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Early
Release: An Exclusive Interview with Najmaldin Karim,
newly elected Kurdish member of Iraqi Parliament from
Kirkuk for
the Kurdistan Alliance
Kurdish
Herald recently sat down with Dr.
Najmaldin Karim, a newly elected Kurdish member of Iraqi
Parliament representing Kirkuk and a member
of the Kurdistan Alliance, to discuss the unresolved
issue of the disputed areas in Iraq and the plans of the
Kurdistan Alliance, as well as his own views on the recent
Iraqi election. Dr. Karim is well-known for his activism
in the U.S. on behalf of the Kurds and founded Washington
Kurdish Institute and is a board member of the Kurdish
Institute in Paris. He is a practicing neurosurgeon who
left his home in the United States earlier this year to
run in the 2010 Iraqi elections. |
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Turkey’s
Shortchange: Dashed Hopes in Anatolia
The
Turkish government’s “Kurdish opening”,
later renamed the “Democratic initiative”,
began with enthusiasm and introduced a new open debate
among Turkey’s intellectuals and scholars on how
to solve the age-old Kurdish question. In recent months,
however, Turkey’s bad habit of censorship through
mass arrests of some of the initiative’s most important
players – elected Kurdish politicians – have
caused unrest and deep mistrust to resurface in the Kurdish
region of Turkey. While the ruling party moves ahead
with its plans, the wavering support may ultimately kill
the initiative and make the conflict unsolvable.
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Remembering
Ahmet Kaya by Ozan Aksoy
Today,
nine years after his death, the leading perpetrator of
the attack, Serdar Ortac, apologized for his reaction
against Kaya. Ortac admitted he was
wrong, but states that he only recently realized this
mistake. In a similar change of face, the Turkish Radio
Television Broadcasting Company announced that it is
going to retract its policy to ban blacklisted singers
including Ahmet Kaya following the new government’s
democratization policy. Kaya has been among the singers
blacklisted and thus banned for more than twenty-five
years.
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Iraqi
Elections: The Fuel for Controversies by Delovan Barwari
Today,
new alliances, divisions, conflict, and uncertainty are
the words that define the political climate in Baghdad
as the third post-Saddam parliamentary elections scheduled
for 7 March 2010 approach. At the center of disputes
are the Hydrocarbon Law, revenue sharing, and the Kurdish-Arab
conflicts over the disputed areas and the status of Article
140 of the Iraqi Constitution on the one hand, and the
explosive issue of barring more than 450 politicians – mainly
Sunnis – from elections on the other.
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The
Kurdish Immigrant Experience and a Growing American
Community by Hero Karimi
The
Kurds’ motives
to emigrate to the U.S. have been very unlike
other minorities
that have come to the country. It has rarely
been simply an escape from poverty and a search
for the American dream. Rather, it has been
a desperate attempt to survive in a region
of the world where the atrocities inflicted
by the states are all too common. In the last
30 years, Kurds have struggled to build a new
haven in Nashville, and director of refugee
and immigration services at Catholic Charities
of Tennessee Holly Johnson says “they
have changed Nashville.”.
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Tribalism
in modern Iraq, Part I: Saddam’s tribal shadow
state by
Ali Al-Saffar
The
nexus of power in Iraq has perpetually been the subject
of heated debate amongst readers of politics, members
of opposition parties dedicated to dismantling Saddam
Hussein’s regime, and more generally, those with
an interest in Iraq. The very fact that Saddam managed
to remain in power for so long despite dragging Iraq
through decades of war, sanctions and unbridled suffering
begs the following question: what policies and strategies
did Saddam use to consolidate his own power?
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Rising
Conflict in Iranian Kurdistan by Sayeh Hassan
One
of the most under-reported human rights issues in Iran
is the current state of Kurdish political prisoners,
and in particular, the current eighteen political prisoners
who are on death row and may be facing imminent execution.
In the past two months, two Kurdish political activists
have been executed by the Islamic Regime of Iran (IRI).
Unfortunately, serious consequences and escalated conflict
may be imminent
if the conditions continue to be ignored.
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Battling
unemployment in Iraqi Kurdistan: How entrepreneurship
can fix some of the problems by Aryan Pedawi
The
notion that Iraqi Kurdistan is, at the moment, economically
weak is not in dispute, but the policies being suggested
to fix this problem are. Some say that the government
should do more to help the working class earn a wage
that provides a reasonable standard of living, while
others say that government action would only deepen the
structural instability. But there is too much talk over
what the government can do and not enough talk over what
the market can do.
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Polygamy
in the Muslim world and new restrictions in Iraqi Kurdistan
by Haje Keli
Many
see laws addressing polygamy as a barometer of where
lawmakers stand on a spectrum of religious versus secular,
or even modern versus traditional. Such a view is rather
simplistic, but not completely lacking in merit. Indeed,
Iraqi Kurdish lawmakers have directly addressed the issue
of polygamy and they have set forth a unique law addressing
the issue, providing a solution that some see as a compromise
of sorts on the issue.
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Traveling
Kurdistan in the 1960s with Dr. Christensen by Natsumi Ajiki
Dr.
Dieter Christensen and his wife, Nerthus Christensen,
M.A.,
immersed themselves into the rural life of Kurdish shepherds
and farmers a half-century ago and earned their place
among only a handful of prominent experts on the Kurdish
culture. During the evening lecture organized
by the Kurdish American Society (KAS), Dieter
shared their experiences from the early 1960s with stories
about
the
Kurdish life
of that era. Dieter’s intimate stories about Kurdish
traditions coupled with unique collections of photography
and musical recordings from a time when the Kurdish region
was virtually unknown to the world enthralled his audience.
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In
the Footsteps of Ehmede Xani – The Relevance
of His Poems Today by Seyhmus Yuksekkaya
Ehmede
Xani, a pioneer of Kurdish literature, was one of the
first to eloquently address the serious issues that haunt
the Kurdish as a nation to this very day – the
interdependent phenomena of oppression and division.
Long before the emergence of modern nationalism in the
Middle
East, Xani perceived
the sad situation of his people and sought to understand
why the Kurds remained oppressed and dispossessed. Long
before the emergence of the myriad of political groups
claiming to work for the Kurdish people, Xani addressed
this issue in a very direct way, bemoaning the current
state of affairs and castigating his own people for failing
to unite.
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and the Kurdistani and Kurdish people. The all-English publication
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