President Jalal Talabani is one of the dearest Arab politicians to my heart. For Talabani has been able to be patriotic, Kurdish and Arab at once, and became a consensual president. Talabani insisted on his friends to call him by his nickname, “Mam Jalal", even after he became president, and he forbade me to address him by anything other than this title, which I have used ever since I came to know him three decades ago or so. I read that Mam Jalal suffered a stroke, and that his condition is critical, but I refuse to talk about him in the past tense, and I hope that his health will improve very soon. Today, I want to give an overview of the most important highlights of my relationship with him, which was never interrupted from the time he was in the opposition and exile, until he took office at the presidential palace in Baghdad. Sheikh Isa bin Salman had invited me to visit him in Bahrain, and my friend Nabil al-Hamar reminded me twice about the invitation, but I was too late. Sheikh Isa died, and to this day, I still regret not seeing him one last time. Mam Jalal has invited me year after year to visit Iraq, and stay at the presidential palace outside the Green Zone, guarded by Peshmerga. But I declined and said that I would never go to Iraq with American soldiers still in it. Last year, at a dinner in New York on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session, I sat next to him, and with us about 70 guests, both Iraqis and Americans and others. He told me that I had no excuses left since the Americans left Iraq, and wanted me to come back with him on his official plane to Baghdad. I told him: Mam Jalal please, I do not want to miss Palestine's and Abu Mazen's speech. Mam Jalal accepted my excuse, and I was going to accompany him back to Baghdad this year, but he was absent due to illness and now I hear that his life is in danger. I knew Mam Jalal when he was in the opposition, in Damascus, Amman and Western capitals. He has always been witty and smart, and a brilliant political analyst who has all his facts straight. His Arabic was fine and eloquent, since he is a founding member of the Iraqi Bar Association and the Iraqi Journalists Syndincate. When he founded his party the Patriotic Union for Kurdistan (PUK), half of the Kurds became his supporters, although their traditional leadership always rested with Mullah Mustafa Barzani, and now with our brother Massoud Barzani. Running out of space, I will content myself with some of the major highlights of my relationship with him I visited him along with colleagues Ghassan Charbel and Ibrahim Hamidi in his headquarters at Dukan Dam in 2002. He came down to us in his sleeping clothes (pajamas) to welcome us, because he could not believe that we bothered to make the journey all the way there. Brother Barham Saleh and I convinced him after some effort to put on a jacket so that Ibrahim can conduct a televised interview with him. But he wore the jacket and forgot to wear a belt. One time in London, we met on a prescheduled appointment after the UN General Assembly session in New York. He asked me to help secure an invitation from President Bashar al-Assad to visit Syria. He was clear and said that he had nine demands, and that if I guaranteed for him that the Syrian president would fulfill three or four of them, then he would make the visit, even if the Iraqi prime minister and the Americans object to this. I took this request to the Syrian president. After that, Mam Jalal received an invitation to visit Syria. When I asked him at the UN whether he managed to achieve any of his demands, he said that he achieved a few, but that this remained better than nothing. He, may God heal him, loves to eat. Once, I asked him to leave the breakfast table in New York because I could not hear him, and to move to the lounge in his hotel suite. But he told me that he knew that his wife asked his friends to stop him from eating. He has always been witty, and that never changed even in the darkest of times. Today, I can only pray to God to bless him with healing. [email protected]
