About Lvin

Lvin

Lvin, also rendered Livin in many English-language reports, is an independent political magazine published in Sulaymaniyah, in Iraqi Kurdistan, in Kurdish. Established in 2002 in Sulaimaniya, as the city is also spelled, it publishes three times a month, is widely circulated in Kurdistan, and has become known internationally less for any single article than for what has been done to the people who write it. Human Rights Watch describes it as one of Iraqi Kurdistan's leading independent publications, frequently publishing articles openly critical of the two ruling parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. Its editor-in-chief and owner, Ahmed Mira, has been sued for a billion dinars, threatened with death by a government minister according to his own recorded account, and beaten and detained by special forces. One of its reporters, Soran Mama Hama, was assassinated in Kirkuk in 2008 at the age of twenty-three, after writing about the alleged involvement of officials in prostitution rings; his murder remained unsolved for years afterward. Alongside the independent newspapers Hawlati and Awena, and the magazine Shock, Lvin is counted among the independent titles published and distributed in Sulaymaniyah, the cultural capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. Its history since 2002 is therefore also a history of the limits of press freedom in the Kurdistan Region, told through one magazine's file of threats, lawsuits and graves.

Origins in Sulaymaniyah

Sulaymaniyah, known in Kurdish as Slemani, has a long reputation as the intellectual and cultural centre of Iraqi Kurdistan, the home of poets such as Nali, Mahwi and Piramerd, and since 2003 the city has sustained a media scene distinct from the party-dominated outlets of the region. Lvin was established there in 2002, on the eve of the fall of Saddam Hussein's government, and built its position in the decade that followed. Reference accounts of the city's culture name exactly two independent newspapers, Hawlati and Awena, and two independent political magazines, Lvin and Shock, as the independent titles published and distributed in Slemani. In Kurdistan media-landscape guides, Lvin Press is likewise listed among the outlets of Sulaymaniyah. That placement matters. Most Kurdish media are owned by, or aligned with, the two ruling parties; an independent magazine in Sulaymaniyah, a city governed within the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan's area of influence, that criticised both parties occupied exposed ground from the start. Publishing three times a month, in Kurdish, and circulating widely across Kurdistan, Lvin made itself a regular presence in its readers' political lives rather than an occasional pamphlet, and its regularity is part of why the authorities' quarrel with it became so sustained.

Editor Ahmed Mira

The central figure in Lvin's story is Ahmed Mira, identified in court documents and press-freedom reports as the magazine's owner and editor-in-chief. Mira's experience, documented in unusual detail by international organisations, gives the abstract phrase pressure on the press a concrete form. Reporters Without Borders photographed and described the notebook in which Mira listed every death threat he had received since July 2008: the date, the hour, the sender's number and the content of each message. During a single interview with that organisation he received no fewer than two further threatening messages. Mira told his interviewers that he received many more threats from KDP supporters, while adding, in a remark that says much about Kurdish politics, that the problem was not attributable to Nechirvan Barzani himself, whom he called open-minded and intelligent, but to some of his zealous partisans. Journalists who file complaints in Kurdistan, the same reporting notes, face a procedural wall: the authorities cannot trace the authors of threats until a court has opened a formal inquiry with the telephone company, and those who threaten by phone typically use prepaid cards that cannot be traced. Mira's notebook was thus both an archive and an admission: the record existed because the remedy did not.

The Killing of Soran Mama Hama

On the night of 21 July 2008, unidentified gunmen shot Soran Mama Hama outside his home in the Shorija neighbourhood of Kirkuk, a predominantly Kurdish area considered relatively safe. He was twenty-three years old. He had worked at Livin for three years while studying at the Fine Arts Institute of Kirkuk, where he was a senior in the music department. His last article in the magazine, titled in translation Prostitutes Invade Kirkuk, recounted the prevalence of prostitution in Kirkuk and the alleged complicity of police and security officials; in it he claimed to have collected the names of police brigadiers, many lieutenants, colonels and many police and security officers who were clients. He had received threatening messages before the killing, including, the Kurdistan Journalists Syndicate said, a threatening message from an unidentified person on 15 May, and he had filed complaints about them. Local journalists told the Committee to Protect Journalists that the gunmen were driving a BMW and that the shooting happened at about nine in the evening. Kirkuk police brigadier Jamal Tahir told CPJ the department had launched an investigation that would receive special attention. Ahmed Mira told CPJ the slaying was designed to silence the free voices in Kirkuk and called it a very dangerous development for the region's media.

