguistic group, like Persians, Lurs, Baluch and Bakhtiari. They are fluent in Persian which is why Talabani, during his speeches, stumbles over his “learned” usage of Arabic, sort of the way our American president does – except in our president’s case, English is his native language.

“What do you think it means for Iraqi Kurdistan, for the Kurds of Iraq, that you're president?” Jim Muir asked.

“First, it means that the Kurds are equal citizens, they are no more second-class citizens…In the past, Iraqi governments were always looking on them as second-class citizens of the country.”

Presidency or not, Kurds will continue to be viewed as second-class citizen because none of the countries they reside in wants them to have an independent state. About 55% of the world's Kurds live in Turkey, 22% in Iran, 16.5% in Iraq and 6.5% in Syria (CIA’s World Factbook). In the 20th century, all four countries have suppressed many Kurdish uprisings. Then suddenly in 2005, Iraq was kind enough to give one of its men the position of Iraqi president?   

Kurds’ prehistory is not very well known. Estimated at about 35 million people, they make up the largest ethnic group in the world who do not have a nation-state of their own. Preparing to one day declare independence, the Kurdistan region in Iraq has been functioning as a semi-independent country. They have their own educational system and their own police and militia, which are now turned into an army and are not a part of the central command in Baghdad. They have refused to allow other units of the Iraqi army to enter Kurdistan. Since 2004, Kurdish politicians have demanded the departure of some 200,000 Arabs who settled in oil-rich Kirkuk.

“He [Jalal Talabani] has dedicated his life to the cause of Iraqi liberation,” President Bush said.

Actually, Talabani has dedicated his life to the cause of the Kurdish liberation. In his lifetime, he had first joined the Kurdistan Democratic Party, KDP, which was then run by Mustafa Barzani and he founded the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the P.U.K. These two Kurdish parties have led Peshmerga (literally, “those who face death”), who used Guerilla Warfare style tactics against Iraqi forces.  

Since Kurdistan is next door to Iran, Jalal Talabani has a very long tradition of good relations with Iran. During the Iraq-Iran war, Talabani and Barzani ran militias that fought alongside the Iranians and against the Iraqi soldiers. They worked with the “enemy” against their own national army. There’s a word for that. “Treason.” There’s another word, “Halabja,” which stemmed from this fighting.

Given his little bio, Talabani is in no way an Iraqi, not by birth nor by heart. As Saddam Hussein watched Talabani’s election from his prison cell on a TV, only one who really knows the history of Iraq could imagine what he was thinking. Oh, those Brits and Americans – never know who they’ll put next into Iraq’s political office. First a foreign-born king in the 1920’s, then a leading member of the Baath Party in the 1970’s, now a Kurd who can barely speak Arabic. But who will believe the nonsense that a Shia or Sunni or Christian or Turk risked their life to vote for a sect outside of their own? And what about me? I’m still president of Iraq.

Technically, Saddam Hussein was correct in maintaining his title of presidency during the occupancy. There are two reasons for that, which Kofi Annan summed up during an interview he gave to Owen Bennett-Jones for BBC. “From our point of view and from the Charter point of view the war was illegal… You cannot have credible elections if the security conditions continue as they are now.”

An election cannot be legitimate when it is conducted under illegal foreign military occupation. It is neither free nor fair. Yet based on this illegal war and fraudulent election, a 275-seat "transitional National Assembly" was put in place. With a total of some 8.4 million votes cast, a 58 % turnout, the Iraqi Electoral Commission had this to report:

The official counting records were almost always completed properly (i.e. filling in a number on the correct line) and signed by the required officials….Observers reported discrepancies during the ballot reconciliation in 15 to 20 percent of monitored cases…Ballot counting was reported to have started late in some places, although lack of electricity and the security context were contributing factors. In terms of the local counting, frequent problems were reported concerning both intimidation of the counting staff and interruptions to the counting process that caused delays...There were reports that some polling station officials refused to co-operate with the electoral observers. This limited the overall transparency of the counting process... There were some local problems with the tamper evidence bags being used improperly (placed in with the ballots rather than in a separate box to be sent to IECI headquarters) or not being used at all. Also, some ballot boxes were not properly locked.

