Iran – Toxic Theocracy – Part II – FOR THE KURDS, THE ROAD OF THE GUN LED NOWHERE BUT DEATH

MESOP – WELCOME ! TO OUR FRIEND SHERI LAIZER ! / THE FATAL IRAN POLICY OF PKK/PJAK

Neither democratic campaigning nor the ‘road of the gun’ has secured rights for the Kurds in Iran.

The track zigzags sharply downwards. Thousands of tiny stones spin away beneath my feet. Far below, a green valley suddenly comes into view riven by a rushing stream, wild and muddied as one gets closer. Sliding and clutching at dwarf oak branches for balance I watch the Kurdish guerrilla fighters move swiftly in front of me, as accustomed to the terrain as the animals with which they share the natural dangers, their dark khaki uniforms blending with the forest.

This side of the stream is Iran and the other, Iraq, rising and descending and approaching new heights in the blurred lines of Kurdistan’s geography. The stream is not an official border crossing place but its smooth boulders make crossing possible after the spring rains cease. A similar stony track ascends the farther slopes followed by further hills, further mountains, further plateaux and valleys. Moving along the ranges in the hinterland, Mount Qandil looms.

Evening is approaching and in the soft amber light the frogs begin their evening chorus. It is a young summer night, but the air is fresher the higher you are in the mountains. One might think this were an earthly paradise until the tat-tat-tat of gunfire echoes from the mountainsides followed by the deeper boom of RPGs. The frogs continue croaking and the cicadas chafing. There is a second round of gunfire, then a sharp exchange of ammunition exploding in several directions. A white puff of smoke goes up on the opposite slope before falling into shadow as the sun drops behind a peak and darkness drowns the landscape.

Thousands of Iranian Kurdish asylum seekers refused in Europe and the UK

Bakhtiyar is just sixteen and from a village near Piranshahr (Kurdish, Mokrian) that boasts some two-dozen houses. Leading a smuggler’s life to support his family he has seen it all. One of thousands of Iranian Kurdish asylum seekers, he has fled to the UK to seek safe harbour only to be refused asylum. Refusal is on the basis that his account of escaping the pasdaran in a gun battle and being mistaken for a guerrilla – abandoning his mule and the incriminating belongings that identify him – is ‘implausible’. He is not at risk in Iran, he is told. Why would he be of interest?

In 2011, PJAK, the PKK’s sister organisation, agreed a ceasefire with Tehran after heavy losses in combat including young Kurds like Bakhtiyar – some who had joined PJAK and others who supported them. Currently, suspected PJAK supporters face the death penalty if captured.

Guilt does not have to be established on the basis of fact but can be attributed by the Iranian judiciary on the basis of suspicions, hearsay, family association, forced confessions or and being an innocent in the wrong place at the wrong time. Smugglers and Kurdish shepherds are often mistaken for rebels or are accused of aiding Kurdish militants – the regime barely takes the time to distinguish between them for they are Kurds after all…Bakhtiyar was not wrong.

In this same terrain, the KDPI responded to Iranian shelling in the 1990s, before crossing deeper into Iraqi Kurdistan and establishing bases more distant from the front line, eventually settling upon Koya, high in the mountains outside Sulaymaniyah. Later the PKK settled in, taking over parts of Mount Qandil before spearheading its sister organisation, PJAK (the Party of Free Life) in 2004, pursuing the same quest of greater rights for Kurds in Iran. Komala has also seen its share of death down the decades, its fighters chastened and scarred.

Most recently, in May 2015, the PKK reportedly attacked KDPI positions not far from here just inside the border with Iraq. Decades of armed struggle since the collapse of the autonomous Kurdish Republic of Mahabad in 1946 have so far not delivered Kurdish rights. The road of the gun has led nowhere but death. Since the toppling of the Shah, the Islamic government in Tehran, has persecuted its Kurds under various pretexts invoking the concept of ‘Mohareb’ crimes under Shari’a law.

Along this winding path, one way leads to comparative freedom in Iraqi Kurdistan, the other way, going deeper into Iran promises high risks of imprisonment, death in custody, death in prison or death by the noose after unfair trial. – if you are Kurdish and you oppose the regime in word or deed – even a mocking blog is sufficient to get you noticed – Ettela’at is likely to come knocking at the door or the Basij breaking it down.

PKK clashes with the KDPI – why?

The Kurdistan Parliament of the KRG delivered a timely statement to the PKK and KDPI after clashes on 24 May in Kelashin[1] urging them not to return to the dark days of Birakuji (inter-Kurdish killing), saying.

“We seriously warn both Kurdish parties to avoid the use of violence and the gun in settling their political problems. It is a crime for a nation to use violence against its own…This kind of incident is a flashback to the darkest pages of Kurdistan’s history and the Kurdish nation will not accept the recurrence of such events.”   [2]

So what lay behind the tensions? Kurdish sources reported that the PKK (HPG forces) were demanding that the KDPI withdraw from the border region where the PKK has bases. Their fighters then began surrounding KDPI positions. [3]

But by what right demand another Kurdish party to obey them? To be the dominant Kurdish party as the PKK has historically sought to be?

