Iraqi Writer Imprisoned For Criticizing Kurdish Leadership
by TChris
As President Bush crows about his success in bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq, perhaps he can explain why Kamal Sayid Qadir has been sentenced to 30 years in an Iraqi prison for criticizing corruption in the Kurdish leadership.
From Austria he had written articles accusing [Kurdish leader Massoud] Barzani's all-powerful Kurdistan Democratic Party of corruption while calling members of its intelligence service, the Parastin, criminals and its chief -- Mr. Barzani's son -- a "pimp."
Qadir was tried for "defaming" the Parastin and Kurdish political leaders. He says the trial lasted only 15 minutes.
President Bush might favor a political system that incarcerates critics of the government, but a country can't be free if journalists and writers risk prison for expressing opinions and exposing facts that discomfort those who hold power. Qadir isn't the only Iraqi who has lost his freedom for daring to express an opinion. The NY Times reports that Iraqi authorities are increasingly "using the courts as an instrument of intimidation to discourage reporting on corruption and abuses of power."
Two journalists from Wasit Province in east central Iraq face 10 years in prison for suggesting that Iraqi judges kowtow to the American authorities just as Saddam Hussein's courts rubber-stamped edicts of the Baath Party. The journalists, Ayad Mahmoud al-Tamimi and Ahmed Mutair Abbas, had also accused the then-governor of Wasit of corruption and labeled him a bastard, a grave insult here. ...
In Kurdistan, [former newspaper editor Rebin Ismael] says, it is not unusual for the secret police to threaten or arrest journalists who fail to toe the line of the K.D.P. More than a dozen journalists have been arrested in recent years, he says, but the cases are never reported on in Kurdistan because other journalists fear saying anything critical of the party.
A "senior Kurdish official" defended the use of criminal defamation prosecutions when writings are intended as a "political weapon." The power of the written word as a weapon against an entrenched political system is essential to a free and open government. That isn't what's forming in Iraq, the administration's assurances notwithstanding.
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