“There are many reasons – and most of them are political – that have made the Kurdish media in this region lose interest in the Arabic language,” Karwan Anwar, the secretary general of the Kurdistan Journalists’ Syndicate, told NIQASH. “And that also applies to Arab media in Iraq and why they lost interest in the Kurdish language.”
“The political relationship between Baghdad and Iraqi Kurdistan has been cold for years,” continues Anwar. “That’s one of the direct reasons. Additionally there is not one single Kurd in management at the official Iraqi media. That’s reflected in the media itself which doesn’t have any desire to make Kurdish one of its broadcast languages.”
“It’s because of how the majority see the minority,” Anwar suggests. “In Iraq, the Arab population is in the majority and they don’t feel like the need to bother with a language that’s only used by a few million people when they themselves number around 25 million.”
Salem Darwish, an Iraqi journalist living in Baghdad, agrees with Anwar – and he is concerned that Baghdad’s messages are not really getting through to the Iraqi Kurdish.
“The country’s Kurdish are an important source of wealth for this country,” Darwish says. “Even Saddam Hussein, for all his cruelty and savagery toward the Kurds, gave them their own media channel. But today Iraq’s Kurds don’t actually know what their government is doing in Baghdad and what it wants. The government and media channels seem to have lost any hope of ever reaching them either – it almost feels like they have given up on the Kurds.”
“The absence of Arab media in Iraqi Kurdistan is really negligent,” Darwish concludes. “The average man on the Arab street sees the Kurdish as enemies. If the Kurdish could establish some influential media they could undo the damage done by the distortion.”
(Journalism image via Shutterstock)
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