Squelching freedom in Iraqui Kurdistan.

My trip to Kurdistan began inauspiciously. I flew from Amman, Jordan, to Irbil, the largest city in the north. I was pulling a sort of end-around on my way to Baghdad. Kurdistan has looser visa rules than Baghdad, and I hadn't bothered applying for a visa to go directly to Baghdad because the Ministry of Interior official in charge of issuing press visas had threatened to arrest me over a story I wrote last year about torture by the Iraqi police. As I suspected, I had no trouble getting a visa in Irbil, and so I began my tour of Kurdistan, which the Bush Administration holds up as a success story.

I went to the local journalists' union and asked about the arrest of Kamal Said Qadir, a Kurdish law professor who had been living abroad but was arrested upon his arrival in Kurdistan in October. Said was sentenced to thirty years in prison for a pair of articles he had posted on his website denouncing Massoud Barzani, head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party. That sentence was reduced to eighteen months, and Said was released this spring.

"He is a university professor, not a journalist," Farhad Auny, the head of the union, told me.

I pressed him on freedom of speech in Kurdistan.

In response, Auny held up a copy of the independent weekly newspaper Hawlati, the biggest paper in the region, and turned to an op-ed written by Hafez Hawezi, a journalist based in Koya, home of Jalal Talabani, head of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.

"In their last issue, they have published an article that talks about the Kurdish leadership," Auny said. "They are calling them Pharaonic. The article tells the Kurdish leadership to leave Kurdistan. They are free to write this article. According to the law in Kurdistan, this journalist's rights are protected."

The day after Auny's reassurance, security forces loyal to Talabani took Hawezi from his home, beat him, and put him behind bars. His colleagues bailed him out of prison a day later, but he still faces charges.

In Irbil, I also went to visit Hassan Babaqir, a member of the Kurdish parliament who belongs to the more radical of the two main Kurdish Islamic parties. During the December election, Barzani's security forces stood idly by as mobs loyal to his Kurdistan Democratic Party burned down the local headquarters of the Kurdistan Islamic Union, killing four. (Islamic parties took fifteen of 111 seats in the autonomous region's parliament.)

Babaqir was on the phone, receiving the first reports of a demonstration in Halabja. It was March 16, the anniversary of Saddam Hussein's gassing of 5,000 people there in 1988. Local residents of Halabja had tried to block Kurdish officials from entering into the city to celebrate the anniversary. Security forces had opened fire, killing seventeen-year-old Kurda Ahmed and wounding at least ten others. Demonstrators, in response, burned down the museum built three years ago to commemorate the victims of the attack.

"The people in Halabja have been waiting to get something from the government because most of the city was destroyed," said Babaqir. "Halabja was a big town, and the government has not done enough."

Kurdish officials blamed the demonstration and the burning of the museum on Iranian-supported Islamic radicals, but a trip to Halabja told a different story. The day after the attack, security forces were out in droves in the city. One of the leaders of the demonstration, fifty-one-year-old Ali Soft, was shot at a checkpoint, and a four-year-old child in his car was also wounded. The security forces raided houses and arrested demonstrators, who had been passing out flyers that read, "This is a city, not a mass grave."

Reached by phone in his hiding place in the woods outside Halabja, one of the leaders of the demonstration, a student from Koya, spoke with a mix of fear and pride.

"I ask them to listen to the common people," he said. "The aim of the demonstration was to ask for the rehabilitation and reconstruction of Halabja."

Saif Eddin, a shop owner who was in high school at the time of Saddam's gas attack and lost his mother and four cousins, said the demonstrators had valid complaints.

"We haven't had any reconstruction," Eddin said. "The people of Halabja are very, very angry."

Next, I went to Suleymaniya. At the office of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, a London-based group that trains local journalists, I met Mariwan Hama-Saeed, who is the Kurdish editor of the institute's Iraqi Crisis Report. He played a mini-disc recording of the shooting. He said that though the Islamic parties are a marginal presence now, such tactics could only strengthen their hand as an alternative to the rule of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdistan Democratic Party.

"If it continues like that, their future will be like Fatah in Palestine," he says.

The protest in Halabja speaks to the widening generation gap in Iraqi Kurdistan. For younger people, the specter of Saddam does not justify repression.

"They have been doing well to liberate us, but they have failed to serve us," says Hama-Saeed. "I don't need slogans like 'The Baath Party is terrible,' 'Arabs are chauvinists.' I need universities, and I need roads paved. I don't need to see officials with $10 million houses while people are suffering. I think it was really shocking for Kurdish youth to be fired on by security forces that are supposed to protect them. I don't think Halabja will be the last place."

The week before the Halabja protest, students held demonstrations at universities in Koya and Suleymaniya over lack of services. In both cases, demonstrators were shot at and arrested.

"They took injured students not to the hospital but to jail," Hama-Saeed said. "They are the same young people that the Kurdish officials were begging to vote before the elections."

The government is also continuing its assault on the press, proposing a law in the region barring speech deemed against the Kurdish national interest.

"It's getting worse. The journalism code they are doing now says you cannot write anything against the Kurdish nation," Hama-Saeed said. "Dr. Auny says there is freedom of speech, but what kind of freedom of speech if you are arrested and beaten and called a terrorist?"

Speech is not the only right the Kurdish government is sacrificing in the "Kurdish national interest."

With the ratification of the new Iraqi constitution, Kurdish women have fewer rights than before, as Sharia law now governs many personal matters.

As the constitution was nearing its final draft last August and women's rights remained one of the unresolved issues, Zakia Hakki, a Kurdish lawyer who was appointed one of Iraq's first female judges in 1959, told me how higher-ranking Kurdish officials instructed her to abandon the debate because they were more concerned about bargaining over Kirkuk.

"They said, 'Don't be involved in such disputes,'" Hakki mentioned. She was fuming. In 2004, when Shiite Islamic parties pushed for Sharia to be enshrined in the interim constitution, Hakki, who had been selected to help write the constitution, used her Department of Defense clearance to bring activists into the Green Zone. They staged sit-ins in then U.S. proconsul Paul Bremer's office until Bremer, exasperated, agreed to veto Sharia. But in August, she was resigned to defeat at the hands of her male counterparts.

"It is just on the outside they are freedom fighters, but on the inside, no," Hakki said. "How can we build the new future for Iraq when women are left aside?"

Before leaving Suleymaniya, I had dinner with Peshwaz Faizulla, Hawlati's managing editor. Undaunted by the government's campaign against the press, he was contemplating an op-ed for the next issue.

"It will be set in the year 2020," he said. "And the Kurdish leadership will be in The Hague, on trial for the death of a seventeen-year-old boy."

Illustration by Douglas Fraser 

David Enders is the author of "Baghdad Bulletin," which is now out in paperback. He is working on a new book of essays about Iraq, the Middle East, and the United States, which will be published later this year by the University of Michigan Press.