In May of 1992, the Iraqi Kurds held democratic elections which led to the formation of a Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in which power was equally shared by Massoud Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Jalal Talabani's Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). During that same summer, the Iraqi Kurds also played a major role in the creation of an umbrella Iraqi opposition organization, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), whose professed goal was the creation of a democratic and federal post-Saddam Iraq in which the Kurdish problem would at last be solved. Jawar Namiq Salim, the speaker of the Kurdish Parliament, said that a special human rights committee in parliament was not necessary, because the entire legislative body would now serve as a human rights committee. Looking at the reasons why everything went so badly wrong, this work is a political analysis of events in Iraq since 1992, based on the author's extensive travels in Kurdistan and interviews with Kurdish participants.
The author examines the personalities of Barzani and Talabani, the Iraqi opposition to Saddam, in which the Kurds were a leading force, the continuing Iraqi-Kurdistan civil war which began in May 1994, and the resulting power vacuum in Iraqi Kurdistan. Gunter provides an objective analysis, with the hope that it will lead to a better understanding of both the continuing tragedy in Iraqi Kurdistan, and the chances that exist for renewed hope.