Iran's
Kurdish Rebellion
|
|
|
Share:  
|
  Be the first of
your friends to like this.
Note: This commentary was written with Veli Sirin.
Violent protests by Iranian Kurds have taken the world by surprise,
and mainstream reporting on them is sparse. That is doubtless explained
by the general absence of decent journalism under the regime of the
Islamic Republic, including restrictions on the entry of foreign
correspondents. Yet the events in Mahabad, a city of up to 280,000
mainly-Kurdish inhabitants in the Iranian province of Western Azerbaijan,
has fascinating aspects to those who follow Kurdish (and Iranian)
affairs.
The demographic profile of Iranian Azerbaijan reveals the ethnic
diversity of Iran. The country is not entirely Persian, as many outsiders
believe. Turkic, Kurdish, and other non-Farsi languages are spoken by
large minorities.
The recent turbulence in Mahabad began as such urban troubles often
do, with an alleged abuse of power, a death, and rapid communication
through the streets. According to the English-language web portal of the
Kurdish newspaper Rudaw, which is professional and reliable, in
the first week of May a Kurdish woman, Farinaz Khosrawani, aged 25, died
after she fell, jumped, or was pushed from the fourth floor of the Tara
Hotel in the city. Ostensibly, the victim, while employed at the hotel,
sought to escape a rape attempt by an Iranian state official.
|
The
rape and subsequent death of Farinaz Khosrawani early this month
touched off the largest anti-government Kurdish demonstrations Iran has
seen in years.
|
Mahabad Kurds reacted by demonstrations on May 8 leading to riots and
the burning of the hotel. Local activists claimed between 25 and 50
protestors, and seven police, were injured in the confrontation, and that
police attacked the angry crowds with tear gas and firearms. One
participant in the uprising, Akam Talaj, a student also aged 25, suffered
serious wounds from gunfire and was taken to a hospital named for
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in the major city of Urmia.
A Kurdish advocate, Armin Hassanpour, 19, was arrested and his
whereabouts remained unknown two weeks later. Iranian authorities warned
they would deal harshly with the protestors, but then said they had not
detained anybody related to the movement. A suspect in the death of
Khosrowani, however, was purportedly held.
Solidarity actions with Mahabad spread to the nearby Iranian
Kurdish-majority city of Sardasht, where hundreds of participants chanted
"Mahabad is not alone, Sardasht will stand with Mahabad." They
were attacked by police, which fired on the people, and at least 30
Kurdish militants were rounded up and jailed. Security forces were rushed
to other Iranian Kurdish towns to prevent further anti-government
mobilizations, and the internet was shut down in Mahabad.
Similar, if more tranquil, events were seen in Iraqi Kurdistan, in
Rojava, the liberated Kurdish zone of Syria, in Turkey, in Germany, home
to a large community of Kurds from Turkey, and in Scandinavia, where many
Iranian Kurds have gained asylum. They are heartened and proud,
obviously, at the manner in which their forces beat the so-called
"Islamic State" at Kobane on the Turkish-Syrian border in
January 2015, after a five-month siege.
The successful defense of Kobane was aided by air strikes coordinated
with the U.S.-Arab coalition against ISIS, but the Kurdish liberation
movement is overwhelmingly leftist, of a kind that for those who read
history appears a revival of a distant past. Most Kurdish combatants at
Kobane belonged to the People's Protection Units (known by its Kurdish
initials as the YPG), which are affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers'
Party or PKK, designated a terrorist group by Turkey, the U.S., and other
authorities.
Kurdish ultra-leftists may have
become a vanguard for real popular sovereignty in their ancient lands.
|
For years, the PKK and its founder, Abdullah Ӧcalan, hewed to
hard-line Marxism-Leninism and were assisted by Turkey's traditional
enemy, Greece, along with the brutal and eccentric Communist dictator of
Romania, Nicolae Ceauşescu. When Ceauşescu was overthrown and executed in
1989 the PKK was among few organizations in the world to mourn him. But
Ӧcalan was arrested in Kenya in 1999, having left shelter in the Greek
Embassy. Since then, the PKK leader has claimed to have abandoned his
former ideology in favor of a voluntaristic, anarchist libertarianism
that, truth to tell, might fit better with the history and traditions of
the Kurds. Women have been active combatants in the ranks of the Kurdish peshmerga
- a word meaning "they who face death" - in Turkey, Iraq, and
Syria. It is said that ISIS thugs are frightened of "martyrdom"
at the hands of women.
Turkey, for its part, has not abandoned its long-held posture of
hostility to Kurdish demands for autonomy. When the Kurds battled ISIS at
Kobane, the Turkish army stationed tanks on the border with Syria. Turkey
was accused of siding with ISIS, since the Turkish authorities consider
the assertion of Kurdish identity more dangerous to them.
Iraqi Kurds are gratified that, thanks to the no-fly zone imposed by
U.S. President George H.W. Bush after the first Iraq war, in 1991, they
could establish a democratic parliament in the Kurdistan Regional
Government (KRG), and initiate significant economic development. They
emphasize that when Saddam Hussein was removed in 2003, no coalition
troops lost their lives in the KRG.
Still, foreigners should have no illusions about the Kurds. They are
tolerant of religious differences, with Sunni and Shia adherents among
them, as well as heterodox metaphysical Sufi groups like the Ahl-e Haqq
(People of Truth) in Iran, who are called Shabaks in Iraq, where they are
targeted for genocide by ISIS. Of course, many Kurds, as radical leftists,
are atheist.
Yet the KRG has serious problems with political corruption, and female
genital mutilation (FGM) is an atrocity imposed on young women there.
Outside the KRG, the Kurdish struggle is dominated by ideological
leftists like the PKK. In Scandinavia, the Komala party, a little-known
movement that resembles Trotskyism, is influential among Kurds. Komala
joined the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI), which began as a
pro-Soviet party in the mid-1940s and has since evolved toward social democracy,
to organize rallies for Mahabad in Sweden. While official sources in Iran
smeared Farinaz Khosrawani, the female victim in Mahabad, as pursuing a
romantic relationship with her attacker, Komala representative Abdullah
Muhtadi said she was an accountant at the hotel, not a maid as widely
described, that she had been attacked by a state hotel inspector from
Urmia, and that she was bruised and her clothing torn.
In a detail reminiscent of earlier revolutions, KDPI political bureau
member Omar Baleki, speaking to Rudaw, called on Iranian troops to
refuse orders to suppress their fellow-citizens. He declared,
"Members of Iran's armed forces or the security should remember that
they are part of that nation and therefore they should not be silent when
something like this happens to their people... They must not take the
side of the Islamic Republic against their own people... they must
protect the people."
History is not linear. The Afghan national struggle against the
Russians was turned into an anti-Western jihad after the Russians
withdrew and their Stalinist puppets fell. Kurdish ultra-leftists may
have become a vanguard for real popular sovereignty in their ancient
lands.
Stephen Schwartz, a fellow at the
Middle East Forum, is executive director of the Center for Islamic
Pluralism in Washington, DC.
|
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment