Loghman H. Ahmedi

The Kurdistan Republic (often mistakenly called the Mahabad Republic), established on the 22 of January 1946, stands as the high point of the Kurdish liberation movement. Among other things the republic gave birth to the Peshmerga Forces of Kurdistan (the republics Armed Forces) and the Kurdish flag.

Three years earlier a secret organization called the Society for the Revival of Kurdistan (Komeley Jiyanewey Kurdistan or JK) was formed. Peshewa Qazi Muhammad was elected as chairman of the organization. In 1945 the JK decided that the organization should reorganize into a mondern political party, hence the JK established the Partî Dêmokiratî Kurdistanî Êran (PDKI).

On orders from Peshewa Qazi Muhammad a committee of hand-picked academics and writers searched for a Kurdish word for the republics armed forces. Witnesses say that the committee discussed and argued about the name for several days until an old man serving tea to the members of the committee suggested that they call the Armed forces “Pêşmerga” – literally meaning “those who face death” (Pesh front + marg death). The committee approved the the suggestion and took it to Peshewa, who in turn made the name the official name of the Armed Forces of Kurdistan.

On the 17th of December 1945 the last trace of Iranian rule over Kurdistan disappeared when the Iranian military barack in the Kurdish capital Mahabad was overrun by the Kurdish people. On the same day the Kurdish people raised the Kurdish flag in Mahabad. Later the PDKI declared that the 26 Sermawez (17th of December) as the Kurdistan Peshmerga Day. Both the Kurdish flag and the Peshmerga name is today used by Kurds in all parts of Kurdistan.

Video from the declaration of the Kurdistan Republic and the first Peshmergas:

Video of Peshmerga training and graduation:

Every year the Islamic Republic of Iran kills hundreds of Kurds who are attempting to make a living for themselves and their families by taking goods across the Iran-Iraq border. Many of these Kurds are unemployed young men who are forced to risk their lives only to make a couple of dollars in order to provide for their families. Iranian border guards either force them to pay bribes or kills them in cold blood.

Iran Human Rights documentation Center has published a new document on the execution of Kurds after the revolution in 1979, the document is very interesting, even though it has some flaws. For example the document mostly relay on news articles published in Iranian newspapers at the time (which only reported the regimes version of the events at the time).

The historical introduction is also filled with flaws, for example they link the underground organization Komalei Zhainewe (established in 1943 and predecessor to our party, Democratic party of Iranian Kurdistan) to Komala-party (left/communist Kurdish political party) which was established some years before the revolution. But the document is great for everyone that is interested in Iran’s policy towards the Kurds.

Read the document (html or pdf). Iran Human Rights Documentation Center has also published the following documents related to the Kurds:

Murder at Mykonos: Anatomy of a Political Assassination

No Safe Haven: Iran’s Global Assassination Campaign

Condemned by Law: Assassination of Political Dissidents Abroad

Covert Terror: Iran’s Parallel Intelligence Apparatus

Parviz Dastmalchi was one of the men sitting in the Mykonos restaurant in Berlin when Iranian agents assassinated the Kurdish leader Dr. Sadeq Sharafkandi. The following is video of a witness statement by Mr. Dastmalchi on the assassination:

Christopher Hitchens links the assassination of Dr. Said Sharafkani with the failed plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to the U.S.:

Yesterday an earthquake hit the Kurdish city of Wan (Van) and its surrounding region. Hundreds of Kurds have died and thousands are injured or homeless. Kurdish civilians are reporting that the Turkish government have not responded to the needs of the affected people in the region and the Turkish government have also rejected emergency relief by several countries.

The Kurdish mayor of Amed (Diyarbakir) gave an interview to the Swedish News Agency TT, in which he said that the Turkish government is not doing enough because the victims are Kurds.

All this is happening at the same time as Turkey has mobilized thousands of troops to fight the PKK in Iraqi Kurdistan. Turkey has the time, recourses and will to wage war but not to sufficiently help the civilian Kurdish population of Wan. The Turkish Health Minister Recep Akdağ even said that “all was good in eastern [Kurdish] province…”

Putting all this aside, something that have disgusted and angered the Kurdish public opinion in all parts of Kurdistan is statements made by Turkish hosts of TV-programs and ordinary Turks on social medias like Facebook regarding the Kurdish people affected by the earthquake.

