Today in my Civil Rights Law class we had a guest speaker, Reyal Hajibadri of
Kurdish Human Rights Watch. KHRW is primarily concerned with helping Kurdish immigrants and refugees in the United States but also works to help Kurds in Iraq. Hajibadri has mostly lived in the U.S. for the last ten years but visits Iraqi Kurdistan regularly. He was last there just before the war started this spring.
Here are some highlights of Hajibadri's presentation:
1) The official Iraqi constitution is actually a fairly good document and similar in many respects to the U.S. Constitution. The problem is that it was suspended because of a "state of emergency" when Saddam Hussein took power and has not been enforced. Likewise, the regular Iraqi court system handling civil and criminal cases is not that bad. However, the Ba'ath party set up a parallel court system called the Revolutionary Court to handle "enemies of the state" and threats to national security. Hajibadri said that nearly all of the human rights violations took place through the Revolutionary Court not through the regular court system.
2) The Iraqi people don't hate the U.S. but they feel they have been repeatedly let down by it. Before 1990, the U.S. actively supported Saddam Hussein and gave him money and weapons, not caring how he abused his own people. In 1991, after the Gulf War, the U.S. did not overthrow Saddam Hussein and it provided no help or aid to Iraq groups that tried to do so, nor did it intervene when the regime cracked down on them. The Iraqi people feel that the U.S. does not really care about their freedom and their interests because it only takes action to help them when it has some other interest of its own at stake. Otherwise it leaves them to suffer or even helps their oppressors. Hajibadri said that he supported the war only because the U.S. happened to share the Kurdish goal of removing Saddam Hussein but he doesn't think the U.S. and the Kurds have common interests otherwise.
3) After 1991, Iraqi Kurds had their own country in all but name in northern Iraq. The Saddam Hussein regime did not have power over them. They had freedom and rights. However, the other neighboring countries (Turkey, Syria, and Iran) did not recognize them as an independent country because they feared an uprising of their own Kurdish populations. Turkey in particular (which has by far the largest Kurdish population) was constantly threatening to invade if the Iraqi Kurds did not toe the line. The other main problem faced by the Kurds was that the economy was devastated because of the sanctions. Hajibadri says that the Kurds want an independent Kurdish state for all the Kurds in the region and they do not want to be part of Iraq.
4) I asked Hajibadri if he thought that religious fundamentalists could take power in Iraq. He said that there was a good chance that radical Shi'a Muslims would do so and that they generally want to establish an Islamic state along the lines of Iran. I guess that he is not too worried about this as a concern for himself or his family, as long as the Kurds have their own independent state.