Iraqi President Jalal Talabani peers from behind the Iraqi flag during a press briefing with US Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad (not shown) on Saturday, July 23, 2005 at Talabani's residence in Baghdad.
Photo: AP
| Other Photos |
 |
|
 |
Jalal Talabani
// A report by Vlast Magazine and Ekho Moskvy Radio
Last week, the attention of the international media was focused on the report by the Baker-Hamilton report concerning the state of affairs in Iraq. The authors of the report propose the gradual withdrawal of American troops from Iraq by 2008, but the report casts serious doubt on the federal structure of post-war Iraq as set down in the country's constitution, which was adopted in 2005. While a majority of Americans approved of the report's conclusions and suggestions, the Iraqi authorities voiced sharp criticism of the report. The first Iraqi politician to speak out against the Baker-Hamilton commission's conclusions was Iraqi President Jalal Talabani. "I think that the Baker-Hamilton report is not fair and not just, and it contains dangerous articles which undermine the sovereignty of Iraq and its constitution…. It does not respect the desire of the Iraqi people to control the country's army and to be able to rearm and train Iraqi forces under the leadership of the Iraqi government," said President Talabani.
Uncle Jalal
Jalal Talabani is the first leader of an Arab country who is not himself an Arab. Mr. Talabani, an ethnic Kurd, was chosen as Iraq's president on April 6, 2005. His leadership proved to satisfy both the country's Sunni and Shiite factions, and he was reelected in April 2006.
Despite the fact that Iraq is a parliamentary republic and that most executive power is vested in the prime minister, Mr. Talabani has an important say in many matters. The president, who has managed to preserve good relations with those on the other side of the table in negotiations with Syria, Iran, Turkey, and the United States, is one of the most widely-respected politicians in Iraq and in the region as a whole.
"Jalal Talabani made a very strong impression on me," said Georgy Mirsky, an expert at the Institute of World Economics and International Relations at the Russian Academy of Sciences who met the man who is now the Iraqi president in 2001. "On the one hand, he is a typical party leader, a field commander who spent his life commanding detachments of guerillas in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan. On the other hand, he reminds one of a European professor, a Western intellectual. He speaks beautiful English and dresses elegantly, and he is an intelligent man with gracious manners. But his powerful charisma quickly becomes apparent. He exudes will, intellect, and energy. He is a born leader and an experienced and hardened warrior."
His fellow Kurds call Talabani "Mam Jalal" ("Uncle Jalal"). According to one version of the story, he received the nickname when he was still a boy. "Despite his youth, Jalal Talabani reasoned like a grown man. For that ability to think like a grown-up, people started calling him 'uncle,'" said Shorot Said, the head of the Moscow office of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. According to a different version, "Uncle" Talabani was given his nickname in the 1960s, when he and his comrades in the party began to take a serious interest in Marxist ideology.
A Kurdish Partisan
Jalal Talabani was born in 1933 in the village of Kelkan, the ancestral home of the influential Talabani family, which has produced many Kurdish spiritual leaders. Jalal, however, never showed a religious bent: he was always more interested in politics. In 1946, when he was 13, he became one of the founders of an underground Kurdish student organization. The year after that, "Mam Jalal" joined the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), and at age18 he became a member of the party's central committee.
After finishing school in Koysanjak (in Iraqi Kurdistan) in 1953, Jalal Talabani went to law school at Baghdad University. Three years later, however, he was forced to go into hiding to avoid arrest by the Iraqi authorities for his political activities as the founder and general secretary of the Kurdistan Student Union. Talabani was able to return to school only after the Hashemite monarchy that ruled Iraq was overthrown in 1958.
Upon finishing school in 1959, Mr. Talabani served in the Iraqi Army, first in an artillery division and then as the head of a tank division. According to Shorot Said, Talabani still reads a great deal of military literature (he especially enjoys books about the life of WWII-era Soviet Marshal Zhukov).
In 1961, the Kurds began an armed uprising for independence from the authorities in Baghdad. The leader of the Kurdish revolution was KDP chief Mustafa Barzani, under whom Talabani headed the Kurdish "peshmerga" (literally, "those who face death") fighters in Kirkuk and Suleimani. At the same time, as editor-in-chief of the newspaper "Kurdistan," Talabani led the charge in the ideological battle between the Kurds and the Iraqi authorities.
In 1964, the KDP suffered a split when Jalal Talabani had a falling out with General Barzani over their views on the Kurdish revolt. Barzani believed that armed struggle was the only means of standing up for Kurdish rights, while Talabani gradually came to lean towards political methods of resolving the problems faced by Kurds in Iraq. Accordingly, he and his supporters began to work on establishing relations with Baghdad.
In 1970, Talabani married Hero Ibrahim Ahmed, the daughter of the Krudish politician and writer Ibrahim Ahmed. When the Kurdish fighters began to lose battle after battle against the Iraqi Army in 1974, Talabani again joined ranks with Barzani, and his wife followed him into the mountains. "Hero Ibrahim Ahmed is an amazing woman. She was always by her husband's side, even when he was spending all of his time in the mountains and fighting a partisan war against the Baghdadi authorities. She was always filming the Kurdish opposition campaigns. Our television archives are thanks to her," said Shorot Said from Moscow.
In 1975, the Kurdish resistance collapsed, and Jalal Talabani fled to Beirut. In Lebanon he fell under the sway of George Gabash, the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Front and an ardent proponent of Marxist-Leninist ideology. When Talabani, fired up with Marxist ideas, returned to Iraq, he founded his own party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). In 1975, Talabani and Barzani effectively divided Iraqi Kurdistan between into two zones of influence: the southeast, under the control of the PUK, and the northwest, under the control of the KDP.
