WINDOWthe w w w . w i n d o w m a g . n e t

A bi-monthly magazine, issued by the students of the University of

Kurdistan-Hawler

UKH after Vali.

We are ready to support Turkey to solve

the PKK issue by all means but military.

UKHSU is unique among all student

organizations in Kurdistan and Iraq

KDP external relations director:

UKHSU President

Robin Brims.4PAGE:

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Editor-in-chief

Namo Abdulla0750 495 70 24

Concessionaire

Aso Muhammad

Deputy Editor

Hemin Hussein0750 112 10 83

IT & Design Manager Rahel Kareem

Political Consultant

Dr. Zafer Yörük

May, 2008Issue No. 2

35 years of Photography & Journalism in Kurdistan

Chris Kutschera

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Email: editor@windowmag.netWeb Site: www.windowmag.netAddress: Kurdistan, Hawler, UKH.

The First English Magazine in Kurdistan

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Abdulmajeed N. GlyArdalan Abdul-WaheedAree MamshaeeBalen Hama KareemEvan NizarKarokh NuraddinMeran M. MubarakMiriam AbdulrahmanMuhammad A. BapirMuhammad Ali MRaed AsadRanj AbdbullaRasan RamziSazan M. MandalawiShehin SalahShko Bakir Abdulqadir

Writing & reporting staff

ISSUE 2

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MAY 2008

After the West has become more civilized and secularized, their Universi-ties took a big step in terms of scientific invention. Technology and highly devel-oped weapons have been created solely by Western minds. But, to what extent this inventiveness could change the world into a better world in which human beings en-joy a safe and worthwhile life is another story and worth questioning.

Western people rapidly began to in-vent when the focus shifted from com-munity to individuals; that individuals should be given all possible freedom and equal opportunity to practice their lives. This idea is of liberals and currently has extended to an extent that individualism has emerged and collectivism is not only dismissed, but rather it has been interpret-ed as a creator of fascism and this, in turn, has required a minimal state that does not have the legitimacy at all to interfere in the private life, and individuals should be left alone to do what they want.

Today, Western universities under the influence of liberalism are creating people who are able to criticize, take risks and finally invent. The success of this idea in terms of invention has made countries ev-erywhere of the world with those which are experiencing dictatorship and auto-cratic regimes to build Modern Western universities in their countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran.

However, although, these inventions have benefited human beings in terms of facilitating their life, such as the invention of Mobile telephony, Internet, automobile and planes are ‘distance minimizers’ and help people contact each other and trans-fer in a very short time. None of these can balance the killing of millions of people in the last half century by extremely de-veloped technological weapons, such as weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and the current warfare world led by high-ly industrialized countries of the West.

The world nowadays is going through the darkest age of history, darker than that of Medieval ages. When you turn on the TV, almost all news are telling a number of people have been killed as a result of a terrorist attack, explosion, car accidence, collateral damage, lack of health care, poverty and so forth.

Today a mind in the west (I am saying the west not because the rest is not like the west in this way, but rather I think it is difficult to talk about the mind here, while we are consumers of the West and it might be impossible to talk about rationality of ‘zero-inventive’ Third-World to a West-erner), is being created thinking only how to invent, no matter what they are going to invent. This mind is conditioned to be innovative but an "abusive mind"- a mind that does not know how to use its product. Today a mind is at work that can create nuclear weapons, but this mind has not been taught how to use it in a way that serves humanity.

Today's minds have been deviated from their real mission, their current mis-sion is a cowardly mission which is creat-ing physically stronger people believing that only the stronger can survive. The re-sult of all western inventiveness has made Westerners only become more powerful and fearful (of the weaker).

If the purpose of the mind was to cre-ate stronger people and dominating oth-ers, this mind is not only a coward mind and an in-tolerating mind, this is more an animalized mind, because the belief that "only stronger can survive" is a rule of the

animal nature that today's realist world is working on. In Today's world at which working rationality is claimed, why has war solely become the modus operandi of every state to solve its problems with oth-ers? Using stick, by all means, means the absence of a real mind.

What should this mind have been like? It has to have been a collective or a communal mind which thinks broader and of others. This is not only because of morality and caring the life of others, but this is in the interest of the creator as well because whatever you create, it some-day goes into others' hand and is used by them as well. Yesterday, the West created nuclear weapons believing that becom-ing more powerful and dominating others with the dismiss of today's result that ev-eryone (state) has this weapon and is a big threat upon them.

An Individualist mind creates weap-ons and everything and does not tell peo-ple the right way of using because of the belief that individuals assert, that is, "I am I" and "others are others".

The interest of all and the life of the next generation requires an attempt to cre-ate a peaceful world in which universities can lead it and play a significant role in this process. The task of today's univer-sities is not to create scientifically inno-vative people, but rather socially flexible and tolerating people, because I believe that as far as world is becoming materi-alistic and technological, people's inter-est in cooperation becomes less. In deed, human beings becomes devalued when age of technology, because, as Habrmas, a German philosopher, says, technology makes everyone alike. Today's universi-ties' task is to create a real mind-which is a 'communal mind' - that requires a mind working alongside the conscious. This mind can be critical but instead of having focus on the individual it will focus on the community ,and gives (possible) op-portunities to all individuals of the society equally.

* editor@windowmag.net

Namo Abdulla

EditorialWhat is today's universities' task?Focus from Individual to Community

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"The main aim of this university is to educate people that can take their place in government who governs for their people and also deals with other external actors, can engage with the outside world, and take part in the development of the re-gion" said Robin Brims, the rector of the University of Kurdistan-Hawler (UKH) since March, 10th 2008 and after replac-ing the former rector Prof. Vali.

For this significant mission of UKH to be gained, Mr. Brims believes that there are many things that should be taken seri-ously and not be compromised such as the high standard of the university including the provision of international accredita-tion of the university.

'If we compromise on academic stan-dard, we will never build ourselves up, in deed, we shall fail".

It is not false to say, that from the foundation of university hitherto, there has been talk about Bradford University crediting UKH. Prof. Vali, former rector of UKH, told the previous issue of the Window that Bradford University was ready to provide UKH accreditation, but we are waiting for our government's ap-proval.

However, Mr. Brims tells a different story: "Bradford contract yet has not be-ing signed and is an ongoing process.” He adds that Bradford external accreditation is only for undergraduate students not post-graduate ones.

"At the moment, nobody apart from internally is looking for post-graduate ac-creditation," said Mr. Brims.

While UKH is new and has not fin-ished its first round, this is the reason its post-graduate degree not to be recognized internally. However, Mr. Brims is trying to find a remedy for this problem and is a part of that should not be compromised.

"I am running the next phase of the university which is about the management structure and continuation of the develop-

ments," said the rector. Now UKH does not have enough pro-

fessors, some departments have stopped from working or studying insufficiently, Mr. Brims calls this short-term needs and promised that he is trying to bring new professors in this semester and has adver-tised in the region, the US and the UK for that.

"I am talking everyday with profes-sors to convince them to come and teach here, however, it is difficult to persuade people to come to Kurdistan, as it is a part

of Iraq" Mr. Brims has also talked about long-

term needs and said that UKH needs a lot more professors than it has got now.

"I am not academic; in deed, I did not go to university," Mr. Brims told UKH students and teachers this at the first day of taking a step in to the university in his unexpected introduction by a representa-tive of Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in the auditorium of UKH.

This initiated tens of questions in the minds of many students and professors, for instance, how should a non-academic person be the president of university, how can he deal with academic affairs? How will he be able to assess the knowledge of new coming professors? Does this presi-dent not want to turn UKH into a military academy as he has worked 38 years in the British army? And so forth.

Mr. Brims justifies all this by saying that this phase is a phase of organization-al structure and he is "a problem solver and an experienced man". Further more, he is not going to assess the knowledge of new professors who come to UKH, but rather it’s the business of head of each de-partment to stand to this task.

"Robin Brims is very famous and knows a lot of people around the world, “I am sure, he will easily be able to bring best in terms of professors and qualifica-tions to UKH,” said a professor in UKH.

Robin Brims, prior to become the dean of UKH, was a general in the Brit-ish army. After working 38 years, he is now is retired.

Robin Brims:

International Recognition Is Not Compromised

By: Namo Abdulla

Bradford is only about giving undergraduate accreditation.At the moment no body credits post-graduates.

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University of Kurdistan-Hawler (UKH) as the first public English-based University was established in 2006 by a personal decision of Nechirvan Barzani, the Prime Minster (PM) of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). The Uni-versity has cost millions of dollars since its establishment in the construction of its building, including library, internet and computing facilities and a remarkable amount of money has been and is being spent on bringing in a foreign staff for the aim of teaching and running UKH.

UKH consists of five departments in terms of undergraduate program, which are, Politics and International Relations, Sociology, Business and Management, Economics and Finance and Information Technology (IT) in which 95 students study. For the post-graduate program, in addition to Petroleum Technology de-partment, all those of undergraduate de-partments with the exclusion of IT and Economy and Finance and has 82 stu-

dents. These have been achieved in only 15 months.

Prof. Abbas Vali, who is a political sci-entist, working in the academic field for more than two decades in different univer-sities across the world, was asked person-ally by the PM¬ to intiate this university as soon as possible and without having to wait for the parliament approval for this project. He, himself, was appointed to be the first rector of UKH.

On March 10th 2007, by an official de-cision of the PM, Prof. Vali was replaced by Robin Brims. However, Mr. Brims is not an academic; he is an expert in run-ning intuitions and has been working for 38 years in the British military. This deci-sion was and is very contestable amongst students and faculty. It is contestable be-cause, on one hand, Mr. Brims is not an academic and, on the other, Prof. Vali was not administrative.

This decision was done in the begin-ning of a new semester and caused some

problems to UKH, such as the sudden abandoning of some professors. Dr. Zafer Yoruk, a former professor of UKH, fired by the former rector, explained the timing of the decision by giving two sayings, his first saying goes " you should not change the horse while crossing the river", on the other hand his next saying which, as he believes, more appropriate to the situ-ation, goes " whatever stage of loss you turn away from is profit".

Dalia Kaikhasraw, general manager of UKH, admits that UKH had and currently has problems and she does not trace the causes of these problems to individuals, but rather she justifies the problems by UKH's newness.

Concerning the new rector, Mr. Brims, in addition to him being administrative, she says that he is very well-known inter-nationally and this is enough for UKH.

Chris Whitney, head of Foundation program, believes that Prof. Vali was a good academic and accomplished many

UKH after Vali.

Muhammad Ali M Abdulmajeed N. GlyNamo Abdulla.

The replacement of Prof. Vali by Mr. Brims between students and professors.

Prof. Vali , the former rector Mr. Brims, the current rector

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good works in terms of the academy. However, he states that the former rector was not an expert in, as he says, 'organiza-tional structure', so the university needed someone to fill this gap and he stated I have confidence in the current rector that he will be able to hit the ground running.

In support to Mr. Whitney's state-ment, Damga Qadir, Foundation student,

says the position of running university is more about experience rather than having academic degrees. Furthermore, Robert Dobler, English teacher, asserts that be-ing non-academic for this position is not a problem at all.

"Even though administration is a key issue in the rector's position, it is not the only one. Since he is running an aca-demic institution, the reputation of UKH requires him to be an academic." An anonymous student who stated the previ-ous statement continues "although during his tenure, Abbas Vali was the source of some administrative problems, this does not justify bringing a military general to university".

However, Dr. Yoruk believes that a di-rector with experience in the management of a human organization (and the military is the oldest and still one of the best uni-versal human organizations), is precisely what we need at this stage.

Zardasht A. Muhammad, Foundation

Student, traces the decision of rector re-placement back to politics and students have no legitimacy to interfere govern-ment's decisions.

"UKH was established by the PM, so it is up to him. Whatever decision he makes, and he knows better what is best for the university" added Brwa Othman, Foundation student.

When Prof Vali was removed, stu-dents asked 'why' by organizing a protest because they believed this decision is re-lated to their future. These students ques-tion still remained non-answered. To the former rector this is surprising and the government has given no answer. Zrar Azwar, Politics and IR student, believes that no comment should be made regard-ing the rightness of the removal decision, because neither Prof. Vali nor the govern-ment have unveiled the reasons for the decision.

"However, we, students, would like Prof. Vali to remain as well. We have to be empirical rather than normative, and put UKH above any individual," said Sa-man Abbas, the president of the Student Union of UKH, an organization which was founded democratically by the vote of students this year, 2008.

Saman says that he is going to work honestly with the new rector to help him succeed and maintain the highest stan-

dards possible.The majority of students are concerned

about whether their degree it is interna-tionally recognized or not. Students prefer this university to other Kurdish and Iraqi universities, for not only having West-ern professors and programs, but rather because they have been promised by the former rector that they will have interna-

tional accreditation. Amanj Abdulla, Poli-tics and IR student, believes that this new rector makes our dream which is having an international certification come true.

Changing the rector will certainly bring changes to the entire university. But, whether these changes will be positive or negative is another story. However, it is, of course, early to judge whether UKH will be better or worse under Mr. Brims's tenure. Being administrative of this rec-tor may tell a good story. Zafer Yoruk explains the change like this: "UKH is a small university and it does not currently require a sophisticated structure. What it desperately needs is a strong and effective machinery. Once this machine begins to roll, the academic 'steam' will certainly follow."

Students of UKH in the university yard

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These days, Kurdistan Regional Government has committed itself to reform the educational infrastructure, beginning from primary schools and secondary schools. However, still it is not clear how this reform will be effec-tive and practicable, how this education will be modern.

Liberal education, which is a mod-el of Western liberal democracies, is a healthy and supportive education that can produce highly educated, innova-tive, and critical minded risk takers. Then, is this reform of the KRG based on liberal education?

Still, we may not be aware of the process of reform that how, when, and where we should start. Liberal education and its components might be strange for many of us. In this interview an expert on Education will talk and give his sat-isfying answers to all of our questions.

Francis Adu-Febiri holds a Sociol-ogy PhD from the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is a sociology professor and former Chair of the So-cial Sciences Department at Camosun College, Victoria, Canada. In addition, Dr. Adu-Febiri is an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Graduate Studies, Uni-versity of Victoria and in the Depart-ment of Education at Simon Fraser Uni-versity, Canada. His publications have appeared in the Berkeley Journal of So-ciology, Tourism Recreation Research, The African Review, International Jour-nal of the Humanities, Review of Hu-man Factor Studies, CDTL and Brief of National University of Singapore, and the Journal of Pan African Studies. Francis has also published one book and a number of book chapters.

If we want to reform education, from where and when should we begin?

Start from what you want education to achieve for Kurdistan students, teach-ers, families, communities and country: Education that transforms knowledge and skills into wisdom to empower students, graduates and teachers to de-velop positive (emotional, moral, spiri-tual, aesthetic, cultural) connections with their families, communities, cul-tures, country and humanity to use their knowledge and skills for their benefit and improvement. Content of education is therefore context-dependent sciences and narratives that facilitate the integra-tion of relevant indigenous knowledges and relevant transcendent or universal knowledges to improve relationships and communities in Kurdistan. Peda-gogy or instruction focuses on motivat-ing and inspiring students to actively engage with course materials, teachers, educational administrators, families, communities, cultures, country (politics & economy) and humanity.

What sort of people can be consid-ered reformers?

People who know, understand, be-lieve and are committed to the above aims, content and pedagogy of educa-tion.

What role does culture play in re-

form? Does its role more toward encour-aging reform or a conservative role? If culture was an obstacle standing in the way of such reform, then what should you do for that?

Culture is central to educational re-form because culture provides the con-text for the reform. The Educational system that cries for reform is the one that has ceased to be relevant to local and global cultures. Educational reform therefore aims at transforming culture to empower societal members to posi-tively transform relationships, families, communities and country politically and economically.

When the educational infrastructure

of a country is quite damaged, is it pos-sible for such education to be reformed? In other words can it be changed from the root?

Reform of education in KurdistanWhere should we begin?

Francis Adu-Febiri

Namo Abdulla

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Education is socially constructed. That is, education is made up by the in-teraction of members and outsiders of a particular society. Education therefore can be deconstructed and reconstructed. The starting point is committed people with the vision, knowledge, skills and wisdom to organize people and resourc-es for the improvement of relationships, families, communities, cultures, coun-try and humanity.

If education is changed from the root? Is that reform or revolution?

True educational reform is a para-digm shift through conscious and calcu-lated intervention. It is therefore more of a revolution that evolution.

In Kurdistan? The Kurdish Govern-ment established a new university on British standard for the purpose of re-form in the region. How do you think of that? Do you think it is the best plan or not?

Educational Standards should be decided by local context in relationship with the international context. That is, the needs of Kurdistan citizens, fami-lies, communities, cultures, and country in their interaction with the global com-munity in the 21st century play a sig-nificant role in deciding on “Standard”. Is the “British Context” similar to the “Kurdistan Context”?

Do you think it is possible to transfer

a western model of education to Kurd-istan’s culture, where a huge difference is seen between these two cultures? If you do, how? If you don’t, then what country’s model is possible to be copied to or imitated by Kurdistan?

So far as the Kurdistan context is unique, no country’s model will fit it. However, Kurdistanians could use rel-evant parts of other countries education systems to combine with local knowl-

edge, skills and wisdom to construct an education system that works for the people of Kurdistan.

There is more talk about liberal edu-

cation, we want to know: What is lib-eral education?

Liberal education is the one that provides students and graduates with the tools such as critical thinking, open-mindedness, originality, creativity, and consideration of public good to make rational choices that positively trans-form their lives, relationships, families, communities, cultures, country and hu-manity.

How can it be achieved?

Through educators, curriculum and pedagogy that do not make students passive receptacles but rather make them active and giving learners. In other words, reforming educators, cur-riculum and pedagogy to motivate and inspire students and graduates to de-

velop and apply critical thinking, open-mindedness, originality, creativity to help improve their lifeworlds and that of their families, communities, cultures, country and humanity.

What are the most important things

that liberal education teaches our chil-dren?

Include the core things such as criti-cal thinking, open-mindedness, origi-nality, creativity, and empathy.

Finally, please write your sugges-tions and advice to educational reform in Kurdista.

Design an education system that is Kurdistan-relevant. That is, education by Kurdistanians and their friends, of Kurdistanians and for Kurdistanians to improve their lives and connect positively with the global community. That education will focus on develop-ing context-dependent curriculum and pedagogy giving priority to indigenous

knowledges/skills, relevant external knowledges/skills, content and peda-gogical diversities to meet the diverse learning styles of students, and service learning projects that actively engage and inspire students at all levels to de-velop positive emotional, moral, spiri-tual, aesthetic and cultural connections with each other, families, communities, country and humanity.

The Kurdistan context is unique, no country’s model will

fit it.

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PanelKurdistan and The United States

Namo Abdulla & Hemin Hussein

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Garner, in his short stay in position continuously backed Kurdish claims, impressing Kurdish people and leaders. He came to Kurdistan this time with a different agenda, that is business; bring-ing with him businessmen and compa-nies. We saw him in the house of Sle-mani Governor, Dana Ahmad Majid: He accepted our interview, though for a short time only.

Jay Garner, former American admin-istrator in Iraq, told The Window, a fed-eralist system brings rapid solutions to the Iraqi quagmire. This does not signify a weakness of the central government, Nonetheless, it remains responsible for issues such as; currency, taxes, border and foreign policy. “If America prac-ticed the federalist system at the com-mencement, it would not have faced the

current difficulties it faces; However, it is not too late at this point to put the sys-tem into practice,”.He adds “if we want a stable Iraq it must proceed to be a Fed-eralist state,”

During the interview Garner repeat-edly assured us that he is a friend of the Kurds, however, he could not assure us America is a real friend of the Kurds. He said “I can not speak of the strate-gic relations between the Kurds and America because I am not a part of the American administration; I am unable to say what George Bush, Dick Cheney and Condoleza Rice think of the rela-tions between America and the Kurds” When he was an administrator in Iraq, in his visits to Kurdistan he was always warmly welcomed with flowers, hence, his very positive attitude towards the

Kurds in general.Jay Montgomery Garner is a retired

United States Army general who was ap-pointed in 2003 as Director of the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance for Iraq following the 2003 invasion of Iraq but he and his office were replaced after only one month by L. Paul Bremer, III and the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). He had not expected to be in the position for such a short time span, He further informed the Window “prior to my visit to Iraq I was told that my time would be short, despite this, I had not expected it to be this short. The reason behind my replacement was that I am not a diplomatic person. I had not accomplished any diplomatic duties.”

Regarding, the situation in Iraq and Kurdistan Garner praised Kurdistan and

Jay Garner:

I always support the US military base in Kurdistan

The Window Exclusive

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described the rest of Iraq to be disap-pointing. He said “After 5 years on from the Iraqi war, the situation remains dis-appointing. In fact America achieved security development to some extent, nonetheless, if you look at the political process, it is very slow and the Kurdistan Regional Government is the only success story in Iraq” He further talked of Kurd-istan, its success came down to two vital points. Firstly, its liberation 17 years ago from Saddam and secondly, the people of Kurdistan are very understanding and different.

“Look at the structure of the KRG, there are numerous females within it, especially in Slemani. Out of five plan managers three are females. This indi-cates the activeness of the KRG, in hav-ing female participants. There is a con-stitution in Kurdistan providing minority rights. We can say Kurdistan can be an example for the rest of Iraq.”

He further complimented the Kurdish leaders for their efforts for Kurdish uni-ty. He said “In Iraq Kurds have suffered a lot; however, they have been able to re-main intact. Currently, Kurds have vari-ous natural resources, yet the important thing here is the method of using these resources that are available. It should be used in a way that will encourage young people to remain in their land.”

Regarding democracy and human rights in Kurdistan, recently published numerous reports criticized the Kurdis-tan Regional Government (KRG) in that democracy is still fragile, as well as the violation of human rights. Garner said

“Democracy is not a perfect system and contains many flaws; to have a proper democratic system requires time and confrontations will be faced. Presently democracy in America is not flawless, despite the fact that it is a product of 200 years.”

In relation to the KRG’s oil contracts in Kurdistan, Garner said that oil is cru-cial in the region, although the oil’s rev-enue across Iraq should be returned to the central government in Baghdad, oth-erwise the Shittes in Basra will become extremely wealthy. Hence, the central government should equally distribute the revenue, including to those areas not possessing oil.

"Essentially, I guess the first day I got to Baghdad, I was a lame duck," Garner told the “Front line” while he said to The Window “If my plans were put into prac-tice, there would have been a different outcome.”

One of the Kurdish leaders dreams is an American military base in Iraqi Kurd-istan. Garner supported this idea of the base and said, “I always support the US military base in Kurdistan. Not a large, rather a small military base consisting of an air force and one brigade. This has its importance, which is strengthening the relations between Kurds and America. Also it will send a message to Middle Eastern countries, America will remain, for long term stability”

“I cannot speak of the strategic rela-tions between the Kurds and America because I am not a part of the Ameri-can administration; I am unable to say what George Bush, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice think of relations between America and the Kurds”

* Fazil Najeeb contributed in this article.

