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Iraq's Talabani, outlaw turned peacemaker
AFP
BAGHDAD
Petroleumworld.com 02 26 06Iraq's President Jalal Talabani, evacuated on Sunday to Jordan after falling ill, has a reputation as a peacemaker for trying to broker consensus between the country's bitterly divided factions.
Himself a Kurd, the 74-year-old former outlaw is the first non-Arab to lead an independent Arab majority state.
He became president in April 2005 after the first election in Iraq since a US-led invasion overthrew dictator Saddam Hussein, his sworn enemy.
Talabani was re-elected to the post a year later, cementing his people's powerful role on the national stage after suffering years as second-class citizens.
He has since won praise for attempting the near impossible task of trying to bridge the divides between post-invasion Iraq's bitterly divided Sunni and Shiite, Arab and Kurdish factions.
Talabani, a close ally of the United States, has won plaudits for striving to smooth strained relations with Syria and Iran as part of efforts to end the two regional powers' suspected efforts to feed the insurgency in Iraq.
He made trips to both Damascus and Tehran in recent months and afterwards urged the United States to speak to both countries in a bid to end the insurgency in Iraq.
An imposing, barrel-chested man, he has also won praise for his efforts -- if not his success -- in walking a conciliatory line with Arab insurgents and disaffected Sunni Arabs who had largely boycotted the political process.
Talabani, married and a father of two, dominates Kurdish political life along with his rival Massoud Barzani, with whom he cut a deal to become Iraq's president when the country formed a national unity government.
In his mountainous northern fiefdom of Sulaimaniyah, Talabani is known simply as Uncle (Mam) Jalal.
Born in 1933 in the rustic village of Kalkan in the mountains, as a young man he was quickly seduced by the Kurdish struggle for a homeland to unite a people scattered across Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria.
Today impeccably dressed in Western suits, he has an unaffected manner and a sense of humour, and is known to ask Iraqi journalists to give him the word on the street.
His preferred catchphrase is: "My door is open to all Iraqis."
After studying law at Baghdad University and doing a stint in the army, Talabani joined the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) of Mullah Mustafa Barzani and took to the hills in a first uprising against the Iraqi government in 1961.
But he famously fell out with Barzani who sued for peace with Baghdad -- the start of a long and costly internecine feud among Iraqi Kurds.
Talabani joined a KDP splinter faction in 1964 and fled to neighbouring Iran with his future father-in-law, Ahmed Ibrahim, in protest.
He formalised the break-up in 1975 by establishing his Patriotic Union of Kurdistan after Barzani's forces, abandoned by their Iranian, US and Israeli allies, were routed by Saddam Hussein's army.
Talabani's long career in troubled modern Iraq has also witnessed some of the lowest moments in Kurdish history.
A renewed uprising in the 1980s against the Saddam regime sparked the notorious Anfal campaign of 1988 in which the army razed hundreds of Kurdish villages and gassed thousands of people.
Kurds were driven from their homes across north-central Iraq, particularly around the oil city of Kirkuk, as Saddam set out to Arabise the region.
More tragedy was to come in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf war, when the Kurdish uprising collapsed, prompting hundreds of thousands to seek refuge on the mountainous borders with Iran and Turkey in the heart of winter.
Western intervention allowed the Kurds to re-establish control over the three most northerly provinces of Iraq, but the rebel enclave fell far short of Kurdish claims for full independence amid Turkish opposition to statehood.
The rivalry between Talabani and the Barzanis, led by Mullah Mustafa's son Massoud, degenerated to all-out war in 1993, as Talabani challenged the rival KDP monopoly over customs revenues levied at the Turkish border.
The disastrous struggle climaxed with a KDP-invited invasion and re-conquest of Arbil by Saddam's forces in 1996.
True rapprochement came only in 2002, when it became clear that Washington intended to topple Saddam. Since then Talabani and Barzani have sought to set aside their rivalries and unite to safeguard their hard-won gains.
AFP 25 1931 GMT 02 07
Copyright© 1999 AFP. All Rights Reserved.
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