Iraq:Iraqi Kurdistan is so afflicted by mismanagement and corruption that people are calling for change, writes Michael Jansenin Sulaimaniyah
Turkish economic sanctions and the threat of military action against Turkish Kurdish rebels holed up in the inhospitable Qandil range along the border with Iran are undermining confidence in the Iraqi-Kurdish semi-autonomous region and its government.
Since Iraq's Baathist regime was ousted in April 2003, the Kurds have imposed relative security. They have forged ahead with plans for rapid development in the hope that progress here will bring peace to and generate growth in the 15 restive provinces to the south.
However, this may be a pipe dream. Iraqi Kurdistan is so afflicted by mismanagement and corruption that people are complaining and calling for change.
The ruling elite in the Kurdish Democratic Party though, headed by regional president Massoud Barzani, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, led by Iraqi president Jalal Talabani, refuse to take notice.
Mohamad Tofiq, a normally taciturn man, is among the most vocal. A former peshmerga, he battled the Iraqi army in the Kurdish mountains. In 1992 he became minister of development and humanitarian affairs in the elected but unrecognised government established by the KPD and PUK.
This was set up in the "safe haven" created by the US and Britain after the 1991 war to drive Iraqi forces from Kuwait.
Last year he resigned from the PUK's politburo and helped form a company called Woosha, "word" in Kurdish. This firm publishes a biweekly newspaper, Rozhnama, has a polling organisation, a website and a satellite television company. Its purpose is to convince the Kurdish public to put pressure on the government, dominated by the PUK and KDP, to reform, adopt transparency and accountability in governance, and to end corruption.
In his office in Woosha's hilltop headquarters, Tofiq observes that Westerners consider this region to be the success story of post-war Iraq because there is relative security compared with the anarchy elsewhere.
But many people have abandoned their farms for the cities. Land lies fallow. There are no small industries. Nearly everything is imported from Iran, Turkey, Syria, China and the West, including foods. Unemployment is high and the cost of living is soaring.
While the region continues to progress better than the rest of Iraq, development is not taking place at the rate it should.
"It was important to fight Saddam [ Hussein] in the mountains but now we have come down, we have to fight in different areas," Tofiq continues. "We must make our people producers rather than consumers. Kurdish society deserves better leadership. I left politics because I did not want to be a part of that [ the traditional set-up].
"We have no bombs in the streets, but not having bombs in the streets is not enough. We have to have better agriculture, better infrastructure. We get $7 billion a year from the Iraqi government," far greater he says than the resources made available before the fall of the Baathist regime.
Iraqi Kurds have become "Palestinised", he argues, deprived of their living and dependent on external aid.
"What has happened in Palestine could happen here. The Palestinians were ruled by Fatah for 40 years. It became corrupt and inefficient so the majority of Palestinians voted against Fatah [ in the parliamentary election of 2006]. They did not vote for Hamas but against Fatah."
In Iraqi Kurdistan, he warns, "there is the Islamic League, which began by supplying aid and turned into a political party. People are discontented and could turn to it."