A freedom writer is born

You need only to ask one question to know whether a society is democratic or fascist. Who controls the media?

When political parties own and control all media and channels of expression, then this society is definitely either fascist or potentially fascist.

The Ba’athist regime has gone but the worst form of Ba’athism is alive in Kurdistan with its family oligarchy; control of wealth, land and any chance of a livelihood for people; control of media, community organisations and the economy. The two political parties are based around two family oligarchies and a corrupt group of people calling themselves the political bureaus of the two parties. They have divided up all the posts in Baghdad and Kurdistan, and even those in embassies and party and government offices abroad, among themselves and close family members. These families make all the decisions and control all aspects of life without reference to any constitutional or legal authority or any sort of accountability, rational planning, consultation or community involvement and feedback.

To justify their totalitarian control, both parties draw on their past. They consider everyone who has died in the process of the “revolution” (of course including Kamal Qadir’s family) are martyrs. They consider that they “own” the martyrs and their surviving family members. They own everything that Kurds have done and achieved. They own the cities today because they were “mountain revolutionaries” yesterday.

But the Barzani family goes much further than this. They have created the cult of the leader “Barzani” and the ideology of “Barzanism”. This ideology, like any authoritarian totalitarian ideology, is based upon these principles:

• that the Kurdish movement was started by the Barzani family so they are legitimate owners of the movement;
• that the Barzani family had a central leadership in the Kurdish movement and so they are destined to keep this role. If, for whatever reason, they do not have central leadership power in any Kurdish movement, they consider it their legitimate right to oppose, fight and co-operate with any power against that movement;
• that the Barzani family represents the historical continuity of the Kurdish movement; and
• that Mustafa Barzani is a spiritual leader of Kurds and so all members of the Barzani family, especially his sons and grandsons, are sacred and must not be criticised or attacked whatever they do. They have eternal undisputed right to inherit leadership, control everything, own everything and make decisions on behalf of the Kurdish people.

When the Kurdish people first freely elected their parliament in 1992, many intellectuals demanded that all power should naturally and democratically be with parliament. To prevent the division between the authority of party leaders and parliament they suggested that the leader of Kurdistan Democratic Party would become “president or speaker of parliament”. The official reaction of the party, which was published and widely publicised in their official party newspaper, was that: “the leader was too sacred to be the head of parliament. If someone in parliament asked inappropriate questions this would affect (the leader’s) sacredness and this is something that the party never allows to happen.” The result of this thinking was five years of in-fighting and bloodshed.

When the party papers published this story many writers were talking about democracy, the role of parliament and civil society. But none considered this theory of power (that a tribal leader is more sacred than parliament) to be anything other than normal.

Even today, more than two decades later, it is inconceivable in Kurdish society if someone, even in exile, directly, courageously and unequivocally challenges and criticises autocratic leaders.

But Kamal Sayid Qadir did just that.

He used a subversive language intended to shatter the illusion of sacredness and centrality of power and to challenge the continuity of a medieval mentality: a mentality that accepts immorality and cannot tolerate criticism of the reality.

Before going back to Kurdistan Kamal wrote an open letter directly to the leader of Kurdistan Democratic Party, Mr Masu’d Barzani, in which he told him about his determination to go back to his home town and to face the Barzani family in court, in “a legal and civilised way”, and to expose their claims to patriotism and an uninterrupted history of struggle for Kurdish rights. This letter was published on the Kurdish website Kurdistanpost, putting the struggle between the revolutionary subversive Internet-based media and the Barzani family into the international arena.