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John Feffer, co-director of Foreign Policy In Focus. John has authored or edited eight books and numerous articles. Most recently, he has been a Writing Fellow at Provisions Library in Washington, DC and a PanTech fellow in Korean Studies at Stanford University. He is a former associate editor of World Policy Journal. He has worked as an international affairs representative in Eastern Europe and East Asia for the American Friends Service Committee. He has also worked for the AFSC on such issues as the global economy, gun control, women and workplace, and domestic politics. He has served as a consultant for the Friends Committee on National Legislation, among other organizations.(FPIF).

How do you perceive US foreign policy regarding Iraq's Kurds?

The United States has a paradoxical approach to Iraq's Kurds. On the one hand, the Bush administration is desperate to see that northern Iraq

remains relatively stable and prosperous. On the other hand, the administration doesn't want the region to break away and become independent. This approach is a continuation of the earlier U.S. position after the first Gulf War, when Washington expended considerable resources and diplomatic energy to create the safe havens for Kurds. At the same time, the United States was and continues to be sensitive to Turkey's concerns in particular and so did not support an independent Kurdistan. There is a certain amount of guilt involved in U.S. relations with Kurds. After all, Woodrow Wilson supported self-determination for Kurds in the wake of World War I. But many of Wilson's promises went unfulfilled.

What are the benefits of the Kurds for the US that the US does not want to

give up them?

The Kurds are, generally, the most pro-American group in the region, with the exception of Israelis. The polls suggest

that the Kurds still overwhelmingly support the U.S. invasion, condemn insurgent attacks on U.S. troops, and do not favor U.S. military withdrawal. Kurdish views on these issues are quite different from other Iraqis. The majority of non-Kurdish Iraqis support the withdrawal of U.S. troops and have changed their minds about the 2003 invasion.

The relative stability of northern Iraq is a second major reason. And a third reason are the U.S. bases in the Kurdish areas, and the potential for the consolidation of these bases into several "enduring" installations in that region. And a fourth reason would be the oil resources in northern Iraq,

The US gave green light to Turkey to cross Iraqi Kurdistan boarders, then after a few days Turkey was told by the US to withdraw its troops form Iraq? why did the US do these two dichotomies? In your opinion, the Kurds would be better for US long-term interest in the Middle East or Turkey?

Turkey is a key military ally of the United States. Through Turkey, the United States was able to maintain a presence quite near the Soviet Union during the Cold War. And today, through Turkey, the United States has an ally that borders the Middle East. Turkey participated in the first Gulf War. But the victory of the AKP and the change in government in Ankara led to a reluctance to serve as a staging area for the 2003 invasion. Turkey has acquired some distance from the United States and has courted other powers (Russia, the Islamic world, and so on). So the United States is very eager to woo Turkey back. Providing intelligence to Turkey for its cross-border attacks is one such strategy. The Bush administration's lobbying against the Armenian genocide legislation last fall was another tactic.

At the same time, the Bush administration does not want to see another front open up in the Iraq War.

John Feffer

The United States has a paradoxical approach to Iraq's Kurds

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The Kurdish north has been relatively stable, and the United States does not want to see Turkey destroy that relative stability.

From a realpolitik point of view, Turkey is a more important ally than the Kurds. It is a big country. It is a bridge between Europe and the Middle East and between Islam and the West. It is also a model of moderate, m o d e r n i z i n g Islam. Turkey has been an i m p o r t a n t military client and serves as an important conduit for U.S. influence in Central Asia. All of these factors outweigh the importance of the Kurdish region.

My own opinion, which is not a realpolitik position, is that the United States should maintain good relations with both Turkey and the Kurds in th region. Indeed, the United States should apply its influence to achieve a political settlement between the two.

Who can be considered the most advantaged people of post-Saddam regime, the Shiites, the Kurds or the Sunnis? To what extent have the Kurds wisely acted in Iraq?

The Kurds seem to have reaped the greatest advantage, having achieved a measure of self-determination within the larger political framework of the country. The Kurds, too, have acted with a good measure of wisdom in investing a certain amount of political capital into the government in Baghdad while retaining authority at home.

The main drawback to the exercise of wise political rule for the Kurds is corruption. Some of this information came out around the trial of Kamal Said Qadir, which also revealed flaws in the legal system.

Some days ago and after the Turkish incursion, Dick Chiney, US vise president, visited Kurdistan and met up with Masud Barzani, Iraqi Kurdistan president. How do you explain this visit of Mr. Cheney?

Vice President Cheney invested a lot of his own political influence into pressing for the invasion of Iraq. Like President Bush, he wants to demonstrate that the United States is winning the Iraq War and preserving a unified Iraq. A visit to the calmest part of Iraq reinforces this message. And Cheney needed a statement from Barzani that the Kurdish region would remain part of a unified Iraq and support various pieces of upcoming national legislation.

But the major reason for Cheney's visit was to win Turkey's support for continued NATO operations in Afghanistan and for the U.S. approach toward Iran. The discussion Cheney had in Ankara touched on the PKK, of course. And his discussions with Barzani would have focused on this issue too. By visiting Kurdistan first, before Ankara, Cheney was sending a message that Turkey should not take U.S. support for the cross-border attack for granted.

Turkey has argued that it conducted the cross-border raids against the PKK and not against Iraqi Kurds. It has done so in order to frame its actions within the larger "global war on terror" that the United States launched in 2001. Turkey

can thereby gain the support of the United States for its actions. After all, the United States has had a clear policy against the PKK for many years.

In general, Turkey is interested in seeing the continuation of a stable Kurdish region and preventing the

disintegration of Iraq that might lead to an independent Kurdistan. Turkey has been very frustrated because of its perception that the United States is not targeting the PKK or pressuring its Kurdish allies to do so.

I don't foresee a major Turkish invasion. As I mentioned, the United States does

not want to see a major front open up in northern Iraq that pits two of its allies. I suspect that the United States gave the green light to Turkey for a small cross-border attack in exchange for Turkey promising not to escalate. In this way, the United States is seeking to contain the situation.

In partnership with Lvin Magazine

The United States should maintain good relations with both Turkey and the Kurds in

the region

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Parag Khanna is Director of the Global Governance Initiative and Senior Research Fellow in the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. He is author of The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order. This book came out in March 2008.

The Window has exclusively interviewed Mr. Khanna about his book and the Kurdish question as the writer, in his book, predicts an independent state of Kurdistan by 2016.

In your book you have asked a question: "Weren't we supposed to reconnect with the United Nations and reaffirm to the world that America can, and should, lead it to collective security and prosperity?" Do you mean here that The US does not respect and acknowledge United Nations?

In America, the Democratic

presidential candidates speak more about the need to work through - rather than around - the United Nations, but this will be strongly tested given the challenges of Iran and counter-terrorism. So even if the next administration pays more respect to the UN, it is not yet clear how the US will relate to the UN in terms of concrete issues, including Iran, terrorism, poverty, and others.

When you say :"Many saw the

invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as the symbols of a global American imperialism; in fact, they were signs of imperial overstretch." How have you come to this conclusion?

The domestic economic crisis

in America that is linked to foreign indebtedness and deficits at home are the economic signs of imperial overstretch. The wars have extended the US military such that it is not regenerated quickly enough and cannot cope with both missions at the same time while also balancing its other global commitments.

It sounds like you are anti-war of

Afghanistan and Iraq, then, in your perspective, what the US should have done regarding terrorists after 9/11?

Counter-terrorism should not

be undertaken through wars, which concentrate American/coalition forces and make them targets, while also inspiring broader terrorist movements

globally. Terrorism must be combated through smaller, special operations types of missions, and very much through international police cooperation.

How do you perceive current US

foreign policy regarding the Kurds? The US is trying to keep Iraq stable

and unified, rather than encouraging Kurdish separatism, but at the same time it does require Kurdish support for its military and to maintain the notion of Iraqi unity. It is an uneasy position given the Kurdish desire for independence.

Michael Rubin, an Amwerican

researcher, says that the US is an ally of Kurdish people not KRG, do you agree with Mr. Rubin's statement?

The US has supported Kurdish rights

in the region and seeks for the Kurds to be protected, including in Iraq, but has no formal alliance with the KRG, which is not the sovereign government of Iraq.

You have predicted that Kurdistan will

become independent by 2016 and 20,000 US troops would be based in. What has made you to make such a prediction?

I made a hypothetical prediction that Iraq will eventually splinter and that there will be a Kurdistan state that is within the borders of present-day Iraq. I estimated that America would have to withdraw largely from what remains of Iraq, but that it would remain close to an independent Kurdistan and negotiate to keep troops stationed there in order to support its regional interests and help protect

Counter-terrorism should not be undertaken through wars

"The US has no formal

alliance with the KRG"

In partnership with Lvin Magazine

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Dr. Denis Natali is originally Ameri-can and holds a PhD in Comparative Politics and International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania, in the US. She is an expert in the Kurds and, in addition to writing a number of academic articles about them, the author of a book entitled "The Kurds and the State".

She is know as speaking frankly and here, for the Window, will be giving her important notes about the US policy and the Kurds of Iraq.

You are as an American, how do you interpret current US-policy regarding the Kurds?

I will answer this as a political sci-entist first because I do not see any re-lationship between my national origin and analysis of US policymaking. For-eign policy is about assuring one’s na-tional strategic interests – it has nothing to do with charity or philanthropy. This all sounds very Kissingerist, but the US is only doing what any other country would do in the region - to protect its national security interests. The US came into Iraq in 2003 to overthrow Saddam

Hussein, not to create an independent Kurdistan. Although the US has made unpardonable errors in the southern and central Iraq, it has enabled the Kurdistan region to realize important financial and political gains.

My criticism of US policy is that it is a non-policy. There still is no specific policy toward the Kurds or the Kurd-istan region, and in fact, an imbalance and contradictory approach to dealing with the different Kurdish communities. One can no longer divide the Kurds into neat categories by country of origin and devise policies accordingly. The trans-nationalization of the Kurdish problem means that the Kurdish problem in Iraq must be managed alongside the problems in Iraq, Syria and Turkey. Failure to ad-dress the larger Kurdish problem, partic-ularly that in Turkey, is likely to result in a more expansive and lingering Kurdish problem in the future. More simply put, the US is going to have to put more real pressure on Turkey to resolve its Kurd-ish problem if it wants to see stability and prosperity in the region.

The US gave green light to Turkey

to intervene Iraqi Kurdistan for the so called purpose of the elimination of PKK rebels.

• Does this mean that US-Kurds relations are going to be weaker?

• To what extent this shows the failure of Kurdish government or Kurd-ish foreign policy with the US and other regional countries?

• After allowing Turkey to inter-vene Iraq, Turkey was told by the US to pull its troops back, what does this game that the US is playing mean?

• According to your perspective, is this Turkish intervention really for PKK? If yes or not, please explain it how and why?

Remember, Turkey has angry and emotional nationalist populations that are demanding their government to do something about the PKK problem, which is one of the leading issues in Turkey at the moment. I believe that Turkey’s intervention stems from this pressure and the influence of the military in the current government to remove the PKK from Iraqi Kurdistan. This recent intervention is a continuation of what the government of Turkey has engaged in since the mid 1980s, when it signed a ‘hot-pursuit’ agreement with the Iraqi government to search and seize terrorists in the border area. Turkish military in-cursions occurred throughout the 1990s, and they penetrated deep into Dohuk governorate in 1997.

Yet, the difference today is the con-ditions in which these penetrations are being conducted. Turkey has become increasingly threatened – if not myo-pic – about the autonomy and economic development of the Kurdistan region. I think it is safe to say that given their con-cern about the PKK, the Turkish govern-ment would prefer to have a weakened and destabilized Kurdistan region than a stable and autonomous one. The fact that Turkish leaders still do not recognize the legitimacy of the KRG and refuse to meet officially with its political leaders

Dr. Natali

The Kurds reaped the “spoils of peace” from the war

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indicates the nature of this political myo-pia and insecurity.

The ‘green-light’ provided by the US is only one of various signals of the declining influence of the Kurds in Iraq and the US policy agenda. As the US is looking for exit strategies out of Iraq, and as the Kirkuk referendum seems to keep getting pushed farther off the political agenda, it appears that the Kurdish role will not be as significant as it was, say, in early 2003 to late 2003, when the Kurds were directly part of the Northern Front and assisting the American military in operational strategies for the war.

Still, the US needs a stable Kurdistan to attain its larger goal of stabilizing Iraq so that oil can start pumping at full ca-pacity. In this sense the Kurds still have important leverage and influence in the US regional policy agenda. But I do not see the US government stepping over this line to support Kurdish political na-tional interests in any other way, not at the time being.

You, as an expert of the Kurdish is-sue, how do you see the level of success-fulness of the Kurdish foreign policy makers with the US and other sects in Iraq?

The Kurdish leaders have managed to use their leverage well since the 2003 in-vasion of Iraq. They have compromised their nationalist agenda, worked with the Americans and reaped the “spoils of peace” from the war. Instead of de-manding independent statehood they played by the new rules of the federalist game, which often required more com-promises, to attain economic benefits of stalemate.

Some people have criticized the Kurdish leaders for having pulled out of Kirkuk or negotiated away key territo-ries or issues immediately after the war. I disagree. The Kurdish leaders were actually pragmatic and had little real al-ternatives. They could have unilaterally occupied Kirkuk with their peshmergas, but would have lost the legitimacy and

support from the US and international community they have worked so hard to attain over the past years. Even to-day, with 95% of the budget of the KRG derived from Baghdad, the only route is for compromise and negotiation with the central government, as well as regional states. One cannot forget that the KRG has new forms of leverage, but it is still a landlocked region surrounded by states hostile to the idea of Kurdish national-ism. These states will continue to im-pede Kurdish nationalist activities.

Second, the Kurdish elite have also pursued a path of economic develop-ment first as a means of increasing their leverage and stability of the region. I think this is a wise strategy because the emotional calls for nationalism and the decade of victimization has ceased, or at least weakened. It is time to focus on economic strength and reconstruction, which can only further legitimize the Kurdistan region and its economy in the ideas of foreign governments and inter-national investors. Once this stability and economic power is established, then they can possibly open social and politi-cal avenues as well.

Turkey was a strategic allay of the US and it supported the US logistically in almost all its military in preserving safe-heaven for Kurdistan. How do you interpret the current Turkish paranoia about a possible Kurdish independence? Was it a short-sightedness by the Turkish foreign policy?

The Triangular strategic relationship between the US, Turkey and Iraqi Kurds is not mutually exclusive. The US needs both Turkey and Iraqi Kurds for regional stability, and Iraqi Kurds and Turkey also need each other for economic and politi-cal development, as well as quelling their own political problems. The fact that Iraqi Kurds and the government of Tur-key have differing views on the PKK or the Kurdish problem in Turkey does not necessarily make them “the Nemesis” of

each other. Politically some components of the Turkish establishment, mainly the military, continue to refuse to recognize the KRG and its leadership, particularly the Barzani family. However, there are moderate civilian leaders, policymakers and intellectuals that argue that the gov-ernment must recognize the KRG and that the Kurdistan region’s quasi-inde-pendence is a reality. The current AKP government is making efforts to close this gap and reach some type of accord with the Kurdish leadership in Iraq.

Secondly, one should look beyond the political landscape to realize the im-portant economic interrelationships that have emerged between Turkey and the Kurdistan region since 2003. The Turk-ish government exports nearly 4 billion USD worth of goods to the Kurdistan region and has important investment projects that are likely to continue for decades ahead. I believe that as eco-nomic linkages become more closely intertwined, avenues for political coop-eration can become possible. In this re-gard there is a high level of cooperation between the countries.

Look at this recent military incursion that barely lasted a week. I was here in the early 1990s and traveling throughout the Kurdistan region of Turkey during the civil war. Silopi was bombed out and there was no business to talk about. The Iraqi Kurds had no real economic stake or leverage on Turkey, and the Turkish military had no important investments or commercial interests in Iraqi Kurdis-tan. The military incursions went on, of-ten for weeks, and with the cooperation with the different Iraqi Kurdish political parties as a means of keeping the border open.

The political and economic context today has fundamentally changed in the sense that both sides have more to risk financially, as well as diplomatically. If I were an Iraqi Kurdish entrepreneur or political elite I would try to entrench Turkish commercial interests in the re-gion as much as possible, with guaran-tees that can be established along the way.

US policy is a non-policy

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The image of the citizens and the prosperity of any nation depend im-mensely on the character of its leader, and his behavior in daily-life and in ruling the country. The country can be enormous like the United States, or small like Iraq.

The story remains unchanged. G.W. Bush has many admirers in Kurdistan. His popularity is palpable especially among lower ranked political figures, par-tisans of political groups and relatives of Saddam’s victims. The appreciation right is fully granted to the last group. This is true because they look upon G.W. Bush as the savior who cut off the head of Medusa for them. Certain individuals also ma-nipulate their love to Bush as to manifest how nationalist they are and they dare to accuse anti-Bush groups of being Sadd-am sympathizers. This popularity is also due to people’s perceiving G.W. Bush as being a very different leadership model from what they are accustomed to seeing in their own country. The differences be-tween Saddam and Bush are tremendous for most of the people. But this might just be the consequence of beholding the tip of the iceberg.

The way of coming to power is one evident difference. Saddam was person-ally involved in a bloody assassination attempt of the former Iraqi president A.K. Kasim and his party came to power with a coup de’tat. On the contrary, G.W. Bush was elected in a democratic election for the first term (If we do not mention his going to court with Al Gore over cheat-ing allegations in the election) and was re-elected for the second time in the same way. But during the time Saddam was in power, he was arranging fake elections in which he was the only candidate and got hilarious 99.9 % voting rates.

Another field of differences includes family structure and historical back-

ground. The Bush family is from Texas. G. W. Bush’s father is a former CIA chief and US president. His brother was the governor of Florida. During the Vietnam War, G.W. Bush joined the National Air Force Guard, not to take part actively in

the war, but to ensure the security of the US by patrolling inside the country. John Kerry allegedly stated that G.W. Bush used his family connections to avoid be-ing sent into war zone in Vietnam. With a document that shows indiscipline in the

G.W. Bush and Saddam: Different but Alike

Raed Asad

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army by G.W. Bush, Michael Moore ac-cused him of being a deserter. G.W. Bush has one wife and two daughters. In con-trast, Saddam is from Tikrit and very little is known about his father. His mother was married twice that lead to his hav-ing Barzan as his half-brother. After the unsuccessful assassination attempt on A. Kasim’s life, Saddam fled to Egypt and discontinued his education in law, but claimed to have continued his studies af-ter coming to power. He had more than one wife and more than five children.

One last difference to talk about is the way of using their military power. G. W. Bush never used his military arsenal and bombs against the Americans. He just uses them against the people of other countries and to hunt down what he calls as the threats or enemies of the nation, whereas Saddam regularly used his mili-tary might against the Iraqis and did not hesitate to use chemical weapons against civilian villagers.

Nevertheless, these two dog-eat-dog rivals have many shared points.

Waging wars is the best talent of both of them. Saddam drove Iraq into three pointless, devastating and unnecessary wars that brought destruction, poverty and misery to our people. But I have to admit that G.W. Bush is better than Sadd-am in this field. Saddam could just take one war at a time. But G.W. Bush is jug-gling with Iraq and Afghanistan, flirting with Iran and North Korea, sending kisses to Somalia and winking at Sudan. They also both claim their wars to be holy and sacred. Bush claimed his war on Iraq to be a crusade, while Saddam claimed his wars to be Jihad and holy struggles against the infidels.

They both spent countless amount of money on arms and on increasing their military might, sent thousands of fine young Americans and Iraqis to death, or-phaning their children and widowing their wives. Both leaders have kidnapped peo-ple and eliminated them without giving them the right of having a fair trial. Hun-dreds of Iraqis disappeared all of a sudden for a statement they made or a word they uttered. Also Bush kidnaps his suspected enemies around the world. Hundreds of detainees are said to be secretly kidnapped from their countries to be deported to Guantanamo. Saddam’s famous tortur-

ing centers are in no need of mentioning. Prisons across the country were used to torture Iraqis in the worst manner a hu-man could ever imagine. Also G. W. Bush has a camp called “Delta” in Guantanamo were various up to date and old meth-ods of torturing like (water boarding) is used in interrogating the unlawfully kept prisoners. And G.W. Bush is deservedly known as the first president of the United States to use his Veto power against a law that prohibits water-boarding use in inter-rogation.

The final area of similarity between these two leaders is in the faith field. They both pride on showing their faith and both are being mocked by their en-emies. Saddam randomly visited mosques and shrines were he prayed in front of the cameras in his military uniform and under the shadows of his bodyguards. Many Iraqis told jokes about Saddam and the ceremony accompanied his prayers. There are even numerous comedy videos mocking Saddam and his absurd religious manners. Saddam also claimed his fam-ily roots to be linked to Ali (the cousin of the prophet.). G. W. Bush in his part at-tends the church close to the White House on Sundays and boasts about his admi-ration of the personality of Jesus, and it was his love to Jesus that made him quit drinking alcohol. Bush in one of the occa-sions claimed that he talks to god in one day more than once, asking him guidance to the right path. The funniest comment on Bush’s statement came from Hugo Chavez during his last visit to Iran. The Venezuelan president said “I am not sure how many times he talks in one day, but what I am sure of is the person he does talk to is not God, but devil.”

Who is the devil and who is the angel is certainly not our concern. People will always have different ideas and different visions. You can never have all the people agree on the same thing. Our world is built on differences. Different languages, different skins, different cultures, reli-gions and ideas. But what unify us all are our humanity and the color of our blood. An Iraqi blood is as red and precious as an American blood. Afghani blood is also as precious and red as a Canadian blood. Wait a minute! I think I made a mistake here. Afghani blood could not possibly be as red and precious as Canadian blood,

because the last time the American forc-es in Afghanistan mistakenly, as usual, bombed a wedding party in one of the villages of Afghanistan, an amount of around $100 was paid to the families of each person they killed in that wedding. While in another incident where Canadi-an soldiers were killed by friendly fire of the US army in Afghanistan, the amount of money paid was $100 000 for each family of the dead Canadian soldiers! So, it is more proper to say that one Canadian is equal to 100 000 Afghani, according to the perception of the US administration.

The model that G. W. Bush admires, Jesus, says in the bible that you have to love your brother the same way you love yourself, and the model that Saddam claimed kinship to, prophet M. (P. U. H.) says, “One will not have faith till he loves for his brother what he loves for himself.” So where did the two village idiots screw up I wonder??!!!

raedlospect@gmail.com

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Conflicts have always existed all over the world, and they have mostly occurred as a consequence of misunderstandings between individuals, groups, nations or countries. The biggest problem that makes any conflict issue more complicated and causes it to continue is that both sides of the argument define the conflict, and the reasons why they don’t reach an agree-ment, in their own different ways.

The case is the same for this long last-ing conflict between Turkey and the PKK. The PKK pretends to be struggling to achieve Kurdish people’s rights in Tur-key. On the other hand, the Turkish mili-tary forces pretend to be providing secu-rity in their country by fighting against terrorism. Both sides are (in some ways) right and wrong! Kurds have the right to struggle for achieving their rights and Turkish military forces also have right to struggle to provide security for their citizens. However, they both have chosen the wrong ways of struggling to alter their goals and that takes them them to a totally opposite result of what they are trying to achieve.

