PATRONS ARE REQUESTED TO FAVOR THE AUTHOR BY CRITICISM AND SUGGESTION CONCERNING HIS SERVICE
For what it’s worth, this document is said to come from the leaders of the Benghazi protests. It was forwarded to me by a Libyan expat in the U.K.
In the name of the 17th of February Revolution we declare the following:
1. We are constructing a united, free, civil, sovereign, Libyan state that emphasis the unity of Libya and equality for all.
Full text after the jump.
My friends The Workweek from Norman, Okla., are releasing their album tonight. This is an in-session recording of their haunting track, Ain’t So, with my friend Marcus on the trumpet. I’ve posted three other tracks from their album. Listen up, y’all.
A Kurdish official conducts an interview from the Citadel overlooking downtown Erbil, the site of a reconstruction effort. (Photo by Grant Slater)
Last week, the revolutionary fervor that has flared up from Morocco to Iran found its way to Iraqi Kurdistan. What has been a bastion of stability in a war-torn country now faces the possibility of spreading civil unrest largely because economic gains in recent years have failed to trickle down to an increasingly educated middle class. I spent the whole of last summer with a team in Kurdistan training a promising group of aspiring journalists to cover their own society in a situation just like this. And as the protests become more pronounced, I find their stories and knowledge essential to understanding what could happen in the coming weeks.
The protests began in Sulaimaniya, the region’s second largest city near the border with Iran, and have swelled to include thousands of demonstrators in the city’s main square. Sulaimaniya is viewed as the intellectual capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, a home to artists, university professors, poets and a less stringent interpretation of Islam. It is also home to the second largest political party, which formed an alliance more than a decade ago with the current ruling party. Another smaller, more liberal party known as Change – or Goran in Kurdish – also participated in the most recent elections and has its base in Sulaimaniya.
So far, four people have died, three protestors and one police officer. The protests have followed a familiar pattern for those watching the movements in Tunisia, Egypt and Bahrain. Kurdish youth have set up Facebook groups, some predating the protests and some new, where they share information. This one arose after a recent protest in honor of a 14-year-old that was killed by government forces. According to local Kurds, the government has sought to restrict movement between Sulaimaniya and the capital of Erbil to the north. It has also approached and threatened people who posted anti-government status updates in recent weeks.
There is a sense that things could go either way at this point. The Kurds appreciate their stability and have an extensive security apparatus walling them off from the rest of Iraq. But at the same time, many feel a sense of hopelessness born through resentment of a booming economy for a select few and general economic malaise for most. If the protests spread to Erbil, things will get serious. Follow me and The Tiziano Project on Twitter. If the protests grow, we will be watching.
In the meantime, here are some quick facts to get you up to speed quickly:
Why is Kurdistan different than the rest of Iraq?
Luckily, The New York Times dropped a fairly comprehensive suite of articles on the current state of play in Kurdistan in simpler times – like January – before dictators started dropping across the Middle East. The biggest development in the region has been the influx of Turkish cash to fuel Kurdish development and trade. This is what is driving the wealth of the few along with those Iraqi oil revenue sharing agreements we’ve all read so much about in recent years.
This is evident in the billboards leading up to the mountaintop fortress that is Saladin, home to the Kurdish president and now a place that a mustachioed Turkish real estate speculator would like you to consider buying a villa. That cash allows some Kurds to shop at upscale malls like the one in this video while some can barely find jobs with a college education:
The increased trade has come with a slight denouement of the conflict between the guerilla PKK movement, designated a terrorist organization by the United States, and the Turkish army. As recently as this summer, nighttime bombs from Turkish fighter jets and cross-border raids by itinerant PKK fighters remained the norm along the porous border between southeast Turkey and Kurdistan. Today, the PKK leader is striking a more conciliatory tone.
“Our youths are always ready, hot-blooded and combative, but we want the Kurdish problem — as a nation’s problem, as a people’s problem — to be solved not by guns, but by dialogue.”
The PKK are still kicking around in the mountains as evidenced by this haunting video from The Times’ Stephen Farrell (who spearheaded the video effort out of Tahrir Square), but their role has diminished and the Kurdish government has kept its hands off them for the most part.
It’s fairly evident wherever you go that Kurdistan is not Iraq.
What do I need to know about Kurdish history?