One female host of the Turkish news channel Haper Turk said something in the line of; “Today Turkey was shaken by another sad news … all of Turkey … despite that it [the news] came from the east [Kurdish regions], from Van, we were all deeply shaken by this news …”

This was followed by another female host of Turkish a-TV saying something like; “Throw rocks, we do [she is referring to Kurds], and strike in the mountains like we were out on a bird hunt when it suits us. But when something happens we are calling for the police and Mehmetcik [Turkish soldiers]. We should have some balance here. On hard days you [Kurds] are calling on them but then you are chasing them away as if you were hunting birds in the mountains. I am meaning that one should put them [Kurds] in their place.”

Ordinary Turks on social mediums like Facebook don’t use the same poetic language, instead they write things like; “I hope that all the bastards of Van dies so that we can get rid of these damn Kurds.”

And of course, one Turkish write takes the opportunity to lecture everyone on how not to report on the earthquake and at the same time write a couple of words on Gaddafis death.

The lack of empathy towards Kurds is nothing new or uncommon amongst Turks, neither is the different views regarding Kurds mentioned above, but what is tragic is that some believe that Turkey has made huge transformations in its relationship with the Kurds and that it is the Kurds who do not want peace. Unfortunately the views expressed by ordinary Turks on Facebook and hosts of TV-programs regarding the Kurdish people, who are going through this tragic event, is vastly more common than uncommon.

The fact that the EU has a close economic relationship with Iran and Syria is nothing new, but one expects the EU to have changed its policy due to the events of the past couple of years and months in these two countries. Yet there seems to be some hesitation in the EU to make the necessary decisions to put pressure on these two dictatorial regimes due to economic interests.

Read:

As the world witnesses the Syrian and Iranian regimes commit countless human rights abuses and, in Iran’s case, move ever closer to perfecting its nuclear capabilities, there’s a common belief that, short of military intervention, there’s nothing that can be done. As it turns out, however, that’s far from the truth—but the majority of the initiative must come from Europe. The European Union has thus far failed to confront the Iranian and Syrian regimes to the full extent of its ability. Though they are loath to admit it, European countries are Iran’s and Syria’s best customers, providing the EU with significant leverage. Meaningful energy sanctions could deliver a one-two punch to Iran’s nuclear weapons program and Syrian president Bashar Al Assad’s ongoing campaign to snuff out his country’s democratic reformers.

To its credit, the EU imposed oil sanctions on the Syrian regime in September, barring its 27 members from purchasing Syrian oil. Given that the EU consumes 95 percent of Syria’s oil exports, the embargo could potentially cripple the country’s economy. But there are loopholes in the EU sanctions that allow European energy firms to maintain their investments in Syrian oil fields, continue producing oil from them, and continue delivering it to their EU customers until mid-November. As a result, major European energy companies continue to operate there, including the United Kingdom’s Gulfsands Petreoleum and Petrofac, Hungary’s MOL, France’s Total, Croatia’s INA Industrija Nafte d.d, and the joint Dutch-British enterprise Royal Dutch Shell.

And when it comes to Iran, the EU remains the country’s most important global trade partner. Just last year, the total trade volume between the EU and Iran exceeded €25 billion. Almost 90 percent of Europe’s imports from Iran are energy, making the Islamic Republic the sixth-largest energy provider to the EU. While U.S. companies are prohibited from purchasing Iranian gas, and the Obama administration pushed the EU to ban the export of energy technology to Iran, Europe continues to buy Iranian gas. In addition, Iran joined Syria and Iraq in July as a signatory to a $10 billion natural gas pipeline agreement, under which Syria would eventually buy between 20 and 25 million cubic meters of Iranian gas per day, and run an extended transportation operation—the so-called “Islamic Gas Pipeline”—to Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea, through which it would pipe gas into Europe.

If the EU decided to reduce its Iranian gas imports, the measures could jolt Iran’s fragile energy market, prompting secondary pain to the cash-strapped Syrian regime that Iran is aiding. Iran’s highly vulnerable energy sector has long been considered its Achilles’ heel. The country finances its nuclear program with invaluable revenue from its energy sector. A staggering 70 percent of Iran’s governmental revenues derive from its petroleum business, which makes up 80 percent of the country’s export activities.