If we look at the case from the PKK‘s perspective, we can see that it might be true if it is considered that the PKK are useng the experiences of Kurds in north-ern Iraq as an example of law to get to their target: the experience of achieving their peoples’ rights by fighting against the highest power in their country. But the PKK should realize that there are huge differences between Saddam Hussein’s regime and the Turkish government. Saddam Hussein was a dictator who was trying to become a superhero for Arabs and deny any other ethnicity. It is also im-portant to note that Saddam Hussein was an unlikable leader in the region for the West. On the other hand, Turkey (as the strongest member of NATO in the Middle East) is a country struggling to become a member of the EU. One of the most im-

portant points which makes the EU refuse Turkey is the issue of “human rights and the protection of minorities” (reported by commission of the European communi-ties, Brussels, 6/11/2007). Among the points made by a research group was, of course, the Kurdish issue and it is always a weak point for Turkey. This means that Turkish governments (whether they like it or not) have to provide rights to the Kurds the same way they provide rights to the Turks. However, the fighting ac-tions that are taken by the PKK inside cities of Turkey and among citizens have given Turkish governments a huge card

to play against the PKK. Turkish govern-ments also use the PKK as an excuse to run away from providing rights to Kurd-ish people, trying to define all Kurds as followers of a terrorist party (PKK). From this it becomes clear how wrong the PKK strategies and policies are.

Coming to the Turkish side of the is-sue, in the thoughts of some political thinkers, it is difficult for Turkey to get over the thoughts of the Ottoman Empire.

Politicians think that Turkish govern-ments are still sometimes trying to act as the Ottoman Empire used to act. The Ottoman Empire used to deny any other ethnicities around them which some-times led to the occurrence of huge vio-lence liked: the genocide of Armenians in which about 1.5 million Armenians were killed. . Even after the Ottoman Empire, Ataturk continued denying the existence of other ethnicities living in Turkey and created an official story which claimed that Kurds were Turks who got lost in the mountains once upon a time and forgot that they were Turks! “Turkish ideology

is that any citizen who cannot say ‘I am a happy Turk’ has no citizenship rights and are considered aliens to be punished and marginalized” ( posted by Juan Cole, 11/11/2007, article “Iraqi Kurd Op-Ed: “Turkey must Recognize Kurds for there to be Dialogue”). However, lately, be-cause of the conditions of the EU, Turk-ish governments have started mentioning Kurdish people’s names as their citizens and allowing a small number of limited

Conflict and its Resolution"Resolution of the conflict between Turkish military forces and Kurdistan

Workers Party (PKK)"

Narin Bahat Hasib

A group of PKK guerrillas

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The participation of youths in the political process and the authority con-tributes to a more strong and powerful political process and a united communi-ty. Throughout the world we have many eminent youths’ participating in the political process, like David Miliband the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and also close to home here in Kurdistan we have Prime Minister Barzani who is a young man.

In Kurdistan there is a significant gap between the Kurdistan Regional Govern-ment and youth section, and the govern-ment does not recognize this gap offi-cially. If this gap expands further it may contribute to endangering the situation of both the society and the government.

Our youth simply want to live with today’s new standards. The government does not have programs for the youth, and until now, they have not stepped for-ward to solve the problems of this large group of the society. The main reason for this is that the youth have been de-prived completely from the government. They do not participate in government, they play no role in the political process, and there are no real members of youths in the political process.

For few weeks, now, the Center of Future for the Youths Issues has submit-ted a project to the National Assembly of Kurdistan to decrease the age of the parliament membership from the age of thirty to the age of 25 years old.

This project is driven by the fact that the seventeen year Kurdish authority has not paid attention to the new generation that has been growing up after the 91’s uprising; youths are feeling that they are the only sector of the community that they do not have representative and, un-fortunately, no role in the Kurdish ad-ministration. Of course, if there would be young people as members of the par-liament, they would represent Kurdish youths; act forward to implement their needs and producing a new and better situation then the current one.

This project of the Future Center is one of the best few projects of the non

governmental organizations (NGOs) that have until now been forwarded to the Kurdistan Parliament. It represents the demands of all the youths to de-crease the age of the Parliament mem-bership. In the past 16 years youths have not benefited of the promises of the Parliament and the Kurdish govern-ment; they do not believe any more in their promises, they want now have di-rectly own members.

This project can succeed with the support of all our society’s youth. It is very important for us to support this project, because after the affirmation of this project in the Parli ment of Kurd-istan, a new period for youth will start. From here on, we can get resolve the fleeing of our youths to foreign coun-tries, the dis-alienation of youths from the rest of the society, from the gov-ernment and weakening national senti-ment. Having youth representation in the parliament would allow budgetary discussions and decisions to be made with youth in mind. Then some badly needed money could be allocated for youth projects and issues.

Let's Go tothe Parliament At 25

Ari Mamshaee

Kurdish TV programs be shown. But of course it is not yet what the Kurdish peo-ple are dreaming of and nor what the EU is asking Turkey to do.

The solution is very simple for Turkey if they just give up their arrogance and re-alize that other people have the right to live the way they want to. By just looking at the bloody history of Iraq they can understand how useless an armed conflict is when the target is a whole nation and the aim is to deny them. The Iraqi experiences also show that Kurdish people are entitled to have their rights as a nationality, especially because nowadays “Kurds are described as the world’s largest ethnic population that doesn’t have a homeland (state) of its own” (Corey Flintoff). It is also clear from the Iraqi Kurds’ experiences that they will use their rights only for their own goods and not for hurting anyone. This would also protect the country’s unity (as it protects Iraq’s unity).

These points take us to a conclusion for solving the conflict between Kurds or the PKK and Turks or Turkish governments. Both sides should give guarantees to each other. Turkish governments should give the guarantee of providing Kurds their rights and removing all the political censors which are now in place. The Kurds also have to give the guarantee of using their rights for their people and country’s good and avoid-ing any kind of misuse of power and their political rights. This way the security will be provided for everyone living in Turkey and rights of Kurds will be provided. This will probably open a locked door in front of Turkey in their long way to the EU.

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Following the downfall of Saddam Hus-sein’s regime in Iraq and American penetra-tion into Iraq with an ambitious project for “the new friendly Middle East”, the applica-tion of the Big Middle East project has tended to mean catastrophic consequences for most of the regimes in the Middle East especially for the Iranian Islamic regime. The easy and fast victory in Iraq surprised all, even Bush’s administration. Indeed they did have a plan to invade Iraq, but they did not have a strategic plan for governing the country after the war. Subsequently, the United States failed to con-trol security and the political process in Iraq.

The security gap in Iraq was a golden op-portunity for Iran. The historical and doctrinal relationship between Iran and Shiite imams was exploited by the Islamic republic to estab-lish a strong influence on political life in Iraq.

On the other hand, the canny Iranian for-eign policy succeeded in portraying Iran as the center for all anti-American movements in the Middle East. Iran, as a Shiite state and as a symbol of anti-American project in the Is-lamic world, succeeded to gain strategic allies in the heart of the Middle East. The Islamic republic after the war in Iraq, sought to build good relationships with Sunnites, Shiites, and the Arab nationalist movements in the Middle East. This collaboration built on mutual inter-ests and a shared approach regarding Ameri-can influence in the Middle East and the Is-lamic world.

One of the essential allies of Iran is Syria, as the Ba’ath regime in Syria was and still is a vital actor in both the Lebanese and Palestin-ian political arenas. Iran consolidated Syrian efforts to disrupt the democratization opera-tion in Lebanon, because the successful pow-er sharing and democratic political process meant strong central institutions in Lebanon. Consequently, that was a serious threat to the Hezbollah’s militia in the south of Lebanon.

Syria’s efforts succeeded in provoking Is-

rael to invade Lebanon in 2006.After the July war in Lebanon 2006, Hezbollah recorded a military victory that hindered the political process to create a central pro-American gov-ernment in Lebanon. Iran did not stop at this point. They have simply made the peace pro-cess between Israel and Palestinian authority impossible by motivating pro-Iran political and military movements, especially Hamas.

The United States was quite enthusiastic about such a peace process between Israel and Palestine for three significant reasons; first, diluting the feud against the United States and Israel in the Islamic world; second, acquiring friends and allies from Sunni Islamic move-ments in the Middle East; and finally, dis-solving pro-Iran movements in Lebanon and Palestine.

There is a different interpretation of the Iranian influence in Iraq. It is more direct and paradoxical than Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian stories with Iranian influence. Iran has a quite complex policy in Iraq. Each side in Iraq has a special relationship with Iran and a different kind of relationship with different vital institutions in Iran. Despite the ideologi-cal differences with Sunnies, Iran has good relationships with insurgent Sunni groups. Iran has interests to support Al-Qaeda and other rebellious Sunni groups by military and logistic assistance. The Iranian policy goal with these groups is to keep the Sunnies sect an enemy of United States in Iraq because if any convergence took place between Sunnies and the United States, that will be a historical victory for American projects in Iraq and sub-sequently in the Middle East.

Obviously Iran has a doctrinal relation-ship with Iraqi Shiites, but it also has different policies with various Shiite groups. Iran has two different policies with two different Iraqi Shiite groups. They are encouraging the first group to be a dominant actor in the new po-litical process in Iraq. On the other hand, Iran reinforces the second group to be prepared for any military action, to confuse the security situation in Iraq and to provoke Sunnites.

However, generally Iran desires a modest relationship between Shiites and U.S in Iraq. This precision policy in Iraq has made Iran a key-player in the Iraqi game with the Ameri-cans. Iran had the key to war and peace before the surprising development that was made by the Anbar tribes.

The United States has “a waiting policy” against Iran. Washington is waiting for an ap-propriate opportunity to start a limited military action, first, to attack intelligence and military installations, and secondly to destroy the nu-clear reactors in Iran. But the U.S realized the level of Iranian influence was in a very high

level in the Middle East after the July war between Israel and Hezbollah, and expected a serious reaction from extremist Muslims in Pakistan. That means any military action will be suicidal for the Middle East and the political situation inside Pakistan. After the July war in Lebanon, the United States con-centrated on the idea of the war against Ira-nian influence more than the war against Iran itself. Americans ignited a new war against al-Qaeda in Iraq, by wide military campaigns. Nevertheless, generally they failed in these at-tempts.

The United States started negotiations with Iran, accepting Iranian conditions in Iraq versus alleviating violence between Shiites and Sunnies, while the military advancement is taking place against al-Qaeda by Anbar tribes in the largest province in Iraq.

The Anbar revolution succeeded in dis-solving al-Qaeda in the province. This sur-prising victory was a golden opportunity for the U.S to destroy al-Qaeda in Iraq’s Sunni provinces. The Sunni tribes in Anbar became close to the U.S. They opened the first doors of understanding between Sunnites and Amer-icans. These new friendships between U.S and Sunni tribes in Iraq opened graves for Iranian influence in Iraq.

Currently, the mission of controlling the Iraqi situation has become easier than before, because instead of two organized enemies (al-Mahdy army and al-Qaeda), the U.S now have one well-organized enemy. The Al-Mahdy army militia is one of the serious challenges for the U.S in Baghdad and the south of Iraq. The Al-Mahdy army has many enemies within the Shiite array. Therefore, the American ad-ministration consolidated Maliki, Iraqi PM, to confront the Mahdi army, but did not interfere directly in Basra battles between Iraqi army and the Al-Mahdy army. The Basra battles were a sign to ignite “the new war against Ira-nian influence in Iraq and the Middle East”.

Bush’s decision to freeze withdrawing op-eration in Iraq is explicit evidence for Ameri-can intention to have a new confrontation with the remains of Al-Qaeda and Al-Mahdi army in Iraq. This war will be crucial for American and Iranian influence in Iraq. Any relative vic-tory for the U.S in Iraq will influence Syria’s relationship with Iran. If the U.S controlled the security situation in Iraq, Syria will have two choices, either ally with the U.S or con-front a catastrophic war with Israel. In both situations, Iran will lose Syria as a strategic bridge with Hezbollah and Hamas. The col-lapse of the Syrian bridge will be the end of Hezbollah and Hamas as significant actors in the Lebanese and Palestinian arena. Finally, the war against Iranian influence is crucial to the future of American projects in the Middle East.

War against Iranian Influence

Abdulmajeed Nidhamadeen Gly

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Life is a chain of pain and pleasure, hard-ship and ease; to live, is to experience time, and time is simply the continuity of the pres-ent, while present can be defined as the ex-istence of matter. Hence, life is the presence of all these mixed compounds; it is all the positive and negative points, or, rightly to be said, all the opposed things such as bright-ness and darkness, water and fire, love and hate and further, happiness and sadness that make up an environment suitable to live in. Occasionally, we may ask why in experienc-ing life we face difficulties, even sometimes, through no fault of our own; we suffer. Then we might ask how to make this life easier: to release ourselves from this suffering. The former is rooted in understanding life while the latter leads to success based on the for-mer.

Let us consider life just as a reminder: Yes. We can remember the old days; our childhood precisely; when we were at prima-ry school and we had monthly, mid-term and end-of-term exams, which weren’t very dif-ficult. We were able to pass those tests with-out much effort. But, step by step, the exams became harder. Compare secondary and pre-paratory study with the study in university. The later ones are more difficult; actually, the examinations which we have to take in university are much more difficult than those we did before. Our life is the same at the be-ginning; we are only children, in a primary situation. Gradually, as we grow older, the situations become harder, and we discover that the reason for life’s hardship is to help us understand life and distinguish between right and wrong. Yet, this is the most pre-cious gift of all to human beings, the faculty of distinguishing between right and wrong.

We should learn that our success, prosperity, and salvation, as well as our failure, decline, and perdition, depend on our own selves.

A mistake most us make is that when we face a difficulty we think that an unjust has been done against us! But this way of thinking is wrong. Since difficulties can only harm us ahead of perceiving the wisdom within them. For we look at the surface of these difficulties, but when we are able to understand, we can see both the appearance and the reality of a bad situation or problem. Then we soon learn to welcome each diffi-culty, for it would prepare us for harder situ-ations on one hand, and come to tell us that pleasure is ahead on the other. This can be called gaining the ability to understand life. Yet, it should be kept in mind that difficul-ties help us grow: Overcoming obstacles makes us stronger. This would lead us closer to perfection in life. It is clear that after each hardship there is an ease; that is to say, after each pain there will be pleasure, as this is the nature of life. We acquire this wisdom from nature; the hard and cold winter presents the green spring giving this world life after its death. It is the same for us; sometimes we are almost dead without perceiving it. An obstacle or a strenuous situation comes to challenge us, to bring us to life again. Each difficulty comes at its own time, when we need it. Some are born in our mistakes; how-ever, most of them arrive through no fault of our own. Never be depressed, as they have come to put us right.

Nature tells us that we are created to be tried through the hardships and the pleasures of life: whether to succeed through making effort, or to fail through our own careless-ness. We call this a trial or ‘examination’, because there is either possibility: pass or fail. In other words, gain or take the loss, and further to become loved or hated, or both in-terchangeably. This is exactly like a school; those who obey the rules and do their best will succeed, and those who do not care will fail. Thus, it can be said that life is a trial; everyone who has ever come into this world will take his or her exam. The examinations are diverse for people; those of us with a sense of responsibility have to perform very difficult exercises; whereas, for others with-out this sense the experimentations are quite easy.

Never forget that pains teach us to ap-preciate pleasures. We face difficulties in this life more than we have ever dreamed of.

But if we take care they will not wipe us out; on the contrary, they make us stronger. Each one would give us increased power to over-come subsequent obstacles. Thus way, hard-ships are both school and teacher. In other words, we will be taught how to live better through passing these trials.

As mentioned previously, each difficult situation is a trial to train us. Here the ques-tion is: how can we overcome each difficulty? What do we need to do to pass these tests? Indeed, all we need is the smile, the strength and the optimistic outlook. The secret is: we can find all of these factors within ourselves; within our souls. These are factors of being optimistic, seeing good in everything and, finally, gaining patience.

When you face strenuous situations or suffer from what is wrong you have to be happy with your suffering, since this would suggest that you are intelligent enough to perceive life. Imagine the world without winter; it would be an endless desert of thirsty lands. Likewise, life without difficul-ties and challenges is tasteless. Consider this is the winter; be sure that this hard and cold winter with all its gray clouds will soon go by and be a part of your past. Then, there will be spring with the bright sky and the sunshine, streams and green grass, birds and trees, flowers and butterflies. Also there will be you and your reward, success. If so, look forward to that spring ahead. Make steps in the way of success, towards your target in life, through doing your best now, the pres-ent presents you happiness; for, you can only experience the future and what it holds at present. It may take a while so till then re-member that if you want to smile, you have to cry, and if you want to succeed, you have to try. So, do your best for it is time, for you are capable of, for the pleasure is ahead wait-ing for you. Always consider that each mo-ment can be a new chance to create what you precisely want and most of all to attain what would please you.

In a word, gaining understanding and reasoning is the supreme attainment in life, since it is an underpinning for all other achievements. It is the ability to see the hid-den parts of life, the perfect design beyond the imperfect being; seeing an unlimited sight within a limited portrait. Simply be-cause when we have the ability to under-stand, we discover that we are really lucky to face all these difficulties. Possibly, they would make us special.

A good trial

M. Ali Bapir

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It is difficult to look at full-scale spectrum at all things through a window. It might be easy to look at different things through different windows? Let us look together through the windows of the UKH; what are its surroundings? There are two important

social institutions beside the UKH; which are the Mehta jail behind UKH, and the Sheikh Sewaf mosque on the left side of it. The jail is important for social regulations, while this mosque is a religious institution that has a political dimension against the Kurdish nationalism movement. This institution is called Sheikh Mahmoud Muhammad Sewaf Mosque. It was built by Sheikh Sewaf sons in 1999. In my country most of the Mosques are built either for economic or political purposes. They are built either by wealthy people to avoid taxation on their properties; or they are built by political Islam (Islamism) to organize Kurdish youth to their political parties.

SHEKH Mahmoud Muhammad SEWAF mosque is one of the mosques that was founded for political purposes. Sheikh studied theology at University of Azher in the early of 1940s. He brought all the books of Hessen Benna, Muhammad Khazaly and Sayid Qutib to Iraq and to the south of Kurdistan. Dr.

Jamal Nebez says that Sewaf was an extreme Arab nationalists in Baghdad and, he adds that the Sheikh informed the Egyptian intelligences in Cairo about two Kurdish students who were his colleagues. These Kurds belonged to Kurdish separatist parties and then they were arrested by intelligence. Sheikh Sewaf was a founding member of Muslim Brotherhood in Iraq in the

mid 1940s. Also he was a member of the office guide of Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. At the end of 1959 he came to Kurdistan to establish a branch for his political party. Actually he achieved his goal in Helabja in 1960. Some Mullahs in the region promised (Al Bayet) to work with him seriously, therefore; Islamic groups in Kurdistan stem from the Muslim brotherhood in Iraq, and currently these groups claim that they can be an alternative of the nationalist political parties within the region. The founding of the branch aimed to weaken Kurdish nationalist parties which were represented by KDP at that time.

Both Dr. Jamal Nebaz and Dr Romano Jamestown believe that the work of the Sheikh is against Kurdish national security. This is because Islamic political parties or Fundamentalist parities were founded, in Kurdistan in 1960. As we know during the 1960s, Kurdish freedom movements were very active. The movements were struggling for Kurdish national identity based on being a Kurd (Kurdayati). The Islamic

parties started to challenge this identity. They focused on religious identity as a challenge to the freedom movements of Kurdistan. This argument is based on the premise that all of society's problems stem from the failure to correctly observe Islam. In other words, Islamic parties claim that the Kurdish question is not a nationalist question. It is not a question of a nation that has historically

been suppressed by Muslims, Arabs ,Turks and Persians so the Kurdish society should return to the fundamental basis of Islam.

Dr Romano Jamestown believes that Sunni Islamist groups are opposite to Kurdish nationalist groups. The emergence of political Islam and their destructive behavior poses a real challenge to the Kurdistan region, the major nationalist political parties and to the regional administration. He adds that the Islamic groups in Kurdistan have three strategies. First, re-Islamize the society. Second, infiltrate Islamic cadres into organizations. Last, to gain power in order to control the country. That is why we see that all Kurdish enemies are supporting and fomenting Islamic groups and they receive financial support from gulf charities.

In brief, the Sheikh has utilized Islam to support Arabism and weaken Kurdish nationalism. Indeed his work to some extent is fruitful for Kurdish enemies and Islamic parties.

Through a windowIslamic groups in Kurdistan stem from Muslim brotherhood in Iraq

Aso Muhammad

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It is a fundamental irony that a population finding itself liberated from tyranny, such as is to be found in Iraqi Kurdistan, may subsequently fail in realizing its development objectives because of that very liberty. A society in which order has been maintained by a fear of violence is one in which the power of its institutions is weak; the disciplines that are necessary to ensure the successful and long-term running of the organs of such a community are not instilled in its members. Instead, an everyone-for-himself ethic that arises to allow personal and family survival under oppressive rule becomes a liability to that society once it finds itself in possession of basic freedoms. Rather than freedom from constraint, the evident need for post-liberation societies is for strong institutions adhering to rigorous standards, with clearly stated policies and with consistent and fair consequences to members who do not respect or observe the regulatory framework that

ensures institutional survival.Our membership in any

community requires of us that we strike a balance between our personal freedoms and our responsibilities to that community. That communities have boundaries, and that they live in a range of possible relationships to other communities, places a burden on leadership to ensure that the membership it represents inculcate values directed toward the survival of the whole, a task that must be started early.

Children seem to enter a phase of organizing the world according to rule far before they gain the critical abilities to analyse the set of rules they then acquire. That is, according to some sort of developmental determinism, children are open to accepting the principles of the family and community into which they are introduced. Thus it is that culture gets a head start over reason, and many communities manage to perpetuate their values while facing surprisingly

little criticism from within. (Thus, Catholics have Catholic children, Shi’as have Shi’as, Yazhidis breed Yazhidis, Mormons breed Mormons and Republicans breed Republicans.) The challenges, of course, routinely come from outside the community, a factor of little concern only when communities are isolated, an increasingly rare phenomenon in this century.

Education may be examined from, and evidence produced to support, two (at least) quite opposed angles. The first sees it as an instrument of an oligarchic elite and in service of the priorities of a privileged class. Education is the process of disciplining populations to the purposes of power. Teachers, locked into the system that employs them, are servants of power, and methodology consists of a quest toward ever-subtler techniques to conceal this power. Education does not represent the best understanding available: teachers “…are seen as perpetuators rather than innovators, and their task is to reproduce the cultural apparatus to the design of others”. ² The end of education is compliant but productive citizens who will submit to group norms, assume the mundane tasks of maintenance and unquestioningly follow their leaders into war, or whatever other folly they may choose. We could see the university in this scheme not so much as a bastion of free enquiry as the ultimate stage in an inculcation of conservative social principles: rigidly hierarchical, autocratic, riven with difficult authorities, exclusive of membership, married to power interests, and ritualized like imperial courts.

