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GNN’s reporter in the
field, David Enders, has filed another dispatch from
Iraq. Here he spends some time with Kurds fighting
for democracy in Iran. One says, “The Iranian
government is strong. But not that strong.”
In the mountains with a
Kurdish opposition group trying to bring democracy
to Iran.
KANDEEL, Kurdistan-Iraq, -- The simple,
cinderblock and sod-roof, dwellings of the Party for
Free Life in Kurdistan (PJAK) don’t look much
different from those of the surrounding villages in
Iraq’s Zagros mountains. The plumbing is outdoors
and the water comes from mountain streams. Nor do
the men and women in the village look much different
from those elsewhere in the region—most wear
traditional Kurdish clothing, baggy coveralls sashed
at the waist, and it’s not uncommon to see people
with Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders.
It’s only in conversation that the men and women of
the PJAK camp, most of whom hail from Iran, begin to
distinguish themselves from Iraqi Kurds, who tend to
be subsistence farmers with little education. My
first night in the PJAK camp, I was treated to a
broken-English crash course in the group’s
ideology—a variant of democratic socialism combined
with a call for the Iranian government to adhere to
the European Union’s convention on human rights.
The group has been exiled to the mountains of
northern Iraq during its struggle to bring democracy
to Iran, but the members of PJAK remain surprisingly
optimistic. They began organizing underground cells
and demonstrating in Iran in the mid-1990s, but
after facing persecution by the Tehran government in
1999, many members fled and set up a base in Kandeel.
In 2004, the group began carrying out small-arms
attacks inside Iran against military targets, in
response to Iranian aggression against Kurds in the
country’s western provinces. BBC Persia reported
that PJAK killed 120 Iranian police officers during
a six-month period in 2005. It is currently one of
the largest—if not the largest—Iranian opposition
group, claiming 4,000 members in Kandeel and
thousands more inside Iran.
PJAK claims that its numbers have risen steadily
since its formation, and that its existence is
convincing many of Iran’s approximately 3.7 million
Kurds—about 7 percent of the country’s total
population—that the theocratic government in Tehran
can be challenged both militarily and politically.
“The Iranian government is strong,” says Akif Zagros,
28, a former journalist and a founding member of
PJAK. “But not that strong.”
Since the creation of modern Iran, the Kurdish
minority inside the country has endured
oppression—as have Kurds in neighboring countries.
The Islamic Revolution in 1979 initiated a jihad by
the Shiite government against the Sunni Kurds.
Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini,
declared that Kurds were not autonomous and had no
reason to seek cultural rights. Such discrimination
continues to this day. Kurds in Iran, for instance,
are not allowed to receive Kurdish-language
education in school—as was the case in Saddam
Hussein’s Iraq and, until 2004, in Turkey.
In addition to cultural discrimination, Iranian
Kurds complain that they do not receive the same
services—such as petrol subsidies—as Iranians in
other parts of the country, and that the Kurdish
provinces, despite being oil-rich, are economically
depressed.
Iran’s previous president, Mohamed Khatami,
attempted to reverse some of this discrimination by
including Kurds in the government, authorizing the
creation of Kurdish-language chairs at universities,
and easing restrictions against Kurdish political
activity. But these small steps have been reversed
with the election of hardline president Mahmoud
Ahmedinejad last year.
PJAK’s location in Kandeel is remote—to get to the
leadership, one must ride to the end of a two-track
road accessible only by 4×4, and then hike for a few
hours. But that has not discouraged many young
Iranian Kurds from seeking refuge here.
“If I hadn’t left Iran, I might have been hanged,”
says 24-year-old Karwan Agri, a computer engineering
student from Markezi in western Iran. Agri says he
was part of a PJAK cell at his university, and
decided to flee Iran and travel to Kandeel two
months ago, after Ahmedinejad’s election and a
subsequent increase in crackdowns on members of
Kurdish political parties. PJAK in particular has
received much attention because of its latter-day
militancy.
“After Ahmedinejad’s election, the situation
changed. Freedoms that had existed in Iran before,
under Khatami, disappeared. There is now an
atmosphere of violence. Eighty percent of university
students are opposed to Ahmedinijad’s ideology. I
know more than 100 students who have left to the
mountains since his election.”
Zagros says PJAK’s armed operations only target the
Iranian military and police in response to
aggression against Kurds. (To date, there is no
evidence that the group ever engages in terrorism
against civilians.)
“Defense takes two forms. Some of it is organized
here, some of it is organized spontaneously by
people in Iranian Kurdistan,” he says.
PJAK isn’t seeking independence for Iran’s Kurdish
provinces; rather, the group is calling for an end
to the rule by mullahs in Tehran. It is the only
Kurdish group in Iran calling openly for the
government to reform, although Zagros says his group
would negotiate with the mullahs if the latter were
willing to end Iran’s discrimination against its
Kurdish population.
