Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani were the two competing rebel leaders of Iraqi Kurdistan. Barzani wore a turban and traditional Kurdish baggy pants that became tight around the ankles. Talabani wore suits. Barzani’s guys had yellow flags, and Talabani’s guys had green flags. That’s how we knew which zone we were in.
On our way up to visit Barzani, the tribal leader of western Iraqi Kurdistan, we were met by two 4x4 pickup trucks filled with peshmergas (“those who face death”) armed to the teeth. Their weapons included heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. Much to Pasha’s displeasure, they escorted us up the mountain of Salahuddin, named after Saladin, the great warrior to whom Saddam Hussein often liked to compare himself despite the fact that the former was an ethnic Kurd. Saladin is probably the greatest hero of Sunni Islam. He expelled the crusaders from Jerusalem in 1187 and set up his own ruling dynasty in Egypt called the Ayyubids, who, through the centuries, worked to expand Sunni Islam in the Arab world at the expense of Shiite Islam.
If Saddam’s forays into war and bloodshed seem senseless to many Western observers, it is probably because they don’t understand his wish to be recognized as a modern-day Saladin. The name of Saladin resonates as widely in the Middle East as that of King Arthur in the Western world. The difference, of course, is that if Tony Blair started comparing himself to King Arthur, everybody would laugh, which was not a luxury available to Iraqis living under Saddam.
From the security of his fort perched atop the mountain of Salahuddin, Massoud Barzani received us with a suspicious smile on his face. Massoud is the son of the notorious Mustapha Barzani, who led the first organized rebellion against Baghdad. Massoud was born in 1946 on the day his father founded the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), the first and most widely recognized political movement for Kurdish independence, and he eventually succeeded his father at the helm of the KDP. Mustapha was the military chief of the Soviet-backed, Kurdish-dominated Republic of Mahaban, in northern Iran. This attempt at an autonomous Kurdish state, erected after World War II as Stalin tried to retain control of Iraq, failed within a few months, and Mustapha had to flee. He took his young son and five hundred followers with him into refuge in the USSR. In 1958 the Barzanis were invited back to Iraq, but in 1961, when the Kurdish region suffered renewed repression, Mustapha took up arms and once again was condemned to the life of a guerrilla warrior. Massoud joined the fight at sixteen, often spending his time in exile. He survived an assassination attempt in 1978 as he was making his way back to Iraq once again. By the time Massoud succeeded his father at the head of the KDP, one of his father’s generals, Jalal Talabani, had founded a rival Kurdish faction, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). In the year before we arrived in the area, Barzani and Talabani had been fighting a bitter civil war for control of the region’s trade routes.
There was construction going on at Barzani’s mountaintop headquarters, for it had recently been hit by a missile, courtesy of his archrival Talabani. Foremost on our agenda was the goal of consolidating the recent truce between the KDP and the PUK. The humanitarian program had been slow in getting up and running, and we didn’t want more skirmishes between the two sides to further impede our work or put our staff in danger. Even though we were in way over our heads trying to reconcile these old foes (something even the CIA had failed to do), we did have one advantage: we were in control of the money—more money than the region had ever seen.
The interior of Barzani’s housing complex was lined with snowy white carpeting.
Unfortunately, I had managed to muddy my shoes during an earlier visit to a sewage project. When positioning myself to take a photograph of Pasha greeting the mayor of the town, I had somehow managed to step into the actual sewer. So before stepping onto Barzani’s pristine carpet, I tried to wipe off my shoes. What I needed was a big roll of Bounty, but under the circumstances, I was lucky to get my hands on a Kleenex. Having managed to dirty my hands and sleeve with mud as well, I finally stepped in to catch up with Pasha and Barzani and a massive delegation of UN and Kurdish officials. The room where the meeting was to take place was also lined with white carpeting.
I walked in, trying as best I could to keep a low profile as I strolled into the meeting room, leaving heavy tracks of mud in my wake. I sat down and surveyed the damage. Incriminating brown footprints led straight to where I was sitting. I looked guilty as a raccoon atop a trash can. Since I didn’t know what the repercussions could be for walking into a Kurdish rebel leader’s house and messing up his carpet, I decided to cover my tracks. In the commotion that preceded the meeting, I did something truly shameful. I stood up and got hold of Stafford Clarry, gave him some random document, and politely offered to let him sit in my place, saying he needed to be close to Pasha “just in case.”
“In case what?” asked Stafford.