Impunity and Aftermath

The investigation produced no public result. A year after the murder, in July 2009, CPJ again called on the authorities in Kirkuk province to bring the killers to justice, reporting that the investigation was still ongoing but without result, in the words of the same police brigadier, and that Mira believed officials wanted to neglect the case in any way they could. Local journalists told CPJ they feared political influence and conflicts of interest had impeded the case; they also pointed to an alleged assassination plot against Mira himself in September 2008 as evidence that the publication, not only its dead reporter, was being targeted. Livin journalists issued a statement on the day of the killing holding Kurdistan Regional Government officials accountable, and Mira argued that Kurdish parties in Kirkuk should be held accountable first, since most security and police in the region were Kurdish and no investigation had been done. The United States State Department's 2008 human rights report on Iraq recorded the case, noting that the KRG took no action to help solve it, claiming it lacked jurisdiction because the killing happened in Kirkuk. Years later the murder remained unsolved; a 2021 assessment still recorded it as unresolved. The case also fed the grievances of the Kurdish protest movement of 2011, whose young demonstrators demanded, among their calls against corruption and nepotism, an end to the suppression and imprisonment of journalists and independent writers, in protests that lasted sixty days before security forces ended them on 18 April 2011.

Threats Over a Historical Interview

In August 2010 the magazine was threatened over the content of an interview. The 1 August issue carried an interview with Irfan Qani Fard, a Harvard doctoral student, discussing the legacy of Mustafa Barzani, the Kurdish nationalist leader and father of the Kurdistan Region's president, Masoud Barzani. In the interview Fard asserted that Mustafa Barzani had betrayed Qazi Muhammad, president of the short-lived Republic of Kurdistan, and claimed he was supported by Iranian intelligence services. Halgurd Samad, the magazine's editorial director, told CPJ that Livin was then threatened in public statements, emails and text messages. On the Thursday after the interview, an entity describing itself as a youth group defending the sanctity of Kurdistan published a statement in Khabat, the daily newspaper of the KDP, calling on Kurds to raise their hands against those who would abuse the history of leaders like Qazi Muhammad and Mullah Mustafa Barzani, stating that those responsible must be abused and insulted, insisting that the Livin journalists apologise, and warning that otherwise they would pay the price. CPJ said it was alarmed by the threats. The episode shows the particular sensitivities around Lvin's work: in Kurdistan, historical judgement about the founding figures of the ruling party could draw organised menace as surely as reporting on present-day corruption.

The Lawsuits of 2011

The spring of 2011 brought Lvin's gravest legal danger. Its 1 May issue carried an article by reporter Jiyar Muhammad, headlined in translation Lvin Reveals KDP and PUK Plan to Murder Three Opposition Leaders. The article quoted an unnamed senior member of the PUK as saying that the possibility of assassinating three opposition leaders, named as Nawsherwan Mustafa of the Change movement, Salahadin Bahaddin of the Islamic Union and Ali Bapir of the Islamic Group, as the only way to end a wave of pro-democracy protests, had been raised at a meeting of the two parties' political bureaux at the end of March, a meeting the article said was attended by KDP leader Massoud Barzani and PUK leader Jalal Talabani, then president of Iraq. Talabani sued Mira and Muhammad before a Sulaymaniyah court on 7 May under the 2007 Journalism Law; at an initial hearing on 13 May Mira was released on bail of three million dinars and Muhammad on bail of one million. Police had already detained Mira and a Livin reporter, named by Human Rights Watch as Zhyar Mohammed, for five hours on 5 May. On 17 or 18 May the KDP filed its own action in Erbil, naming Mira as Lvin's owner and editor-in-chief, demanding the magazine's closure and one billion dinars in damages, some 605,000 euros in the reporting of the time, for the publication of false information intended to defame the party, and asking the court to ban Mira from leaving the country. Reporters Without Borders warned that the suit could force one of Iraqi Kurdistan's leading independent publications to close, and objected that legal actions for press offences should be brought under the 2007 Journalism Law, which contains no provisions for such sanctions, rather than under provisions of the civil or criminal codes that allow uncapped damages.

