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Islamic Republic of Iran’s atrocities
against civilian disobedience in Kurdistan 28.8.2010
By Ahmad Eskandari |
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August 28, 2010
The memories of 19 August 1979 are still alive.
The execution of five Human Rights activists, among
them the brave and intellectual young Kurdish
teacher, Farzad Kamangar on the 9th of May 2010,
that was highlighted by the international mass
media, was followed by mass demonstrations and
protest actions by Iranians and Kurds in Iran and
around the World. To protest against this atrocious
act in Kurdistan itself, the whole population
responded positively to the appeal of political
parties in opposition to the Iranian Regime and
participated in a one day general strike on May
23rd. This general strike made it clear that the
situation was not exactly the same in Kurdistan, as
in the rest of Iran.
Since the very beginning of the establishment of the
Islamic Republic in Iran, the tone and mode of
opposition has been different in Kurdistan.
31 years ago, on August 19th, 1979, the Iranian
radio and television stopped its ordinary programs
abruptly and read time and again the Jihad Decree of
Ayatollah Khomeini against the Kurdish people in
which he called on “all the armed forces (air,
ground and marine) of the country to move
immediately towards Kurdistan . . . |
A government firing squad executes nine Kurdish
rebels and two former police officers of the deposed
Shah of Iran after summary trials, Aug. 27, 1979.
The next day, another 21 Kurdish rebels and military
deserters were executed. Photo: Iranian photographer
Jahangir Razmi. |
Any delay, even one hour
will be regarded as contravention of duties and
wrongdoers will be punished severely and
accordingly.” Despite the fact that there is no sea
connection to Kurdistan, the formulation of the
Fatwa demonstrates to what extent the armed forces
were involved in the operations and the situation
there on that ‘bloody Sunday of August 19th, 1979’.
The whole action was based on the false news, cabled
the same day to Khomeini’s headquarters. It alleged
that the armed Kurds in the capital city of Sanandaj
had kidnapped wives and daughters of officers in the
army and other police forces and held them as
hostages in the city’s Friday Mosque. The news of
the kidnapping was totally fabricated, of course.
Neither on that day nor the days before or after,
any women or girls had ever been kidnapped or taken
hostage in Kurdistan.
Besides, on that same day, there was not a single
armed Kurd in that big and famous mosque. At the
time and due to the “revolutionary fervour of
radical pro-Khomeini militants”, nobody within the
Iranian administration dared to defy this false news
item. Later on, the very Governor of Kurdistan
Province, designated by the Interior ministry, who
at the time was in fact in the same city of
Sanandaj, denied the news through his lines of
communications with the Interior Ministry in Tehran.
He indicated in an interview, some months later,
that he had tried to convince the authorities in
Tehran on the falseness of the news, but it was in
vain.
This was the beginning stage of a process of three
months of atrocities, summary executions (officially
for having “endangered national security and
territorial integrity”) and massacre of some
villagers in Kurdistan and an unprecedented
oppression towards the civilian population. The
political parties, who did not expect such a
reaction and were not prepared at all, were
completely surprised; however, they managed to
organise, after a couple of weeks, an armed
resistance from scratch.
The Kurdish people, who had boycotted the referendum
for the establishment of an Islamic Republic in
Iran, earlier in April of the same year-1979,
resisted and were mobilised in supporting the
Kurdish political organisations thoroughly. This
resulted two months later, in dispatching of a
“Governmental Delegation of Good Offices” to meet
with Kurdish leaders in the mountainous area on the
border with Iraq. The same Khomeini, who had ordered
the Fatwa for Jihad three months earlier, agreed to
negotiations and issued “a historical message for
reconciliation” and praised the Kurds and their
political leaders!
After several meetings with a ministerial delegation
(I participated in a couple of the meetings in
September 1979), a Kurdish delegation was formed.
