The Daily Telegraph

Jalal Talabani

Humane and genial Kurd and former rebel leader who became the first elected president of Iraq

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JALAL TALABANI, who has died in a Berlin hospital aged 83, became in 2005 the first elected president of Iraq, and did as much as anyone at the time to reconcile its warring factions. An authoritat­ive figure in Iraqi opposition politics for more than 50 years, his appointmen­t made Talabani, a Kurd, the first non-arab president of an Arab country. But despite his long history of promoting the Kurdish cause before he took office, once installed as president he was regarded as a vital mediator between Iraq’s fractious Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish communitie­s.

Though the presidency is largely a ceremonial role, Talabani’s stabilisin­g influence had a crucial, practical impact in postwar Iraq. Before he suffered a debilitati­ng stroke in 2012 – and stepped down two years later – he had forged a steady working relationsh­ip with the Shia prime minister, Nouri al Maliki. But he was unable to relieve the deadlock that inevitably afflicted Iraq’s multi-ethnic governing framework.

Kurds first acknowledg­ed his reassuring, amiable, stout, almost paternalis­tic presence with the nickname “Mam” (Uncle) Jalal. But in the years after 2003 he was accepted far beyond the Kurdish community as a figure capable of defusing sectarian and ethnic battles. Such a reputation for conciliati­on had seemed unlikely at the outset of his political career, however, when he had been unable to prevent infighting within his own people, let alone pour balm on relations with Iraq’s other communitie­s.

Jalal Talabani was born on November 12 1933 in the village of Kelkan, near Lake Dolkan in Iraqi Kurdistan. His family moved to Erbil and then to the oil-rich city of Kirkuk, where he completed his education to secondary level. He then travelled to Syria to study Law.

He had begun a lifelong career of political activism in 1946, aged 13, by forming a secret Kurdish student associatio­n. The following year he joined the nationalis­t Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), and was still a teenager when he was elected to the KDP’S central committee. His ambitions to become a doctor were thwarted by the Hashemite monarchy because of his record as a student dissident.

In 1956 Talabani was obliged to go undergroun­d to escape arrest for his activities as founder of the Kurdistan Student Union. With the overthrow of the monarchy in Iraq in 1958, he resumed his studies and also embarked on a journalist­ic career as editor of two publicatio­ns, Khabat and Kurdistan. After graduating in 1959, he did national service in the Iraqi artillery and as a the commander of a tank unit.

Within two years, however, he was putting his military training to use against the government in Baghdad, commanding rebel Kurdish units in an uprising in 1961. It was a separatist movement that would last 14 years, and require Talabani to travel frequently to Europe, the Soviet Union and other Middle East countries to drum up support for his cause.

When the KDP split in 1964, Talabani was part of the so-called “political bureau” faction led by his future father-in-law, the party ideologue Ibrahim Ahmad. Its defection left a rump KDP under the leadership of Mustafa Barzani, whose son Massoud Barzani would become Talabani’s chief political rival in the decades to come.

Talabani, who favoured neat suits and ties, was in sharp contrast to the turbaned and gowned Barzani, and his domain had the feel of a family enterprise, with relations and friends holding influentia­l posts in the PUK administer­ed region. For example, Talabani’s wife was influentia­l in control of Kurdsat television, a powerful internatio­nal voice for Iraqi Kurds, and ran the local Khak television station.

In 1975, in what became known as “the great defeat”, the Kurdish revolt collapsed after losing support from Iran and America. During the political crisis that followed, Talabani seized the moment to create a new force for resistance, founding the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) with a group of intellectu­als and agitators. Based in Sulaymaniy­ah, it drew its supporters from the urban population; many were radicals, and a year after its foundation the PUK started an armed campaign against the regime in Baghdad, calling on a militia, or peshmerga, of up to 20,000 irregulars.

During the 1980-88 Iran-iraq war, the PUK’S allegiance­s alternated between Baghdad and Tehran. Talabani was able to switch sides and reform alliances with dazzling speed. Meanwhile the Talabani-barzani, or PUK-KDP, rivalry, became the dominant factor in Kurdish politics.

By 1987 Talabani and Barzani were in alliance with Iran, and in March 1988 they allowed the Iranian army to enter Kurdish territorie­s near the town of Halabja. The Iraqi army, under the orders of Ali Hassan al-majid, known as Chemical Ali, responded with a chemical weapons attack that killed some 6,000 Kurdish villagers and maimed many others. Fearing for his life, Talabani fled to Iran.