A Minister's Death Threat

Running alongside the lawsuits was a more direct menace. Mira reported that on 24 April 2011 he received a death threat by telephone from Sheikh Jaafar Mustafa, the Kurdistan government's minister of Peshmerga, its security forces. The call's history is unusual: a Livin reporter had telephoned the minister for comment on an unrelated matter and recorded the conversation, in which, the reporter said, the minister, angered by an unflattering article comparing him to the Israeli defence minister Ehud Barak, threatened the editor. Mira said he informed the KRG prime minister, Barham Salih, and asked for his help, adding: I have a recording of the threat and can prove it, but unfortunately the prime minister has not made any efforts to investigate a death threat by a member of his own cabinet. On 7 May Mira published an article about the threat. The minister denied threatening him. Human Rights Watch called on the KRG to investigate the alleged threat and, if substantiated, to remove Mustafa from his position and prosecute him. That a magazine editor could hold a recording of a cabinet minister's alleged death threat, publish it, and see no investigation, became one of the emblematic facts in international reporting on Kurdistan's press climate, with Human Rights Watch describing Kurdistan authorities as having repeatedly tried to silence Livin Magazine.

The Raid of September 2011

On 7 September 2011 the pressure turned physical again. At about half past twelve in the afternoon, men in the military uniform of the special forces stormed into Lvin's offices in Sulaymaniyah. Mira's account, given to Reporters Without Borders, describes the men threatening his secretary, who refused to let them pass, threatening to smash everything, searching every corner of the premises and insulting him repeatedly, before he was handcuffed and hit on the legs and ankles with the butt of a Kalashnikov. His brother Osman was also hit. Four military vehicles waited outside; Mira was bundled into one, taken to the Bakhtyari police station, and then before a judge, who ordered his release at half past three, after three hours. He said he still did not know why he had been attacked, and that he had filed a complaint against the special forces and against police officers who insulted him at the station. The KDP denied involvement. The Asayesh, Kurdistan's intelligence agency, responsible for the special forces, also denied its forces had anything to do with the incident; an Asayesh representative in Sulaymaniyah added that he had filed a defamation suit against Lvin over the magazine's own report of the raid on its website. Reporters Without Borders condemned the illegal arrest and beating. The sequence, a raid, a denial and a defamation suit against the victim for describing it, summarises the environment in which Lvin worked.

Lvin in the Kurdistan Media Landscape

To understand Lvin's significance, it must be set among its peers. Sulaymaniyah's independent print scene of its era consisted essentially of the newspapers Hawlati and Awena and the magazines Lvin and Shock, set against a much larger field of party-owned and party-aligned media across the Kurdistan Region. Human Rights Watch's May 2011 report on Iraqi Kurdistan, titled to describe a growing effort to silence media, made Livin its leading case: an independent magazine established in 2002, publishing three times a month, widely circulated, openly critical of both ruling parties, several of whose writers had been threatened or arrested or had fled the country. The local press-freedom group Metro Center to Defend Journalists documented more than two hundred cases of attacks and harassment of Kurdish journalists from 17 February 2011 alone, and Reporters Without Borders tallied forty-four physical attacks and twenty-three arrests in the same crackdown season. Lvin's file was the thickest single thread in that documentation, because the magazine kept publishing the kind of material, on corruption, on prostitution rings protected by officials, on alleged assassination plots, on the reputations of sacred historical figures, that the authorities most wished unpublished.

Significance

Lvin's importance in the record of Iraqi media is double. As a magazine, it is a Kurdish-language independent political title from Sulaymaniyah that achieved wide circulation in Kurdistan without party ownership, one of only two such magazines in its city. As a case, it is among the most fully documented examples in the Middle East of how an independent publication can be pressured without ever being formally banned: through an unsolved assassination of a young reporter, through threats logged in a notebook, through defamation suits under laws that permit ruinous damages and demands for closure, through alleged threats from a minister and through a raid that every responsible authority denied. The international record closes, in the sources available to this profile, with the events of 2011; it does not record the magazine's closure, and the title's survival through that year, unbanned and still publishing, is itself part of its story. In a directory of Iraqi magazines, Lvin stands as the Sulaymaniyah title whose history demonstrates both the existence of a genuinely independent Kurdish press and the price, measured in one life and many threats, at which that independence was maintained.