“If the Iranian government accepts our demands, we
are ready to talk to them,” he says.
In the meantime, the group is focusing on assisting
and empowering the Iranian population.
“PJAK supports helping people get off heroin,” said
Diller, a Kurd from Mariwan, a western Iranian city
where PJAK is active. (There are currently an
estimated three-to-four million heroin addicts in
Iran.) Diller, who is not a member of PJAK, works on
the dangerous smuggling route from Iraq to Iran,
carrying contraband alcohol across the border
because, he says, there is no other employment. “The
Iranian government doesn’t care about Kurds. They
don’t supply our cities with the same services they
do for the Shiites.”
Like the better-known Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK)
in Turkey, which advocates for an independent
Kurdish homeland, and which has used these mountains
as a base since 1991 in a guerrilla war against the
Turkish government that has claimed more than 30,000
lives, a major component of PJAK’s fight is for
women’s rights.
“Our aim is to be an alternative to the leadership
of Iran, and we organize women toward this aim. The
Iranian government deprives women of their freedom,”
says 26-year-old Golistan Dugan, a female member of
the group’s leadership council. “Here in the
mountains the women are organized.”
Dugan left Iran in 1999, in the wake of Kurdish
nationalist demonstrations following the arrest of
PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan in Turkey. The protests
provoked crackdowns by Tehran.
PJAK members claim 45 percent of their membership is
female.
“We want not only to include Kurdish women but also
Iranian women,” Dugan says.
Women in PJAK receive the same political education
and military training that the men do, and “daughter
guerillas” have participated in the attacks against
Iran that began in 2004.
According to the group’s charter, 12 of the 21
members of PJAK’s elected legislative council must
be women; as well, three of the seven members of the
leadership council, selected from the legislative
council, are women. The group also has three
educational subcommittees—focusing on secular
democratic education for youth, democracy, and
women.
“We send [the people we train] back to Iran to
organize underground among the women, young people
and university students,” Zagros says.
Many of the group’s members say they are inspired by
Ocalan, and pictures of him and his wife—as well as
those of Vian Jaff, a PKK member who recently self
herself on fire in Turkey—adorn the walls of PJAK
dwellings. But unlike the PKK, the members of PJAK
eschew Kurdish nationalist rhetoric, and would
prefer a democratic Iran to the formation of a
greater Kurdistan. Ocalan is a controversial
figure—during his rule of the PKK he was so
intolerant of dissent that he sentenced his first
wife to death for disagreeing with his policies—but
PJAK points to his Declaration of Democratic
Confederalism in Kurdistan, released last year, in
which Ocalan professed to switch from an autocratic
ideology to a democratic one.
Zagros says the PJAK, which counts membership abroad
in the Kurdish diaspora in Europe and Russia—which
is a major source of the group’s funding—has had
contact with other Iranian dissidents, including the
Mujahideen e-Khalq (MEK), a communist opposition
group whose members inside Iraq continue to languish
in U.S. custody at Camp Ashraf near the Iranian
border, where they have been since shortly after the
invasion.
“There is just talk, a primitive agreement, but in
our plan there is a widening agreement,” Zagros
says, declining to elaborate further.
Both the MEK and the PKK remain on the State
Department’s list of terrorist organizations, but
the Iranian government has accused the U.S. of
supporting PJAK. Zagros denies this, saying the
group has had no contact with the US military or
diplomats.
“Our demand is democracy—we accept and welcome
[American] support,” Zagros says. “But only in
accordance with the interests of Kurdish people.”
At a PKK base on the other side of the mountain,
Abdul Rahman Chaderchi, a member of the PKK’s
political council, confirms the PKK’s support for
PJAK and decries the U.S. government’s hypocrisy in
supporting autonomy for Iraq’s Kurds but not for
other groups.
“We want the U.S. to see all Kurds with the same
eyes,” he says.
Kandeel is essentially under PKK control—as one gets
deeper into the mountains, checkpoints manned by the
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the party loyal to
Iraqi president Jalal Talabani, give way to PKK
outposts. The PUK avoids putting pressure the PKK
because of both local sympathies for Kurdish
national groups and the fact that it wants to avoid
sparking armed conflict. PJAK says they have no
relationship with the PUK, and Zagros criticized the
autocratic nature of Iraq’s Kurdish parties.
“This ideology is opposite to ours,” he says.
The PJAK leadership would like to receive the same
level of support from the United States that the PUK
enjoys, although the specter of an American military
intervention in Iran makes some PJAK members uneasy.
“Outside intervention is not good for Iran right
now, because the people are not ready for it, and it
might be damaging,” says Agri, the former
computer-engineering student.
Regardless of what happens on the international
stage, however, Zagros says that, for now, the group
is planning a response to the arrests of Kurds in
Iran during Nowruz—the traditional Zoroastrian new
year, celebrated by Kurds and Persians on the vernal
equinox on March 21.
Guerrillanews.com
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