Shkoi Kurdistan-
A parliamentarian for the Kurdistan Region’s Change Movement (Gorran) has been fined over seven million dinars ($5,000) by an Erbil court for defamation, years after posting a video of 2018 protests that went viral.
“The court has fined me for not deleting the video, but publishing it,” Shayan Askary, the parliamentarian in question, told Rudaw on Monday, discussing a video she took in March 2018 while at a demonstration protesting the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) slashing of her salary. Askary was a doctor at a public hospital at the time, and became an MP in September of the same year.
The video shows the Askary getting into a verbal altercation with a passer by, who was later identified as Sangar Abbas Awla. She accuses the man of being sent by the ruling Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), while he accuses her of “lying” over her reasons for taking to the streets, saying she was not there for her salary. Then, another person comes and asks her to stop filming. When she refuses to do so, he hits her mobile phone.
“They say that I have defamed the person, Sangar Abbas Awla,” noted the MP.
She added that the decision was made by an Erbil court on October 19, but she did not know of it until she went to collect her salary as an MP.
“I was not informed. Today, I went to receive my salary. I noticed that my salary had been reduced,” she said, adding that she was later told that the court had decided to cut one fifth of her salary every month until the fine is paid off.
“The courts are not independent. They are under pressure … I have witnessed this first hand,” she claimed.
Salim Salman, Askary’s lawyer, told Rudaw that his client was fined “for defaming [Awla and the other man] on social media.”
Awla told Rudaw that he has decided to donate the money he has won in the lawsuit to a cancer hospital.
“I do not need the money from this doctor. I had previously asked my lawyer to donate the money to Nanakali Hospital in Erbil.”
However, Awla’s lawyer refused to comment on whether he had been instructed to donate the money to the cancer hospital.
In a Facebook post on Monday, Askary addressed the court, saying that “even if you cut all my salary we are still the winners.”
Kurdistan Region teachers and health workers went on strike in 2018, fed up with their monthly salaries being slashed, up to a third in some cases. The protests spread across most of the Kurdistan Region.
The KRG has suffered from an economic crisis since 2014 following the emergence of the Islamic State (ISIS) group, cut offs of funding from the federal government, and drops in the price of oil.
Almost three years after the protests, the KRG is still unable to pay its civil servants on time and in full.
