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Kurds Await Iraq's Embrace, And Hope It's Not Too Tight

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  • Kurds Await Iraq's Embrace, And Hope It's Not Too Tight


    Many young Kurds in Sulaimaniya, Iraq, like Darya Ibrahim, above, say they will insist on preserving their freedoms and secular lifestyles as they face having to integrate with more traditional and conservative Iraqis.


    SULAIMANIYA, Iraq — For the last 12 years, Chope Hamed has lived in Iraq without living in Iraq.

    Ms. Hamed's home is the capital of the Kurdish northeast of Iraq, a region that gained de facto independence from the rest of the country in 1991, after the Americans established a no-flight zone to keep Saddam Hussein's forces at bay.

    So while young people farther south grew up within the cloistered repression of the Baathist rule, Ms. Hamed, a 24-year-old college student, enjoyed new freedoms and saw the bigger world through satellite television and the Internet. While Muslim women elsewhere in Iraq veil themselves in ever-increasing numbers, Ms. Hamed and most other women in Sulaimaniya walk with their thick, dark hair tumbling over their shoulders.

    "Here I'm equal with guys," Ms. Hamed said, as she sat with friends at the Sulaimaniya University student center. "I say, `I'm just like you, I study, I work, I go out.' "

    Her friend Paiman Ahmed, 23, said, "That's the difference between us and them," referring to Iraqi Arab women. "We have freedom. Our families gave us the chance to say what we want, to dress how we want, to be what we want."

    A world of possibility and freedom is what this younger generation of Kurds is desperate to preserve, as their elders meet with other Iraqi politicians in Baghdad to mesh the Kurdish north once more with the Arab south. Already, Kurdish politicians recognize their youth as an independent-minded force to be reckoned with, a politically sophisticated group that regards the rest of Iraq as a foreign — and backward — country.

    "The Arabs from other parts of Iraq are starting from zero, but we've been through all that already," said Brwa Abdulrahman, a 26-year-old who works in the city's youth center. Joining with Iraq, he said, "is like putting a sixth grader in a class with first graders."

    The most startling thing about Sulaimaniya now is its vibrant normalcy. While foreigners work in Sulaimaniya, American soldiers are nowhere in sight. Thunderstorms, rather than gunfire and bombings, interrupt the city's sleep. In the evenings, young people go to restaurants, tea shops and Internet salons. The women, unlike those in Baghdad, have no fear of abduction. Young Kurds often study and work several jobs, their main demands being serious economic development and greater political representation.

    "Before, people like my dad, they all talked about independence, even just for one day," said Mr. Abdulrahman, nattily turned out in an ivory parka, leather pants and well-applied hair gel. "It was a dream for them. But now the reality is, we have independence. The question is, what kind of independence? We want to talk now about the details."

    The word independence makes other Iraqis very nervous. As the American-led civil administration and the Iraqi Governing Council negotiate the path to Iraqi self-rule by July 1, Kurdish parties have united to demand a federalist system under which the north would function as one large, semiautonomous province. Many Iraqi Arabs see this as the first step to a breakup of their country along ethnic and sectarian fault lines. Kurds see this as the bare minimum needed to preserve the life they have built in the north and to protect themselves from possible future repression by the majority Arabs.

    The inability of the two sides to understand one another, despite the suffering of both Arabs and Kurds, some say, is a troubling legacy of the old Baghdad government. "There's no trust between people," said Darya Ibrahim, a 22-year-old student, who is also a photographer and a colleague of Mr. Abdulrahman. "Saddam Hussein broke it, on the levels of individuals and families, and of peoples, too."

    The role of Islam in a new Iraq threatens to be a flash point between the increasingly devout south, including Baghdad, and more secular places like Sulaimaniya. Most young people here see faith as a private matter, not the basis of an overarching political system.

    "In the south, you see demonstrations for gasoline, for jobs, and they always hold up signs that say, `There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet,' " said Ms. Hamed. "What's the connection between that and jobs or gasoline? We're all Muslims, but their thinking is old."

    The challenge for Kurds and Arabs alike will be to integrate into a new Iraq people who have no affinity for Arab Iraq. If young Kurds have grown up in the modern world of cellphones and the Internet, so too have they been shaped by the memories of brutal repression by successive Iraqi governments.

    Most young Kurds remember the uprisings in 1991, when rebellions by the Shiites and the Kurds were brutally suppressed by Mr. Hussein. Most are also old enough to have lived through events like the killing of civilians with chemical weapons in the village of Halabja in March 1988, or the mass deportation and killings of villagers in the Anfal campaign from February to September 1988.

    "I'm very angry at Saddam Hussein, but who was his regime?" argued Steven Fouad, a 23-year-old Kurdish Christian, at an Internet shop in the town center. "Who was his party? They weren't from a foreign country."

    Mr. Fouad, who lost his father and brother in clashes with the Baathist government, added about Iraqi Arabs: "They wanted us to ask for mercy because they consider us guests on their soil. They wanted to rule us with the sword and the Koran."

    The different sets of memory that Iraqi Arabs and Kurds have and that often govern their attitudes toward one another reside within Soleen Muhsen, a university student with an Arab father and a Kurdish mother. She lived in Baghdad until three years ago but continued to visit the north for a few weeks every summer after 1991.

    In Baghdad, she said, people did not know of the suffering of Kurds, and the knowledge she had crushed her. Still, she sympathizes with the Arab Iraqis, who lived in an ignorance enforced by Mr. Hussein's police state.

    "There is a huge difference in memory with those in Baghdad," Ms. Muhsen said. "But we were outside the ring" of state terror for the last decade, she explained. "They were inside the ring, and it was terrible for them."
    http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/26/internat...ast/26KURD.html

  • #2
    "There is a huge difference in memory with those in Baghdad," Ms. Muhsen said. "But we were outside the ring" of state terror for the last decade, she explained. "They were inside the ring, and it was terrible for them."


    I hope things work out for them, and us.
    No man is free until all men are free - John Hossack
    I agree completely with this Administration’s goal of a regime change in Iraq-John Kerry
    even if that enforcement is mostly at the hands of the United States, a right we retain even if the Security Council fails to act-John Kerry
    He may even miscalculate and slide these weapons off to terrorist groups to invite them to be a surrogate to use them against the United States. It’s the miscalculation that poses the greatest threat-John Kerry

    Comment


    • #3
      Sadly, I have a feeling that the fanatical Muslims will take the reins of power when we leave and well have to do the same thing over again. The Iranians cant seem to stay out.

      Comment


      • #4
        Originally posted by ChrisF202
        Sadly, I have a feeling that the fanatical Muslims will take the reins of power when we leave and well have to do the same thing over again. The Iranians cant seem to stay out.
        You're probably right, but I'll continue to hope for the best, and brace for the worst.
        No man is free until all men are free - John Hossack
        I agree completely with this Administration’s goal of a regime change in Iraq-John Kerry
        even if that enforcement is mostly at the hands of the United States, a right we retain even if the Security Council fails to act-John Kerry
        He may even miscalculate and slide these weapons off to terrorist groups to invite them to be a surrogate to use them against the United States. It’s the miscalculation that poses the greatest threat-John Kerry

        Comment


        • #5
          Originally posted by Confed999
          You're probably right, but I'll continue to hope for the best, and brace for the worst.
          It dosent hurt to be positive :)

          Comment

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