Instead, however, the EU—and especially Germany, which is Iran’s number one EU trading partner—continues to have a soft spot for the Iranian regime when it comes to trade. Despite the new EU sanctions, German exports to the Islamic Republic increased by 2.6 percent between 2009 and 2010, reaching a total of €3.8 billion. German exports then dropped from approximately €2.22 billion for the first half of 2010 to roughly €1.76 billion for the first half of 2011, but German imports of Iranian goods increased from to €382 million to €453 million during the same time period. The Federal Republic’s consumption of Iranian gas and oil rose during the first six months of 2011 to €280 million, up from €197 million in the first half of 2010.

Moreover, Germany continues to lend political legitimacy to Iran’s leaders. Last October, a cross-section of German parliamentarians ranging from the Greens to Merkel’s Christian Democrats visited Iran and met with Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel, the head of Iran’s parliamentary cultural committee, who supported Iran’s fatwa against British novelist Salman Rushdie. The delegation also chatted with then-Iranian foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki, who delivered a key speech at Tehran’s 2006 Holocaust denial conference, and Mohammad Javad Larijani, who heads the Iranian human rights council and famously called for Israel’s destruction at a German foreign ministry-sponsored event in Berlin in 2008. During their almost one-week stay in Iran, the German deputies uttered not a word of criticism of Iran’s nuclear and human rights violations.

Videos of Libyan revolutionaries capturing and killing Gaddafi marked the definite end of the brutal rule of Gaddafi, but it also raised questions on the future of Syria, Iran and other dictatorial regimes.

People are drawing parallels between the fallen dictators of the Arab countries and to some extent hope that people’s power will prevail in other dictatorial states in the region. But if we make a comparison between the fallen dictators of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and the current regimes in Iran and Syria we can conclude that changing the regimes in Syria and Iran will be more like the case of Libya than Egypt or Tunisia.

Iran and Syria has more in common with Libya than they do with Tunisia and Egypt. The revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia were, compared to the revolution in Libya, quite peaceful. The common denominator in the case of Egypt and Tunisia was that the regimes of these two countries were more prone to Western, in particular U.S., pressure.

Hence, when the U.S. and other Western countries withdrew their support for the regimes in these two countries and openly supported regime change, the dictators of these two countries could not violently suppress the revolutions and were eventually forced to step down. There are of course a series of other explanations for why and how Ben Ali and Mubarak were forced to step down, but key to the fact that they hesitated to use brutal violence was Western pressure not to do so.

In the case of the revolution in Libya, Western countries had no influence over the regime and could not pressure Gaddafi not to use brutal violence to stop the revolution. Hence, we saw at the early stages of the Libyan uprising how close Gaddafi was to suppress the revolution with force. It wasn’t until the Libyan opposition took up arms and a UN resolution was passed that made it possible for NATO to intervene that Gaddafi was pushed back and finally captured and killed.

In the case of Iran, which definitely does not reply positively to Western pressure, we saw in the summer of 2009 how peaceful demonstrations were brutally crushed by the theocratic regime. Looking into Iran’s modern history and the 1979 revolution we can draw a parallel to Tunisia and Egypt. The former Shah of Iran (who had close ties to the U.S. and was to a high degree prone to U.S. pressure) came close to crushing the 1979 revolution until the U.S. stepped in and essentially forced the Shah to stop using violence, which resulted in regime change. But in the case of the current regime there is no such link and there is also no real risk of intervention, thus the regime has, for now, been able to stay in power.

And in the case of Syria we are witnessing how the regime of Bashar al-Assad is brutally killing people in the thousands in order to stay in power. Just like in the case of Iran there is no Western influence to exert pressure not to use violence to suppress peaceful uprisings. Consequently both regimes are able to use brutal violence to suppress peaceful uprisings.

Going back to the case of Libya, we would never have witnessed a successful overthrow of Gaddafi if the opposition hadn’t started an armed uprising and if NATO hadn’t provided the necessary military support.

Based on these examples we can draw the following conclusions; for regime change to be possible in Iran and Syria the following two things need to happen (1) the opposition in Iran and Syria need to take up arms and resist against the two regimes military forces, (2) the opposition will need some kind of international support/intervention in order to succeed.

Reuters reports that Iran has ordered a human rights investigation against the U.S.

Iran’s judiciary ordered an investigation on Wednesday into human rights crimes committed by the United States — a defiant response to a UN report on its own alleged rights violations and to the U.S. charge that Tehran planned to kill a Saudi envoy.

“We must open a special case for America’s crimes in which there is an indictment for the crimes it has carried out in this country and other Islamic states,” Ayatollah Sadeq Larijani was quoted as saying by the official news agency IRNA.