I nodded at the document I had just given him as if it contained the answer. Stafford looked slightly confused but accepted my offer to sit. I tiptoed a few seats away and sat down, innocent as a firstborn. The room settled down and coffee was brought in. The protocol officer was now looking straight at Stafford, who was nervously checking the soles of his shoes. Thankfully, the cameras were invited in and everybody put on their best official smiles.
The Kurds insisted on filming every meeting we attended. Their recently acquired autonomy was not quite the independent Kurdistan of their dreams, but in all aspects of protocol they behaved as if they were at the head of a little state. This irritated the Iraqis tremendously, of course, and I think that was partly the point. Showing their leaders holding bilateral talks with the United Nations strengthened their claim to independence. After the cameramen were whisked out, the meeting began in earnest.
Barzani, speaking through an interpreter, thanked the UN for its work in Iraqi Kurdistan, then ran through a litany of complaints about the inefficiencies of the humanitarian program. Essentially, he wanted a larger share of the pie, direct control over funds, and greater autonomy from the Iraqi government, which, under the Oil-for-Food deal, remained responsible for purchasing food and medicine for the whole country. The Kurds were convinced the Iraqis were cheating them out of their share by dumping expired drugs on them. That might well have been so, but the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) was denying it, so all we could do was promise to monitor the situation more closely in the future. The head of the WHO in Iraq turned out to be a Saddam Hussein apologist who avoided setting foot in Iraqi Kurdistan so as not to upset the regime, despite the fact that his greatest managerial responsibilities were there, not in Baghdad. While our working-level staff seemed to get along just great with the local population, a majority of our leaders appeared bent on snubbing their Kurdish counterparts, creating an atmosphere of undue suspicion that permeated the entire mission and sabotaged the work of the midlevel managers.
Barzani raised several issues that challenged my preconceptions. I had never imagined, for example, that Iraq had a rich potential for agriculture. But the region around Erbil, under Barzani’s control, produced vast amounts of wheat. Before the onset of Oil-for-Food, Kurdish farmers used to make a killing selling their crop to the food-strapped Iraqi government. But now, with all the wheat being imported from France and Australia, the Kurdish farmers were losing out. So Barzani wanted the UN to buy his farmers’ wheat.
It was clearly an issue of significant domestic concern for Barzani, and he got visibly angry when Pasha explained that the sanctions did not allow the UN to buy food locally from the Kurds. Barzani didn’t understand why the sanctions had to apply to the Kurdish region, and indeed, he had a point. There was no moral reason the sanctions should have applied to Iraqi Kurdistan, since the Kurds were not under Saddam’s control. The only reason they applied was that the international community felt a need to perpetuate the illusion that Iraq was one entity. Therefore, the UN found itself breaking one of the basic precepts of economic development, overseeing the dumping of foreign wheat on a wheat-producing region.
Most of Barzani’s complaints concerned issues that Pasha felt he couldn’t really do anything about. Unfortunately, the Kurds were not very good at being given the runaround, because they would simply repeat their question again and again and again until they got some sort of answer. They had four times the patience we had. Not to be outdone, Pasha developed new techniques that helped him sidestep their complaints. Pasha often described the limitations of the humanitarian program with colorful metaphors. On this occasion, he compared the Oil-for-Food program to a coconut, for a reason that escaped just about everyone.
The poor interpreter, who had done his best to make sense of Pasha’s elocution, stalled at this one and looked around nervously, as if asking for help. Since nobody in the room had understood what a coconut had to do with anything, the interpreter was on his own. With every second of silence, the pressure on him mounted. Pasha tried to help him by repeating the word “coconut” several times, but clearly the interpreter had no idea what he was talking about. Some members of Barzani’s delegation then came to his rescue, offering a translation for “coconut,” but that didn’t help either, because by that time, the context of Pasha’s image was long lost. The confusion aroused Barzani’s suspicion, and he pressed his interpreter for a translation. The latter turned to Pasha, apologized profusely, and asked him to please repeat himself.
“Coconut! You know what is a coconut?” Pasha said, as if speaking to a retarded person.
“Yes, Excellency,” said the interpreter, after which he turned to Barzani, coughed, wiped the sweat off his forehead, and said something about a coconut.
Barzani creased his foxlike eyes. Had Pasha just called him a coconut? Thankfully, another member of Barzani’s staff intervened, offering a lengthy explanation in Kurdish. I have no idea what the man said, but I could tell that he, too, was struggling to find meaning in Pasha’s words. He spoke apologetically, and after a while Barzani nodded impatiently. He had heard enough about coconuts.
Changing the subject, Barzani went on to discuss the most pressing issue facing the region under his control: the lack of electrical power.