Kurdistan Post then reported that an agreement had been reached and the violence ended following the deaths of two KDPI peshmerga, and other KDPI fighters wounded. The agreement was underpinned by Kurdish leaders, Khosrat Rasul and Nechirvan Barzani.[4]

The PKK/PJAK/PYD habitually acts the dictator, imposing its will along with media spin and censorship – and using violence against its rivals and critics. Abusing the keyword ‘democracy, the PKK and its sister organisations, continue to endorse autocracy. Rigid structures of internal discipline also remain in place according to which hundreds of Kurdish patriots have been lined up in the sights of the PKK’s guns? Disaffected members, many long serving and long suffering, have fled on pain of death, such as those that escaped to form the PWD (Partiya Welatpareza Demokratik- Patriotic Democratic Party) based in northern Iraq since 2004. But several of its leading figures were swiftly assassinated one after another by PKK hitmen. [5] Pregnant PKK guerrillas are also among those Kurds to be executed along with their unborn and some few living babies – whose mothers successfully escaped to give birth and bear witness. For them, the road of the gun led to hell.

Massoud Barzani justifiably asks how the PKK would react if parties from Iraqi Kurdistan should begin muscling in on Mardin and Diyarbakir, in reference to the PKK/PYD’s ‘interference’ in northern Iraq and specifically Sinjar.

Barzani added, “The PKK has no role to play. They should pull out and they must because the people of Sinjar will determine their own future and this is Iraqi Kurdistan. Would the PKK be happy if a Kurdish political party inside Iraq meddled in the affairs of Diyarbakir or Mardin?[6]

In Iraqi Kurdistan the KDPI has long been betrayed to placate Iran

The KDPI has long been ‘hosted’ in northern Iraq and is still unable to return to Iran. Betrayed in the 1990s by its hosts, until the recent tensions with the PKK, the KDPI has eked out a relatively peaceful existence – although sporadically its security has been ruptured by Iranian intelligence operatives ‘welcome’ in the KRG region.

The two main traditional Kurdish parties strive to sustain friendly relations with their powerful neighbour generally at the expense of Iranian Kurds.

PUK official and co-founder, Adel Murad, who had formerly declared that the peshmerga would not withdraw from those positions they now held outside the KRG [7] has reportedly posted a fresh comment that Kurds should choose relations with Iran over relations with the US as ‘the cultural and religious parallels between Kurds and Iranians gives the Iranian government priority to intervene in the Kurdistan Region.’ [8]

One rule for one and another for another: but the Kurds of Iran cannot couch their struggle in such semantics as ‘parallels’ with the Islamic Republic of Iran. The endless blacklisting of Iranian Kurds as enemies, the scores of ethnic Kurds on death row and the even longer list of Kurds executed by the state as ‘mohareb’ offenders seems to have been overlooked.  But is not the Kurdish concept of a historical, spiritual Kurdistan that of one homeland? Has not the experience of each severed part been the same experience that leads to death and mental trauma? Do not Kurdish hearts that decry ‘birakuji’ speak the same and equal truth or is the gun raised more in the service of power than to serve the goals of Kurdistan?

Why have Kurds taken to the ‘road of the gun’ in Iran if they are so close to Iranians? That dark road still looms ahead, winding through the mountains and valleys, cities, towns and villages of Iranian Kurdistan, as immortalised by Iraqi Kurdish poet, Rafiq Sabir, in his poem about armed resistance and the reasons for it, The Road of the Gun.

I had a small blue sky
The occupiers brought it down over me
I had a trickle of dark blood
A bouquet of honey dreams
And a collection of books
They plundered them all
But when they came
To change my skin
Deform my face
I dressed myself in snow and thunder
Carried my homeland on my shoulders

And took to the road of the gun. [9]

[1] http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/iranian-kurds-clash-with-pkk-report.aspx?pageID=238&nID=82893&NewsCatID=352
[2] http://rudaw.net/english/kurdistan/240520154
[3] http://ekurd.net/pkk-kdpi-clash-on-iranian-kurdistan-border-leaves-two-dead-2015-05-24
[4] http://www.kurdistan-post.eu/tr/birakuji
[5] http://www.pwdnerin.com/makale/faysal_dunlayici/oldurme-emri
[6] http://www.mesop.de/mesop-todays-word-of-the-week-by-kak-mesud-b/
[7] http://rudaw.net/english/middleeast/iraq/010720142
[8] http://www.mesop.de/mesop-todays-quotation-the-pkk-puk-iran-belt
[9] Rafiq Sabir, the Road of the Gun co-translated into English by Sheri Laizer, in Martyrs, Traitors and Patriots – Kurdistan after the Gulf War, pg. 29.
See also: Exiled Ink: War and its Long Shadows, Winter 2006, Jennifer Langer, p. 22 http://www.exiledwriters.co.uk/magazines/em6.pdf