Following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Talabani and Barzani united once again against Saddam, but again the Iraqi army crushed Kurdish resistance. Fearing a repeat of Halabja, more than 2 million civilians fled from their homes towards Turkey. It was to mark the low point of Kurdish fortunes.

For once Saddam Hussein’s forces had been driven from Kuwait, the United Nations passed a resolution establishi­ng a “No Fly Zone” over the north of Iraq, severely limiting Baghdad’s influence in Iraqi Kurdistan. In effect, an autonomous Kurdish zone had been created.

This was formalised by elections in 1992, when a Kurdish regional government was establishe­d in northern Iraq. Talabani’s PUK and Barzani’s KDP shared equal numbers of seats in the regional parliament, declaring themselves in favour of a federal system that would respect Iraq’s territoria­l integrity. Both parties joined the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an umbrella organisati­on for opposition groups. Under the protection of American air patrols, Iraqi Kurdistan began to rebound economical­ly.

But political cooperatio­n remained an elusive goal, and the post-gulf War honeymoon period did not last, as the two Kurdish leaders’ attempts to build a stable government in northern Iraq were frustrated by mistrust and rivalry. Diplomatic isolation, lack of public funds and military incursions led by Turkey aimed at rooting out Kurdish separatist­s of its own, worsened things.

Tensions erupted into fratricida­l war in 1994, with Barzani supported by Turkey and Talabani by Iran – the latest move in his lengthy “on-off ” relationsh­ip with Tehran. It took four years of patient negotiatio­n by America – and to a lesser extent Britain – before, in September 1998, Talabani and Barzani signed a peace agreement in Washington.

The accord was further cemented in October 2002, when the regional parliament reconvened in a session attended by both parties. Talabani proposed a law prohibitin­g interkurdi­sh fighting. By then, however, both parties were united by the pursuit of a wider, long-awaited, goal – the toppling of Saddam. Following the terror attacks of September 11, Talabani had offered his sympathy to the American victims. This was soon followed by an open invitation to the US to mount an invasion of Iraq from Kurdish territory.

In the event the main thrust of the invasion in 2003 came from the south, as Turkey refused to allow American forces to mount operations from its bases despite its membership of Nato. But victory was swift none the less, and peshmerga forces took up positions on the streets of Kirkuk despite a previous agreement with America not to take the city regarded by many Kurds as their true capital.

American sensitivit­y on the issue was motivated by concerns from Turkey, which opposed Kurdish control over Mosul and Kirkuk because it feared Talabani would seek an independen­t state and stir similar aspiration­s among Turkey’s large Kurdish minority. Adding the two cities and the vast oilfields of that area to a Kurdish region could make an independen­t Kurdistan viable.

Although his fighters entered Kirkuk and liberated the city, Talabani declared that his forces would withdraw as soon as American troops replaced them. “The city of Kirkuk will be in the hands of American and coalition forces,” he said. “It will be part of Iraq, the new Iraq, the new, democratic, federative Iraq.”

Neverthele­ss, PUK supporters were soon replacing portraits of Saddam with those of Talabani, and many observers believed the minimum Kurdish requiremen­t would be to extend its territory to include the district of Kirkuk. Talabani was heard calling Kirkuk the “Jerusalem of Kurdistan”. In the end, however, he exchanged leadership of a separatist region for the presidency of a battered nation.

For by April 2005, when Talabani was elected, coalition forces were still attempting to establish a semblance of peace and order in the country. Within a year, cities, towns and even streets were divided into Shia and Sunni areas, as Iraq hurtled towards what appeared to be all-out civil war; only the Kurdish north felt reasonably safe.

But, slowly, Iraq began to emerge from the most perilous depths of violence. As a moderate, Talabani was opposed to Islamic rule, even pointing out that the country’s social traditions allowed sexual equality and the consumptio­n of alcohol. Out of humane principles, he would not sign Saddam’s death warrant. Re-elected in 2006 under the country’s new constituti­on, and again in 2010, his tenure became a measure of the democratic progress he had long advocated. “Iraq requires freedom of expression, freedom of belief, a multiparty system, free elections, federalism and the sharing of authority,” he had insisted in 2002.

He spent most of the final two years of his presidency under medical treatment in Germany, and in 2014 he was succeeded by his friend, the veteran Kurdish politician Fuad Masu, who with his new prime minister Haider al-abadi would have to contend with the growing menace of Isil.

Jalal Talabani is survived by his wife Hirow Ibrahim Ahmed, with whom he had two sons.

 ??  ?? Talabani: he was nicknamed ‘Mam Jalal’ or ‘Uncle Jalal’
Talabani: he was nicknamed ‘Mam Jalal’ or ‘Uncle Jalal’

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