How 23 August 1979: Kurdish revolt grew in Iran

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23 August 1979: How Kurdish revolt grews in Iran

Kurds in Iran have ousted government troops from a large area near the Iraqi border.

However, they have full control of only one town, Mahabad, the centre of Iranian Kurdistan in the north-west of the country.

The revolt began last week when Kurdish tribesmen overpowered Iranian soldiers in the nearby town of Paveh.

The fighting later spread to the towns of Divan Darreh, Saqqez and Mahabad which was briefly the capital of an independent Kurdish republic from 1946-7.

Iran's four million Kurds have been disappointed the ousting of the Shah and the setting up of an Islamic state has not brought them more autonomy.

Hiding

Many of the 15 million Kurds inhabiting the mountainous area where Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Syria and the Soviet republic of Armenia meet want it to be declared an independent state.

But Turkey and Iraq in particular have always resisted giving up sovereignty over their portions of Kurdistan.

Earlier this year Kurdish leaders met Iran's spiritual leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, who warned them against trying to break away from Iran.

Many Kurdish leaders have now gone into hiding after Ayatollah Khomeini ordered their arrest.

In spite of the current fighting, Iran's Kurds say they do not want to sever the territory from the rest of the country.

"If we cut ourselves off we would have only the mountains and the goats. We would die from hunger," said one Kurdish leader.

Iranian newspaper reports have put the number killed so far at about 600.

Traditionally, Iran's Kurds have been less strident in their demands for independence and have rarely resorted to violence.

They have more in common with the majority population who are Persians than Kurds in Turkey and Iraq have with the majority Arabs there.

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Islamic Republic since its 1979 inception when Ayatollah Khomeini famously declared a "fatwa" [religious decree] against the province of Kurdistan

The Kurdish people, one of the largest minorities in Iran, have been heavily targeted by the Islamic Republic since its 1979 inception when Ayatollah Khomeini famously declared a "fatwa" [religious decree] against the province of Kurdistan and crushed opposing unrest by sending 110,000 troops complete with heavy artillery, fighter jets and armed helicopters. The fighting was so intense that residents were forced to flee into the harsh mountains. Kurdish men have been executed, dozens at a time.

As Kurdistan continued its resistance, on September 17, 1992 three prominent Iranian-Kurdish opposition leaders -- Sadegh Sharafkandi, Fattah Abdoli, Homayoun Ardalan -- along with their translator, Nouri Dehkordi, were gunned down by Iranian government agents in the Mykonos Greek restaurant in Berlin, Germany. From 1988-1998, Islamic Republic operatives carried out serial assassinations of opposition leaders and Iranian dissident intellectuals, both inside and outside Iran -- assassinations later dubbed "the chain murders of Iran."

Since the Iranian revolution in 1979, the Kurdish provinces have been neglected economically by the current government of Iran, an exclusion that gave rise to rampant poverty. Furthermore, Kurdish political, social and cultural rights are badly repressed by the present regime, causing widespread resistance, including armed conflicts, inside Kurdistan. As such, the majority of Kurds, who sympathize or hold a membership to Kurdish opposition groups, are viewed as possible "[armed] combatants," trying to overthrow the regime by the Islamic Republic. This trend can be seen in the nature of the charges and the sentences handed down to large numbers of Kurdish political prisoners, who are systematically tortured, given death sentences or long prison terms. Although there are many Kurdish prisoners, the exact number is unknown. The following are two cases where the families or the victims had the courage to contact human rights organizations, an outreach banned and punishable by the authorities.

