KurdishMedia.com - By Dr Kamal Mirawdeli20-02-2008 00:00:00
By Hawre Bakhawan

Translated by Dr Kamal Mirawdeli

Published on www.kurdistannet.info on 19 February 2008

http://kurdistannet.info/index.php/babeti-jimare-1550.html

The former cabinet of the so-called “Kurdistan regional government” had more than 40 ministers. It is said that the new cabinet would be different although it is the same shape and content of the previous one with the same PM, deputy and so on. There is a rumour that it will have only 20 ministers. This means more than 20 ministers would be removed.

I do not want to talk about what, in their time in office, these 40 ministers, ministries and their staff and servants cost, what and how much they have stolen, and how much bad impact they had on the economic and social conditions in Kurdistan. I will leave all this for another opportunity.

In this article I talk about the most important Minister that it is again ignored in this cabinet: a minster for morality! Except for this one I laugh at all the other minsters in this cabinet. Why do we need a minster, a ministry and all these offices and staff for electricity, if Kurdistan never has minimum power supply?

Even stranger than this: Why do we need a minister for industry with all his entourage, if we export everything from abroad and cannot even produce shoes locally? Why do we need a minister and ministry of agriculture, when even basic vegetable is imported from Iran and other countries? I even laugh at Minister of Culture because Kurdish culture now is undergoing a dangerous phase. Don’t judge by all these magazines and translated books. In Kurdistan you can now become a professional translator even without knowing the language you translate from!

Then why do we need Minister of Peshmarga when the Turks roam and bomb around in the country as they wish, and [Kurdish authorities] are too cowardly even to report what is happening!

Here I cannot talk about all the 40 ministries. I come back to my point: a Minster for Morality! This ministry should have become the most important one in the cabinet with the remit to supervise all other ministries and government activities: culture, peshmarga, people’s living conditions, the conduct of officials, living conditions of young people, freedom of expression, women’s rights, dealing with neighbours, etc . This is the most important task because all these aspects of life in Kurdistan, under the rule of ‘Kurdistan regional government’ and the ignorance and incompetence of officials, have been afflicted with great immorality and anarchy and lawlessness have been embedded so powerfully that some of these aspects need tens of years to improve.

I know when we talk about morality, 99 per cent of the officials [in Kurdistan region] just think of a piece of flesh and their black-painted moustaches smile with joy, because this is what has become their sole vocation and this is their only understanding of morality! That is why I used the word ‘Akhlaq’ (morality) in Arabic because some of them do not know whether [the Kurdish word for morality] ‘rawsht’ is a Kurdish or a Hebrew word. But here I use the word ‘morality’ in its philosophical sense and believe that establishing a department for morality in every ministry to make the officials understand the meaning of morality, is a very important task. For the issue of morality has nothing to do with the piece of flesh our officials understand so well!