Kurdish, July 24: “I must ask you to leave because you are criticising the authorities on state property,” said a Kurdish official, interrupting our conversation with a critic of the Kurdish government.
We were speaking to Peshko Hama Fares Mohammed, a representative of Goran, or Change, the new political party which is seeking to dislodge the two parties which have ruled Kurdistan for the past 18 years. The result will be decided in a hard-fought general election taking place tomorrow.
We had met outside the town of Halabja in eastern Kurdistan at a monument whose blue and white tower commemorates the 5,000 Kurds killed in a poison gas attack by Saddam Hussein’s air force in 1988.
–Agencies