A second view of education sees it as the enterprise that

raises humanity above the level of its base animal nature. It instils a skill set, including literacy and numeracy, that cannot be gained otherwise and upon which any complex social organization depends. It provides wholesome discipline and productive routine. Through the contact it brings with great ideas and classic achievement, it enlivens the imagination, raises standards and inspires the student to strive to achieve. The end of education is to create the liberated, imaginative and responsible citizen, capable of bringing reason and ethical standards to the service of decision-making and leadership. Young people should gain sufficient humility before the sum of all human learning, surveyed and plumbed in the years of their public education, that, while they aim high, they do not overestimate the importance of one lone individual.

In every social unit that displays system, without regard to the freedoms it may claim possession of, education includes indoctrination and submission to authority. It combines this with the cultivation of expertise, the fundamental need in order to ensure that the transfer of authority from one generation to the next is progressive. The alternative to this would be to have each generation build the structures of its society anew. The consequence, while possibly satisfying to an undisciplined and angry youth, is to perpetuate a society weak in its institutions. In the competition for survival that has characterized the history of nation states, such societies tend to be losers.

The value of an education, at all levels but most so in post-secondary institutions, must be seen in the character of that

C. Whitney

A Fundamental Irony ¹

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indoctrination, the legitimacy of the authority, and the quality of the expertise that it cultivates. What skills do graduates display? How do they seek knowledge, process information, consult with others and use this to make better decisions? What standard of integrity disciplines their actions?

At some level, then, it is not a lack of personal freedom that holds a society back, but rather that a state of anarchy, in which no institution has sufficient credibility to earn general trust or to wield credible authority, prevails. Thus, even the most conscientiously judicious decision making is suspected of corruption, regulations are seen as infinitely malleable and without authority, standards are flexible enough to allow all comers through, and dismissals not overturned on a fifth attempt still very well may be so on the sixth. In response to this student pressure, and in an absence of institutional procedural steadfastness, the lonely instructor is thrust into that state of anomie where annihilation seems as convincing, and perhaps more attractive, an outcome as institutional survival.

The saving grace of post secondary education may be seen in one of its least appealing guises. The chair of the department where I did my own graduate studies compared graduate school to prison, a beneficial place of reflection for some inmates, though also a school for lifetime professionals of crime. It is therefore not so inappropriate that this university is situated next to one such prison (a railway station in an earlier era, a place from which travellers could freely come and go), and our office windows allow us a view over the walls to the place of confinement within. It is not without irony that one of my most ambitious (former)

students pointed to the prison yard: “I will end up there,” he stated. This would be the cost, he believed, of his spending these years daring to think his own thoughts, and then one day to speak truth to power.

It may not be more, then, but less freedom that will provide the answer. Or, rather, freedom needs a different wrapping: it remains very much an urgent need of the young woman denied the right to travel or to marry a partner of her choosing, or of any young person to choose a career path, or of the scholar in pursuit of knowledge, or of the individual endowed otherwise by nature. It is, then (lone wolf humanists notwithstanding), the freedom of self-mastery rather than of self-indulgence that is needed. It is the freedom to raise up rather than to tear down, to come together rather than to fall apart.

Kurdistan and the University of Kurdistan-Hawler have taken the first few steps of a long journey through some rough terrain. We who are educators have no choice but to work in good faith toward success, without regard to whether the forces that would defeat us prove ultimately overwhelming. For all that post-conflict and post-colonial experience has been discouraging in its outcomes, failure is not inevitable. The choices made by the student population of this university will have a great deal to do with where we go from here.

References:1. This is adapted from a

longer paper submitted in January 2008 to the journal Review of Human Factor Studies.

2. Meighan, R. & C. Harber (2007) A Sociology of Educating, 5th Edition. London: Continuum, p.32

The Window Magazine Online

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The First English Magazine in Kurdistan

T H E W I N D O W

ISSUE 2MAY 2008

After Dr. Yoruk, in the previous issue , talked about Turkish Media and its nega-tive role in Kurdish issue by giving disin-formation and he resembled its role to Jet pilots, death squads and ultra-nationalist mafioso gangs. Here he is going to com-plete his frank philosophical speech by ad-vising the Kurds of Turkey how to achieve their rights. Finally the interview will shift to the Iraq’s Kurds by focusing on Kirkuk and their future.

What do you recommend to Kurds in Turkey to be doing against the Turkish state regarding obtaining their rights?

I see the struggle for the Kurdish rights and the struggle for a democratic Turkey as one and the same thing. The future of Tur-key will be determined by the fate of the Kurdish question and for this reason their struggle is of special importance for all the progressive people in Turkey. Moreover, the Kurds of Turkey constitute not only the most oppressed (here, I’m not merely referring to state violence but the system-atic denial of identity, culture and language

through the 20th Century by the Turkish political establishment) but also the larg-est portion in one country of the Kurdish

people in the world. Consequently, the fate of the Kurdish struggle in Turkey will also determine to a large extent the future of the Kurdish people all around the world. Af-ter this emphasis on the importance of the Kurdish struggle in Turkey, let me begin with the recent developments regarding the Kurdish question, which I view with increasing optimism. Firstly, all the indi-cators point out that the Kurdish people in Turkey are increasingly turning their faces to the developments in south Kurdistan. This is important, because it means that a window of mutual comparison is open to both sides of the border. The Kurds of Tur-key have a lot to learn from the Iraqi Kurd-ish experience while at the same time they have a lot to offer in terms of constructive criticism to the Kurds of Northern Iraq, and this interaction can only improve the po-litical quality of both sides. Secondly, for the second time in modern Turkish history, Kurdish political movement has gained parliamentary representation in July 2007 elections. You probably are familiar with the famous saying, “War is a continuation

of politics with different means”. Now, the opposite of this statement must also be true, that is, “Politics is the continuation of war with peaceful means”, and this is the precise description of the current situ-ation of the Kurdish question in Turkey. The Kurds have fought a prolonged war against the policies of denial and violent exclusion of the Turkish state, and it is, along with a number of other factors, this war, this violent and painful confrontation with consequences of immense suffering, that successfully opened the current space of political representation. DTP (Demo-cratic Society Party) deputies have now the historical mission to advance this war by peaceful means. Certainly we cannot load the whole burden on the Kurdish deputies, who are after all only the tip of that gigantic iceberg called the Kurdish political will in Turkey. It is therefore the task of Turkey’s Kurdish movement as a whole to reorga-nize and reorient themselves according to the needs of this decisive – and long due at least since 1999 – transition from the era of what Gramsci called the ‘war of manoeu-vre’ dominated by the military conflict to the era of the ‘war of position’, that is, of political struggle.

There are many aspects of this transi-tion, of which I would like to choose one to speak about. It is the problem of ‘self determination’ and ‘minority rights’. For a long time by now the Kurdish discourse in Turkey has been oscillating between these two poles and this oscillation brings about a certain level of confusion particularly among the Kurdish political ranks. These terms therefore need clarification. Accord-ing to the international law, a group of peo-ple can be recognised as a minority or as a ‘people’, but it is by no means an either/or choice. I mean, you can press for your minority rights in a certain country with-out losing your right to self determination. Whenever the demands of minority rights are raised in Turkey, I hear objections from the Kurdish circles to the term ‘minority’. These objections usually emphasise the fact that the Kurds had historically partici-pated in the formation of the Turkish state and therefore they are part of the ‘essential element’ (asli unsur) rather than a minor-

Turkey will be determined by the fate of the Kurdish question

2:2By: Namo Abdulla

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ity. I heard this argument at least from two influential figures – former MP Leyla Zana and novelist Yasar Kemal. And although I understand their anxiety, I believe this line of argument leads the discussion to a blind alley, because there is practically nothing to be won from the emphasis on the ‘essen-tial element’. In fact, the argument for the Kurds’ inclusion in the definition of the ‘es-sential element’ or the ‘dominant nation’, particularly during the negotiations leading to the Lousanne Treaty of 1922, lies in the foundation of the Turkish denial of Kurd-ish identity. Moreover, my reading of his-tory is such that this notion should itself be the subject of self-criticism, for it connotes more than anything the Kurdish partici-pation in the state-sponsored elimination of the non-Muslim elements of Turkey. People of Turkey, including primarily the Kurds, should understand that by partici-pating in this ‘purification’ they prepared the grounds of their own disaster in the form of a racist-Kemalist nation-state. If we abandon this useless argument and con-centrate on the formulation of the rights of the Kurdish people in Turkey as a minority then we can develop a clear-cut ‘minimum program’ consisting of recognition, equal-ity and the accompanying rights for the Kurdish people. This minimum program does not necessarily rule out the existence of a ‘maximum program’ based on the right to self-determination as a people. And the ‘maximum program’ goes beyond the ex-isting borders to unify the Kurdish people of the region around the idea of ‘self-deter-mination’.

Finally, a conjunctural warning: for some time, there has been a war within the Turkish political establishment between the Kemalist and anti-Kemalist elements. This war has escalated during the recent months around a dispute on the election of the new president. It looks in the first glance as if the anti-Kemalist bloc has won an impor-tant victory in the July elections and the subsequent election of the first Islamist President of the Turkish Republic, and that they are on their way to important constitu-tional-structural reforms, which can lead to the elimination of the Kemalist establish-ment for good. This, however, is only the surface and I’m afraid that Kemalists will not go without a bang. They have proved to be capable of turning the tables in so many coups-d’Etat, and a similar dirty resistance is imminent by all criteria. Looking at the developments of last summer, including the

threats to invade Northern Iraq and the sub-sequent military operations on the Kurdish guerrillas inside Turkey, it will not be diffi-cult to derive that today, the Kurdish move-ment is unfortunately trapped in the midst of this power struggle. I expect similar provocations by the Kemalist military-bu-reaucratic elite to escalate in the near future and the Kurds of Turkey should find a way out of their current location as the object (and the scapegoat/excuse) of this danger-ous conspiracy. It seems to be impossible to indicate any way out except for emphasis-ing the significance of what I have already suggested above, that is, the necessity of a clear-cut transition in political orientation from ‘war of manoeuvre’ (military conflict) to ‘war of position’ (political struggle).

Do you think that Kurdish people are on their way of being an independent state?

Following the 1848 Revolution, French liberal/aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville ob-served that once the principle of equality entered in social life at one level, it was in-evitable that this principle would become a universal one and infiltrate into all levels of social texture. The same inevitability applies to the national liberation of all the peoples around the world since the wake of the World War I, when the Wilsonian (and Leninist) principle of “national self-determination” was adopted by the League of Nations. Since then, many nations and ethnicities have been in the waiting lounge of national liberation and today the Kurds appear among those at the very top of this waiting list. There are three reasons for this priority: Firstly, the Kurdish people demonstrate all the features to be interna-tionally recognized as a “people” without a state. Secondly, the Kurdish people have engaged in substantial political struggles through the 20th Century to achieve their independence. Finally, and most impor-tantly for practical reasons, a de facto Kurdistan State has emerged in Northern Iraq since early 1990s. In the light of these indicators, the formation of an independent Kurdistan State seems imminent. There are, however, a number of issues related to this evolution which I will dwell on as part of my response to the next question.

Do you think it is better for Iraqi Kurds

to announce an Independent state now? Why?

I don’t think that I can be the judge of the feasibility or the timing of the declara-tion of independence. I am sure that Kurd-istan’s political leadership is far more capa-ble of evaluating the circumstances. But if you want an analysis, then I can point out, in addition to short-term security concerns, a number of parameters to be taken into ac-count in going ahead with such a decision.

First of all, the declaration of indepen-dence would effectively legislate Kurdis-tan’s current isolation from the rest of Iraq and therefore the question of whether we lost all the hope for a democratic-federal Iraq requires a lot of consideration before such a decision is made. Secondly, how would an independent Kurdistan situate it-self in this world of the 21st Century, which is progressively inscribed by global trends that transcend the nation-state form in fa-vour of regional, transnational forms of sovereignty (such as the European Union) and the accompanying discourses and insti-tutions of ‘global civil society’? We know that national self-determination does not necessarily imply the establishment of a nation-state of one’s own, and the law of uneven and combined development teaches us that belatedness, which is conventionally interpreted as a disadvantage could well turn into a great advantage: every society does not need to exhaust the stages in a linear or-der that have been previously taken by the more advanced societies before reaching and overtaking their level of development. These factors taken on board, Kurdish peo-ple could well pioneer the global search for new social imaginaries capable of fulfill-ing the long desired ideal of independence beyond the increasingly outmoded nation-state form. Thirdly, the economic concerns: if Kurdistan is declared an independent entity while the status of Kirkuk is still in dispute, what would be Kurdish economy grounded upon? Lastly, how well does the project of an independent Kurdistan fit in the international plans of restructuration of the Middle East? Or, to put the question differently, to what extent does the will of the people of Kurdistan correspond to the international decisions of reshaping the re-gion? The project of independence should emerge with sufficient answers to each of the questions raised above through serious consideration of all these parameters.

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Safeen Dzayee is the Kurdistan Dem-ocratic Party (KDP) External Relations Director and representative in Ankara. In this exclusive interview for the Win-dow, Mr. Dzayee talks about the current Kurdistan-Turkey relations and the role or influence of the United States in these re-lations. Furthermore, the PKK issue will be within the scope of the interview.

Many observers argue that, if any con-flict took place between the Kurdistan re-gion and Turkey, the U.S would uphold the Turkish side as a strategic ally. What is the plan or strategy that Kurdish leaders are going to implement to deal with such a possible situation?

I think it is important for the Kurdis-tan region to enjoy good neighborly ties with all neighbors particularly Turkey. For many years when we (the Kurds) had no status neither in the Iraqi constitution nor International Law, Turkey used to be a good and effective ally of the Kurds, however, after 2003 through which we gained local and International recogni-tion, unexpectedly (for the Kurds) Tur-key-Kurdistan relations have dramatically weakened.

We still believe that it is important to make an effort to develop better ties with turkey socially and economically. Turkey is one of those countries whose compa-nies are investing greatly Kurdistan.

Regarding the US-Turkey relations, the US perceives Turkey as an important ally and the deterioration of these relations is unexpected. However, since 2003 until recently these relations have obviously weakened. For example, many people in the U.S will not easily forget Turkey's at-titude in 2003, by not providing its bases to the US for the mission of the operation of Iraqi liberation.

I think the Kurdistan region is an area which has a lot of importance for the U.S. we (the Kurds) have built a democratic experience in the region and have played a major role in the political process and national reconciliation in Iraq. While the US is trying to accomplish the project of democratization of the 'Great Middle-East', the Kurds will have a special impor-tance for this mission of the US in Iraq. Furthermore, the stability of Kurdistan as the sole secure region of Iraq is another factor helping the US dream in Iraq to come true. The importance of Kurdistan on one hand and of Turkey on the other make the US balance its relations with both of them by finding common ground.

As we know the Kurdish leaders and the regional government in Kurdistan de-sire negotiations with Turkey. Which kind of negotiations do we want?

First, there are number of issues

which are of concern to Turkey and to us as well. For any positive and meaningful dialogue, first of all, you have to select your priorities and your agenda which is building common ground and an atmo-sphere which brings a positive end. We do not want dialogue for dialogue’s sake. Dialogue does not mean all the problems should be resolved by a single meeting, but rather it means a process that some-times takes along time. We have to re-spect each others legitimate concerns and not to intervene each others affairs. PKK is a problem but this problem was born Within Turkey and is an its internal prob-lem.

We are not supporting PKK and we are not agreeing with PKK's deployment of methods. However, we are not supporting the use of the military to solve this prob-lem because twenty five years of history of war between Turkey and PKK proves that the resolution of this problem in mili-tary terms is fruitless. Whenever, Turkey,

We are ready to support Turkey to solve the PKK issue by all means but military.

KDP external relations director:

Mr. Dzayee, KDP external relations director and representative in Ankara

By: Abdulmajeed N. Gly

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keeps asking to find a remedy for this is-sue we, as the Kurdistan Region, will be ready to offer our help by all means but military.

How do you interpret Talabani's visit to Turkey?

Although, Talabni's visit to Turkey was done lately, it seems to have been a successful meeting. President Talbany visited Ankara as president of Iraq and it is natural for two neighboring countries to have these contacts. I think, the continu-ation of these meetings followed by the Turkish delegations (Turkish foreign min-ister and prime minister’s office) 10-day visit to Baghdad who met up with key Kurdish leaders, will be very significant to keep our Turkey-Kurdistan relations going.

On the return of their visit, Turkish senior officials had a meeting with the Duhok Governor and me. Many impor-

tant bilateral economic political social se-curity issues discussed in the meeting.

The fact is we do have contact with Turkey. We still have representative of-fice in Ankara. From time to time, I go to Turkey and I meet officials within Turk-ish government but it has not developed further to the extent that we want to re-move all obstacles and have a meaning-ful dialogue. I think, the next step will be much more comprehensive and will include wider meetings with higher level of government that help to remove theses obstacles.

In your opinion, if any developments lead to the situation that Kurdish leader-ship had to make choice between both the security and economy of the region or Kirkuk. In this situation, do you expect any negotiations will be between Kurdish political leaders and Turkey around article 140 and Kirkuk's issue?

As I said earlier this issue is very cru-cial to security and the stability. Some is-sues are just a matter of destiny or future. Confrontations between Kurdish move-ments and various Iraqi regimes were over Kirkuk. The Iraqi Constitution has an article designed for Kirkuk issue which has been voted for by 80% of the Iraqi people. This article is for solving Kirkuk's problems. There have been some techni-cal problems and delay but the process is ongoing and will continue. This is an internal matter for Iraq and the Iraqis and a referendum will determine the future of this city. It is not a matter of bargain-ing what they want a security or Kirkuk. I think we want to enter a dialogue with Turkey just to the door for other future di-alogues . It is a legitimate right of turkey to have its borders secure. Iraqi territory should not be used against security of its neighbors.

Concerning Iraqi security, if the issue

of Kirkuk is ignored, Iraq entirely will not be secure. For Iraqi government or for any other institution if there is any delib-erate policy to derail the article 140 pro-cess, that means, it is violating the consti-tution and the only thing that keeps Iraq together is adherence to this constitution. If there is any violation of any part of the constitution that means Iraq will not stay together. That means further violence and instability in Iraq.

We do not want to link the Kirkuk is-sue with PKK, or border security. They are totally different issues. Kirkuk is an internal Iraqi issue and about border secu-rity we are agree that Turkey has a right to be concerned about its borders' security.

Do you have any relationships as Kurdistan Democratic Party with PKK's political leaders?

We totally disapprove with PKK's methods. Unfortunately, they have harmed

the Kurdish cause more than anybody else. I think PKK must act more responsibly and they must not turn to violence. They should not provoke the situation and an-tagonize what we have achieved in Kurd-istan. But, rather they should promote themselves as an organization denounc-ing violence. I think the way forward to resolve the Kurdish issue in Turkey can only be done through democratic means not through violence. We do not want to say that we want to interfere in Turkey's affair, but, if Turkey fells that we can help them to contribute in resolving this issue through peaceful means, we will be more than happy to offer our assistance as much as we can. We do not have any official re-lationships with PKK. We are not pleased for the existence of the PKK's militants in our mountains and pushing them out of this region is not an easy job.

Obviously, there is not many points of understanding with the Turkish army, but these points do exist with the Justice and Development Party in Turkey (AK Party). Are there any official or unofficial rela-tionships between Kurdish parties in Iraq and the ruling party in Turkey?

Indeed we have good relations with AK Party. They are a party, we believe, that does not have any chauvinists and we maintain a good contact with the AK par-ty. There has been exchange of visits. We visited four months ago with five political parties from Kurdistan. They visited An-kara and met members of Turkish parlia-ment, advisors of the prime minister and officials from the foreign ministry. There is a good relationship with the ruling par-ty. However, in Turkey it is not easy for the ruling party to have relations with us (the Kurds).

As you have stated that you have rela-tions with the AK Party, can these rela-tions be considered official relations be-tween Turkey and Kurdistan?

In politics there is a principle that you never have permanent enemies and you never have permanent friends, you have permanent interest. We don't consider Tur-key as an enemy, we don't want Turkey to see us as an enemy as well. We are not an adversary to Turkey. We are both neigh-

"PKK harmed the Kurdish case more than anybody else"

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bors and have lived together for thousands of years and there is no reason why we can-not live together for the next thousand years. Therefore, we all should make an effort in or-der to remove these concerns and problems which we were involving in the last few years. The relations with the ruling party in turkey are good. We also have certain contact with other parties in Turkey. But the relationships with Turkish parties depends on their views. Turkey is a state of institu-tions. One party comes and goes but certain principles and strategies remain the same. We are working with some of these institutions. Once, when we open the door for dialogue in the near future I think, this will be the first step to remove the concerns and problems.

As you said there will be an opening doors of dialogue with Turkey. In future dia-logues is a recognition of our region by Turkey?

We have had a representa-tion office for the last seven-teen years in Turkey and they have been received like other foreign missions. I agree this is not KRG representation but KDP and PUK reorientations. But who constitutes KRG at the end of the day. KDP and PUK are key parts of it. How-ever, I think we should move with reality and Turkish reality denies the Kurdish identity for many decades coming to the present situation to deal with the Kurds. They have come a long way. And of course, Turkey has ambitions to enter European Union. There should be reforms that should be in-troduced in order to become a full member of the EU. These reforms of constitution and laws will pave the way more and more to have peaceful ties

with its neighbors. Regarding the violations

of human rights in the Kurd-ish regions in Turkey, Iran and Syria. As we have seen in the last Newroz celebrations. To what extend the Kurdish lead-ers specially President Barzani are ready to interfere to avoid violations and protect human rights in the Kurdish regions in these countries?

It is not KDP and KRG policy or any serious political party policy in Kurdistan to adopt a policy of interven-tion in the internal affairs of our neighbors. As much as we ask them not to inter-vene in our affairs, however, when there is a violation of human rights anywhere from a humanitarian perspective, we speak against it no matter it took place in Kurdistan or in Africa. After all the Kurds have suffered too much and their right have been violated occasionally. We can not toler-ate violations of human rights. When incidents occurred re-cently at Newroz in Syria, we had a statement from President Barzani's office which was very clear asking Syrian presi-dent to look at these violations in order to investigate. I think this is the normal standard of world leaders to ask respon-sible authorities of those coun-tries to take serious steps in order to end the violations of human rights.

“Kurds came to this day by bloodshedding of martyrs, torment and…” is a far too familiar beginning of an endless story of anyone who you may ask, or simply they may begin without you even asking. Be it your father, grandfather, or in a speech of any well known Kurdish person.

As a young adult, like myself, you may have sighed as you think to yourself ‘and there comes another endless story.’ This is because young Kurds these days simply do not appreciate or often take for granted the cavernous history of violence, torture and sorrow experienced by our nation, which forms an endless number of real life heroes who are great inspirations, especially for young people to look up to and admire.

You may ask which ethnic group has not experienced a brutish history; the Jews of the Holocaust, the murders of Rwanda's in Africa, the victims of Darfur in Sudan or even the indigenous Aboriginal people of Australia in the days of white settlement, are just few common examples.

Kurds nonetheless, have a past that is unique and

different- a past that makes us appreciate a day such as today. At past that allows us to understand how today came about. A past that adds to our nationality and a past that increases our patriotism and fondness of who we are, It is this past, that no matter how many times we hear the endless stories it makes us appreciate today more and more.

