Replies

February 5, 2003
Give Us a Chance to Build a Democratic Iraq
By BARHAM A. SALIH

ULAIMANIYA, Iraq — When Colin Powell appears at the United Nations today, he is expected to talk about Iraq's efforts to build weapons of mass destruction and its ties with terrorist organizations.

Those are excellent reasons for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. As we all know, there are other powerful reasons, too — most notably the desire of my people to be free from repression and to plant the seeds of democracy in soil that has for too long been given over to tyranny.

In my office in Sulaimaniya, in the part of Iraq already free from Saddam Hussein's control, I meet almost every day with travelers from Baghdad and other parts of Iraq. Without exception they tell me of the continued suffering inflicted by the Iraqi regime, of the hope secretly nurtured by so many enslaved Iraqis for a free life, for a country where they can speak without retribution.

Most of my Iraqi compatriots — Shiite and Sunni Arab, Turkmen and Assyrian, Muslim, Christian and Yazidi — have been united by what they have endured under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. They want the overthrow of a regime that used chemical weapons against the Kurds and wasted a nation's natural resources on wars rather than schools. They want democracy in Iraq. These are goals worthy of the world's support.

Those who doubt the prospects of a liberated Iraq should examine the record of Iraqi Kurdistan since 1991. Under our autonomous regional government, we have used our share of oil revenues to invest not in chemical and biological weapons, but in education and health. We have tripled both the number of schools and doctors since 1991, and we have reduced infant mortality to its lowest level ever in our region. We have a free and diverse news media, with hundreds of newspapers, magazines and television stations. We respect the rights of minorities.

These achievements should be celebrated as a model for the rest of Iraq. Indeed, we Kurds are willing to give up our dreams of an independent Kurdistan in order to bring our expertise in governing to a new democratic Iraq.

Sadly, what we Iraqi democrats are hearing from many in the West is that we should not seek the world's help to be freed from tyranny; that the war is for oil; and that the Arab and Muslim "street" will rise up against those who liberate Iraq.

We have watched demonstrators in Washington and other cities chant, "No to war." But the Baathist dictatorship has been waging war for decades. It has inflicted hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties. Every day, Iraqis of all ethnic and religious groups are tortured in horrible ways. The regime even now is waging a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing in the parts of Iraqi Kurdistan it still controls.

Iraq has many dedicated apologists, including some who defend or deny the Hussein regime's use of chemical weapons on Kurds. They ignore captured Iraqi documents that tell of inhuman attacks on my people, among them an audiotape of Saddam Hussein's cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid boasting of his plans to use chemical weapons against the Kurds. We know from samples collected by Human Rights Watch at the village of Birjinni and tested by the British defense ministry that the regime used mustard gas and the nerve agent sarin against our people.

Some of the protesters in the West say that this war is simply for oil. Iraqis know that their mistreatment has too often been ignored because Iraqi oil was more important to the world than Iraqi lives. It would be a wonderful turn if at long last oil would become the vehicle of our liberation — the oil will then be a blessing and not the curse that it has been for so long.

Others say, "Justice for Palestine first." Why should justice for the Palestinians, and for the Israelis as well, be a reason to postpone justice for the Iraqis? If anything, this Iraqi dictatorship has made it all the more difficult to bring an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict. A democratic Iraq will foster peace and justice in the entire region.

We Iraqis hear much about the rage of the so-called Arab street. I know the streets of Baghdad, and I know they will be filled with jubilant Iraqis once the dictator is gone. Recall the joy of liberation in Rome and Paris in 1944, the cheering crowds in Kosovo in 1999, the Afghans who danced in the streets in 2001. Wars of liberation created hope and opportunity in these places.

The only way for Iraqis to escape their nightmare is for the international community to help us liberate Iraq and build a postwar democracy that is peaceful, stable and based on the rule of law.

In their conference in London in December, the Iraqi opposition movements endorsed a vision for a democratic, federal Iraq — one in which my people, the Kurds, would be an integral part. I ask the free people of the West to lend their passion and energy to support our liberation.

Barham A. Salih is co-prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Goverment in Iraq.