The Dokan Dam, then under Talabani’s control, used to produce electricity for the city of Erbil. As a result of recent fighting between Barzani and Talabani, the electricity supply from the Dokan Dam to Erbil had been cut off. Bilateral negotiations had been initiated to resolve the problem, and the broad outline of an agreement had been reached. However, Talabani seemed to enjoy antagonizing his nemesis too much to follow through on the deal, so instead of adhering to the established schedule of power supply, the PUK authorities switched the electricity on and off at will, following an erratic pattern based on the daily mood swings of their leader.
By way of retaliation, Barzani blocked commercial vehicles from traveling to his enemy’s territory. This unending game of tit for tat hindered our work. It needed to be resolved immediately. Hence, I was delighted when Pasha agreed to offer the United Nations’ good offices to help resolve the dispute. Finally, there was something concrete—an actual achievement to point to when we came back from our mission!
When I found myself unable to take a hot shower that same evening, I became even more strongly convinced of the need to get electricity to Erbil. After a glacial scrubbing, I took a moment to admire the majestic view from my hotel window. The fortified city glowed like a jewel in the late afternoon sun. Surrounded by the walls of an old castle, the ancient city of Urbillum was founded sometime before 2300 B.C. by the Sumerians. It is known as the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. Its strategic location near some of the few fertile plains in an otherwise mountainous region had made it a coveted stronghold for centuries, and the city had seen many battles throughout the ages—including, most notoriously, the battle between the Persian King Dara and Alexander the Great in 330 B.C. Anywhere else in the world, such a location would be swarming with tourists. I earnestly hoped it would one day attract visitors intent on admiring the place rather than destroying it, but for the moment I savored the rare sight of this golden fort-city at sundown.
The next day we drove over to Sulaymaniyah, the city under Talabani’s control. In contrast to Barzani, who came across as suspicious and calculating, Talabani was a world-class charmer. A jovial bon vivant, he never said no to a good cigar. His Michelin Man proportions testified to a love of good food. He received us in an informal setting, without pomp or circumstance. Jalal, as one felt like calling him, was sociable and easygoing, but unlike many of his compatriots, he was rather impatient and didn’t like to sweat details. If he felt he was getting the runaround, he would immediately change the subject with a wave of the hand. He wasn’t interested in talking technicalities. He spoke English perfectly and came across as well educated, especially when it came to history. Born in 1933 in the Kurdish village of Kelkan near Lake Dokan, Talabani has spent most of his life in Iraq (unlike Barzani). A true son of the land, he received his elementary and intermediate school education in Koya (Koysanjak) and his high school education in Erbil and Kirkuk. In 1946, when Barzani was born, Talabani was already 13 and in the process of forming a secret Kurdish student association. The following year he became a member of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, and in 1951, at eighteen, he was elected to the KDP’s central committee, under the leadership of Mustapha Barzani, Massoud’s father. Upon finishing his secondary education, he sought admission to medical school but was denied it by authorities of the then-ruling Hashemite monarchy because of his political activities. In 1953 he was allowed to enter law school, but he was obliged to go into hiding in 1956 to escape arrest for his activities as founder and secretary general of the Kurdistan Student Union. Following the July 1958 overthrow of the Hashemite monarchy, Talabani returned to law school, at the same time pursuing a career as a journalist and editor of two publications, Khabat and Kurdistan. After graduating in 1959, he served in the Iraqi army, where he held positions in artillery and armor units and as a commander of a tank unit. By the time of Mustapha Barzani’s death, Talabani felt he was the rightful heir to the KDP, but because of the tribal nature of the region, Massoud took over—hence the rivalry that endured for years between Mustapha Barzani’s son and his top field commander.
Despite having spent more time inside Iraq than Barzani, Talabani appeared more worldly than his rival. He was interested in talking about big-picture politics. He shared with us his vision of how Saddam Hussein could be confronted and defeated, which was a subject on which Pasha had very little to say. Talabani then provided us with an analysis of the region’s challenges and of the road ahead for the establishment of an autonomous Kurdistan within a democratic and federal Iraq.
In terms of a vision for the future, Talabani was light-years ahead of Pasha, who was still working on the basic premise that, one day, sanctions would be lifted and the Kurds would again come under Saddam’s control, which would make the man he was talking to a future fugitive in his own country. Talabani was already a marked man, as far as Saddam was concerned, partly because a few years earlier he had actually attacked (and temporarily routed) the Iraqi army V Corps. He did so using no more than two thousand lightly armed peshmergas, which testified to his audacity and skill as a military commander.