I learned my lesson a different way, in a time span of one and a half hour with three Arab cousins, that evening I understood what it really means when I say ‘I am a Kurd!’ An unforgettable experience that had me in tears during the interview, I was ashamed to not have previously realized the depth of the wounds left by the Anfal tragedy among so many Kurdish people.

Let me introduce you to Taymoor, an Anfal victim and survivor. Unfortunately I never really thought in detail about the tragic events of 1988. I saw it as a genocide, full stop. Now every time I hear the name, I remember my personal hero- Taymoor! I was introduced to this inspiring person, who I now know as a valiant Kurd. His story is an illusory tale, that leaves every listener feeling like in a climatic scene of a fictional horror film. But the hero is there, in front of you and the witnesses also giving their account in every detail. Yet it is still difficult to accept and believe such a circumstance; that some of us could not even visualize in our imaginations.

A fiction like dramatic tale, showing what it means to say ‘I

am a Kurd’

Sazan M. Mandalawi

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Heja Sindi, is a Kurdish professor of Business Administration at Business and Management Department at the Univer-sity of Kurdistan Hawler. Here, he talks about Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs), their functions and importance in Modern Societies. Dr. Sindi responds to the question of whether Kurdistan has NGOs or not.

What are NGOs?

NGOs are one of the forms that any civil society could take. The essence of such entities is that in order to function properly, it should exclude the represen-tation of the government or the state.

What is the relation between an NGO and the government or the state?

The relation between NGOs and any government is a bit of a complex one. Now, when it comes to the needed ap-provals for registration purposes NGOs need to be officially and legal registered by governments. However, NGOs exer-cise their role by observing the perfor-mance of the same government!

What is the source of money of NGOs, is it from government? If yes, so why is it called non-governmental? If no, then who funds it?

When it comes to the issue of funding NGO's, the case becomes somehow sen-sitive. Despite the regular case of NGOs funding themselves via membership dues, some believe that NGOs should not receive funds from the government. This argument is based on the fact that the es-sence of NGOs is to fill the gap resulted by governments in terms of non-achieved services. However, it is not necessary that governments always produce this gap de-liberately say violating human rights in an area or not providing a quantitative and/or qualitative service to a segment of the

society.Now, if we free ourselves from the

dominating common perception that NGOs "only" play the role of an opposite political party, then it becomes a plain that in many cases NGOs could be viewed in a positive perspective rather than a nega-tive one, for example, NGOs can integrate what has been provided by the govern-

ment but unfortunately fragmentized due to the bureaucratic nature of gov-ernmental work.

I believe that if there are good in-tentions, then receiving funds from the government is neither a sin nor a bribe! In this context, I would like to raise the following simple question: whose mon-ey is government's money? Simply, it is the public's money! And NGOs are public organizations.

From my point of view, the major issue that counts here is guaranteeing the non-dominance of the government's power on the NGOs due to the repre-sentation of governments inside these organizations via its members.

How do you perceive NGOs in Kurdistan? Do we really have NGOs?

I believe NGO's in Kurdistan should play a greater role, from my point of view the limited role of these organi-zations has two reasons, one is related to the government itself. If democratic governments believe in NGOs’ role then it should take the initiate of promoting the NGOs’ culture, especially that this role of the governments becomes more significant in developing societies such as the Kurdish society.

The second reason is related to NGOs themselves where their mem-bers need to be more professional in the NGO arena. According to my personal observation, the majority of NGO key members in Kurdistan are ex-UN em-ployees where they do possess in-depth experiences in the UN context, yet still the lack of NGOs, other need profes-sional qualifications. I believe that time will play a role in the maturation of the

whole issue of NGOs in Kurdistan.

What are NGOs? DO WE HAVE THEM IN KURDISTAN?

By: Ardalan Abdulwaheed

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The child was brought in with a bullet gone through his shoulders and blood continuously being lost from him. “There were prints and wounds all over his body, especially his arms- clearly from the sand and the shuffle, his clothes were also ripped.” Mohammed recalls the elderly mother of the house instantly demanded that the Kurdish clothes were taken off the child and burnt in fear for their own lives.

Taymoor, the young 10 year old at the time had escaped the mass murders of the Anfal crisis. As Mohammed, the oldest cousin recalls “my uncle was in Samawa, they had heard the sound of dogs barking and immediately went outside fearing for our sheep from a fox.” However, it was not a fox on their land, instead, first a shadow of a small boy was spotted, then latter, a young Kurdish child was seen who was in a critically poor condition.

A trusted friend who also happened to be a doctor was informed of the incident and hence visited the family every second day to clean the young child’s wounds.

This was when Hussein's father (also present in the interview) warned his brother there was ‘eyes on him’ in his area and asked to take the child to his house, where it was safer. When asking Mohammed of fear he replied without hesitation: “Of course! When a military car came anywhere near, we were immediately alarmed, being situated on a main road made times like these very regular."

Khalid continued the next chapter of the story: “I had heard of Taymoor but never saw him until my father brought him to our house, on his arrival we took him to the second floor of our house where we had a room there. I remember clearly he was closer to my mother, maybe because she is a traditional village girl.”

It was clearly difficult to deal with Taymoor, especially because of the language barrier, him unable to speak Arabic and the family incapable of speaking Kurdish. The family’s close friend who was also a deputy doctor

of a military completed Taymoor’s treatment to recovery, from the bullet that had protruded through his shoulder, an acute injury requiring time and constant treatment in order to heal.

“My father had a Kurdish friend of 15 years, he asked him to explain Taymoor’s circumstance to us, we were aware of the disruption of the Iraqi government but never realized that it

was to this extent brutal and victimizing. I remember as my father’s friend talked to Taymoor he began crying fiercely and incessantly hitting the ground.”

Young Taymoor explained how he was with his mother and 8 months old sister in the mass graves along with his aunties and other relatives. “Only through Taymoor did we see the reality, it was beyond our imaginations.”

The 10 year old innocent child in front of his eyes had witnessed the killings of his mother and sister, indeed an extravagant shock for him, a hole was dug by the shuffles and the families were placed into the pit like structure, which were the mass graves, raining gun shots on top of them, those who died by the shots that was it, and those who managed to survive the shots were killed by the sand that was latter compressed on top of them.

Khalid continues, as he rewinds his memory, telling everything as if it was just yesterday, with eyes shinning tears

waiting to stream out he recalls “We called him Ali, to further protect him and ourselves. We would say ‘Ali don’t go out’ when someone knocked the door we would call ‘Ali, Ali’ he knew and ran directly upstairs to the room.”

Taymoor was hidden inside the house for an extended period of time, he could not be sent to the streets with his Kurdish accent, looks, behaviour and language;

this would have been too much of a risk to the family. “He continued his recover, as his injuries healed, his internal wounds remained unhealed; his mental state was particularly poor. He had to go out, ride a bike and play with a football; after all, he was a child. My mother attempted to make up for him his own mother’s love and devotion.”

With a gentle smile he adds “I remember he was the spoilt one! I was the only boy at home surrounded by girls; they used to tell me God gave you a brother called Ali, I was just happy to have someone come into my house to play with.”

As Taymoor cultured the new language he was given the opportunity to go outside and as Khalid describes only lies could be told to cover for the reality. “The neighbors began to ask who this is, we said he is my uncle’s son and his mother died. We simply made up a story that he had come to live with us. Often

Anfal; an unhealed wound

Sazan Mandalawi

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they questioned his looks, he had fair skin unlike us, with a beautiful Kurdish face, and we lied again and said he looks like his mother who was also fair and beautiful so he has taken her resemblance. The continuous lies conceded the neighbors; they would never have thought this was a Kurdish kid with us.”

Young Taymoor, even though slowly growing had mixed emotions and on one occasion as Khaled justifies “My mother brought some children’s toys including a small shuffle. without delay as Taymoor saw the shuffle anger dominated him, rapidly with all hatred and resentment he began to smash the shuffle with all the energy and frustration he had inside him, then started biting it as hard as he possibly could. It was obvious to realize he was recalling the time when his family burial took place by the shuffles.”

“Taymoor explained they were at the edge of the shuffle, right at the side, their mother hugged them tightly with both her hands around him and his sisters, as the guns began shooting a bullet had gone through his shoulder, then to complete the operation sand was placed on all those alive and dead. Taymoor however, was able to breathe and air could reach him, topped with sand in the dusty atmosphere he could not be seen as he escaped the mass burials.”

As tears rushed down my face, Khalid decided to pause “you see...” he tells me, and continues “I believe God wanted Taymoor to stay and face Saddam one day, just like he did!”

He recalls to me another incident, “I was in primary school, they would give out T-shirts with Saddam’s picture illustrated upon it, I brought mine back home, Taymoor saw it and began to curse bad words in Kurdish.” As if this was happening in front of his eyes right now Khalid says “I could never forget as he spread the shirt on the ground and with a rock he began to scrape off Saddam’s face until it was no longer visible.”

“Gradually he began to call my parents by Mom and Dad and we began to see life back in him. Originally he used to be upset, stay in a small corner and ask to be taken to the North or to the mass graves.”

The family treated Taymoor as their own son, and never risked taking him to the Kurdish land as they knew the

possibilities of being caught were infinite. With time Taymoor spoke full and fluent Arabic and had a circumcision party where the traditional routine took place of killing an animal and all close relatives brought him gifts, in short he was now a member of the family; progressively overlooking the idea of the mass graves.

“When he used to cry I would come in and see everyone crying from my sisters, aunties and mother. Every stranger coming by with a moustache we used to fear greatly. My mother used to make kids wear gold rings; she brought me one and one for Taymoor as well, anything they buy for me they bought double, so Taymoor could also have one.”

Khalid takes another pause from his story, takes a drink of water and with a sigh gives his grief to the Kurds, “Taymoor’s story proved to us the hardships of the Kurdish nation, and the suffering Kurds endured, the things that your imagination or the human brain can not reach has happened to the Kurdish nation, no one would imagine there is a nation that is being buried alive, even worse the person burying them is their own leader, who is supposed to care and serve the people.”

Coming back to his account, he clarifies that incidentally a family member made regular visits to Slemani, whilst the men in the house opposed the idea of Taymoor going back North, not because they refused for him to go to his survived relatives but were simple in fear for their own lives, “All we thought of at the time was ‘what if... what if.. What if…’ we used to think of the rarest possibilities and consequences to every action we wanted to take.”

“My cousins went to Slemani to Taymoor’s exact village, they asked if anyone knew Taymoor Abdul Kader and we knew his mother’s name as well, Sarra.” Not mentioning anything about mass graves they claimed that they had found a Kurdish boy in Samawa. “His uncles and cousins were curious, surprised and in disbelief of how he had reached us, his family were afraid, we did not blame them because they had right to think we were also influenced by Saddam Hussein and for all they knew, this may have well been a plan.”

Despite uncertainties, fear and disbelief Taymoor’s uncles returned with

the cousins to Samawa, a risk they took for the sake of their nephew.

“We let Taymoor look from another place close by from a window, when Taymoor saw the men coming out of their car, some of whom in Kurdish clothing, he immediately and with no hesitation ran out towards them.” This was the defining moment to the family in Samawa to completely believe that Taymoor’s real family had been found. Khalid explains at the reunion of the small child with his uncles whom thought he had died years ago was nothing but tears and crying by all. Taymoor’s uncles insisted to take their found nephew back to Slemani despite the refusal of the family. “We feared when he returns he will accidentally talk, and immediately our life is in danger, we asked for Taymoor to remain with us and the family could come and see him when ever they wanted, although they persisted to take him back with them.”

Khalid, once again almost in tears, he leans back; re-winding time expressing from his heart “the phase of Taymoor’s farewell for us all was hell, fire, miserable… I was happy a brother came to me and now they were taking him, I began to cry.”

This fiction like tale can indeed be a book in endless chapters. Whilst it does not begin with ‘once upon a time’ it does end with ‘and they lived happily ever after’. Taymoor is now in America, always in contact with his adopted family, with regular visits. He by chance met his sister from the Samawa family in America; which on its own is another fairytale and even invited Khalid’s mother for a visit to America. He faced Saddam Hussein at the trials and is a married man of a Lebanese Kurdish girl today.

This is just one of the endless number of stories of the Anfal, which saddens me, despite all this, many refuse the fact that it was a genocide, how else could anyone identify or justify such horrendous, harming and unimaginable action?

In partnership with Soma digest

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When do dreams become reality? There isn’t only one answer for this. Because there isn’t a particular way to cope with reality. Some deal with it by what is called “pragmatism, or compromise”, which they affirm the reality as emerged to us, while others take a ‘negative’ stance by denial. All of these perceptions take reality into consideration, but they differ in thinking of what reality might be.

Both pragmatism and compromise are characterized by a sort of concession to what the reality implies and they adhere to a certain kind of ‘realism’. But most philosophers contend that reality entails both contradiction and contingency. Now, if one takes this for granted, one has a re-alistic outlook on life. Most of us tend to overlook that not everything in dreams is always illogical and contingent!

It is seldom that our dreams are ful-filled. Nevertheless many people go about their lives with their own vision of the fu-ture, which is reality to them. This makes the concept of ‘reality’ a matter of differ-ences. There is no singular reality, but re-alities. We could talk about a particular so-cial, political and economic reality. Thus, for them, dreams are more real than reality itself. Whether this is illogical is up for de-bate. What makes dreams so compelling is the simple fact that dreams are easy to have and because our wishes in our dreams are realisable. Well, dreams are not always as impossible, as they seem to be.

On the other hand, reality is, as in the philosophy introduced, a complex domain which bears a lot of difficulty within itself. There is another problem bond with reality: you might do to accept it as truth. By this, reality obeys a set of rules, norms if you wish to call it: the ‘laws of reality’. This means that our views should be according to what the reality implies to us. But, by dreaming as the simple axiom that main-tains: everything is allowed in the word of dreams. This leads in my opinion not to think about what the reality should be, but to ask myself: “Why do I believe in dreams unless they are reality themselves?”

Simply because I do not belong to re-ality, if the dream is my only gate to real-ity. For example, when you do not belong to any kind of reality, the only reality left

is a dream, which is more real, what makes one more aware about one’s stance to life, or being. By the word ‘being’ I mean that which sets the norm. Many of us, includ-ing myself, cannot sustain the life, being, because reality is against our dreams and we can’t accept it as such.

Moreover, the paradox of the concept of reality is used, for example, as justifica-tion for some political decision or econom-ical disasters. Afterwards this justification turns into a rule, a way of life. It means we have to accept many undesirable things at any rate.

This makes reality uneasy and goes be-yond the simplicity of dreams, it means that also dreams can be. After all to be in a real world it means to be somewhere, which is not always to do with your choice. In other words to be no where. To be more specif-ic: reality is a wholeness and that makes it abstract and general. Well, existence in dreams means to exist at least somewhere, which is conventionally and ironically not called reality.

Hence dreaming about something means to be somewhere that I choose. In this sense a dream is a matter of choice. However, to be in reality it has nothing to do with a choice whatsoever, we are –to borrow a word from existentialism- “thrown” into this world, whether we like it or not. In other words, it means to be thrown-in, into the world without a choice of place where you’d like to be. Neverthe-less this is not tantamount to determinism. With no doubt, reality is an overwhelming totality, which constrains our ways of ex-isting.

To put in more concrete terms; reality is as vast as the entire universe, it is limitless. We as human beings can’t surround reality, but the reality surrounds us and escapes from our authority despite our knowledge. The question is then :should we surrender to this reality and accept it as it is? What are we to do, if reality contradicts human values, morals and ethical principles?

How should we justify the injustice

and suppression in this world? If we ac-cept reality without any objection, does it make us realistic or does it make us weak and foolish?

Someone could call you an idealist if you said that you didn’t want to play ac-cording to the rules of reality. My answer to this objection would be that it has just annihilated my “real” existence. Let’s say that I’m a person without any real exis-tence. Nevertheless dreaming has afforded me an opportunity to escape, even though to escape was never my goal. Sometimes it is necessary to detach oneself from reality. Detaching form reality is an option to criti-cize political threats or economic abuse of human beings.

I remember seeing a documentary a couple of years ago, about young Kurds who believed in the idea of liberty, the title of which has slipped my mind. Among them was a girl who confessed in very strong words: ‘yesterday I dreamt about the impossible’. By this she meant, as I understand it, the impossibility of freedom for the Kurds today. Ever since I saw this, I have thought about what she assumed and what she must have meant. That strong sentences made me realize that the “dream” of freedom for the Kurds is not unrealistic and illusory. Because the Kurds have the same right of being as any other nation. Kurdistan has never been a ‘dream’ and it will never be. It’s a legitimate goal that should be realized.

Well, I don’t have wishful thinking about the liberty of every one and especial-ly not for the Kurds, but I don’t think that would be impossible. Therefore, dream-ing is about the possibility of survival and existence. Moreover, there is an affinity between the concepts of dreaming, hop-ing and wishing. They bear in themselves a kind of intrinsic relation. It is impossible to answer when a dream will become real-ity, but you can try to make it so. Hence, dreams are basically extensions of possi-bility between hope and the will to make it come true. You touch the fingers of these dreams when you are deep in thought, and the thought is the place where you will find the impetus for all your dreams and expec-tations.

The complexity of reality versus the simplicity of dreaming: the Kurdish case

Nawzad Jamal

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Cemetery as library

Namo Abdulla-Kalar

After completing the first semester of studying students entered a 15-day holi-day period. I, on vacation, went to Kalar, a district located approximately 65 Kms South East of Sulaimaniyah, my birth place, to visit relatives and friends.

Kalari Kon (old Kalar) is a quarter of the town that I spent some days in, If you want to walk to Bazzar from Kalari Kon, you walk by a cemetery on your left side. In this cemetery I saw a num-ber of students who were reading, after going there and talking to some of them, I heard different and surprising answers and preferred to inform you with some of them with the hope that you will en-joy it.

"Since 8 years ago, when I was only 14, I have come to read with these graves," said Sarkawt Jalil, student of Law, when he was standing in a grave’s shadow in the cemetery of “Kalari Kon”,

The atmosphere of Kalar and its surroundings gets very warm in summer this is why it is known as the province of “Garmian”

Sarkawt is not alone, reading in the cemetery, it is a strange story of a group of students who spend their time by reading and studying in the cemetery. This story becomes more outlandish when realizing some of these students still come in order to do their reading despite of the extreme-ly warm summer.

Masud Hama Salih, student of English language in Kalar institution, explained that having no decent library in Kalar is the reason why he reads in the cemetery. He says that, indeed, there is a library in Kalar but in addition to its distance this library lacks electricity, air cooler and suf-ficent space.

Kalar is a town where the biggest An-fal campaign, the genocide of more than 100,000 Kurds, was carried out, hence a large number of its people are poor. Pov-erty surely is a problem for some students that they cannot have independent rooms for studying, sleeping and so forth. A stu-dent who asked not to be named stated

that they have only one room for studying, sleeping, eating and everything else.

It was about 02:30 in the afternoon when we were undertaking these inter-views. We interjected some other students,

who were sitting in the shade of a cot-tage’s wall built around a few graves each of them had a different book for studying. Though the situation was very hot, these students feel very comfortable as it is calm and quiet.

"When we are here nobody tells us do this and do not do that. All of those whom we are with, are dead people" said Waleed Omar, a student from Kalar and studying Persian language at the University of Sala-haddin.

“Living with dead people is better than living in a place that you are always ruled” Mr. Omar added.

The reason given by Arkan Salih, Eng-lish language student, who used to come to read at this cemetery is ,on one hand, he is unable to give up reading books while books have become a part of his life, and on the other hand there is no room in Ar-kan’s house for reading.

"Despite this, I am facing problems here, for instance, my mind sometimes goes to think about these bodies inside the

graves and forget about what I read, still, I prefer here to home because what do you do at home in this hot weather when you have no electricity?" Mr. Salih added

Living in a cemetery might be very scary for many people especially for chil-dren; many students have come to read in this cemetery since their early childhood.

For Masud coming to study at cemeteries was scary at first, however, he was gradu-ally conditioned with the situation.

"I neither care about any thing nor am scared of dead people because I have grown with these graves, this is why whenever it is possible I come here," stat-ed Muhammd Amin, a student of College of Education in Kalar.

This cemetery has not only become a library for students, but it can be consid-ered a bar for drunken people, an appoint-ment place and so forth.

"For its safety, some people come and drink alcohol in this cemetery. As far as drinking alcoholic beverages are banned by Islamic norms and culture, many peo-ple do not dare drink in the bars for the fear of being seen by somebody who al-ready knows them," Waleed said.

These youths of Garmian are com-plaining about the government that it does not help Garmian enough, asking KRG to build more libraries, parks and educational centers for them.

A student reading in a cemetery, Kalar

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Chris Kutschera was born in France in 1938. He is an author and a journalist and has written numerous political reports along-side his wife (photographer). They have been to Kurdistan region of Iraq from 1971 and met Kurdish leader "Mullah Mustafa Barzani" in a rugged town of Kurdistan "Haji Omaran" close to the Iranian boarder. Kutschera is famous for writing the events with moral and showing the truth without being biased to any sides. Most of the Kurds consider him as a close friend of them. Mean while. He has two famous books about the Kurds, "The Kurds in 1971-1975” and “Kurds in 19-20th century".

Kutschera thinks the era after 1991 is considered as the best era in the Kurdish history. They are controlling three large cities in Iraq; Arbil, Sulaimanya and Duhok. He added: "in 1974, Kurdistan was much smaller than it is now; it was limited only around Haji Oma-ran, a small town in Kurdistan region of Iraq". He also did not hide his happiness for seeing "the significant progresses and enlarge-ments in Kurdistan" as he was quoted in a private interview for the Window magazine.

He always has positive attitudes about the Kurds generally and those of Iraq particularly; his perception and interpretations for Iraqi Kurdistan are very hopeful.

"I am very happy to see all of these significant progresses and developments in the Kurdistan region. As you know, I visited Kurd-istan in 1991; it was really different from it is now. At that time, this region was almost completely destroyed. However, today, there are a lot of beautiful buildings, parks and international airports in the Kurdistan region. Having international air ports and the ability of traveling directly from Arbil and Sulaimanya is considered as a good progress. I've visited this region many times in the previous decades and I have many nice reminiscences. One is it that remains memorable is in 1971when I met Mullah Mustafa Barzani in Haji Omaran in 1971."

Chris Kutschera is widely experienced in the history of Kurds, and having a good knowledge about the former and the current Kurdish leaders. In answering a question about whether the former or the current Kurdish leader's tasks are more difficult, he confident-ly replied that the tasks of current leaders are much more difficult. In addition, he asserted on his speech saying "the current leaders have to deal with a lot of international issues, they have mutual relations with the US and Russia, in addition to the threats of neighboring countries and the central government of Iraq."

This author is dealing with issues of the largest ethnic nation of the world without their independent state. Different treaties divided them over four countries (Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria). The Kurds

Chris Kutschera:35 years of Photography & Journalism in Kurdistan

Chris Kutschera and his wife, exhibiting their photos of 35 years in Media Hall.Karokh NuraddinRasan Ramzi

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are not living in the same cir-cumstance in all those counties. "The situations are very unequal, for instance, the Kurds of Iraq these days have their own gov-ernment, parliament and they possess almost all of their rights. While in Turkey, the Kurds are deprived from their political, cultural and linguistic rights. In Iran, moreover, the Kurds have their cultural right but not po-litical ones. Syria does not grant basic rights for the Kurds at all" he said.

According to the Iraqi per-manent constitution, the Kurd-istan regional government is unable to buildup independent relations with other countries, but within the framework of Iraq. France has formal relations with Iraq only, however, recently it has opened its council bureau in Arbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurd-istan. Kutschera considered this step as a new and different view point of the French government towards this region.

Furthermore, the Kurds of Iraq are struggling to annex the disputed areas of their semi-au-tonomous region of Kurdistan. They asserted this step in the Iraqi constitution through article 140. Most important and contro-versial disputed area is the oil-rich heterogeneous cultural city of Kirkuk. This city has been the main reason for the resurgence of the Kurds against the Iraqi government in 1974. Kutschera is pessimistic about this issue, as he said: "Similarly, there was a pact about Kirkuk that con-tained a deadline like the current one. The dead line was reached without any steps being taken by the central government of Iraq toward implementing the agree-ment."

In your opinion, whom

Kirkuk does belong to?

The answer: "According to all of the historical documents and evidences, its geographical location and a historical truth prove that Kirkuk belongs to

Kurdistan. Kirkuk, through history, always have had Kurds as the majority of its popula-tion. But the problem is, even if article 140 is implemented, what will be the response of the neighboring countries espe-cially those ones who have the fear of establishing an indepen-dent Kurdish state by returning Kirkuk to Kurdistan region? Especially Turkey, who shares the alliance with America as the Kurds do. You should know that if one day America falls in a situation to choose between one of its alliance like Turkey or the Kurds. Surely it will choose Turkey and leave the Kurds, because Turkey is more power-ful. But if America could avoid choosing between Turkey and the Kurds, it will remain on its normal relations and alliance with the Kurds."

Regarding to Turkey and it's attitudes for the accession to the European Union (EU) and the probability of the bad case of Kurds there were being a hin-drance in this process, he stated: " I think the Kurdish case does not play any role in deterring Turkey to join the EU. The EU approved it's refusal for joining of Turkey to it because firstly, Turkey is not located in Europe continent except a small part of it. That is the geographical rea-son. Secondly, Turkey is a poor country, so it cannot join the EU. The Turkish government is not such a democratic government to join the EU. Furthermore, the military in Turkey is more powerful than the government and it has the most authority in the whole state, while the other members of the EU have pow-erful governments that have the authority above all of other gov-ernmental organizations."

On February/20/2008 , in the University of Kurdistan-Hawler's seminar hall ( audito-rium) a ceremony by both the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Researches, and the university of Kurdistan-Hawler was conducted to issue certifications to the participants of the successfully completed library training course.

Minister of higher education and scientific researches Dr. Idris Hadi with several UKH teachers were attended. At the beginning of the ceremony, Amed Demirhan, UKH library director and the course teacher, welcomed the attendant.

Then Hoshiyar Basheer Jalal, the course planner in the HE & SR ministry presented a speech, he emphasized on the importance of the libraries and educating librarians.

"In order to offer a better knowledge and information, we have to educate the librarians, for this purpose we have started this course, the course was suc-cessful and we will conduct the same course for the other universities and institutions in Kurdistan Region," said Mr. Basheer.

Then, in his speech Amed Demirhan Said: this course is very crucial need to develop information and scientific ser-vices in Kurdistan universities, in the beginning of the course we surveyed our students to find out our students' level of knowledge of librarianship, and to find out their needs and what we should teach them. Now they are well educated and they have a lot more informa-tion about conducting libraries. After the course, another survey was conducted, and to do so we had to linger our class hours to six more hours.

After presenting the

certifications, Dr. Idris Hadi , the Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research, said: "I congratulate you all, for success-fully completing this course and receiving your certifications, I'm sure you will all do a good job in serving your universities and institutions, I'd also like to thank and appreciate the university of Kurdistan-Hawler, Specially the UKH Rector, The Library direc-tor Amed Demirhan and the li-brarian (Lesley) which has had played a big role in teaching and educating those who have par-ticipated in this course."

"We realize the significance of the libraries and we do pay a lot of attention to libraries, es-pecially modern libraries, and I appreciate the UKHL for their effort in transferring their librar-ianship knowledge and modern technology to the other univer-sities in Kurdistan Region," added Mr. Hadi.

In addition, one of the pa-tricians, Abdulwahab Atrooshi said: It was a good course, al-though it was short but we have learned a lot, now I know what Electronic Library, and Data Base is; and how to search in the Data Bases. Ameen Abu Bakir , another participant said :“I'm very thankful to the UKHL and I appreciate their effort , I've learned so much and I can run a Library now.”

This is the first course and for the first time conducted for the librarians in Kurdistan, UKH Library plans to do the same course for the other universities and Institutions in Kurdistan, UKHL with the cooperation of Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research conducted the same course for the Uni-versity of Duhok and Slemani, and other universities and In-stitutions eventually. It is worth mentioning the course was con-ducted gratis by UKH.

UKH's first certifications given to a group of librarians.

Mohammed Ali M

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Shko Bakir Abdulqadir is a Kurdish student from Halabja, a town bombarded by the chemical gas by Hussein’s regime. He is the first Kurd wearing Kurdish traditional clothes, entering the White House. He met several senior officials in the United States such as President Bush, Colin Powel and Condoleezza Rise.

Shko was one of the six Kurds out of eleven Iraqi students who were invited by the United States government through the Youth Exchange and Study Program (YES) , to study English language and leadership skills in the United States for a year, in 2004.

Going to the US previously did not come to Shko’s mind as he is from the biggest stateless nation that has no friend but the mountains. He says: “Even af-ter I passed all the exams of YES, I still thought that it was just a dream.”

Despite of its dangerous situation, Shko and his friends risked visiting the US embassy in Baghdad to get visas, and there they managed to meet the former secretary of state, Colin Powel who just returned from Shko’s town.

“When a friend of mine and I told Mr. Powel that we are from Halabja, he ex-pressed his over-gladness to see us”

Culture shock is a normal phenom-enon that everybody would face when find themselves in a different culture. For

Shko the problems were at the very begin-ning of the trip, when he was hosted by an African American family in the State of Texas.

“At the very beginning, American Students had a negative idea about Iraqis and they avoided communicating with me. They were unable to distinguish be-tween Kurdistan and the rest of Iraq,” said Shko.

Nevertheless, Shko informed students of his school about Kurdistan, its safety and their open-minded people, as he was also a social person there, he became one of the most lovely and friendly students in his school.

“I tried to erase the bad image that Americans had about the Iraqi people through giving presentations in my school auditorium and churches.”

“I told them that the Kurds are a peace-ful nation in Iraq and they have always been oppressed by its enemies throughout history, however, they still have not pre-ferred to carry guns. They never offended war, but defended themselves.” Shko as-serted.

Alongside American people Shko was working voluntarily to serve Texas and this made him become more respect-ed by his American friends. He was called by his colleagues form Lubbock high school, that is, “Shko is not form Iraq, but

he is from Kurdistan” The lack of common cultural foods

might be a problem for most people, yet, it was not for Shko. That is because, on one hand, his host family cooked Eastern foods for him, and he did not differenti-ate between Western and Eastern foods so much on the other. What is more, the fast food was Shko’s favorite meal in the US.

He is very honored to have been to America where, as he says, the culture of democracy, toleration and freedom of speech, is present, somewhere that wasta (personal contact) does not work.

After the one-year invitation of YES, on May 13, 2005 Shko and all other Middle-Eastern students were invited by President George W. Bush in the White House. Furthermore, as Shko claims, he was the first Kurd, even prior to President Masud Barzani, to wear the Kurdish tradi-tional clothes in the White House, that is to tell he is a Kurd.

Then, at once after Bush gave a 20-minute speech in the Rose Garden of the White house, Shko went and talked with President Bush. President Bush told Shko that: “I wish I see you again as the presi-dent of your country.”

Shko, The First Kurd Wearing Kurdish Traditional Clothes In the White House

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Reading has become an essential part of people's life in every society. When we read about an important person, a scien-tist, a leader or a religious man, we might discover that reading has been their prior task. “The best friend in any time is a book” an old saying asserts. The Kurd-ish society, as a society which is trying to transit from a one that is unsophisticated to a developed one, also shares the story of reading with the world, but in a quite different ways.

Despite the few newspaper and

magazines selling kiosks in the cities of Kurdistan region, there are some quite frustrating themes and stories for read-ing newspapers. As we visited one of the industrial areas of Hawler, the capital of the region, some of the car painting and polishing shops were transferring tons of newspaper into their shops. That was re-ally an attractive view. The owner of the shop, whom did not want his name to be mentioned, said that they are covering the car’s glass with newspapers during paint-ing the body of the cars. He added "these newspapers are daily remnants of the ba-zaar."

Moreover, when you visit the kiosks for selling newspapers, you realize that most of the people who are paying atten-tion to newspapers and news, only read the headlines and they leave without buying any newspapers, one of the kiosk owners stated that this has become a normal event for them that happens every single day.

Sozan Rahem, 40 years old, a house-wife with a degree of secondary school was pessimistic about women because they are not reading efficiently. She was waiting for her husband to buy a newspa-per and leave there; she expressed: "au-thorities are also responsible for this cri-sis, poverty made the people not to think about anything but money." She was also confused about the situation of media in Kurdistan as she said "there are so many newspapers and magazines published in this country, despite their economic dam-age. Most of them are just repeating the news which are mentioned in other plac-es."

Ashti, a young boy who has a little kiosk on a pavement between two roads in front of Nishtiman building, thinks that all kind of newspapers, magazine and even books have their own readers. He contended that the biased newspapers are not as popular as the independent ones," the private newspapers have the most demands, especially the newspapers and the magazines which are independent and not biased to any of the political sides." Answering a question about the reasons of this phenomenon, he stated: “For years our newspapers have been publishing po-litical subjects and each side biases and tells the stories mysteriously and poli-tics has been their major concern, so the people have turned away from politics and most are now turning to read about culture, social and art articles."

Furthermore, the situation of books does not vary very much than that of me-dia. There is a considerable boost in the

number and title of books after the inva-sion of Iraq in 2003. The (Diwans) of the poets were rare, and the present ones were old editions. However, these days they have reprinted and published in a modern way." Before 2003, we had a few books to show for sell, they were some joke books and some cooking books, while there weren't any technical, political and social books." Ashti informed.

Meanwhile this increase is not paral-lel with the number of readers. There are lots of dusty books on the shelves of book stores. "Most of the costumers prefer nov-els, fictions and the magazines and news-papers that are about sports and arts rather

than political, in addition to philosophical and religious books" Muhammad Khidir, a book and newspaper seller stated.

Lack of academic readers is another problem facing the Kurdish society. Most of the youth these days prefer luxury sto-ries, fictions and novels about love rather than philosophical, psychological and his-torical books. Karzan, owner of a book-store in bookshops, said most of his cos-tumers are old people; the youth are not visiting as much as the elders do. Even if they buy books, the novels in the genre of love is their main requirement.

The media should encourage youth to read critical subjects that would have an impact on their life and their country. TV and radio broadcasts are responsible for advising people to choose what they read. Our authors are also recommended to be more critical in their writings, "these days the translated books are more popular than the books of our authors." Karzan said.

Sako, Karokh, and Meran

To what extent do the Kurdish youth read?

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Reading is one of the most effec-tive means to experience life profoundly. Without reading our experiences in life will be quite shallow, so the unique op-portunity to observe and examine life will be lost without it! The only way to live acutely is to read deeply. Reading is a magic key to open numerous doors in the brightest and gloomiest castle which is called life. Reading is a path which blazes the reader to different gardens in order to taste various kinds of fruits which are di-verse thoughts. There is an essential rela-tionship between reading books and form-ing a person’s identity as a rational being. The main condition to acquire a rational identify is to ask many vital questions, and crave to obtain the answers. This process cannot be done without a journey through books. Questions like, what is the principal purpose of my existence, what is the major responsibility I have towards myself, others, and life in general? Many others philosophical questions, are asked and examined by a serious reader. That’s why a real reader seeks for truth and has philosophical concern. In this essay just some of the real readers' characteristics, like having strong desire, knowing more than one language and identity issues will be discussed. Moreover, these character-istics will be used as a criteria to evaluate the new generation of Kurdish reader.

First, the real reader has a strong desire to read in order to obtain more knowledge about life. Indeed humankind in general has a desire to know, Aristotle said, “Human beings naturally have a de-

sire to know”. But the difference between the real reader, and ordinary people is the real readers' desire to learn is much stron-ger in contrast to ordinary people's desire. Nothing can be done successfully if it’s done unwillingly. That is why a good reader reads willingly to observe life, and discover the ambiguous purpose for his existence. A real reader is someone who deduces the compelling answers for his\her infinity of questions. However, a seri-ous reader, fortunately and unfortunately, will never ever derive his \her answers thoroughly! Do the new generations of Kurdish have a strong desire to read? The answer unfortunately is negative. The dominant reasons for their dislike of reading are first, the major concern of the new. generations is money not education. Second, Their knowledge about the im-portance of reading is superficial.

Knowing more than one language is the second most important characteristic of a real reader. Anyone who craves to be-come serious a reader must learn another language other than his\her mother's lan-guage. Knowing a new language is like a new window to see another aspect of the view which is life. A serious reader longs to notice things in many facets. That is why he or she should know more than one language. There is no doubt that nowa-days English is the most powerful lan-guage. It is no exaggeration to consider it the most essential language to someone who fancies becoming a real reader. The domination of English language over oth-er languages can be endorsed by numer-ous facts: One of them is a huge source of any subjects on the internet, which can easily be studied. Despite its vital role in the education system, the number of Kurdish youth readers who know this lan-guage fluently is scarce. Not knowing this language is the most restricting problem behind Kurdish readers to alter from ordi-nary readers to serious ones. The Ministry of Education and Higher Education are mainly responsible for this crisis. How-ever, there is a unique lightness in the stern dark system of higher education in Kurdistan of Iraq. This unique bright light is UKH. Therefore the students of this university have a valuable opportunity to

learn English, so they had better take this unique chance seriously in order to learn English.

A real reader is open to personal change. This kind of reader has a philo-sophical concern, and inconsistent identi-ty. This feature of a serious reader can be called “identity issue”. An Identity issue is a constant process of forming and chang-ing identity. The Identity issue in connec-tion with a real reader is an educational process. Identity encompasses all the various visions which someone has to dif-ferentiate things in life. A Special identity is a result of a particular understanding of life. Someone who has an unchangeable identity, has unalterable perceptive to life too. In another meaning, this dogmatic person perceives strongly that all his or her understanding of life is thoroughly true. On the other hand, a true reader tries to found his or her identity on a rational base. In order to do this burden a serious reader must live with books entirely. An Accurate reader seeks for answers of his or her infinite questions. Moreover, this ideal type of reader will never ever ob-tain compelling answers for all questions; therefore, the process of learning and thinking will be continuous. The identity issue is a result of this permanent process. The motivations are more than one; it can be a rational curiosity or a psychological motivation. The processes of forming and converting the identity of true readers are motivated by rational curiosity. While there might be many readers whose their identity could be altered by psychological drive, the main difference in identity issue between an ordinary reader who suffers from many psychological problems and a serious reader is coherence. Coherence reasons create condition in order for accu-rate readers to change his or her identity, while any simple reasons can convince a simple reader to alter their identity. In general Kurdish youth readers are ordi-nary readers, and they don’t have logical reasons for their belief and visions which their identities consist of. Why youth readers in general ordinary readers? This question cannot be explained explicitly in this essay. Another major factor is the education system. “Instead of knowledge,

The characteristics of a real reader

Harem Hadi

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Abbas Kamandi is a famous Kurdish singer and has many fans especially for his emotional songs. This long bearded artist looks like a very old man, but he is very young by heart and mind. This singer has a deep feeling, filled with a very soft emo-tion and has become a suitable definition for the Kurdish song. Kamandy has always been singing for beauty, nature, love, Kurdistan and also for his nation.

How was Kamandi's childhood?

I was born in eastern Kurdistan in San-andaj (Sna). My family is called "Qal Qaly" which is related to "Jaff" tribe. About 300 years ago, my ancestors emigrated from Hal-abja toward the east to Sanandaj (Sna) and Saqz, two cities of Iranian Kurdistan. I was born here in Sanandaj (Sna) 55 years ago, I was born in a family that loved its nation too much. The Childhood phase is a sweet and an innocent level of life in which all of my hallowed reminiscences are found. You really sent me back to that era, when I was always listening to the passionate voice of Said Ali Asghar Kurdistany.

When did you take your first step to-wards art?

I was just 11, the Persian singer, Fardin Mohammed Ali, who was a close friend of my uncle, helped me so much. He came to Sanandaj (Sna) with my uncle's to record a movie for the cinema; I met him there for the first time. I really liked art and singing. The fact that I was not prepared for acting and I knew nothing about cinema, they specified one of the best roles for me to play. I could trust myself; it has been more than 40 years I am serving the art.

It is obvious that people in Kurdistan rec-ognize you only as a singer, while you have worked as a photographer, sculptor, author, poet and editor in dramas. What is the reason for this?

Well, the world of art is so large that whatever you do, you are still in the begin-ning. Maybe most of the people in northern Kurdistan know me only as a singer, but as I said I begun working in art through the cinema. Subsequently, I started working as a photographer, in the ages of 14-15 I was writing dramas, theaters and novels continu-ously.

Meanwhile, I have worked for radios for many years especially when I was young. At that time, I wrote many fictions and litera-

Ages of one-sided loveTranslated by: Karokh Nuraddin Shko Bakr

indoctrination was imposed upon the youth” Dr.Zafer Yoruk said.

“The strength of culture does not just depend on creating an internal texts, but also, depends on its reader “Bakhteyar Ali said. In the process of giving meaning to life and realizing its vague facts and truths, both the writer and reader have a great role. Can ev-ery writer and reader play their hard-ship role successfully? Of course not, the only category of writer and reader who can participate in the process of strengthen life is just real writers and readers. Real readers have many char-acteristics. The main three aspects are a strong desire, knowing more than one language, and openness to person-al change. The new Kurdish genera-tions’ readers have a serious shortage in all three aspects. Why are serious readers few in this generation? This question cannot be answered elabo-rately. Anyway, the dominant reasons are first, Kurdish youths are suffering from numerous and serious problems, the extreme one is their finance issue; when they graduate from colleges and institutions, they are employed at a very low salary. They cannot afford even a very simple life with it. In such awful circumstance, youth’s main con-cern is how to acquire more money in-stead of desire for knowledge. Second, the process of education is a process of indoctrination instead of teaching students how to think critically and in-dependently. Moreover this process of education is old-fashioned and useless, Furthermore, “The education system is not only discouraging student from reading, but is making them feel dis-gusting about reading!!” Sherzad Has-san believed.

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ture subjects that were published as theatri-cal series. In many of those theaters I have played important roles and I am still work-ing in this aspect.

Why is it that whoever sees or knows you, they do not think that you are 55 years old, they think that you are much older?

Yeah they are right, (laughing) who said that I am not 55 years, I am 110 years old.

What do you mean by that?

My dear, I am saying that I am older than 55 because I have worked both of day and night times of my life. I was always aware of everything happening in my sur-roundings, I was always burning for my art and works related to it, I have always had a lot of dreams and I still do. That is the reason why I look so older.

Is there any one who hasn't tasted the bitter brew of love?

Oh love, I am a lover from my being day up to this moment. I am a lover of beauty, nature, etc. But if you mean the love of girl, I have a lot of experience in that. However, my real love was for a girl that I was obsessed about her all the time, while she wasn't aware of my feelings toward her. This means that it was a one-sided love. But after many years I told her about my love for her, but unfortunately I was too late. By that time, I was already married, with all my respects to my wife because she is the mother of my four children and all of them are post-graduate students. But that girl still exists in my heart, this is love, it is a disas-trous event.

How do you interpret your time in terms of art, and have you been in contact with the Kurdish artists of your time?

The era which you are talking about was better than the present in many aspects, but the artistic steps weren't as they were supposed to be. Especially we, the youth of that time, there were a lot of hindrances preventing us from doing our works gener-ously. Since you are from Sna and this city has its own capacity in Arts, it’s been a base of Arts from a very long time.

That period you are talking about, was better in many ways, but the steps which were taken were not necessarily enough. Especially us as the young singers, there

were many reasons that we couldn’t finish our works, However we still helped each other even it was by a “praising”. It was a hard stage, hence it was beautiful, because we were always trying to find our way to-wards our Arts character, and I can say I started drawing my Arts map through that stage.

When was Abbasi Kamandi known widely?

From my first personal movie which was written and directed on my own, at that time it was a serious and precious project. Moreover it was the first Kurdish project shown from the theatre screens, which was the only movie in theatre in the city. I was 17 years old, whom people got familiar with Abbasi Kamandi. After this, a competition was held by Snas Radio station for young story writers, among tens of attendants, I was named as the first writer and this made my responsibility and job harder for my Arts and in serving my people as well.

When did you start singing and who has encouraged you to become a singer?

At first, I met the great artist “Hasan Kamkar” Kamkarans father in Sna radio station, after introducing myself as a poet and told him my voice was good for poetry, from then we got to know each other more, after hearing my voice he was astonished and decided to do something for me, unfor-tunately it did not work, he could not, help me. After meeting the great and dear Maser “Gusisha” who was from Russia, he was very generous, helped me a lot with record-ing my first song” Hay la kwey” in 1971, Since then I was known more and recorded some other songs which were published by cassettes and CD’s and introduced Abbas to people more.

Besides “Hay la kwe” your first song, and then “Guli Bana” in 1973 for the first time in Kurdish songs, you made a featur-ing song with “Shahen Talabani” what do you have to say about this?

Its obvious that before me, there were other singers making really good projects and steps and they should be appreciated, but for the first time, I wanted to do a fea-turing song with a female singer, My goal was behind the featuring song, it was trying to find a way how to show female singers

their ways of introducing themselves, this was my main goal. Thank God what we wanted worked out perfectly and success-fully. If I am not mistaken this was a very famous song among the people which was a simple song.

What is your observation for Kurdish music nowadays and its future?

In general, big steps have been taken, but we should not forget if we don’t be care-ful, Kurdish song and its Arts is in a danger-ous situation, origin is the most important fact for Arts everywhere. And we as Kurds, have a rich civilization and very deep dic-tionary, these things have to reflect in our Arts. Our Youth should protect themselves from foreign effects and work on origin, and then we can say that our steps are for-warding and progressing. When you look at countries like Balkan generally, India, Scotland, and some other countries espe-cially, are serving their Arts and music with their national Arts. By this, Kurdish music and Art evolves better and stays high as we can be proud of it.

After serving Kurdish songs and Arts for a very long time, what are your dreams now?

I dream that one day, my people, and my nation which is more than 40 million, will live under Holy Kurdistan flag waving on Holy Kurdistan with peace, honor, and safety, and then I wish to make concerts in all the Kurdistan cities. Especially “Sle-mani” city, because they have understood my Art very well, with my respect to every Kurd.

