The Erbil Burble : Ken Gibbs

By Ken Gibbs

UNICEF bureaucratic minutiae seem rarely to suit operations in war or conflict zones such as Iran, Iraq, Operation Lifeline Sudan, the Rwanda Genocide, Kosovo and Albania and the like.

Being sent to Erbil in the Kurdish, Northern Governorates of Iraq in 1996, was one such.

The breakup of the Ottoman Empire and the scramble by Europeans to divide the spoils into countries that bore little resemblance to the political, religious and ethnic realities on the ground, was a recipe for eternal strife. The Kurds occupy an invidious position sitting between Turkey, Iran, Syria and Lebanon – and even as far away as Egypt – where they find themselves without a country that they can call their own, and worse still, they are seen as a threat to those countries in which they find themselves.

In Iraq, Saddam Hussein and a cousin of his, Chemical Ali, targeted the Kurds especially from 1986-1988 implementing the Anfal which caused the total destruction of over 4,000 villages and between 100,000 and 180,000 deaths of mainly males between the ages of 15 and 50 years of age. Following the 1991 First Gulf War where Iraq was driven out of Kuwait and the Kurds were invited to rise against Saddam, the Iraqi Army was let loose on the Kurds who tried to flee into Turkey and Iran through the mountains, and around 50,000 of them died of starvation as a result. As if this were not enough, there were two Kurdish factions vying to exert control over parts of the Northern Governorates, and they fought each other rather than combining forces against Saddam.

Many of the UNICEF local staff in Erbil, Sulaymaniyah and Dohuk had had first-hand experience of the Anfal or the 1991 uprising. By 1996/97, Saddam was sufficiently emboldened to try to enter the battle between the rival factions in Kurdistan – by sending in his tanks to Erbil, the capital of the northern governorates. This was where UNICEF and other involved UN agencies were based, attempting to deliver the UN’s side of the Oil-for-Food agreement. To say that local staff were terrified is perhaps an understatement. I wasn’t too happy myself.

I had the good fortune to have an Iraqi Kurd as the section secretary – who was rather better qualified than me as he had two degrees and I have only one. He came with another advantage: he had a wonderful sense of humour. We had noticed that humour of the right type could reduce tensions in the office and focus attention on something other than the more immediate, and so was born ‘The Erbil Burble’, an occasional news-sheet full of local thinly veiled gossip and dreadful puns which was developed and circulated anonymously.

It made light of the ongoing battle between the two Kurdish warring factions; it poked fun at the UNICEF Coordinator who, happily, had a robust sense of humour; it mentioned office gossip using wireless call-signs to identify individuals; and, best of all, a central figure in almost all the news sheets was ‘Little Deer’ which was a fawn rescued from the local market where she had been on sale as live venison. She had effectively been domesticated by the Admin Officer who brought her to the office each morning. The Peacekeepers, who ran an in-house refectory, came in for special attention for their menus which, thank goodness, did not include any local wildlife. One event received special attention – the office was hit by two strikes of lightning on the same day, burning a lot of electronic equipment. Naturally, this proved that lightning can strike the same place twice, which was copied from the ‘Erbil Burble’ report into one of the local Kurdish newspapers.

The first issue of ‘The Erbil Burble’ found its way, inter alia, into the In-Tray of the Coordinator, placed strategically under two memoranda. We knew when he had discovered it because we heard the guffaws. Thus somewhat emboldened, the next issues also had more constructed, scurrilous gossip about him. In all, there were six issues of The Erbil Burble before the founder and editor was transferred. Or was he fired, I wonder ?

During this period, UNICEF Erbil, was undertaking the largest Water and Sanitation programme to that time (±US$ 72 million over an 18 month period) with all the difficulties of having the UN Security Council scrutinize every supply list to ensure that there were no hidden weapons of mass destruction. The volume of work involved was prodigious and only made possible by the cooperation of many of the NGOs that were active in the area at that time. Since the area is mountainous, the technology of choice always was piped, branched gravity water supply systems; and because computers were becoming mainstream by then, they were used for designs. In addition, the local Kurdish Administration had a number of very competent technical staff – all female in this instance.

UNICEF undertook to train the Kurdish Administration and NGO staff in how to design the water supply systems by computer, and how best to implement them in the field. As I was leading this endeavour, I needed translation for the training sessions. It only took a couple of mistakes in the translation for me to realise that the words for numbers in the Kurdish language parallel those in Pharsi (modern Persian) which I could handle at bazaar level when I needed a good deal when buying a carpet. This caused many opportunities for banter, inevitably. UNICEF Erbil, checked every single water supply design and I think we had only to correct three of around 50 designs which the NGO technical staff had handled by the time that I left Erbil.

For years afterwards, I marvelled that we had been able to function so effectively without having to consult AIs, FIs, the PAM, Directives from the 13th Floor in New York and more. Earlier, when the true scale of funding for the Northern Governorates became apparent, it was essential to have some additional external, expatriate consultants for the sector. This was perhaps the only time that we phoned the WES Section in New York to request their help in short-listing suitable candidates. We were blown away by the response – “Sorry, but the requisite staff are on holiday, but you can phone again when they return. . . .” Naturally, we went the private sector route and located most of the ones needed within days rather than months. Why have a central UNICEF office if it simply cannot respond to field needs?

Sadly, the editor of the Erbil Burble left before he had time to write a special piece on “Support to Field Offices”.

Click on the images to enlarge and read the 'Erbil Burbles'!