Taha Muhi ad-Din Maʿruf

Taha Muhi ad-Din Maaruf ( Arabic طه محي الدين معروف Taha Muhī ad-Dīn Maarūf , DMG Ṭāhā Muḥī ad-Dīn Maʿrūf ; alternatively also written Taha Muyiddin Marouf '; * approx. 1929 in Sulaimaniyya , Iraq ; † August 8, 2009 in Amman , Jordan ) was an Iraqi politician and diplomat, and from 1974 to April 2003 the first Kurdish Vice President of Iraq .

Life

Maʿruf during a state visit to East Berlin in 1978

Maʿruf studied (like Jalal Talabani later ) law in Baghdad and became a lawyer in 1948 ; from 1951 he worked in the diplomatic service of the then kingdom .

Before that, however, he had already been active in the Kurdish Freedom Party ( Rizgari ) in 1945/46 and in 1946 even became a founding member of the Iraqi Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) under Mullah Mustafa Barzani . When the KDP split in 1964, Maʿruf joined the Talabani wing critical of Barzani, which worked with Baghdad against Barzani, but returned to Barzani from 1971 to 1974.

As a representative of the Talabani faction, Maʿruf became Minister of State in Baghdad in 1968. The two Barzani representatives in the Iraqi government of Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr protested against this and resigned. Baghdad, which at least at that time also sought reconciliation with Barzani, therefore sent Maʿruf in 1970, first as ambassador to France, then to Italy (including Malta and Albania); instead, five Kurds moved into the Iraqi cabinet. When the reconciliation between Baghdad and Barzani finally failed in 1974, the neo-KDP (another split under Barzani's eldest son Ubaidullah ) provided three of the Kurdish ministers and one each from the Progressive Kurds and the Kurdish Revolutionary Party . The old KDP, however, was taken over by Idris or Masud Barzani in 1975 , while Talabani founded his own party with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which fought with Baghdad against Barzani in 1984.

Instead of Barzani and Talabani, Maʿruf finally became the first Kurdish Vice President of Iraq in April 1974 and thus one of the two Vice Presidents alongside Saddam Hussein (until 1979) and Michel Aflaq (until 1989), from 1989 to 1991 even the only Vice President of the Republic, from 1991 to 2003 next to Taha Yasin Ramadan al-Jazrawi . Meanwhile a member of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party , Maʿruf was in 1976/77 or from 1982 to 2003 a member of the Revolutionary Command Council ( RKR ), the top leadership of Iraq, and as such was a prisoner of war of the US occupation forces in 2003.

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1. ↑ Maʿruf was at least the first de jure Vice-President. Already 1959-1961 was the Kurd Khalid an-Naqshbandi as vice chairman of the three-member sovereignty Council (Council of State) de facto deputy head of state. He was followed by the Kurd Rashad Arif in 1961–63 .

swell

• Erhard Franz : Kurds and Kurdishism. Contemporary history of a people and its national movements (communications from the DOI; Vol. 30). German Orient Institute, Hamburg 1986, p. 118, ISBN 3-89-173-006-3 .
• Peter Sluglett: Iraq since 1958. From revolution to dictatorship (“Iraq since 1958”, 1987). Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / M. 1991, p. 222, ISBN 3-518-11661-4 .
• The International Who's Who . Kent 1988, p. 991.