Larijani appointed chief prosecutor Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei — himself under U.S. and European sanctions for alleged rights abuses — to conduct the investigation. He did not say in what jurisdiction any “indictment” would be applied.

This might come a cross as ridiculous for most people, but the regime in Tehran knows what it is doing. The regime will use this so called investigation against the U.S. in several ways. The obvious point Iran will try to make, in order to shift focus from its own human rights record,  is that the report by the UN’s Special Rapporteur is nothing more than another U.S. scheme and that the U.S. on its part is responsible for grave human rights violations, especially in the Islamic world.

But more importantly, they will use a possible “investigation” against the U.S. to bombard the Iranian people with images and information about what the Great Satan (Sheytan’e Bozorg) is doing to Muslims. You might think that most Iranians might see through such a campaign? But if you don’t understand the the mindset of most Persians and don’t speak Persian and haven’t watched the regimes TV channels (especially the local ones targeting specific groups) you won’t understand what a big impact the regimes propaganda has on large segments of the Persian society.

This is true in part because the regimes propaganda is highly sophisticated and effective (even if it seems ridiculous to most people in the West), but also because the regime has become an expert in using Persian nationalism as a tool to shift focus from its own treatment of people in Iran. The regime in Tehran is such an expert in deceiving the Persians that it often even manges to convince its own hardcore opposition to get in line with the regime.

One example of this is how many Persian opposition groups, even though they are openly seeking to overthrow the current regime, have at different times taken the side of the regime on important issues because they are convinced that there is a bigger threat against Persian domination of Iran.

And the current regime in Iran, as mentioned before, is an expert in making almost all issues about this perceived threat, and it will undoubtedly try to make this human rights “investigation” against the U.S. one of those issues. You shouldn’t be surprised if significant parts of the Persian public opinion, even in the diaspora, starts to question why the UN is pushing so hard on Iran’s human rights record, believing that it could be used as a pretext for the West to go to war with Iran.

Again, this might all seem silly to most of you reading this, but it is an reality of Iranian politics.

According to different Iranian media outlets Iran’s Revolutionary Guard arrested 37 of its own officers (belonging to the Guards ground forces) who were planning to carry out a coup d’état yesterday night. The source of the report is said to be the former CIA double agent Reza Khalili.

According to the reports the officers had planed to take over 130 strategic points and military bases in Tehran. It is also reports that a conflict has broken out in Iran’s Intelligence Ministry related to the failed coup d’état.

The Iranian Regime has not issued any statement on the issue.

On a different subject, Roya Hakakian has written a great article on The Wall Street Journal about “How Iran Kills Abroad”, in which she makes the same point I did regarding the failed plan to kill the Saudi ambassador (read the last paragraph):

On the night of Sept. 17, 1992, at 10:45, two darkly clad men burst in on a private dinner at a Berlin restaurant and stood over a table around which eight of Iran’s leading opposition figures were seated. The taller of the two intruders shouted: “You sons of whores!”

Then he thrust his gloved hand into the sports bag that hung on his shoulder. In the dimly lit air, sparks of fire flashed at the intruder’s hip. Bullets, piercing the side of the bag, riddled the guests. After two rounds—26 bullets in all—the machine-gun barrage finally stopped.

The eldest of the eight guests at the table, Sadegh Sharafkandi, Iran’s most prominent Kurdish leader, was still in his chair, head slumped, blood tinting his white shirt. Another guest sat doubled over, breathing noisily, gasping for air, his face smashed into a mug of beer. The rest were strewn on the floor. Of the eight guests, four died that night at Berlin’s Mykonos restaurant.

The lead shooter, an Iranian named Abdulrahman Bani-Hashemi, also known as Sharif, flew to Turkey that night, got on a bus the next day and crossed the border into Iran. Two years earlier, he had attempted to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Sweden. The Swedish authorities detained, then released, him. Three years before, he had assassinated an Iranian exile, a former pilot named Morad Talebi, in Switzerland.

Nearly two weeks after the Mykonos restaurant murders, German authorities arrested several men in connection with the attack. Only one of them was Iranian. The rest belonged to a ring of small-time Lebanese crooks with histories of petty theft, forgery and other such violations. [...]

Many have said in the last few days that the recently disclosed bomb plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington in a restaurant could not have been ordered by Iran’s regime—or, if so, only by rogue elements within it—because parts were planned incompetently, using non-Iranians. The staggering parallels between this and the Mykonos hit suggest otherwise.