KurdishMedia.com - By Ahmad Eskandari
27/08/2010
Islamic Republic of Iran’s aatrocities against civilian disobedience in Kurdistan
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 . . . 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,and 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.”
KurdishMedia.com - By Ahmad Eskandari27/08/2010 00:00:00
