10/04/2012 10:30
At the internal entrance to the Erbil International Fair, Abdul Salam Berwari invited to me to a restaurant to have lunch. It is not new to meet Abdul Salam and invite me to lunch or dinner. He has been my friend for about twenty years, but it was the first time that we met while he is a member of the Parliament of Kurdistan.
Adnan HussainAbdul Salam came to the book fair and kept looking for me among the pioneers of the show. We shook hands and then walked to the car park. I did not find MP Abdul Salam different than he was twenty years ago. I looked right and left to see how many heavily armed bodyguards were there. None! And how many were walking behind him. None!
He didn't even park his car in the VIPs garage for members of the organizing committee of the exhibition. He parked it in the public park. Even when we went to the restaurant he did not use his government car, but a car belonging to a mutual friend - Asa Hasib Qaradaghi - who became our driver. And of course, as this wasn't an MP's procession there no cars ahead or behind us to annoy other drivers, as we see all the time in Baghdad.
I did not ask Abdul Salam about this issue of another friend who does not care for this chaos that the members of the federal Council of Representatives aspire to. He is Adnan al-Mufti, former Speaker of the Kurdistan Parliament. Until recent times, he lived in his family's modest house. As I know, no minister or MP in the Kurdistan Region has a procession.
The cases of Abdul Salam Berwari and Adnan al-Mufti do not reflect the tight security in the region and this makes everything in Baghdad different from Erbil. Everything in the capital of the region does not resemble what is found in our federal capital. Construction boom, the traffic system, the cleanliness of the streets, cultural and artistic life, leisure facilities and available electricity.
We were a group of five journalists that traveled by car from Baghdad to Erbil to attend the book fair, organized by the Mada Foundation in cooperation with the Ministry of Culture in the region. The exhibition itself is a success in the territory, while we have comprehensive failure in Baghdad. On our way from Baghdad to Erbil through Tikrit and Kirkuk, we passed through many towns and villages that also show the picture of the chronic devastation that grips our capital, while things became somehow different in Kirkuk and more different tens of miles before reaching Erbil and completely different in Erbil.
Our gang continued looking along the road to Erbil and thinking about the secret of the rapid progress of the Kurds. Is it luck or fate? One of us journalists - Sarmad al-Tai - gave an interpretation that he was not tired of repeating: "They love their country. We do not!"
In one of the evenings in which we discussed the issue of political debate in Baghdad and the deterioration of the general conditions of the country, one of us suggested the following: What do you think about an asylum request in Kurdistan if things don't go right in our way? No one objected or denounced the proposal.
By Adnan Hussein
AKnews
