In Iraqi Kurdistan, civil servants demonstrated on Saturday in support of the decision of Iraq’s highest court which ordered the Iraqi government in Baghdad to pay Kurdish civil servants directly, without going through the autonomous government of Kurdistan. In the region, Kurdish civil servants have been unpaid for 6 months, a consequence of bankruptcy since the cessation of oil exports. This court decision is a major loss of autonomy for Iraqi Kurdistan which had obtained a certain independence for 20 years.
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With our special correspondent in Souleymane, Théo Renaudon
“ The Federal Court of Justice is the heroine of the Kurdish people », We can read in one of the banners displayed at the head of the procession.
“ Of course, we place a lot of hope in Baghdad because we have lost all faith in Kurdistanexplains Pakizia, Kurdish teacher unpaid for six months. All these years, civil servants have been oppressed and their protests ignored. So there you have it, we place our hope in Iraq. »
An autonomous region that no longer pays its civil servants necessarily loses its independence. But this is the price to pay to receive a salary again, according to Zangana: “ Of course it’s terrible. We donated our blood for this region. But do we even have a choice? We are forced to turn to Iraq, given the living conditions of civil servants who are no longer paid! »
Of course I would be happier as a Kurd if I had my own state and my own government. But our elites have run this region so badly that we had no choice. We had to look elsewhere for help from the Iraqi government.
Azad, school teacher in Kurdistan
Baghdad’s takeover of the salaries of Kurdish civil servants is part of a broader Iraqi strategy, according to political science researcher Tom Préél. “ It is indeed a dynamic which began on issues such as the control of oil, which today extends to salaries, which are an extremely important resource for the Kurdish parties and which today find themselves deprived of this means of control », Explains the researcher. The Kurdish government announces that it will soon transmit the list of all its civil servants to federal Iraq.
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