Justice & Law Quote by Jalal Talabani

Talabani is insisting that legitimacy is not a slogan you declare, but a discipline you practice. The line is built like a test: if your cause is truly just, it will show up not only in what you demand, but in how you pursue it. The phrasing turns justice into a mirror. Rectification is not merely an outcome; it is a method that must visibly carry the moral DNA of the cause itself.

The subtext is a warning aimed at the classic trap of post-oppression politics: revenge dressed up as righteousness. “Crimes of the past” acknowledges real injury - state violence, dispossession, repression - but “the manner” shifts the battlefield from grievance to governance. Talabani is arguing that the future can be ruined by the tactics used to fix the past: extrajudicial punishment, collective blame, humiliations that feel cathartic in the moment and corrosive in the long run. It’s a plea for restraint not as softness, but as strategic moral authority.

Context matters. As an Iraqi Kurdish leader who became Iraq’s first Kurdish president after 2003, Talabani spoke from inside a volatile transition: de-Baathification, sectarian retaliations, competing claims to land and power, and the fragile attempt to build a state after dictatorship and war. His sentence reads like an internal memo to a revolution trying to become a government. He’s staking a claim that justice must be performed in public, procedurally, and without becoming the very crime it seeks to redress.