An introduction

Welcome to my blog, all. First, to introduce myself and The Other Side. I am a freelance journalist based in Erbil, in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq. I am new to the world of blogging, and I heartily thank Chris Boese, a friend of a friend whom I’ve never even met, for suggesting this to me and for setting up all the technical stuff.

I chose to call the blog The Other Side for a couple of reasons. One, I want to show the other side of the news. I don’t intend for this site to be a substitute for the ordinary media, but as a complement to it. You can get good information from the New York Times, BBC and Associated Press. But you won’t hear unvarnished opinion from a guy on the ground, or what ordinary days are like for the people here: about pornographic movie theaters, tragic love stories or the sunset over Erbil.

Secondly, “the other side” refers to the land outside America’s borders, a big place that most Americans, even well educated ones, are not very familiar with. Reading the news about the Middle East or Indonesia or Venezuela is as about as meaningful as watching a game of Risk if you don’t know what the streets smell like there or what people eat. I hope this blog can be a small substitute for that sort of experience.

By way of introduction, I’ll start with the basics: What is Kurdistan? The great majority of the people living in the three northernmost provinces of Iraq are Kurds who are Muslims like the majority Arab population in Iraq but who have a distinct language (related to Farsi/Persian, but not Arabic or Turkish) and culture. Throughout history they’ve gotten shafted out of their own country (aside from a Soviet-backed enclave in Iran that lasted from 1945-1946). But after the 1991 Gulf War, the first George Bush encouraged the Iraqis to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The Shias in the south and Kurds in the north obliged, but then Bush realized it was spinning out of the US’s control, stood back and let the Iraqi forces put down the rebellion. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise for the Kurds. After some clashes, Iraqi forces pulled back and since then have let the Kurds take care of themselves. At first, it didn’t go well – the two main Kurdish factions fought a civil war for several years. But since 1998, they have stopped fighting and have built one of the freest, most peaceful places in the Middle East.

A friend of mine told me about a debate that took place recently in Berkeley between Christopher Hitchens and Mark Danner in which Hitchens argued for the war, using Kurdistan as a model for a future democratic Iraq. If you ask most people here they’ll say they agree, or rather dodge the question by saying that anything is better than Saddam Hussein. I asked got a more nuanced answer when I asked one local journalist for the only independent newspaper in Kurdistan, Hawlati (Citizen). “I would like that all of Iraq be like Kurdistan,” he said, adding that “we still have a lot of work to do,” pointing out several basic freedoms that people lacked. (It should be noted that he was a former member of a far left-wing party, now banned, whose leader was assassinated by Islamists for suggesting that if men could have four wives, that women should be able to have four husbands, as well. This is not a mainstream view in Kurdistan.)

One of the common misconceptions about Kurdistan is that it’s democratic. The last Kurdistan-wide election was in 1992, and the power-sharing agreement that resulted ended up in the aforementioned civil war. They haven’t tried again. The two main parties each have militias of tens of thousands of fighters, which the governments are only now starting to consider integrating into a Kurdistan-wide force (just in time…) This is not most people’s definition of democracy.

This journalist enumerated several other problems. The government hasn’t known what to do with the rise of Islamism here, and in general it’s done very badly. At times it looks the other way when Islamist groups attack “inappropriately” dressed women in the streets but other times completely cuts the groups out of the political process, or cracks down in such a brutal way as to create sympathy for the Islamists.

Press freedom is also limited. All media except Hawlati are organs of one party or another, and Hawlati journalists have been arrested several times and have on occasion been imprisoned for what they write. “We publish things because we are brave, not because we are free,” the journalist told me.

But – and this is an important point – people don’t care about all this. They have TV and newspapers and schools in Kurdish, and the Turkoman and Assyrian minorities have their media and schools as well. They can speak freely in the streets, and have personal freedoms that are rare in this neighborhood.

Take Internet access. In Iraq proper, it is heavily restricted and basically unavailable to the ordinary person. In Iran it’s expensive and there are few public internet places. Likewise in Syria, and in addition there yahoo, hotmail and any sites from Israel or Lebanon are blocked. Here, though, Internet access is relatively cheap (a little more than $1 an hour in internet cafes) and the cafes are everywhere.

That’ll be it for today … soon to come will be more reports, focusing on particular issues, relating particular incidents, etc. Stay tuned.