The Kurds have a long history of ethnic and political strife. Different dialects of Kurdish are spoken in each of three largest cities in Iraqi Kurdistan. Different religious mores are upheld. And different tribal affiliations hold sway. The most salient storyline leading up to the present day starts in 1992 when the Kurds gained a relative amount of autonomy under the protective umbrella of U.S.-led no-fly zones. By 1994, the relative peace devolved into a civil war that pitted the two major political parties and their regional affinities against each other.
The fighting left thousands dead as it drew in both Iraqi forces from the south and the Turkish army in the north. The remnants of this conflict provide a base for the current protests and explain why the clashes began in Sulaimaniya, not the capital Erbil. A U.S. brokered peace agreement in 1998 ended the hostilities and Kurdistan has gone on a development spree ever since, far outpacing most of Iraq, with implicit U.S. backing. The two parties remained in an alliance and cooperated to help U.S. forces in the 2003 invasion. A joint parliamentary list of the two main parties garnered 59 seats in the most recent parliamentary elections, down from 78 seats four years earlier. The remainder went largely to the Change party, which is based in Sulaimaniya. There are also strong minority Christian, Turkmen and other communities that enjoy religious freedom and some measure autonomy in Kurdistan.
Who are the major players and how do they connect?
KDP – Kurdistan Democratic Party – The current ruling party headed by the president of Iraqi Kurdistan, Massoud Barzani. There are two dynastic families in the Kurdish region of Iraq; the Barzanis are one of them.
PUK – Patriotic Union of Kurdistan – The Sulaimaniya-based opposition to the KDP which became an alliance after the civil war ended in 1998. Jalal Talabani, the scion of the other dynastic family and head of the party, serves as the president of Iraq as part of their power-sharing agreement.
Change (Goran) party – The PUK-KDP alliance opened the door for another party in the most recent parliamentary elections where Goran won 25 seats. The party came from PUK’s left and ran on economic issues. It capitalized on a general sense of economic stagnation among those outside the region’s ruling elite which is centered in the capital, Erbil.
Kurdish youth – Like Egypt or Tunisia, Kurdistan has enjoyed enough prosperity recently to allow this generation to escape the cycle of violence and gain access to more opportunities. The students we taught and the people I interacted with are savvy to regional politics and opinionated about the future of their people, whom they identify as Kurds, not Iraqis. As Saddam’s influence waned in the region, so has the teaching of Arabic, further setting the region apart from its southern neighbor. But with education comes a sense of frustration that they are bogged down in a system that is not built to help them advance. They don’t identify strongly with the political struggles between the KDP and the PUK. I can attest to the fact that they use Facebook incessantly, judging from my e-mail inbox.
If you want to know about the world they see, I suggest you check out their work for yourself.
And here are some shots from my time in the region if you want to see more of what it looks like:
A long, long time ago, I bought a camera. I bought a camera and had no idea how to work it. My thinking went that if I got someone to let me practice taking pictures of them, then I would figure out how to work that camera. It took many beers and many pestering text messages, but I convinced the kind souls from The Workweek to let me use them as guinea pigs.
They were set to release an album and I agreed to make not one, but two, music videos for them in return for their volunteering to be test subjects. And so we did. That was nearly two years ago. Promises, promises. The aptly named and long-awaited debut comes a week from today. So listen to the amazing songs and ignore my video hackery. I’ll come back here and give you the link to download when its released.
Somewhere in those many months, The Workweek made friends with another swell videographer. But they were kind enough to let me play trombone on this song, so I’ll forgive them for cheating on me.
Facebook revamped the look and presentation of their photo albums tonight, going to a dark-background shadowbox effect. The photos also seem to gain a bit in size. The change is striking and sends a couple of significant messages about the direction of social photography online. It’s another shot across the bow of Flickr. As cameras improve, people view photography as something accessible and easy. The shadowbox effect – almost exclusively an artistic rather than social move – is an attempt to capitalize on the democratization of high-quality tools for photography. This is Flickr’s core cache as a sharing site where amateur photographers have built a community around aesthetic concerns.
In late September, Facebook began offering high resolution photo uploads with a warning that it could take ages to send off a batch of images, a warning to the party pic crowd with an editing aversion. The new look departs distinctly from Flickr’s blanched background and sides with several prominent photography sites. If 600 million Facebook users grow accustomed to seeing their photos in the dark, then is black the new white?