Ms. Zainab Jalalian was arrested in July of 2007 in the Kurdish province of Kermanshah for allegedly being a member of a banned Kurdish opposition group of insurgents. She was initially taken to the detention center of Ministry of Intelligence, where she was tortured for eight months. As a result, Ms. Jalalian began to suffer from internal and intestinal bleeding. Two years after her arrest, in a trial that lasted only minutes, with no legal representation, she was accused of "waging war against God" and, at age 27, was sentenced to death. In 2010 she was transferred to the feared Ward 209 of Evin prison in Tehran, a section well known for torturing prisoners until they confess. There she was told that her death sentence would be lifted if she agreed to a televised confession admitting her "armed" involvement against the regime. She endured by maintaining her innocence and refused their demand. She was then transferred back to Kermanshah facilities to await execution.

In a letter shortly after she was sentenced to death in 2009, Ms. Jalalian wrote the following:

"…I am currently ill because of torture and I don't have any lawyer to defend me. I want to tell you that my trial took only few minutes. The court told me: 'You are an enemy of God. You must be hanged very soon.' That was the sum of my entire court process. I asked the judge to give me permission to just say good-bye to my mother before my execution. He told me to 'shut up' and rejected my request." —November 2009, letter obtained by ICAE

The Committee of Human Rights Reporters (CHRR) inside Iran created a report in 2011 by interviewing Ms. Jalalian's former cellmates. The report states that Ms. Jalalian was passed around like a soccer ball between male guards while she was tied up, blindfolded and beaten. In the first three months of her detention, she suffered such serious head injuries that her interrogators, in a rare and unusual act, were forced to transfer her to a hospital outside prison. The report also reveals that she was also flogged on the soles of her feet until she passed out. When she finally gained consciousness; she was forced to walk on her feet and was then flogged again. She was also threatened with rape by her interrogator; she protested, he then struck her on the head with an iron rod, which fractured her skull, causing her to bleed profusely. It is believed it was this blow, along with many more repeated blows to her head, affected her vision; she was consistently denied medical care for her injuries, despite many hunger strikes. She became blind in both eyes.

Between 2009 and 2010, Ms. Jalalian was the subject of an international campaign against her execution. As a direct result, her death sentence was commuted to life in prison. Ms. Zainab Jalalian is presently in agonizing pain due to bleeding and infection of her intestines. The authorities are deliberately refraining from transferring her to a city hospital for proper treatment. She has been given no provisions for her blindness while serving time. Both her ailments are direct result of torture while in custody.

Mr. Mansur Arvand is a Kurdish political prisoner who was arrested in June of 2011 and sentenced to death in July 2012 on the charge of "waging war on God" for allegedly being a member of a Kurdish opposition party.

In an interview with HRANA News Agency in 2013, Mansur's brother, [Ismail] stated that most of Mansur's toenails were pulled out during his interrogations and his teeth severely damaged. He emphasized that Mansur is suffering from kidney infections that appeared only after his arrest, after torture, and that the authorities are ignoring his brother's serious medical needs.

In another interview with CFPPI in late 2013, Ismail stated that his brother was flogged 70-80 times on his back and stomach, that the torture sessions lasted 7-8 hours. He also added that the authorities had installed a noise device in Mansur's cell in order to prevent him from sleeping.

Mr. Mansur Arvand is kept in Orumieyeh central prison in West Azerbaijan province of Iran. Not only is he in imminent danger of being executed at any time; the authorities are withholding any medical care while they continue to torture him. Thus far, human rights organizations have not been able to overturn Mr. Arvand's death sentence.

Two prominent Kurdish political prisoners, Mr. Habibollah Golparipour (arrested 2007) and Mr. Shirko Moarefi (arrested 2008) were hanged respectively on October 26 and November 4, 2013. According to many international human rights organizations and various media; there has been a surge in the rate of executions after President Rouhani's election. 198 people have been hanged just in 2014 -- a period of only two and half months.

Sadly, Iran's grotesque human rights violations, the rise in executions or the fate of three Americans -- Amir Hekmati, Pastor Saeed Abedini and Robert Levinson -- held as political prisoners inside Iran, were not even discussed during the historic negotiations between the United States and Iran in late 2013.

