SULAIMANI, Kurdistan Region – Sulaimani residents speak nostalgically of the days when the city’s wealthy men used their riches for charity, and funded public projects. Those men are still remembered in city street names such as Ali Naji, Ali Kemal and Ali Boskani.
These three men – and some others -- returned much of their wealth back into the city, building public hospitals and schools in the 1970s and ‘80s that still bear their names, some city residents and writers say.
According to statistics by the Kurdistan Board of Investment (BOI), there are 2, 580 millionaires in Sulaimani, and the wealth of each exceeds $5 million.
But Kamal Nuri, director of the city’s Education Department, says that “in the past 20 years only two schools have been built by the wealthy people of Sulaimani.”
Recently, a non-governmental organization organized an investment conference and invited millionaires and investors in Sulaimani to encourage them to support public service projects.
“Only five of all the investors and millionaires invited even bothered to show up,” Nuri explains.
According to Mustafa Baram, project director at Sulaimani’s Department of Health, businessmen have built only two hospitals in the city since the Kurds gained autonomy in 1991.
But he adds, “Sulaimani needs around seven more hospitals,”
Yasin Rashid, president of the investment board in Sulaimani, said that some of Kurdistan’s ultra-wealthy were as rich as the rich in Gulf countries, but gave much less than their Arab counterparts.
They may not have built schools or parks, but Kurdistan’s newly rich have shown a passion for building mosques: Fifty-five have been built over the past two decades, and seven more are under construction, according to Ako Hassan, director of Sulaimani’s Religious Endowment.
Author Mustafa Salih Kareem says that, for their charitable deeds, the city’s former patrons “became the symbol of generosity in Sulaimani, and people will not forget them.”
Jamal Abdul, a prominent education expert in Sulaimani who chaired the Ali Kamal student fund four decades ago, told Rudaw, “Ali Kemal and the others were not even millionaires, but they loved their city and were loyal to its people.”
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