By Nada Bakri
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 19, 2009
SULAYMANIYAH, Iraq -- It was not yet noon when Hallo Rasch left his squat, two-story house in this eastern Kurdish city and strode down the road to his office, where a group of black-clad widows sat waiting for him in a sweltering room.
He bowed and thanked them for coming.
"If I wanted power and money, I would have pursued that," Rasch told them. "But I am here because I want to work for you, because I care about you and I want to help you get your rights."
Done, he moved to an adjacent room where several more women, men and children waited. He bowed and thanked them, too.
"If I wanted power and money," he started again, reprising his stump speech.
The campaign season is in full swing in northern Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region, ahead of parliamentary and presidential elections Saturday. The two groups in Rasch's office represented supporters that even the 58-year-old presidential hopeful acknowledges are scant, in a bid for office that he acknowledges is quixotic.
Rasch is running as an independent against the incumbent, Massoud Barzani, who was elected president of Iraqi Kurdistan in 2005. The pragmatic and cautious Barzani has been at the center of Kurdish politics -- in the region, in the rest of Iraq and in the broader Kurdish homeland -- since succeeding his father, a legendary guerrilla leader, as head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party more than 30 years ago.
Rasch's uphill candidacy is playing out in a region simultaneously considered the most democratic in Iraq and not all that democratic. Two main parties -- Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, headed by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani -- have for years exercised a stranglehold on the region, dividing between them politics, patronage, investments and business deals.
"My candidacy is upsetting this equation," Rasch said in a recent interview from his house in Sulaymaniyah. "It is good for democracy. We can't call it a democracy with only one candidate running."
Rasch and four other presidential challengers are trying to break the two parties' monopoly. By nearly all accounts, they have little chance of winning. But their supporters contend that an electoral victory is less important than what their candidacies represent: an effort to set the stage for a more democratic political life.
Equally important is the backdrop of growing public dissatisfaction with the two main parties. Complaints of corruption, nepotism, high unemployment rates and low wages are common among party supporters and opposition groups alike.
"During the days of Saddam, we had hope that his regime would be toppled one day," said Mohammed Mahmud, a retired teacher, referring to the late Iraqi dictator. "But today we've lost hope. They are the same people and the same faces, rotating again and again."
If elected, the challengers have promised to fight graft, reform public institutions, provide job opportunities and, above all, instill a sense of accountability. "We don't just have a program. We have a program and a time frame," said Rasch, who heads a list of independent parliamentary candidates. "In three months, we will accomplish so and so, and if not, we will leave."
The newcomers' political inexperience is overshadowed by the sheer prestige of the two dominant parties. Despite the complaints, both draw on a deep loyalty that transcends everyday politics. The parties, though occasionally bitter foes, led the Kurdish region to autonomy after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein was still in power, and to prosperity after his fall in 2003.
Irbil, the region's capital, is booming. High-rise buildings and cranes dot the skyline. Sprawling, luxurious housing projects are under construction. Shopping malls are adding a Western look to the city. But beneath the veneer of prosperity, residents say, many struggle daily to make ends meet and to deal with the challenges of inadequate health care and poor schools. Residents of Sulaymaniyah, 100 miles southeast of Irbil, cite water and electricity shortages.
The annual budget for the region is huge -- about 17 percent of Iraq's budget this year -- but many Kurds complain that only the elite benefit from it, widening a gap between rich and poor.
"People are not happy with corruption," said Barham Salih, the Iraqi deputy prime minister and a candidate for prime minister of the Kurdish region. "That has to change."
Politicians in Baghdad and in the north say Salih may benefit from the old system. If the two parties perform as expected, they said, he appears assured of securing the post of prime minister as the consensus choice. But his tenure could prove tumultuous.
"The opposition will change the current situation," said Abdel-Salam Omed, a 29-year-old lawyer sipping tea at Michko, a popular old cafe in Irbil.
In his office in Sulaymaniyah, Rasch, who was a member of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan until last year, courted voters with pleas and promises.
The widows were wives of fighters with the Patriotic Union who had died in clashes between the two main Kurdish parties in the 1990s. Among the other group visiting his office were former members of the party who said they had lost faith in their leaders when their pleas for better living conditions went unheeded.
"Don't vote for them," Rasch urged. "If Iraq was a poor country, we would have accepted this, but it is not."
Rasch is known to most people in the Kurdish region as Hallo Ibrahim Ahmed, after his father, Ibrahim Ahmed, a respected Kurdish thinker and a founder of the Kurdistan Democratic Party. Several years after its creation, Ahmed broke ranks with the party, joined by his son-in-law, Talabani, who would later form the Patriotic Union. Educated in England and Sweden, Rasch was a professor of computer sciences at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm until 2000, when he moved back to Sulaymaniyah and started a group that worked with young people.
Rasch said his differences with the Patriotic Union stemmed from his attempts to reform the leadership. Party leaders had a different take on his departure: They said he was engaged in a family dispute with his sister, Talabani's wife.
Today, his independent campaign for the regional presidency has an amateurish feel. In his office, black-and-white posters printed on letter-size paper decorate the walls. "The road to Kurdistan is ahead," one reads. "With progress, we will have a brighter future," proclaims another. Money is tight, and campaign workers are scarce. The well-funded and well-run main parties, meanwhile, dominate the news.
"I will lose," Rasch said, before correcting himself: "I may lose."
But, he added: "I want to show people that nobody will kill you if you run. And the next time, people will have better chances."
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