Loghman H. Ahmedi

The Kurdish people and the Iranian uprising

July 10, 2009, 4:13 pm | Under Iran, Kurdistan

I have received a couple of emails from friends of our party in Europe asking me to write about the Iranian uprising after the presidential elections and the Kurdish peoples view on the matter. It came as a surprise to many of our friends that the Kurdish people didn’t participate in the demonstrations that followed the presidential elections in Iran. In order to understand the reason why the Kurdish people didn’t take to the streets in Kurdistan some important facts must be taken into account.

In the run up to the election, especially after that the debate between Ahmedinejad and his challengers was broadcasted on Iranian state television a strange media frenzy took hold of the Western world and the Iranian media sphere, which brought about wishful thinking amongst Westerners and Iranians alike. All of the sudden the election was being described as both democratic and as a possible source of “change”. Western governments hoped for a reformist president that would end Iran’s conflict with the West by changing Iran’s “behavior”. Moderate Iranians, both inside Iran and in the Diaspora, hoped for social, economic, and political change.

Our party on the other hand released a joint statement with Komala asking the Kurdish people to boycott the elections. Following that statement almost all Kurdish political parties and organizations followed suite and decided to boycott the elections. It was very clear for our party that the Islamic republic was putting on a show in order to egg on greater voter participation to secure international and national legitimacy for its rule. Weeks before the election, our party leader Mustafa Hijri, stated in a televised speech that the Islamic Republic wouldn’t let anyone but Ahmedinejad to become president, and that the elections wasn’t free, fair, transparent or democratic.

The events that followed Ahmedinejades “victory” is well documented in both English, Persian and Kurdish media, thus I will not write about the details surrounding those events. What is more interesting for those of you that have contacted our party is the question of why the Kurdish peoples did not participate in the demonstrations. In this regard, there are both historical and current reasons for why the Kurdish people didn’t take to the streets.

As for the historical reasons, many of you know the revolution in 1979 was at first lead and orchestrated by different leftist groups and different ethnic groups like the Kurds, the Mullahs and Ayatollah Khomeini had a “spiritual” role in the revolution. The people of Iran wanted independence, justice and equality. The Kurdish people of Iranian Kurdistan demanded democracy and self rule.

After the revolution the relationship between the new regime in Tehran and the Kurdish leadership, which was lead by our party, worsened due to several factors. In the first election to the Majlis, our party managed to win an overwhelming majority of the votes in the Kurdish provinces, and our party leader at the time, Dr. Abdull Rahman Ghassmlou, was elected to the Assembly of Experts, which had the task to write a new constitution. But Khomeini threatened our party leader and made it clear that if Dr. Ghassmlou would travel to Tehran the regime would kill him.

Soon afterwards Khomeini went even further and on the 17 of august 1979 he declared a holy war (Jihad) against the Kurdish people and our party. Following Khomeini’s declaration of holy war against the Kurdish people a brutal war erupted between the newly established Revolutionary Guard and the Kurdish Peshmerga Forces that lasted until the mid 90s. Tens of thousands of civilian Kurds lost their lives and several thousand Kurdish villages was destroyed during this unjust war.

All of the 2009 Iranian presidential candidates, in one way or another, took part in this war. Mir Hussein Mousavi was the prime minister during most of the 1980s and he was one of the main supporters of the regimes war against the Kurds. Mehdi Karroubi was the head of the regimes Martyr’s Foundation, which had its own prisons. Karroubi is believed to be responsible for the imprisonment and death of several Kurdish activists. Mohsen Rezai was the Commander of the Revolutionary Guard from 1981 until 1997, he was one of the main architects of the regimes war against the Kurds and during the 2009 presidential elections he proudly proclaimed that he had planed and carried out the military attack on our party’s bases in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1996. As for Ahmedinejad, he was an officer in the revolutionary guard and he was stationed in Iranian Kurdistan and at one period he was stationed in the Kurdish city of Kirkuk in Iraqi Kurdistan when our party had its Radio station based there. Ahmedinejad was also one of the agents that took part in the assassination of Dr. Abdull Rahman Ghassmlou in the Austrian capital in 1989.

With all of this in mind, our party couldn’t ask the Kurdish people to take to the streets and risk their lives just to become pawns in the regimes power struggle, despite the fact that our party supports the protesters demands for democracy and freedom. In general the Kurdish people showed solidarity with the protesters, but they didn’t feel that it was their fight due to the fact that the aims of the demonstrations wasn’t clear. This doesn’t mean that the Kurdish people and our party don’t support the demonstrator’s, on the contrary we think that the brave people that is taking to the streets and fighting for democracy are the real voice of Iran, but they don’t want a change of faces in the regime, they want system change and real freedoms.

The Kurdish people and the Iranian uprising

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