Sna is the city which has always been standing alive and awake, what do you have to say to this great city?

I was born in that city and I have all the worlds diaries in this city, and I am sure I will die in this city, but the only thing which is worth saying about that city is “ Sna is a corner piece of heaven which has been left on earth”

Translated From Gashbeen, a Kurdish Magazine

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ISSUE 2

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MAY 2008

Suffering has always been a gloomy misconception that people believed stood in the way of looking good and getting in shape. It’s amazing what people would do just to lose weight; they starve themselves, they over workout, and some people misuse food in ways that lead to anorexia.

Finding a solution to these weight problems is not that difficult, believe it or not, there are some simple steps that you can follow in order to avoid using ways that might cause health problems.

Tips for the girls:I’m a contemporary dancer,

working out for me doesn’t mean puffing myself up like guys; girls don’t need to look like Van Damme, right?! So ladies, if you want to get in shape you might be interested in doing some of the things I do:

- Know the right time to eat. There are certain times when the digestive system works better than others, like morning or noon. A healthy brunch (a meal between breakfast and lunch) can satisfy a person’s appetite for quite a while making salad more than enough for lunch.

- Know the right amount of food that you need to eat. It’s easy for people to eat some of their favorite fatty meals without having too much; just eat moderately and you won't have to worry too much.

- Eat slowly and don’t forget to chew your food thoroughly. When you eat slowly your digestive system will have enough time to settle with the right amount of food; and thus it will send intimation to the brain telling it that the

body has had enough food. Don’t forget that chewing the food wholly enables the stomach to digest it easily.

- A light daily workout plays a vital role in shaping the body. 20×3 sit ups a day, 30 push ups, and a 15-minute jogging doesn’t take much of a busy girl’s time. Walking is also an

important figure-friendly gesture that girls can offer their bodies; a 20-30 minutes semi-fast hike can save a girl from gaining about 6 kilos a year.

Tips for the guys:I’m a bodybuilder; I’ve been working

out since 2004 so I can say that I have enough information about working out and staying in shape. Before you start training you need to know two important facts: first, you need to be patient; your body wouldn’t grow muscled overnight. The changes would take about 4 or 5 months then you’ll start feeling attractive because the ladies will start looking at you; checking your guns out! Second, don’t try to puff yourself up like Arnold or Tyson; girls don’t really like that because it’s so huge that it looks scary.

- Before starting to workout you need to warm up for a while, and when you do start make sure that you drink enough water; working out makes you

sweat causing your body to lose a lot of water.

- Eat before and after training because your body needs proteins, vitamins, and minerals to build up your muscles. Healthy food is a must when you want to build your muscles; vegetables, fruit, and meat

are the main sources of bodybuilding ingredients.

- Avoid sugar and food that contain high amounts of fat and oil, and remember to stay away from all the artificial medicines and drugs that can pump up your body quickly as they have many negative results and side effects like cancer (God forbid), I’m sure that you

don’t want to regret having muscles.- Take your time when you

workout and don’t push your body over the limits. Try to find yourself a good coach to follow his/her instructions, incase you don’t have a coach then asking another bodybuilder (like me, uhm, uhm!) is a pretty good idea. According to my experience; working out for three days a week is enough for anyone to be reasonably muscular and healthy.

A final note for the ladies and the dudes:

Starvation is not the key to a healthy, shapely body. Our bodies need a certain proportion of nourishment, and if it doesn’t receive it; the body’s metabolism would malfunction leading to opposite results like gaining weight instead of losing it… We don’t really want that do we?!

Simple steps to get in shape without suffering from starvation and fatigue

Miriam MeriwaniRanj Abdulla

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T H E W I N D O W

ISSUE 2MAY 2008

When we look at the two words “love” and “betrayal” they are two oppo-site words and most people know the dif-ference and distance between them. Love is the fuel of life; it is the most beautiful feeling, and is a name of the most beauti-ful things. There is no deeper fulfillment after love, which can drop people to hap-piness and happy life. On the other hand betrayal is the ugliest thing that can drop us to our knees and make us believe that we will never trust anyone ever again.

A beautiful girl or a handsome young man can inspire a person to do just about anything, but it is their heart that reveals the character of the person. Therefore we should be aware that she or he can capture us through lies of love. She or he can be an instrument of the devil who wants to deceive us and lead us down to a trap that is meant for our destruction.

In the game of life, one of the big-gest players is our emotions. Feelings can make a person jealous, and words of love can make a soul willing to give anything in order to have that love. But when some-one you love betrays you, it hurts deeply and trust is a very hard thing to mend once it has broken. Usually one person wants to end a relationship, and the other one is often heartbroken and devastated at the

prospect of losing the one she or he loves. Obviously, it represents very vulnerable times for both, if both have integrity. Most of people that have been betrayed are trying to get through these vulnerable times by some ways such as, not blam-ing themselves and trying to reclaim their soul and be strong .The most important thing is to try to work it out and do not just give up their relationship and try to find a support group that shares the same situations. Talking is the best medicine; finding out that he or she is not the only one that had been betrayed, finding some-one to understand their feelings and just talk. That is the best support system.

When people are deceived and have lost their love, they do not want to start a new relationship or find another one so they do not carry forward those hurts, close down and become bitter. That is the real tragedy of betrayal, when people close down, become bitter towards life and they close their hearts. It does not have to hap-pen that way. People need to learn how to grieve about the hurt of betrayal so they can open their hearts again to another pos-sibility or another relationship.

In our society we are taught not to feel pain or hurt. Young men, especially, feel they are not strong if they feel pain or hurt. It is crucial that they allow them-selves to feel those vulnerable feelings, because they can not heal themselves un-less they are willing to feel them.

Diane Odegaro, a university teacher, said that she had been betrayed. She be-lieves that the hardest part of being be-trayed is getting a sense of abandonment or becoming lost. Her advice was “focus on God and learn how to forgive others when they hurt you. If we do not forgive we will become angry and bitter and we will lose something inside of us”.

A male university student in condi-tion not to be named stated that “I have betrayed and been betrayed, but I would rather betray a girl than she betrays me! And my advice for youngsters is to not let love be your master, you are the master of love!’

Najat, a foundation student said that

she had not betrayed and said “I think the hardest part is when you feel that the per-son you trust and love had betrayed you with someone else. My advice is; they should try to forget that person and be more careful the next time”.

Zozik M.Amin, a foundation student stated that he had been betrayed once by his friend who revealed his secrets and he was furious so it led to lose contact with him forever. He said that “when someone betrays you just forget it”.

Dler Najdat, another foundation stu-dent cleared that he had not been betrayed and commented that since betrayal is known as bad behavior, many people in most cases do not have the right to betray. Dler added that betrayal can hurt a feeling and break a heart “do not do it if it does trouble”.

Azheen Ziyad, a female student said that she has never betrayed someone and said “I think the hardest part is for you to trust someone while he/she disappoints you. And my advice to every girl/guy, is that they must have a strong personality so that no one can play by him/her as he/she wants. We don’t have to depend on any one until we know them very well and in order to forget this event they must try to change the place, if it couldn’t they must try to relax and read books or go out with friends, or recline to God and prayer”

One of the students, Nabaz Shwany, told the Window that he had not been betrayed. He thinks that the hardest part of being betrayed is when a guy finds out that his girlfriend has an affair with someone else. His advice was “ask your-self about anything that you do. Be honest with everyone especially with your part-ner. You should show your true personal-ity”.

As a girl who was betrayed in the past, Gala Sardar commented “I think I can’t mention which kind of betrayal is the hardest and has the most influence on my feelings and personality, because there are no differences between kinds of betrayal and I advice girls and guys that they have been betrayed to forget the person who has betrayed her or him. Because if a per-

Love and Betrayal

Karzan Hussein

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son does not have feelings of humanity, I won’t see her or

him as a human.”Muhammad sardar, another foun-

dation student had not been betrayed, but has an opinion concerning betrayal “when someone you love betrays you.” He said “start a new life.”

A foundation student, Naz, had never been betrayed because she chooses the specific friends, so she thinks that they have never betrayed her and her advice was “that you have to be careful when you choose friend and examine them in every way, this is for girls. In contrast for boys please don’t betray your girlfriend because today, this life is yours, tomorrow it is my life.”

Ashna, from foundation, told the Win-dow that she has been betrayed so many times. She believes that the worst kind of betrayal is when her best-friend has be-trayed her. Her advice was “never betray anybody even an enemy, because this de-stroys their lives and breaks their hearts so bad and even if somebody betrayed you never do the same… Just let it go”

Another girl from foundation who has never been betrayed, Bashaeer, thinks that when a person trusts someone and she/he does not deserve is the hardest thing to think about it. Her advice was “do not trust your friends or partners %100, be-cause everything may change even people who we love.”

I think people should be careful to

choose their friends and be more careful to choose their girl/boy friends. Because when a person loves someone and think that he /she owned and achieved every-thing, but when he /she loses his /her love everything that concerns him/her will be lost with that love.

According to a survey of the Window guys and girls have been be-trayed in different ways and it can not be mentioned if females or males betray more, because it depends on their person-ality and their emotions. Obviously every person has a different personality and a different set of emotions.

The “why” questions that I used to ask to the power that is above us, made me go to a place that is o so wonderful. I couldn’t deny it anymore. I was born in Kurdis-tan, my par-ents raised me up as a Kurd and in Kurd-ish I used to ask God why? As a child, I used to ask why? Why are Kurds not what they wanted to be? What have we done to “deserve” this? Why can we not be re-spected by a lot of people? I wanted to know the an-swers to these and a lot of other ques-tions. They could only be answered if I would be surrounded by Kurds, if I would see the beauty of Kurd-istan myself, touch it, feel it…

That’s why I left my studies, my

friends, my life in Europe and begun to build a life here in Kurdistan.

The freedom that is taken from me, the pain that it has given me, the wound that won’t stop bleeding. Kurdistan has made me come back. After a lot of tears I decided to come back to answer the ques-tions that I just couldn’t answer in a for-eign country.

It was like a dream when Kurdistan opened her eyes. Her family was happy that she was born and they were all so proud of her beauty. Advent ally they all start lov-ing her. Her family wanted the Kurdistan that they wanted for so long, a Kurdistan that belonged to them. But not only had her family seen the beauty of Kurdistan, every guest that came to visit her was surprised of her beauty. She couldn’t be what she wanted to be. They all wanted a piece of Kurdistan. But she was not very easy to get and her family didn’t want to give her up. They all tried their best but it

wasn’t enough.Every time

I see her I fall in love again. It is just so won-derful, almost indescribable. Just one look at her beauty can change the col-or of my day. If she is in pain I’m in pain, if she smiles, I’m smiling. The only thing I want is her be-ing happy.

She belongs to me and to ev-ery Kurd. Ev-ery Kurd that tried to protect her, every Kurd

that hasn’t given up, every Kurd that wants to be a Kurd.

Be strong and don’t give up on us.

M y l o v e

Shara Jamal

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Shara JamalTranslated from Dutch to English

Kurdistan, a land that looks like a bird without his wings,Kurdistan, my forbidden love,Kurdistan, my land like a broken glass in 4 pieces

I’m behind bars,My hands are tied with a chain,My eyes are blindfolded,They won’t allow me to talk,My name, is Kurd,

I was born in Mahabad, I was raised up in Amed,Qamishloo belonged to me I didn’t want to let it go,In Hewler I put my flag and secured my existence,

Kerkuk is my heart,Halabja is my bleeding wound,Al-anfall is my grief,These are my pain,A pain that will always exist,

Surround me with your love,Shine your light on me,Give me peace,Stay with me,

A night without a moon,A day without the sun,A life without warmth,A future without a view,

I buried Mem-u-Zin,I suffered Peshmerga,I’ve been written down by Barzani,And that’s when I came to life,

Nice to meet you, I’m Kurd,My name is Kurdistan,I’m the land of love,I’m the land of peace,I’m the land of battle,I’m the land of independence!

A night without a moon,A day without the sun,

ISSUE 2

T H E W I N D O W

MAY 2008

We often wonder what the right things to do are in order to attract someone that we really like; what should I wear? How should I speak? Should I lose weight? It’s a cliché and we all know it, but we can’t help trying hard to step up to the so called standards that are so common everywhere and supposedly guaranteed when it comes to impressing others.

The Window made a survey inside the university and asked both guys and girls about the things that really matter to them, and here they are:

-Looks: a lot of people care about their looks; it’s just a normal thing that most of us do not just to attract others, but because we’re naturally inclined to look good; it makes us feel better. The case is, looks can be more than deceiving; excessive attention from a person to his/her appearance might be a huge turn off to some people, it might be a sign of arrogance.

Most of the girls said that appearance doesn’t matter at all, and that love is blind. Okay, we know it’s a cliché, but that’s what they said and they emphasized on that point. One of the girls said that “guys that look extremely elegant and polished are the ones that scare the girls, simply because their looks dictate that they’re not trust worthy, and shallow.”

Some other girl said that “for someone to be loved he has to be beautiful from the inside and that inner beauty reflects on the outside making him more than handsome for the girl.”

“He doesn’t have to be Brad Pitt, but it wouldn’t harm if he’s clean and athletic.” Another girl said “Looks are somewhere in the background, so they don’t always affect my choice.”

When it came to the guys, we found them more demanding, more specific about looks, and that’s no wonder!

One of the guys said that he would like a girl who is “Indisputably beautiful; the kind of beauty that people can’t argue about, a girl with shocking beauty.” Whilst others settled for “a level of confidence to Pull off being hot even when she’s average looking.”

What caught our attention here is that guys don’t like make up at all, “A little make up” was repeated as I asked guys about their ideal-looking girl; “Makeup is listed under the acting category and thus it shows the girl’s lack of self-confidence and self-trust.” Watch out girls; the makeup thing doesn’t work as you planned, you gotta reside to plan B “Confidence.”

Another point that shocked us was the fact that a lot of guys prefer brunettes and dark girls over blondes, which brings up the question “Why girls want to go blonde then?” and thus it shows that blondes don’t really have all the fun!

-Personality: girls care about personality more than guys do. Most of the girls we met prefer trustworthiness and loyalty in guys more than good looks or money. One of the girls said “I wan a guy who can speak to me without making any sound, just in silence.” Sense of humor in a guy is so important, a lot of girls said that “Many guys in our university are so rude and obnoxious; they need to loosen up a little and take it easy.”

Simplicity and confidence are very essential in a girl’s personality; be your-self and don’t act. Pretending to be more feminine or sensitive is another turn off; it doesn’t do the job, sorry ladies!

One of the students made it clear that girls should know what they want, other-wise they shouldn’t bother lying to a guy and making him believe that she likes him “I want to a girl to be straightforward, don’t make fun of him or try to have a good time, make yourself clear and don’t play games.”

“Have a good spirit.” Another guy said “A good spirit and that’s it.”

The students had their share of ques-tions to be answered by others; here they are:

Questions from the girls:

• I really want to know about how can they organize their times, and how they look at girls generally?

• I would like to know about their at-titude towards our life today, and are they re-ally opened-minded or not, also I would like

to know if they believe in the equality be-tween man and woman.

• I want to know about their person-ality how do they feel or think!!! And they must know how to wear cloths; because it s the most important thing in men.

• I want to know that how many relationship he had? Or does he have right now? Is he always faithful? Or can he cheat easily?

• I want to know what they like in girls? And what do they hate? And what dose friendship mean to them?

• Why guys in our university are so tired?

• Do they take serious relationship or its just some thing for having fun?

• What’s guys’ weak point?• I want to know every thing about

them!• Do you have a girlfriend?

Questions from the guys:• Why do they look at guys too

much with not taking any actions?• How do they feel about guys?• Why do they always like to act?• Why do they always ask for rights,

and they have rights to do things more than guys.

• Can they actually love?• Why are they so selfish?• Do they have boyfriends?• I already know every thing about

them.• Do they have hearts? What’s in

them?!• Are you married?• Dose she love me?• Why do girls in our university al-

ways want to show of?

What people have in mind when it comes to falling in love!!!

Miriam MeriwaniRanj Abdulla

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ISSUE 2MAY 2008

The Window caricaturist: Jumana Hamed

47

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MAY 2008

Two boys have been best friends from primary school through university, and still are. They are opposite in personality and character. The shy boy's name is Pola, and the sociable boy's name is Aland. Pola is very shy and he doesn't have any friendships with his female relatives. Even in the past, when a girl would talk to him, he would turn pale, start stuttering, and sweat. But Aland has very good family relations with all his relatives. Aland knows how to talk to girls, and had very good relationships with them.

A while after graduation, Aland and Pola were sitting with each other. While Aland was talking to Pola, the bunch of paper in Pola’s hands slipped and all his papers fell to the ground. Aland tried to help Pola by collecting the papers with him. Suddenly he saw that all the papers were love poems which were in Pola’s handwriting. By this Aland found out that Pola was in love. Aland was also surprised that Pola was in love due to his shyness, and the fact that Pola didn't tell him about his love life. Pola confessed that he was in love with a beautiful girl named "Nadeen", who he met at a party, three months before. From that day on, he has been deeply in love with her. Pola told Aland that he continuously sent messages to Nadeen, and told her that he loved her, but Pola still hadn't told her who he was. Aland told Pola that he couldn't continue

this way and immediately took Pola’s cell phone and called Nadeen without Pola’s permission, and gave the cell to Pola. Nadeen picked up and with a gentle voice said, "Hello, hello". Pola got nervous and tried to talk but he couldn't, and dropped the cell phone. Pola begged Aland to talk to Nadeen instead of him. Aland felt sorry for Pola and talked to Nadeen, as if he was Pola. He told her that he was the one who sent all the love messages. Because Aland knew how to talk to girls and what to say, he had no problem talking to Nadeen. So this was their normal routine, where Pola continued to send to Nadeen messages, and Aland also continued to

talk to Nadeen on the cell phone.This went on for about a month,

when one day Aland told Pola that he wanted to talk to him about something

important. So when Pola and Aland met, Aland immediately told Pola that he has fallen in love with Nadeen. At first, Pola was shocked, and then his eyes became full of tears. Aland told Pola that this was his entire fault because Pola put him in this situation. They decided to explain everything to Nadeen, and let her decide what she would do. And they did, but Nadeen was shocked at the beginning she couldn’t stop her tears from falling. Nadeen decided to not talk to both of them because she thought that they had played a game on her. But Pola sent a poem to her that he wrote by himself which says:

I don’t ask you to love me moreI don’t ask you to take care of me

anymoreI don’t ask you to spend time with me

as much I think about itBecause I’m not the kind of guys that

you think about itForgive me that I don’t love you as

much as I did it beforeBecause you are not the same person

that I loved her beforeSo do whatever you want to do I don’t blame or begging you to not

to do But be aware that you cannot keep me

in this wayAnd you cannot ask me to go on in

this way

So Nadeen had asked for some time to think about it. In the period of time that Nadeen asked for, she continued with her relationship with Aland by sending messages and going out together. Aland couldn't take it anymore, and invited her to dinner one night. He asked for her hand in marriage. She accepted and they got married. But throughout their marriage, Nadeen continued messaging Pola. Aland discovered this because he found all Pola’s poems before and after marriage, in Nadeen’s closet. Aland was very confused; he didn't know what to do. He needed strong and effective advice, so he explained everything in a letter, to his old, best friend, "Meevan" (who lived in another country). Aland told Meevan that his life depended on his advice, and begged him to think it through thoroughly before answering.

This was Meevan’s letter:

Dear Aland, I wish I wasn't in this position, but

my advice is that when I marry someone, she is all mine, mentally, physically, and emotionally. But there is something missing in your marriage. Her continuing to message pola means that she is cheating on you. I think you should make up your mind, because what she wants is in you, and what she loves is in pola. You two complete each other.

With RegardsYour best friend Meevan

My Friend is in Love

Areen Jamal

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It’s not the fault of students if they fails, because the year ONLY

has 365’ days. Typical academic year for a stu-

dent:

1. Sundays-52, Sundays in a year, you know Sundays are for rest. Days left 313.

2. Summer holidays-50 where weather is very hot and difficult to study.Days left 263.

3. 8 hours daily sleep- 130 days GONE. Days left 141.

4. 1 hour for daily playing- (good for health) means 15 days. Days left 126.

5. 2 hours daily for food & other delicacies (chewing

properly & swallowing)- means 30days. Days left 96.

6. 1 hour for talking (man is a so-cial animal)-means 15 days. Days left

81.

7. Exam days- per year at least 35 days. Days left 46.

8. Quarterly, Half yearly and fes-tival (holidays)-40 days. Balance 6 days.

9. For sickness- at least 3 days. Re-maining days=3.

10. Movies and functions - at least 2 days. 1 day left.

11. That 1 day is your birthday.

How can you study on that day???!!! !!!!!!!

Balance = 0

“Then how can a student pass ??”

Source: The Internet

1- When the batteries of a re-mote control are running out, you will push the buttons harder. Do you think the batteries will be recharged by do-ing so?

2- When you realize that you are driving in a wrong way, you will turn down the radio volume. Do you believe it will show you the correct way?

3- You say free gifts. Are there gifts that people have to pay for?

4- When you are home and it is raining, Why will you ask (Is it raining out?), has it ever rained inside home?

5- When you read on a wall (be careful, just painted), and still you will try it by your finger. Does the painter have to swear?

6- When the elevator gets late you will push the button several times. Why? Do you think you will shame it and it will come sooner?

7- While you are feeding a child, you will open up your mouth, why? Are you eating or the child?

8- Why do you think you need 10 more minutes sleeping every morn-ing when you wake up?

9- When you are amongst peo-ple and you hear a cell phone ringing, you will take out your cell phone. Are you the most important person among them?

10- Why you are smiling now? Do you think I am looking at you while you are reading this?

How can students pass? 10 Questions for a wise but crazy

philosopher

Translated from Arabic: Ardalan A. Jalal

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Can you introduce UKHSU? UKHSU is a newly formed student

organization which was established in January 2008. It is the only channel rep-resenting the student’s body. Every stu-dent at UKH is automatically a member of UKHSU. The way this organization functions is different from the other sev-enteen student organizations in Kurdis-tan, each one of them is supported by a political party, and they work for a par-ticular group of students. But, UKHSU is functioning more broadly; it represents its members equally regardless their na-tionality, religion, political affiliation or any other distinction; equal opportuni-ties for all. 84% of the students at UKH participated (voted) in its first process of elections, and elections are held annu-ally. The elected body is called the Union Council which consists of a President and six heads of departments, and they function in accordance with its constitu-tion which is under the process of a ref-erendum.

The administration of the UKH has

been changed, how does it influence stu-dents and can you tell us about the recent change in brief?

In my and the majority of the Stu-dents’ opinion, Professor Vali was a right person for his post. His sort of character is needed in a place such as Kurdistan and Iraq where we are in a transitional period in all considerations. But, he is replaced whether we like it or not. We have to be empirical rather than being normative and we put our university above any individu-al; we have to be realistic and live in pres-ent so as to improve and develop.

