Backstabbing for Beginners Read online

  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.

  CHAPTER 11

  On the Edge

  ANKAWA, ERBIL, NORTHERN IRAQ

  The humanitarian community’sfavorite watering hole in Iraqi Kurdistan was a bar that was operated on a part-time basis by a buxom blond Finnish woman named Yanna. She had named it The Edge, which accurately described the mental state we were in when we arrived there.

  After a week spent drinking coffee with mustached men, it was a pleasure to step into a “co-ed” bar in the Christian zone of Erbil. Hours earlier we had visited another massively dysfunctional electrical dam. The Derbandikhan Dam was located in a lush green valley. The trip had begun with picturesque views of remnants of the old Silk Road carved into the Kurdish mountain ranges. I was so busy looking out at the beautiful landscape that I forgot to read up on the problems affecting the structure we were about to view. And so when we were informed that we would be taken all the way to the bottom of the dam, I initially felt excited. I always marvel at great feats of structural engineering, and I was genuinely curious to see how this massive structure actually worked.

  As we walked down several flights of stairs to reach the bottom of the dam, we had the opportunity to observe a lot of incomprehensible machinery. Pasha and I tried to look as if we knew what we were looking at. All I could really say was there were many tubes and control panels that looked like they were built at the time that the TV show Star Trek was filmed. With lots more dust.

  Since the departure of the highly trained government engineers following the Gulf War, the dam had been managed by local Kurds with scant experience in electrical power generation. They had done their best to keep it going on a shoestring budget, but as we were about to find out, their ability to keep the dam running came at the expense of basic safety regulations. The further down we went, the more we felt like we were deep in the bowels of a submerged Soviet submarine.

  After an endless descent into the belly of the beast, Pasha and I were met by two Kurdish engineers in dirty white shirts, sporting pencils in their ears. One was a bucktoothed man with curly hair and a psychotic grin on his face. I think he was the boss of the pair. He informed us that “UNDP no work,” by which he meant to say that the United Nations Development Program, which had been charged with improving the dam, had not delivered any results. He repeated “UNDP no work” several times as he fiddled with some levers, apparently trying to set some machine in motion.

  A question began forming in the back of my mind: if “UNDP no work,” how could the dam work?

  “What’s the fackin
g problem?” asked Pasha, already exasperated by our claustrophobic surroundings. The UNDP representative in Iraq had told us that all repairs were on track, and we had expected our visit to confirm progress, not problems. As usual, the Kurds saw things differently. And they soon made sure we saw things their way.

  The engineer walked us over to the dam’s floodgate, which, as its name suggests, is critical for the stability of the entire damned structure. This floodgate had a big crack in it, out of which pressurized water was gushing out. That is, water from the lake now situated . . . above our heads.

  I swallowed hard and looked at Pasha, who was livid. We needed no further convincing. There was indeed a major facking problem, and it was about to get us all killed. Before we could stop him, the chief engineer proceeded to turn on the dam’s turbines. Slowly, the rusty turbines began to rotate. The whole dam began to rattle and hum. The ground began to shake, and the noise level shot up dramatically. The Kurdish engineer was smiling at us, as if to say, “See the problem?”

  Yes, we did. The damned dam was about to collapse. Since the noise level was far too high for us to communicate, there was no way for us to tell him to switch the whole thing off again except with random hand signs, which didn’t seem to have any effect on our guide. Instead of turning the turbines off, he directed our attention to various parts of the machinery that were rattling but weren’t supposed to. We nodded abundantly in an exaggerated effort to show the self-declared engineer that we had seen more of the problem than we needed to see. Again, we had little impact on him. The engineer appeared to enjoy watching the dam get more and more unstable.