Corruptistan

Kurds talk big when it comes to democ­racy, but old unde­mo­c­ra­tic ways are hard to shake, and Kurdistan is very very old. Corruption here isn’t as bad as in, say, Baghdad, a city built on closed-​​door deals and dead Kurds. But it’s still pretty obnox­ious.
Take the multi-​​million-​​dollar four-​​lane high­way being built near Erbil that doesn’t seem to con­nect any major pop­u­la­tion cen­ters. It doesn’t make much sense until you real­ize that the high­way begins at the regional prime minister’s house and ends at his office.
Most cor­rup­tion isn’t so grand. At the Erbil air­port, my co-​​camerman David burch got shook down for $80 by the cus­toms guys despite hav­ing every­thing he needed to get into the coun­try: a pre­cious Iraqi visa cour­tesy of His Honor Ambassador of Iraq to the United Kingdom Dr. Salah Al-​​Shaikhly and an American pass­port. Fortunately, Kurdish bureau­crats are as inept as they are cor­rupt, and David sim­ply smiled and hur­ried through the shake­down line with­out pay­ing, and nobody noticed.
Outside Erbil, at Kes Nazan, the Kurdish Regional Government is build­ing a $50-​​million, 3,000-unit apart­ment com­plex with oil rev­enue pro­vided by Baghdad. (How much of that rev­enue winds up in Kurdish min­is­ters’ pock­ets, I’d love to know.) The com­plex is intended for poor fam­i­lies being dis­placed from Erbil by new com­mer­cial con­struc­tion, but sources tell me that many of the units have already been assigned to wealthy pow­er­ful Kurds using fake names.
It’s a shame, made all the more shame­ful by an accute his­tor­i­cal irony. The land around Kes Nazan is flat and fea­ture­less, not because no one has ever lived here, but because it used to be pop­u­lated by con­ser­v­a­tive rural Kurds until Saddam swept in, killed a bunch, rounded up the rest, put them in camps then bull­dozed their homes. Their graves still dot the area. Some of these sur­viv­ing dis­placed peo­ples are return­ing to the area, soon to find their land occu­pied by the local upper class — a newer, more famil­iar oppres­sor, albeit a less cruel one than Saddam.
– David Axe

December 22nd, 2005 | Axe in Iraq (and Elsewhere) | 29945 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2005/12/22/corruptistan/Corruptistan2005-12-22+13%3A35%3A00jason You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.