Fréderike Geerdink
Four Kurds were hanged in Iran – I’m sure you heard because many media spread the news and many human rights organisations fiercely objected. States should know that crushing Kurdish resistance with utter brutality and cruelness, is not possible. Eventually, it will backfire.
Their names were Hajir Faramarzi, Mohsen Mazloum, Vafa Azarbar and Pejman Fatehi. They had spent eighteen months in solitary confinement, they did not receive a fair trail nor legal representation and were severely tortured. On the day before their execution, their families were summoned to prison on Tehran for their final visit – their first and final visit, I must say, because the isolation the four were held in had been complete and family visits had been denied since their arrest.
Sons and brothers
I saw a picture of the families on a car park outside the prison. Gloomy weather, people leaving their cars under a winter sky. I keep trying to imagine how these family members must have felt that day. Despair, anger, grief, and also so much love for their husbands, sons and brothers whom they were about to see for the last time. How can your feet carry you to the prison doors?
Such thoughts have not left me about the four men involved either. Solitary confinement is torture, and who knows what else the prison torturers have done to them. Hearing the verdict after a sham trial for charges that are too absurd to even mention here and being unable to do anything about it. The last visit of your family members, all of you knowing what that means. Having to let go of each other at the end of the visit. Have they slept after that on their last night on this earth? How could their feet carry them to the gallows at sunrise?
Proper burial
What can you do against such an utterly cruel state? The feeling of powerlessness must be so overwhelming. But then again, there is no powerlessness. Not in Kurdistan. The state may have the upper hand in deciding who is in and out of jail, who gets arrested and tortured, who gets hanged and who gets to see their loved ones when, but how much power do you really have if this is the way you have to hold on to it? If you want to torture the families of the executed men even more by not handing the bodies to them for a proper burial? How weak must you actually be to feel the necessity to behave like this?
Just look at where the regime comes from. In the very early days, during the 1979 revolution, they were actually supported by many Kurds because there were promises about the rights of Kurds that would finally be respected. This soon turned out to be a betrayal: the Kurdish population of Iran, ethnically but also religiously a minority in the country, were still denied their rights. And when they rose up against the new government and managed to secure their control over several important Kurdish cities, the repercussions were fierce.
The uprising was brutally put down, with thousands of executions. The city of Mahabad stood the longest, but was eventually taken back by the regime as well. Opposition groups were forced into exile in Başur (Kurdistan in Iraq). A few years ago, Rojhilati-Dutch filmmaker Beri Shalmashi made a wonderful interactive film about one of the places where the resistance settled down, Gawrede, meaning Big Village Shalmashi’s parents lived there, and she too in the earliest years of her life.
These years already showed the weakness of the regime. If they had granted the Kurds their autonomy, they would have been supported by a large group in society, which would have strengthened their rule. They must have been so afraid of the Kurds’ power to quickly act and to gather the masses of the people behind them. What if they granted Kurds autonomy, would the Balochs in the south of the country come knocking on the door as well? And the Azeris in the north? The new regime decided there would be no such freedom. Repression of ethnic and religious minorities remained the default setting, and the freedoms of women were curtailed as well.
Nothing has improved ever since. The regime became entangled in a geopolitical power game in the Middle-East and in the world, triggering them to continue their suppression of revolutionary-minded Kurds, Balochs and women in full force. It shows how utterly afraid they are. They are so afraid, that almost one and a half year ago, they killed a young woman who dared to show some of her hair when she was walking around in Tehran with her family. We all know what happened when the country found out what had happened to Jina (Mahsa) Amini: her murder triggered the biggest uprising against the regime in forty years.
Sakharov Prize
Every time you think the regime can’t be more cruel, they step it up again. Murdering a young woman – who could officially not be given her Kurdish name Jina because the regime is afraid of the Kurdish identity – is not enough. Her funeral was attacked, her gravestone was destroyed. Her family was denied the travel to Europe to receive the Sakharov Prize on her behalf, and the lawyer who did make it to the ceremony, was interrogated upon return.
Long-time human rights advocate Narges Mohammadi received the Nobel Peace Prize, but remains in jail. Look at how strong women are: Mohammadi and two dozen other women embarked on a hunger strike in prison to protest the recent executions of Kurds. Mind you: the four men who were hanged this Monday, were not the first this year. Last week, also Kurdish political prisoner Farhad Salimi was hanged after fourteen years in prison, as was Mohammad Ghobadlou, a 23-year old Kurd with a mental disability who had been arrested for joining the Jin Jiyan Azadî-protests.
Does that sound like a strong government to you? Not to me. Even more so because in the last couple of years, the regime had intensified the pressure on the Kurdish opposition groups, like KDPI and Komala, it forced into exile in 1980. These groups had been rendered militarily weak already because they were allowed to remain in the mountains in Başur only if they wouldn’t attack the regime from their bases. And they didn’t. But they continued to exist, and they continued to attract new members.
The regime used these opposition groups in its efforts to put down the nation wide protests that followed after Jina Amini’s death. They tried to make people believe that the KDPI and Komala had organized the protests and that they continued to incite the people to rise up. This wasn’t true at all. But the result was that the groups were forced to leave their bases in the mountains and relocate to camps. The Kurdistan Region in Iraq doesn’t have the power to stand with the Rojhilati opposition groups. Almost on the contrary: Iranian agents have been able to murder several members of the Rojhilati opposition in Erbil (Hewler), and the Iranian armed forces have attacked KDPI several times, for example in 2022 and in 2018 .
Kurdish resistance
You could say that the Kurdish opposition from Iran is militarily weak, but they are morally and socially strong enough to scare the Iranian regime very much. And they have reason to be scared. The Kurdish resistance is older than the reign of the current dictators. They stand together in Rojhilat (Kurdistan in Iran) and are not alone in their struggle for freedom: their fellow-Kurds across the borders in Bakur (in Turkey), Başur (in Iraq) and Rojava (in Syria) have since forever joined them.
Look how Kurds are not afraid. In several cities and towns across Rojhilat, the shops haven’t opened after the state’s execution spree (other Kurds were hanged in a few days earlier). The four men’s families haven’t been silent either, which is remarkable because everybody knows the Iranian regime has a special way of targeting the families of dissidents. One of the brave ones was Joanna Taimasi the wife of executed prisoner Mohsen Mazloum, who made public via Instagram that the state refused to hand over the bodies and had buried the men in an undisclosed location.
Jina Amini
And trust me: more Kurds have joined the resistance. Not just in Rojhilat, also in other parts of Kurdistan more young Kurds take to the mountains when state violence intensifies. While the states that occupy Kurdistan play their disgusting domestic and geopolitical games and sacrifice their Kurdish populations, what they are actually doing is uniting the Kurds against them. Look at what happened when they murdered Jina (Mahsa) Amini in September 2022 for not properly wearing her hijab: she ignited a resistance that shook the regime and continues to smoulder under the surface. The resistance continues, also after this latest crime of the mullahs.
Hajir Faramarzi, Mohsen Mazloum, Vafa Azarbar and Pejman Fatehi didn’t die. They never will. They will be remembered and live on with more power than the brutal leaders will ever have. The regime is what will die. In all their weakness, one day they will go down. Will their feet be able to carry them to their judges, on earth or in the afterlife they believe in? I know the answer now. The many executed Kurds, their families mourning them: their feet can carry them because they are supported by the people, by their societies inside and outside Iranian borders. The regime is weak. Surviving just because of their brutality, but without a spine and without any popular support. They couldn’t be weaker.
*Fréderike Geerdink is an independent journalist. Follow her on Twitter or subscribe to her acclaimed weekly newsletter Expert Kurdistan.
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