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Mina Zarin`s speech in European Social Forum – Malmo – Sweden 2008

About the Massacre in 1981 and 1988 in Iran

Our common pain is the many years of murder, torture and execution which have taken away from us many comrades in the best years of their lives. Comrades of fate who remained true to their ideals and were full of hope and love to the people .Lovely friends who were killed by the Islamic regime.

Here and to-day I would specially give my respectful greetings and solidarity to the political prisoners, their relatives and to all freedom loving people of the world.

I am Mina Zarin, a former political prisoner of the Islamic regime of Iran. I have witnessed and survived the massacres of 1981 and 1988. To-day I must speak about these massacres in Iran.

In the middle of June 1981, at the age of 19, I was arrested in an accidental mass arrest. Only by the noise of the breathing of the co-prisoners could you guess how many of us there were there. At the time of the arrest, everybody got blindfolded. Hundreds of men and women were sitting between the interrogation rooms and were one after the other sent to a torture room and lashed with a cable and tortured.

Then the prisoners were called to the court and sentenced after a few minutes, without the possibility to defend themselves. The count of indictment was: Not accept of the Islamic regime.

At this time, i.e. the summer of 1981, every evening hundreds of political prisoners were shot because of their way of thinking, and we could – by the number of shots in the back of the head – guess the number of persons executed.

Since the Evin prison was full, many prisoners were taken to Gheselhissar by mass transport.

The prison in Gheselhissar was specially notorious for its disciplinary measures. One punishment was that you had to stand on one leg for hours, your head covered by veil and headscarf, and if you changed your leg, you were furthermore punished .

In 1982 many prisoners, among other I myself, were taken to Gohardasht in isolation. It was the first year that Gohardasht was used as a prison because of the very big cold (Siberia).

Anybody whose personal views deviate from the publicly declared views of the regime may end in this terrible place. Also by pure accident can you be taken to this prison where people are forced by torture to confess crimes they have never committed.

The torture you suffer there will give you pains for your whole life – in the form of anxiety, persecution mania, and other psychological and grave health problems. Later in 1988 many people were tortured and executed in this terrible prison.

But it was not only in the summer of 1988, but all the time, in every minute and hour that we were exposed to conditions unworthy for people. In order to describe this terrible crime, a thorough investigation is needed.

It was made clear to us that they would not let us get out in good health. The regime knew very well that after the Iran-Iraq war, there would be a national and international pressure for the release of the political prisoners.

In the massacres of 1988 about 5.000 political prisoners were executed.

In July 1988 all visits were forbidden and all televisions were removed from the prison sections. We did not get any newspapers and the daily transmissions of the national radio per loudspeaker were stopped. Then they came into the hall and asked us our names, why we had been arrested and our religion. Furthermore, they wanted to know if we recognised the Islamic republic of Iran, and if we were ready to participate in a public interview.

After one month we learned that for that reason the prisoners of the Evin prison had to be hanged. Every day, there were prisoners who were hanged by armed groups of the regime, others were lashed five times a day and others were threatened to death.

The new method of murder in the summer of 1988 was death by cord (rope).. In the hall of the Gohardasht-prison the cords hang in twelve rows. After the hanging of one group, the bodies were immediately taken through the back door to the yard and thrown into a container. When the container was full, the bodies were transported to Khwaran to be buried in mass graves. These mass graves are still to-day a meeting point for the relatives of the executed prisoners; supposedly, more than one third of all the prisoners were executed.

One who survived the Gohardasht-prison reported about the transport of the dead bodies and the mountain of shoes of the executed prisoners.

It is an absolute mass murder by the Islamic regime of Iran in the summer of 1988 where about 5.000 political prisoners were murdered.

But our common hope is the non oblivion of the experiences and efforts we made in our struggle for years and to-day’s struggle for freedom and equality in Iran.

We fight for the total abolition of the oppression and murders of people.

Thanks and be strong

https://icsppi.wordpress.com/category/documents/page/2/