After outlining his vision of the future, Talabani paused to finish his coffee. Pasha sat there nodding, unsure of what, if anything, to say. The visionary rebel commander and the UN bureaucrat had little in common, and I was afraid Talabani would wrap up the meeting before we had a chance to broach the subject of electricity. So I wrote down “ELECTRICITY” in bold letters and placed it in Pasha’s line of vision.
“On the subject of electricity,” Pasha began, before being interrupted.
“I know, I know,” said Talabani, smiling like a naughty boy who had gotten caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “We’ll turn the power back on. But…” and he launched into a litany of complaints he had about his rival Barzani. Chief among them was that the KDP was not sharing the revenue it was raking in from its cut of the illegal fuel trade that was going on between Iraq and Turkey. We weren’t in a position to help him on that one, because to begin with, the fuel trade was a breach of the sanctions. Everybody knew it was taking place, but we did not have any power of enforcement, and the United States seemed to sleep perfectly well at night knowing that its great ally Turkey was busting the sanctions and putting cash into Saddam’s pockets. The only one who never got to see a dime from the fuel trade was Talabani—and that drove him mad! So mad, in fact, that it had caused him to launch his most recent round of attacks against Barzani.
Talabani’s recent bid to control Erbil by force failed when, in August 1996, the KDP invited Saddam’s army to come in and kick Talabani’s forces out. Saddam’s lightning strike happened so fast that the Clinton administration failed to intervene from the air. Clinton dispatched four B-52 bombers to Guam to signify that the United States would not stand for continued progress by Saddam’s forces. Saddam knew that he could not hold Erbil for long without control of the airspace over the region, so he was soon forced to withdraw his troops from their exposed position. Officially, Saddam said he had assisted Barzani in this Kurdish factional fighting because Talabani had been working with Iran. In fact, Saddam had a business agreement with Barzani. The latter allowed the Iraqi dictator to use eastern Iraqi Kurdistan as a smuggling trade route.
The factional fighting in and around the city of Erbil had initially delayed the start of the UN humanitarian operation. The prospect of increased trade helped calm the rivalry between the two Kurdish factions. Now that goods were flowing into the region at a higher rate than ever before, Talabani had an interest in resolving the disputes with his nemesis peacefully. During our meeting he had effectively admitted as much by saying that the time for Kurdish infighting had passed. And so we left with a commitment from Talabani that he would abide by the terms of a negotiated settlement for electrical power-sharing.
The negotiations were held on November 20, 1997, at the site of the magnificent Dokan Lake, where the famous dam was located. The water was bright turquoise, and I wanted nothing more than to jump in it. Instead, we drove directly to the entrance to the dam, where we were met by two negotiating teams, one from the KDP and one from the PUK. At the onset of the meeting, each side spoke for about twenty minutes, accusing the other of bad faith in implementing previous electricity-sharing agreements. The idea was simply that Talabani’s side should offer a reliable time schedule for supplying Erbil with electricity from the dam. It’s a lot easier to run a city when you know in advance the times when electricity will be available. After many back-and-forth accusations, I saw Pasha getting antsy. How would he resolve this one?
Finally, he put his hand up and nodded, as if to say, “I get it.” Then, instead of addressing the issue at hand, Pasha came up with one of his stories about his time spent as a UN envoy in Afghanistan—something about flying between two mountains in a Cessna plane, being shot down, and crash-landing in a minefield. Unrelated as it was to the negotiations under way, Pasha’s story threw both parties off the track of confrontation. They just listened to him, wondering what the hell he was talking about. Once he was done with his story, Pasha picked up the document containing the outlines of a new agreement between the parties and asked, “So, should we sign this thing or what?”
Caught completely off guard, both parties looked at each other and realized this was a yes-or-no situation. Confused, they agreed to sign.
That’s how it was with Pasha. One moment, he would appear the hopeless bureaucrat, and the next, he’d pull a rabbit out of a hat. Brokering the agreement on electricity sharing was one of many ways the UN helped promote reconciliation between Barzani and Talabani. But Pasha held little hope that these agreements would last.
“They’re like the Afghans,” he said of the Kurds. He was pretty sure that the KDP and PUK factions would resume fighting at the first opportunity. And as for Talabani’s vision of an autonomous Kurdistan within a federal and democratic Iraq, Pasha was downright dismissive: “This guy is dreaming,” Pasha said to a group of snickering colleagues, as we drove away from his residence.
Talabani was dreaming, all right. But one day, this dreamer would become the first president of a democratic, federal Iraq. Sadly, it would not be the Iraq of his dreams.