The Kurdish Predicament in Iraq A Political Analysis

In May of 1992, the Iraqi Kurds held democratic elections which led to the formation of a Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in which power was equally shared by Massoud Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). During that same summer, the Iraqi Kurds also played a major role in the creation of an umbrella Iraqi opposition organization, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), whose professed goal was the creation of a democratic and federal post-Saddam Iraq in which the Kurdish problem would at last be solved. Jawar Namiq Salim, the speaker of the Kurdish Parliament, said that a special human rights committee in parliament was not necessary, because the entire legislative body would now serve as a human rights committee.