The Kurdish Machiavelli
Critics of Jalal Talabani often accuse him of being unprincipled. They say that he almost simultaneously managed collaborate with the Iranian, Soviet, Turkish, and American special services.
Politicians who fought for the creation of an independent Greater Kurdistan are indignant that Jalal Talabani supports closer relations with Tehran, which oppresses Iran's Kurds. Talabani's supports, however, point out that the part of Iraqi Kurdistan that lies under the control of the PUK shares a large border with Iran. In 1987-1988, when Saddam Hussein was conducting his Anfal campaign against Iraq's Kurds that destroyed 5,000 Kurdish villages and killed 182,000 Kurds, many refugees from Kurdistan fled to Iran: hence the reason why Mr. Talabani considers good relations with Tehran to be essential.
Turkish Kurds are similarly dissatisfied with Talabani's close ties to Ankara. "We are Turkey's neighbors," said Shorot Said in defense of Mr. Talabani's position. "That is why we must do everything possible to preserve good relations with them. Mam Jalal believes that the Kurdish problem should be resolved by peaceful, diplomatic methods…in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey [alike]."
However, Mr. Talabani's critics point to an episode in 1991 as the lowest point in his career. After the Persian Gulf War of 1991, the Kurds rebelled again, and Saddam Hussein crushed the revolt. In order to stop the bloodshed, a Kurdish delegation led by Jalal Talabani was sent to Baghdad. A meeting with Saddam Hussein led to the signing of a peace treaty, after which Mr. Talabani, in the Eastern fashion, kissed the cheek of Hussein, the Kurds' sworn enemy. A photograph of the kiss circled the globe and inflamed Kurdish indignation.
"Jalal Talabani is a pragmatist. He is called the "Kurdish Machiavelli," said Shorot Said. "You know, he often says privately that he would have liked to cleave to a single line in politics, but that isn't possible. He often compares himself with the captain of a ship that is sailing on an ocean full of different currents. The captain has to change his course in accordance with these currents, because otherwise the ship will get stranded or run aground on the rocks." According to his fellow party members, the "Kurdish Machiavelli" stops at nothing in the pursuit of his objectives.
Entertaining no doubts about the outcome of the approaching war, in October 2002 Talabani and Massoud Barzani, the son of General Barzani, who died in 1979, met in Erbil to convene a session of the united parliament that approved the Kurdish constitution and chose Kirkuk as the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. As Jalal Talabani put it, "Kirkuk is the Kurdish Jerusalem, Iraqi Kurdistan's most ancient town." It also probably does not hurt that the region includes the second-largest oil deposit in Iraq, which contains 10 billion barrels of proven oil reserves. In any case, however, Iraqi Kurdistan has declared itself a constituent part of the future federal republic of Iraq, and Talabani and Barzani have firmly maintained that they see Iraqi Kurdistan only as part of a unified Iraqi state.
&What Jalal Talabani has to say…
About the situation in Iraq: " I do not want to paint an overly optimistic picture of the situation that we are facing in our country. However, in Iraq as a whole there is no civil war. The growing violence is largely linked to the actions of insurgents and extremists who do not reflect the views and attitudes of the majority of the Iraqi people."
About relations with Russia: "Russia looks at Iraq through the prism of its relations with the U.S., relations of friendship or confrontation. Meanwhile, you must build good relations with this government, with this parliament, with the legal parties and political groups… Russia's current policy [regarding Iraq] is not a realistic policy… Russian companies must understand that if their government does not pursue a consistent policy towards Iraq they will not be able to return [to the Iraqi market]. Only a friendly state policy will allow Russian businesses to come back to Iraq."
About US policies in Iraq: "The United States sees Iraq as a new colony on which it can impose its own laws, ignoring the fact that we should be respected as a sovereign state… Iraq is an independent country. The Iraqi people are capable of governing the country, and the absence of security is explained by the fact that our hands are tied."
About Saddam Hussein: "Saddam deserves to be sentenced to be hanged twenty times per day, if only because he has tried to kill me twenty times."
&What they say about Jalal Talabani…
US President George Bush: "Jalal Talabani is the first democratically-elected president of Iraq. He has dedicated his life to the cause of Iraqi liberation. As a lawyer, journalist, and political leader, he stood up to a brutal dictator because he believed that every inhabitant of Iraq should be free. President Talabani is a brave leader of the Iraqis and a friend of the United States."
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: "In greeting Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, we are greeting all of our brothers in Iraq. We thank the Almighty that our friend who fought side by side with us against the criminal regime of Saddam Hussein now occupies the highest leadership position in the political leadership of Iraq."
Turkish Foreign Affairs Minister Abdullah Gul: "Jalal Talabani is a very experienced politician. He is one of the few politicians in Iraq who has spoken out in favor of the preservation of his country's territorial integrity. His election as president is evidence that the political process in Iraq has prevailed. I don't think that Talabani will use his power to strength the position of the Kurds in the north of the country."
Former Iraqi al-Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (killed by an American air strike in Iraq in summer 2005): "The president of Iraq is an agent of the Jews and the Christians. There will be no forgiveness for people like Talabani, because they have spilled the blood of Muslims. For them there is only the sword."
Nargiz Asadova
All the Article in Russian as of Dec. 18, 2006
|
|
|