The “Delegation of Representatives of the Kurdish
People”(DRKP) was presented to the people of
Kurdistan and they supported it with massive
demonstrations throughout the whole of Kurdistan in
Iran. The president of DRKP was Sheikh Ezzedin
Hosseini,www.ekurd.netand its spokesperson was Dr Abdulrahman
Ghassemlou. The delegation was comprised of
representatives of Kurdistan Democratic Party of
Iran, Revolutionary Toilers Organisation of Iraninan
Kurdistan or Komala and People’s Fedayeen Guerrillas
Organisation.
There was only a short meeting with the official
delegation of the government which received huge
media coverage at that time. It became clear from
the very beginning that the Iranian regime was
gaining time to prepare itself for yet another
series of offensives, mass executions and atrocities
in Kurdistan in the Spring of 1980. About 23 years
later, this assertion is supported by some of the
same figures, former ministers and members of the
official delegation at that time, who confess in
interviews with a monthly magazine in Tehran named
“Cheshmandaze Iran” dated March 2003. (I have
commented on this issue in details in an article in
Farsi in 2004).
The Kurds asked for their national rights,
democracy, freedom, equal rights for women and men
in a secular society. But the new leaders of Iran
challenged it and refused to accept them..
Sheikh Ezzedin Hosseini who is a Kurdish cleric and
a prominent political figure that has been an
advocate of separation of state and religion from
the very beginning of the Iranian revolution, had
already met with Khomeini himself, the prime
minister and responsible ministers in Tehran and Qom
discussing at length the autonomy for Kurdistan. At
the age of almost 90, though living in exile in
Sweden, he remains defiant to the Islamic Republic
of Iran and is an active advocate of the democratic
movement in Kurdistan and in Iran.
Even a delegation of KDPI headed by its general
secretary Dr Ghassemlou had made the same journey to
Tehran and Qom. However, later on as it is a common
knowledge now, Dr Ghassemlou and three of his
companions were assassinated in an apartment in
Vienna on 13 of July 1989, on the “negotiating
table” with so called diplomats from Tehran.
Many other political assassinations have followed.
The victims come from all political parties in
Kurdistan, some prominent members of KDPI and Komala,
as well as many more Iranian prominent opposition
figures.
But more than 30 years of acts of violence have not
made Kurdistan a “quiet island” for the Iranian
authorities. Civilian disobedience has characterised
the situation in Kurdistan for many years now. The
general strike of the Kurdish people on 23 of May
this year and following the executions of freedom
fighters is a very good indication of that.
The democratic movement of the Iranian people
throughout the country following the presidential
elections of June 2009 and up to now became an event
in which many scenes from the early years of Iranian
rule in Kurdistan were played and replayed. Shooting
on peaceful demonstrations, beating and torturing
prisoners to death, forcing them to appear on TV
“making confessions”, raping young girls before
execution for not letting them to die as virgins,
refusing giving back corpses of the executed men and
women to their families and forcing families of the
victims not to have any remembrance ceremonies for
their beloved ones and so on, were all known actions
of the security forces in Kurdistan for almost
thirty years. But these were unknown for public
opinion in Iran due to a hard censorship and the
fact that all news agencies and broadcast media were
State-owned and tightly controlled especially on
news from Kurdistan.
That notorious “Holy War” of Khomeini and the
Iranian Regime’s aggression against the Kurdish
people is remembered by Human Rights activists and
freedom fighters and democratic campaigners every
year.
Farzad Kamangar, the Kurdish 35-year-old teacher
executed in May 2010, was accused for the same
reason as those innocents in 1979 and later, i.e.
For "endangering national security" and "enmity
against God". In his letters from prison, Farzad
wrote among others:
“Is it possible to carry the heavy burden of being a
teacher and be responsible for spreading the seeds
of knowledge and still be silent? Is it possible to
see the lumps in the throats of the students and
witness their thin and malnourished faces and keep
quiet? . . .
I breathe a sigh of relief after hearing the news of
the imprisonment of my cellmates Nader and Arash,
who have each been sentenced to 10 years in prison,
that fortunately they were not also sentenced to
execution, but when I think about Nader’s little
Mehdi and Arash’s mother, tears fill my eyes and
again I don’t know whether to be sad or happy.”
Copyright, respective author or news agency,
Ahmad Eskandari, kurdmedia com
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