Focus on libel laws in north

There's no shortage of newspapers at Anwar Borzou's stall in central Sulaymaniyah. He counts them out. Nineteen in Kurdish and two in Arabic, plus half a dozen magazines. There's no shortage of freedom of speech, either, if Borzou is to be believed. Between 1993 and 1998, when the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) were fighting for land, influence and revenues from oil smuggling, journalists had to toe the party line. "There's been a 180-degree change of course since then," he told IRIN in the northern city Sulaymaniyah. "Journalists and writers can say whatever they want." He launched into the story of Kurdish poet Abdullah Peshawa, forced to flee the Kurdish region in 1991 when he wrote a poem, 'Kiss', comparing PUK leader Jalal Talabani to a prostitute. Like many Kurds, Peshawa had been shocked and angered by Talabani's public embrace of Saddam Hussein in May of that year. "Talabani himself was there to meet him when he returned seven years later," Borzou said. "He gave him a golden pen, and told him to keep writing." Few people here would disagree with Borzou's opinion that "you won't find the degree of democratic space we have anywhere else in the Middle East". While newspapers in southern and central Iraq have only burgeoned since the fall of the Baath regime, almost all those on sale in Borzou's stand date from well before last year. "While there was absolutely no press freedom for more than 30 years in Iraq, now there is a very interesting phenomenon, with a new diversity of publications, including political ones... Northern Iraq was slightly different as they already had some freedom of expression," Middle East desk officer for Reporters Without Borders, Severine Cazes, told IRIN from the watchdog group's headquarters in Paris. But, as Twana Osman, columnist for the Kurdish weekly, Hawlati, puts it, "while freedom of press does exist here, and is growing, it is still severely circumscribed." For Osman, the key problem in northern Iraq is that the Kurdistan Regional Government has never got around to changing the articles in Baghdad's law 433 dealing with libel. "They are phrased so vaguely that almost any criticism of any public institution could be construed as libel," he explained. The law was used in 2002 to imprison Hashem Zebari, a reporter based in the northern city of Dahuk. Hawlati itself has been taken to court 10 times in the past decade, most recently for publishing an article implying that KDP Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani had failed to pay an artist whose paintings had been hung in the regional parliament building. The paper's editorial board received a year's suspended sentence, and a warning to be more careful in future. Despite this, Osman insisted there was no direct censorship. He is backed up by Adnan Yousif, a senior producer at the KDP-controlled Kurdistan TV in Dahuk. "KDP plays more of a positive than a negative role," he told IRIN. "Instead of telling us what not to do, they occasionally make suggestions as to what we should do." According to Yousif, those 'suggestions' range from toning down attacks on the PUK and neighbouring countries to increasing the number of programmes for women and children. It is not difficult to find journalists less happy than Yousif with the close relationship between political parties and press. "Local TV and newspapers are full of stories looking at small issues of mismanagement and petty corruption", Muhaydin Hasan, director of an Arbil-based radio station affiliated to the small Kurdish Communist Party, told IRIN. "But publishing more serious allegations is out of the question." Asked whether his radio had ever directly criticised KDP or PUK leaders, his only response was an ironic laugh. "Kurdistan is not Syria or Egypt, but it is not Europe either," he said. "There is no need for direct censorship," journalist Asso Abdulatif Mawludi, told IRIN. "Journalists censor themselves." The real weakness of the Kurdish press is its almost total financial dependence on the PUK and KDP authorities that have governed the divided northern region since civil war broke out in 1993. According to Adnan Yousif, the KDP alone sponsors eight newspapers. Even a non-KDP organ like Hasan's radio receives 70 percent of its funding from the KDP-controlled Kurdistan Regional Government in Arbil. Kurdistan's best-selling weekly, Hawlati, is a slightly different case. With its printing press and equipment paid for by the Dutch organization IKV, Twana Osman said the salaries of its 30 staff were covered by weekly sales of 10,000. But Aso Mawludi warned against overstating the independence of 'independent' newspapers. "I was one of the founder members of Jamawar, a paper supposedly unconnected to any political party", he said. "But it didn't take me long to realise that the independence of my colleagues was a charade. In fact, they were all PUK people." He promptly resigned from the board, and now works as a freelance contributor to Hawlati and Kurdistan-I Nou. "There is only one feeding trough in Kurdistan, and it belongs to the two leading parties," he said. "Either you drink from it, or you are marginalised and impoverished." He felt that the greatest impediment to broadening press freedoms had been the conflict between PUK and KDP, both of which had used journalists as pawns in their struggle to dominate the Kurdish political scene. But he believed the definitive end of Saddam's tyranny has come as a breath of fresh air in northern Iraq. "Before last year, solidarity with the parties was a means of defending yourself against a clear and present danger," he said. "That danger is gone now, and people are more willing to criticise their leaders. Party ideology is no longer paramount." Above all, the economic situation in northern Iraq is changing. Stricken by a double sanctions regime between 1991 and 2003, the Kurds were almost entirely dependent for their survival on money channelled from Baghdad to their leaders. A monopoly of funding gave birth to a monopoly of information. With that monopoly now ended, urban Kurds are slowly waking to the fact that they need no longer depend on their parties for employment.