The government parties KDP and PUK represent a mixture of a tribal confederation and clientelistic party machinery which has covered the region with a financial patronage system. Over night here former refugees became millionaires. All these favorites must be supplied with positions in or related to the government. The consequence is an unbelievably blown up bureaucracy.

Long time Kurdistan was only an ethnic, linguistic and geographical unit. The region has about the size of France, over 500,000 km ², with approximate ... (more)