Tuesday, 30 March 2010
By Kenneth R. Timmerman
The Iranian regime thinks it is on a roll. Without so much as a whimper from the United States or Europe, it succeeded in brutally suppressing the Green movement during the latest round of protests on the anniversary of the revolution on Feb. 11. Now it sees an opportunity to roll up its opponents outside Iran as well.
In recent show trials, Tehran cynically has tried dozens of opposition demonstrators as "mohareb" (one who wages war against God). The crime carries the death sentence and has been used periodically by the regime as a means of eliminating its
On Feb. 23, the Iranians nabbed a prominent guerrilla leader, Abdolmalek Rigi, who had been living in Pakistan. Just days later, they released an obviously staged videotaped "confession" in which Mr. Rigi said that his Baluchi rebel group, Jundollah, had been offered arms, money and training by the CIA - charges the U.S. government dismissed as "ludicrous."
Mr. Rigi's group has launched a series of spectacular raids against the Iranian security forces. The deadliest of these attacks was also the most recent. On Oct. 18, a Jundollah suicide bomber blew himself up near the town of Pishin, Iran, while an official government delegation was visiting the Baluchistan region. The attack killed at least 43 people, including 15 top Revolutionary Guard officers.
Now the regime has won new allies in its effort to crush the opposition: the governments of Belgium and Germany, and Interpol, the International police organization based in Lyons, France.
On March 6, the German government exercised a dubious arrest warrant issued by Belgium and stormed the Cologne apartment of Rahman Haj Ahmadi, the secretary-general of the Free Life Party of Iranian Kurdistan.
According to the German-language warrant, which was not shown to Mr. Ahmadi at the time of his arrest, he was wanted because he "is said to have attended" a meeting of a pan-Kurdish Congress, the KCK, and to have gone to training camps run by his own organization in northern Iraq "wearing a PJAK uniform, which resembles the uniforms of the PKK."
This is literally death by association because the United States and some governments in Europe have recognized the Turkish PKK as a terrorist organization. The only problem is, PJAK is not the PKK, and its training camps are located in a very different part of Iraq's rugged northern mountains from those operated by the PKK. I know, because I visited the PJAK bases in October 2007.
PJAK is primarily a political organization that seeks to "change the culture" of Iranian Kurdistan and promote a broad-based secular democratic movement in Iran, according to Mr. Ahmadi. PJAK activists played a central role in the post-election protests in Tehran and other cities and have been arrested and tried in large numbers. Some have been executed already.
The president of the Iranian Parliament, Ali Larijani, boasted on March 8 that his government has issued an official request to extradite Mr. Ahmadi to Iran, where he will face certain execution. The Germans released him after holding him incommunicado over the weekend, but he has been barred from leaving the country.