Voter turnout ranged from 89% in the Kurdish region of Dahuk to two percent in the Sunni region of Al Anbar. Many Sunnis didn’t show up to the polls, because they, like other Iraqis, opposed these elections and refused to participate in a political process dominated by the U.S.  After all, Paul Bremer, another non-Arab, set up the rules for this election. The High Commission for Elections had the authority to disqualify any party that did not meet with Washington's approval. Before he left his post, Bremer issued a series of articles which cannot be reversed by any election.

For others the fear of violence kept them at home. At least eight candidates were killed in the run-up to the election, and many others received daily death threats. Many of the Iraqis who did vote were manipulated to the polls with money and food rations. With 7,785 mostly unnamed candidates on the lists of 83 coalitions of political parties, voters had little idea who they will be voting for.

The lists were mostly sectarian. Kurdish lists were focused on winning Kirkuk for Kurds, and obtaining a top government post. Shiites, whose revered Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani had issued a fatwa instructing his followers to vote, wanted federalism, others an Iranian-style regime. Rather than having their own lists, the Association of Muslim Scholars, a Sunni group, was calling for a boycott in protest against the destruction of Fallujah by the U.S. military.

With the massacre that occurred in Fallujah, as well as in the rest of the Sunni Triangle, it’s surprising that even two percent showed up. For instance, after the 2003 invasion, Fallujah was one of the least affected areas of Iraq. Despite its pro-American mayor, Tahah Bidaywi Hamed, U.S. soldiers did great damage, and there were reports that cluster bombs and white phosphorus, a controversial incendiary weapon, were used on the city. By the end of operations, the city lay in ruins. Fallujah’s compensation commissioner reported that 36,000 of the city’s 50,000 homes were destroyed, along with 60 schools and 65 mosques and shrines.

So the men and women of that region might have voted were they not busy mourning the loss of loved ones, finding new homes or just scrimmaging for ways to stay alive.  The situation made safe and possible for the Kurds, they got to the voting polls fine, resulting in the high 89% outcome.

Despite all this, A Kurdish interim minister of human rights, Bakhtiar Amin, said, “The parliament elected a president, and it's not like before where the transfer of power was done through the shedding of blood, military coups and invasions.”  Typical Kurdi, an Iraqi would say.

And U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice said that participation had "exceeded all expectations."  Meanwhile, President Bush remarked, “By participating in free elections … [Iraqi] men and women have taken rightful control of their country's destiny, and they have chosen a future of freedom and peace.”  Typical Bush administration, an American would say.

These elections no more reflected the will of the Iraqi people than did the elections held between 1925 and 1958 under the British occupation. During that time, the British struggled to end the violence while teaching Iraq democracy and keeping their foot in the door. They came up with this solution: place on the throne an Iraqi king, foreign born, and surround him by expatriate military officers who had spent most of their adult lives elsewhere. Sounds familiar?

The United States Constitution, adopted in 1788, provided for an elected government and protected civil rights and liberties. Already in the colonial period before 1776 most adult white men could vote. American women have had the right to vote since 1920, and they’re almost equal in number to American men, but their political roles have been minimal. Not until 1984 did a major party choose a woman, Geraldine Ferraro of New York, to run for vice-president. And it wasn’t until 1965 that the United States arrived to a complete form of democracy, allowing African-Americans to vote.

In America, there are 81.7% whites and 12.9% blacks. (2003 est.), nearly the same figures as Arabs vs. Kurds in Iraq. But while after hundreds of years of democracy, America hasn’t yet voted a black man for president, Iraq, a tribal nation, has appointed an outsider, a former enemy, as its leader? That’s like America, on the basis of him speaking English, electing someone with an Arabic accent as U.S. president.