Now, Robin Brims (our new rector) is appointed, we as the Student Union will work with him in a loyal and honest man-

ner so as to give him a clear vision of the atmosphere of UKH. Mr. Brims is a deci-sion maker and with no hesitation, he was flourishing in his other profession and I am sure that he came here from England to be successful and make himself proud; his being so as the rector would breed the whole universities success.

It is true that Mr. Brims is authorita-tively in charge of UKH, but it is also up

to all bodies to strive for maintaining the highest standards possible. We should not forget, the student, academic and admin-istrative bodies are together making up a university, and the reputation of it. Also, government officials should not interfere with the affairs of UKH except the initia-tor and the governing board.

What do you think of the PM’s huge investment on UKH?

Mr. Nechirvan Idris Barzani is not just supporting UKH as the PM, but rather as an individual. For this reason, I believe that H.E pays a special attention to this university and he always intends to make the right decision. An independent scru-tiny team directly linked to the PM would be essential to monitor UKH since H.E is hugely investing on this project.

Government officials should not interfere with the affairs of UKH

President of UKHSU, Saman Abbas:

By: The Window Staff

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Next to the much confrontations and changes undertaken this year in the Uni-versity of Kurdistan - Hawler (UKH), the student union (UKHSU) despite dif-ficulties at some points have been able to arrange and organize events. Some of which remain memorable for years ahead, and form a part of the journey of our uni-versity life.

Like any university in the region, UKH also held an introduction party, even though we were well into the year, with student performances, activities dance and music of all cultures shook the large High City Hall.

It was also an honor this year to have numerous guest speakers and visits to the university. The first formal guest speaker and forum undertaken in the UKH audi-torium was December 6th, with the pres-ence of Mr. Felah Mustafa and Dr. Dindar Zibari followed not long after, discussing political issues and situations.

Valentine’s Day was also a special oc-casion in the University, where students assisted in decorating the cafeteria on February 13th. The following day the col-ored dominated the atmosphere, the cafe-teria turned into a party hall with the loud music and balloons, creating an ‘affec-tionate’ atmosphere. In class then out to a second party in the auditorium later that afternoon for further entertainment orga-nized by a group of our own students.

In mid of crisis to the Kurdistan Re-gion, the university students remained patriotic and devoted to their beloved nation, where a peaceful demonstration was organized by the students outside the university lasting approximately half an hour in the time where Turkey’s cross border operations took place. With no doubt it was a ‘gloomy’ time for many of us, but for young youths to show interest and peacefully demonstrate not only ex-hibited our university to the community but also showed Kurdistan has an upcom-ing faithful generation of loyal citizens. March arrived, and it was a busy month for all; prior to the Newroz break it was a hectic month; the Kurdish uprising was celebrated in the university where the caf-

eteria was dominated by patriotic music and songs.

Women’s day was also an event in March with the presence of many per-sonnel of governmental and nongovern-mental organizations, it was a colorful day, girls in traditional Kurdish clothing, where with much cooperation and group work an occasion was organized by the students for the students in a day that was a credit for the University to consider, to illustrate in today’s society despite wom-en’s positions we continue to rejoice their presence working to promote equality and further justice for females.

With delight we warmly welcomed the English departments in the univer-sities of Koya and Slemani where they were introduced to this new establish-ment, in addition to this a new friendship formed. Koya, then, invited some of our students in their annual picnic to Dukan; which was the beginning of a great rela-tionship between other universities within the region.

Not too long after, there was the first UKH picnic to Barzan, despite the long road trip it was an enjoyable experience by many. The exceptional scenery and wa-terfalls in the mountainous landscape was worth the long bus ride, not surprisingly was all spent with music and dance.

A special screening of the film ‘Half Moon’ with the presence of the renowned Kurdish filmmaker, Bahman Ghobadi took place in late April, it was a differ-ent experience to invite some one from in such a field to the university, who is inspiring in his own way.

A football league was organized and it is going to be held annually, where teams from different departments of UKH com-pete one another. Moreover, we will start to challenge other universities. Since it is the start of the student union and stu-dent activities, UKHSU will continuously work on creating sports and recreational activities.

Visit to parliament was made by the undergraduate politics department with special meeting for our students by Mr. Adnan Mufti, and Mr. Kamal Kirkuki. Mr.

Kirkuki was open to answer the questions in the meeting lasting approximately two hours in the article 140 room. Students of Business and management are also orga-nized to take a scientific trip to Duhok for two days visiting major companies and businesses as well as the University of Duhok.

The list continues of the many ac-tivities taken place, including the visit of mentor to the university who assisted varies students facing any confrontations, there is also a survey study undertaken to see if there is need to change the cafete-ria and food in the university, this change will take place to suit the students require-ments and desires.

The year, even in snapshots, was in-teresting, enjoyable and unique in its own ways with the ups and downs, as the cur-tains close and the library has more vis-its, exams just around the corner, and we await for the next study year, the Student Union along with assistance from many other students were able to create memo-rable, enjoyable, educating experiences, this is an accomplishment, considering it is the first year of its establishment, the journey has begun…

Snapshots of theUKHSU activities

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UKH gives a gift to parliament speaker, Adnan Mufti

Student Union Elections

Bahmani Qubadi screened Half Moon at UKH for the first time

Students of IR meet with Deputy of parliament speaker, Kamal Karkuki

Celebrating 8 March, at UKH

UKH fresher’s party

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Felah Mustafa discusses KRG foreign Policy at UKH

ICG deputy director, joost Hilterman gives a lecture

Koya University invites UKH students

KRG UN coordinator, Dindar Zebari gives a seminar

UKH students protest Turkish incursion

Kurdistan Tv hosts 4 students of UKH

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It is not surprising to say I am very happy to write about a student organization in the Kurdistan region in English. In Kurdish, student has two equivalent words “khwendkar” and “qutabi”. These two words have been divided by the political parties like other things in my region. If I say “Qutabi” readers think I have sympathy with KDP (Kurdistan Democratic Party) and “Khwendkar” belongs to PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan). Surely, most of you agree with me that the reason is simple and to a large extend is “absurd” but it is one of the bitter facts we, Iraqi Kurds, have experienced under the rule of two main Kurdish parties in Kurdistan and still this division of concepts is pending. Despite the unification of the two administrations and an ‘unhappy marriage’ with one another, the two political parties are not united over using some words in their discourse.As a result it has led to misunderstanding and bewilderment among the people. The Student organization which I am talking about here is a new model which emerged at the University of Kurdistan – Hawler (UKH) just recently. The student union of UKH is an independent, self-governing student organization which works in groups to solve student’s problems and aims to create the best possible environment inside the university.

Every student of UKH is automatically a member of the student union which means they can use any of the facilities it offers. The union’s main mission is to

represent the students, see to their welfare and advocate for their rights. The union is dedicated to the promotion of academic excellence and success for students in their studies at UKH. It is carrying the voice of students regardless of political position, race, gender, origin or religious background.

Why a new Model? Yes it is a new model which can be an example for other Student Organizations in the other universities in Kurdistan. Student Union is a new initiative of University of Kurdistan – Hawler, and was established by a democratic process at the University to carry the real voice of the Students. In a democratic process with a capital (D) the students participated in the election and voted for their candidates on the base of merit and ability rather than political background and friendship. The Student Union of UKH is small, but it can play a strategic role in molding the intellectual and civic consciousness of students. It serves as fertile grounds that build and nurture the character and dynamisms of young people to search for the truth and contribute to the betterment of society. UKH Students through their Union can link the intellectual discourse in the classroom to society.

In short I am optimistic, because there is a will to change in my country, even in the minds of some distinguished officials, above all H.E Nechirvan Barzani, the current prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). People should appreciate this will to change. One of his valued initiatives is the University of Kurdistan – Hawler, which is a starting a point of change. Its graduates are expected to hold key positions in the KRG. UKH students are being taught to have critical minds, but a criticism we learn from our professional foreign professors is different from what we see today in Kurdistan. With any constructive criticisms we have to present the alternatives and durable solutions. Although Corruption is every where, which no one can deny, praising the far reaching projects of the KRG also is a moral duty of Kurdish individuals.

It is obvious, although UKH Student Union is still in its infancy it

has presented many professional and useful activities to the “UKHians,” such as hosting distinguished politicians and ministers to talk with the students face to face. Yet the Student Union has not a budget, place, and needed internal support. Unfortunately we, students of UKH, all as a part of the Kurdish society are used to always asking and not giving! But it does not indicate that no one has the right to ask, this organization is first of all intended to serve the students and its slogan has been “students for students” since its inception. UKH in general and its Student Union require internal and external support. Here I call for mass support for this unique model and again we must not forget that we are expected to present something different and have a say in the matters of our society. Our concern as members of the SU is the success of this model and not personal interests at all, because its not “rule to die”. It is chosen by students according to the provisional constitution, that is going to be approved through a referendum by UKH students.It may oust any member of the student Union any time they desire. Students will not be effective every where if they have a poorly organized union. Every student organization should be granted strong support by students and university as well. Student Union is the only student organization far from any political parties in the region. So we have to have a sentiment of faith in endorsing the national initiatives like UKH and its Student Union. The reputation of UKH reflects our reputation. The success of this university will reflect the success its graduates will achieve in future, and a positive and healthy running of this university and its Student Union gives an indication of the internal contentment of its students and staff.

Before closing, I would like to ask everyone in the KRG to support this national project of the PM. The UKH is a far reaching mission to the future of a nation. let's support it...

UKH Student Union; a model needs support

Hemin Hussein

heminhussein@yahoo.com

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I n f o r m a t i o n T e c h n o l o g y

In the first part of this article, we discussed the structure of ASP and its components, while in this part we will start developing our first web application using ASP language. Before developing the application you must have installed Microsoft IIS on your computer, and have a basic understanding of HTML, especially in forms.The application we will create is a login page which checks a username and a password against two stored strings. First create a new HTML file by using Front page, Dream Weaver or Notepad then save it as ‘login.html’. Put two textboxes and a submit button inside the page, and set the

method of the form to ‘Get’ and the action to ‘check.asp’. ‘Check.asp’ is the page where the username and the password will be checked.

After completing the login page we have to create the ‘check.asp’ page. Do the same steps as above to create a new HTML file and save it as ‘check.asp’. Between the ‘body’ tags of the HTML file write the following codes:

We can retrieve the username and the password the user typed

in the login page by using the request object which is passed from the form in login page to check.asp. For example the ID of the textbox in the login page, which is used for entering username is ‘user’, we can take the value of it in check.asp file by using this code: request.querystring (“user”)The password can also be taken by the same way.

(Strings which passed from the login page to check.asp can be seen in the address bar of your browser)

After that you can assign the query strings to variables to be stored in the memory or you can directly compare it to the stored strings.If the username and password is correct the application prints “You successfully logged in” on the screen by using the response object, if it is not true it prints “Wrong username or password”. Finally put all your files inside the wwwroot folder.

Of course it is not a good way to check usernames and password by storing each user and password in a file. For example some web sites have thousands of users and it may take a long time to store all the usernames and passwords in a file, so the best way is to store all usernames in a database and then automatically connect your application to that database to check the users.

Another issue concerns with what happens after the user got a “successful login” message. Usually in most of the web applications when the user signs in his/her UserID would be stored in a session (sessions can used to store information about users and can be passed through all pages easily) then redirected to a page where only users can enter.

This was one of the simplest ways to check a user in a web application. In the next parts of this article I will try explain sessions and connecting of ASP pages to various databases.

Rahel Kareem

ASP Programming

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Geo technology is the information system which supports and works with geographical information. Geo technol-ogy has 3 main types:

1-GIS 2-GPS3-Remote sensing GIS is the abbreviation of Geographic

Information system. “A geographic infor-mation system is an information system that is designed to work with data, ref-erenced by spatial or geographic coor-dinates. In other words, a GIS is both a database system with specific capabilities for spatially-reference data, as well as a set of operations for working with data. In a sense, GIS may be thought of as a higher-order map.”

Geographic because data collected is associated with some location in space.

Information because attributes, or the characteristics (data), about the space is what we want to learn about. Information because there must be a tie from the in-formation to the geography in a seamless operation.

GIS which needs people work on it and collect data and going to some pro-cedure on some different type of machine and hardware adding to a database and software, it creates GIS information.

We can say the visual representation of Data is GIS .This is the most popular in-

formation technology subject of all world technologies. GIS which is used in all kinds of filed work like medical, military, intelligence, education, agricultural, con-struction and industry.. etc. also is related with all other IT topics like networking, web design, databank.. etc.

The building block GIS is working on is X and Y or East and North or Longitude and Latitude, which gives you complete reference of location of any thing on a ba-sic map. In addition to the third dimen-sion which is Z or elevation which gives a third dimension of area.

When we say X and Y it means every thing related to location.

Those 2 points are come from the Earth Grid line which is Longitude and latitude. It has many different types of measurement to show X,Y the most com-mon type is UTM. Universal transverse

mercator also has many types like UTM/Sad or UTM/NAD…etc and Decimal de-gree which is degree minute second. XY units come from different types of projec-tion. When one point XY is projected it represents only 1 point on map. The XY of point are taken by GPS (Global Po-sitioning system) or Total station. Both machines are using tracking for XY are linked with different satellites which each satellite cover a part of world. GPS has many types. Some of them are connected with 12 satellite called 12 channel GPS like Etrex GPS, and another type which connects with 24 satellites and very accu-rate GPS such as Garmen GPS.

The main using of GIS:

GIS is very useful for many kinds of field work when you have good data. I mean when you have a database contain-ing spatial information (XY) with all re-lated information you want visually rep-resent on MAP or you want analyzed by GIS software or find and search informa-tion it will be magical for example:

1- For transportation GIS has a big role to show all the main roads and sub roads not just with tourists, but for im-

proving and construction. Also it has a big role to specify suit location for creating metros line or car moving.

2- For industries like oil, GIS lets you find gaps in pipelines and determines suit area and distances which pipelines go through.

3- For rebuilding and construction, without GIS its very complex to plan or build a city or a collective town. For this reason we can see many cities in Kurd-istan have problems with water resourc-es (hydrological problem), power line, road… because of not using GIS in plan-ning and implementation. As an example for electric and power lines if we use GIS, each building or generator has its own ID number. When any problem. In any short-age have in this area happens by MAP you can find exact generator or building problem and how to solve this problem. In this area or building, visually you can see what’s going on there. As shown in the following picture that is classified of each road and gardens to see and plane for changing and adding or constructing..

4- For medical purposes when the patient calls the hospital for emergency case. The ambulance selects the nearest point and nearest road to get to the patient to hospital. And for finding area contami-nated with specific diseases and how to start to control …etc.

5- For statistical analysis : GIS can do any type of analysis on data represent-ed on a MAP for example

6- GIS crime analysis: which means when you have spatial information of all cities connected with zip codes and all houses and names of population and related information like finger print, are added to a database to find the name of a crime it will very easy to find the location and house of crime as it’s very common in US and UK, Germany, Italy….etc.

In Italy, the crime analysis unit was tasked with performing a geographic workload analysis for the department. Making use of GIS tools available with the newly implementing GIS system, the city was divided into 4 geographical districts, each made up to 2 smaller geographical

What are Geo Technologies and GISs?

Dashti Muhammad

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zones. Each district is commanded by a police captain and each zone by 1 police man. The project is complex but the final product, coupled with an aggressive crime mapping approach targets problematic ar-eas. It changed the way police work was done within the city.

7- For agricultural purpose GIS can show characteristics of land. Such as type of clay in each of land, and which type of agricultural production is suitable.

Component of GIS:1-GeoDatabase: the database which

used inside GIS or out side GIS is called GeoDatabase. GeoDatabase are normal databases which served by database soft-ware like Microsoft SQL server, Micro-soft Access, mySQL or Oracle filed are special for spatial data.

2-GIS software: there is much soft-ware for GIS mapping data, such as Map-maker, MAPCAD, and Arc View….etc.

3- MAP sources information which may be raster type like remote sens-ing (which provides high quality of im-ages taken from satellites we can see on Google earth) it is not served by GIS soft-ware; it is prepared by satellite but recti-

fied by GIS software. Or may be vector type which is served by GIS software and it is editable.

4-GPS (Global poisoning system) for collecting coordinates of each location.

5-Main server or storage provides other GIS users update and uploading or

downloading GIS data (Vector data) di-rectly or indirectly from server or by FTP or HTTP.

GIS in Kurdistan As we know GIS is a very important

subject for planning and implementation projects. However so far in Kurdistan there is no GIS center. GIS are used, par-ticularly in small corners in many organi-zations. But not enough GIS for construc-tion, analysis.. etc.

Problems for GIS in KurdistanAs I mentioned so far there is no GIS

center to support ministries in Kurdistan. Also GIS needs important requirements to be used properly which are:

1- Standardizing name of cities, quar-ter, town, village. Not different types of spelling and some of them have 2 names.

This is going to be a problem for GIS.It means every thing belonging to a

specific ID (zip code) of location 2- Using standardized number for

each location. Creating zip codes for each location, like in European countries.

3- Having a proper Geodatabase for

managing GIS data.4- Right website for sharing informa-

tion of GIS and mapping information.

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Today with the incredible speed of technology, it has become an important factor for humans to cope with and make use benefit of it in the best possible way. If we look back, in the last decade we no-tice what impacts the tape recorder made for humans; by the end of the 90s we saw how this generation died and was replaced by CDs and DVDs which also began to expire and was latter substituted by new technologies. Currently, the same thing is happening to TVs, computers, and other forms of telecommunication.

One of the major human inventions was mobile phones which completely changed our world.

In a very short time the mobile has made communication faster and easier.

Right now anywhere and everywhere you can contact anyone with just pressing few buttons, and it has not stopped there it is going further and further. It has now be-come easier to interact in many different ways to the surrounding, things like tak-ing photos, video calls, listening to music and sending files to someone are few as-pects of the modern day mobile phones.

One other example which has a very serious impact on our life is the banking technology.

The new banking technologies give the ability to humans to manage their

money in very flexible and appropriate ways, things like credit and debt cards have helped humanity in many aspects of their life.

Right now you don’t need to carry a heavy wallet in your pocket; you don’t need to think on how to exchange money when you go abroad; you don’t need to go to your company’s cashier and wait to get your salary to be paid to you by hand; you can even buy something from a store without visiting it by simply going on-line. These, along with many other things are all the advantages of this plastic card which has been gifted to us by modern technology.

In Kurdistan we were behind the rest of the world by decades until 2003, when the doors opened to Kurdistan and we be-gan to bring new technologies to our land, having an advantage in that we brought the ready made latest technologies. In an-other words we skipped the experimental periods of the rest of the world receiving the final products on our doorstep.

For example, we started to implement the latest mobile technologies, so today the cost of a minute call to anywhere around the world are the same as most of the top leading countries, things happened very fast, the people who live in Kurdis-tan don’t feel it but when you study these new technologies you notice how lucky we are.

Still if we look to the banking system in Kurdistan we see that we are far behind the rest of the world, this is not our fault, because such a system depends on a lot of factors which is not our concern here.

Let’s come back to the title of this ar-ticle and try to understand by what means and why we need such a system.

• Mobile, we all know is a device used for communication.

There are some facilities with the mo-bile phone device which must be high-lighted.

- Top-up cards: you buy in any shop a card has a pin number on the back which you enter into your phone, you get the money you paid transferred to your phone’s balance in order to be able to make calls.

• Credit card: a plastic card usual-

ly you receive this from your bank, when you open an account with them, with this card the bank gives you a limited amount of credit that you can spend without hav-ing any money in your account and you pay back the amount in a certain period. However, if you fail to pay it back in that period they charge you interest. There are also other types of cards like (Debt card, Cash card etc…)

The idea behind this article is to com-bine both tools and their facilities so that they can be used together.

This is not new and it’s already been implemented in many countries like Japan where they use this idea in a very efficient and more complicated way.

As I mentioned, we are lucky that we can use the latest ready made technologies in Kurdistan but before talking about the detail of these technologies let us look at some of the advantages, because I’m sure the first question we will see is why we need this.

1- People will be encouraged to learn about the banking system

2- No need to carry a lot of cash for shopping

3- Care about the mobile number and personal details

4- The interaction which will be in-troduced between mobile companies and big retailers

5- Security, as you no longer need to carry cash with you

6- The assurance that your payment is recorded somewhere

7- Promotions and offers can be given based on the expenditure in more efficient ways

8- The use of the mobile facilities in more appropriate ways

Its time now to get an idea on how this system works, with two examples or two facilities, the first one is the Credit trans-fer, this is a new facility has been provid-ed by some companies, they let you share the money you have with other people and transfer it to them via text massage, with a small fee.

The second facility is to pay for an item by your mobile; some companies right now charge their customers a certain amount of money to pay their monthly internet connection fee. This is done by sending a text message to a specific num-

Mobile – Credit Card

Govand S.KadirIT Department

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ber and receiving confirmation via a text reply, and then you have your connection activated immediately.

Our idea is the combination of both. By the agreement between the mobile

company and the retailer they can arrange the payment of the purchased items via mobile, and this can be done as follows.

1- After scanning the purchased items for the customer and revealing the total amount to be paid the cashier will ask about the method of payment, if the

customer wants to pay via mobile it de-pends on the setup agreement of the sys-tem. It can follow different ways:

• The Customer can use their mo-bile to enter the total to be paid and send a text message to their provider and get the amount deducted from their mobile credit.

• The retailer may have a special mobile device that requires the user to enter their ID with the amount required to be paid and the provider confirms on the same device by a text reading: ‘con-firmed’.

• Other methods are also possible

and it can be arranged between the two parties.

2- once the customer paid for their items a record will be registered on the re-tailer’s database in which they provide a receipt for the customer and at the end of the sales period they can take this record to the mobile company and get their sales cash back.

3- There are certain things which should also be arranged, for example the customer should make sure they have

enough Cash in their mobile otherwise they encounter some charges and the sale procedure will not go through. Also the mobile provider should check for the ac-count credit before preceding the sale.

4- Both the mobile and the retailer can make some small amount of charge for this service and it will not effect the customer, for example customers can be offered 1 or 2% discount when they use this method, hence, the charge will not ef-fect on their total payment.

5- Retailers will highly benefit by:• Preventing cash problems• Have some record about their

customers so they provide promotions • Have a record about what items

have been sold more and to whom so they service their customers better.

6- The mobile companies also ben-efit by having their services used widely and provide them with a huge cash flow.

Although in the trail on initial period there will be a lot of problems because of the unsolicited use in our society and the maximum top up card we have right now.

However, this can be changed and they need a lot of assurance from the mobile company for large amounts of ‘top ups’.

In summary using this technology will help people in addition to realizing the importance of keeping personal data and caring about their mobiles. Meanwhile it is providing another method to learn more about modern banking technologies.

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If you want your name to be shown with your computer properties, please follow these steps:

1.open Notepad2.write these informations,for example[General] Manufacturer=The Window Model=Magazine [Support Information] Line1=UKH Line2=www.thewindow.ac Line3=thewindow_magazine@yahoo.com

3.save the file to this directory:c:\windows\system32*Note:the file name should be OEMINFO.INI

4.now,right click on your computer and click properties (on

your desktop)5.you will see the information you have entered before

BRANDING WINDOWS WITH YOUR NAME

Meran Muhammad

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