Security and Cement

LFIQ Joint President Harry Barnes reflects on his week in Iraqi Kurdistan

I have just spent a busy week in the Iraqi Kurdistan with a delegation from our Labour Movement.

The first impression was of security and cement.

Public buildings, hotels and other well used areas were all protected by huge concrete blocks. Guards in uniforms and with guns were present at each entry post and outside restaurants and political offices.

Each few hundred yards in the towns and every few miles in the countryside we met check points, with further local armed forces scrutinising us.

Construction work was taking place everywhere. Private building, Council housing, University Student accommodation, roads and Government offices were all being built. The splendid Ministry of the Interior was, for instance, a replacement for their old building which had been blown up by a suicide bomber.

We regularly passed their big growth industry - cement factories.

The streets were packed with cars, including numerous taxis. But none of the petrol stations were open in an oil producing region. For they were undercut by an open black market in petrol sold in plastic containers by young men smoking cigarettes.

Whilst unlike the rest of Iraq there is almost full employment in the 80% of the economy covered by the State sector, there is what the economists’ term under-employment. The 600 workers at a cigarette factory we visited haven’t produced a fag for over 3 years. The workers sit beside their old machines and receive mainly a poor minimum wage from that State.

Yet these are the friendliest people in the world and they know that their region has a great potential. Oil, raw materials and a strong commitment to education are all great assets. Whilst the far north is the Switzerland of the Middle East and includes snow covered mountains and a vast tourist potential.

48 villages and towns, including Halabja, were gassed by Saddam Hussein. He obliterated 400 villages.

We saw the remains of his hideous torture centre at Sulaymaniyah where 5,000 died in three years and numerous others had their physical and mental well-being ended.

When all this was happening the Iraqi Kurds were uprooted and fled into the mountains. They returned under the protections of a no-fly zone, the removal of their oppressor.

They have a saying that they have “no friends but the mountains”. We have to see that they now have new friends, who can help them in their determined efforts to achieve democracy, peace and prosperity. It can provide a pattern for the rest of their beleaguered nation of Iraq.