Bulletin de liaison et d'information - Institut kurde de Paris

THE FINANCIAL TIMES /October 13,19934 ~
Tehran's vendetta hits the Kurds hard
The war with the guerrillas is worsening, writes Gareth Smyth, recently in Baneh region, western Iran
Mr Ali Azizi, a peshmarga commander.
The KDPI moved its
headquarters in August from
Bollay to Koisanjaq, some 45
miles from the border and
beyond the range of Iranian
artillery.
Casualty figures are hard to
come by. Tehran says nothing.
The KDPI is anxious to play
down the importance of its
bases inside Iraqi Kurdistan
and insists its primary work in
Iran is organisational rather
than military.
Mr Mustapha Hijri, KDPI
general secretary, says "more
than SO" pasdaran have been
killed since April, but a cursory
listen to KDPI radio and
conversations with peshmerga
suggest the real figure is
higher.
Mr Hijri is convinced the
struggle is tilting in the Kurds'
favour. "We will carry out
more attacks. I believe we will
win". His fear is that the Iraqi
Kurds, beleaguered by President
Saddam Hussein and desperate
for friends in the region,
will yield to Tehran's pressure
and insist the KDPI leave. "I
have not thought where we
would go then," he says.
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ASHAD Rashidi is 23,
newly married and
frightened. A shell
llecently exploded across the
isolated, rocky valley in western
Iran where he and his five
brothers farm. The boom of
artillery fire echoes almost
daily around the area. "I know
of more than 20 people who
bave been killed," he says.
Within the mud-baked walls
of his house hang pictures of
President Hashemi Rafsanjani
as well as Ayatollah Khameini,
Iran's spiritual leader, and the
late Ayatollah Khomeini.
"When the pasdaran [revolutionary
guards] see these pictures,
they will not harm us,"
Mr Rashidi explains.
The shelling is one sign of
the intensifying conflict
between Tehran's Islamic
régime and the peshmerga
guerrillas of the Kurdistan
Democratic party of Iran
(KDPI). Yet a news blackout
operated by Iran ensures the
trouble goes largely unreported
in the outside world.
It is a bitter, large-scale conflict.
Iran is said to have stationed
around 200,000 troops,
mainly pasdaran, in its Kurd-
ish region since Ayatollah Khomenei
declared a jihad (holy
war) against the mainly Sunni
Kurds in 1980.
The peshmerga claim the
pasdaran have lost the will to
fight. "They used to hang pictures
of the Ayatollah on their
chests and wear headbands as
a symbol of [the seventh century
Shia martyr] Hussein, but
only a few do that now," said
Mr Sa'ed Brayhim, KDPI commander
for the Baneh region.
Rather than engage in
hand-to-hand fighting, the pasdamn,
who have bases in all
the local towns and many villages,
resort to the imprecise
use of artillery and mortars
against peshmerga who move
largely at night and receive
food and moral support from
Kurdish villagers.
The hamlet of Bagy Kazy,
some 20 miles south-west of
Baneh, was abandoned by residents
terrified. of shelling,
KDPI peshmerga claim. Recent
signs of habitation (hay in cattle
pens, abandoned pots) were
testimony to the villagers'
rapid departure.
In escalating its campaign,
the KDPI draws strength from
bases across the border in
northern Iraq made possible
since the emergence in late
1991 on Iraqi soil of a "free
Kurdistan" with de facto independence
from Baghdad.
The government of 3m Iraqi
Kurds, who elected their own
unofficial "parliament" last
year, has fanned the nationalist
aspirations of the estimated
Sm-8m Iranian Kurds denied
any autonomy and compelled
to use the .Farsi language' on
formal occasions, including in
education.
Relations between Tehran
and the Iraqi Kurdish authorities
have worsened throughout
the year, and threaten a new
twist to the complex politics of
the region.
Iran issues frequent warnings
about the "godless and
morally corrupt situation" in
Iraqi Kurdistan, and its troops
held a security zone inside
Kurdish Iraq between April
and August, prompting protests
from Baghdad.
Among the Iranian bugbears
is the Kurdish radio and TV
now beamed into Iran from
Iraqi Kurdistan and offering a
mixture of news, views and
IRAQ
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music. One aged villager near
Baneh, whose son was recently
arrested for grazing his sheep
too close to an Iranian military
position, tunes in to the station:
"I don't like Tehran radio,
I want a programme in my
own language," he says.
Ordinary Kurds in the Baneh
region say life is worse than
under the Shah, overthrown by
the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
The poor state of the Iranian
economy, with high inflation
and unemployment after the
devaluation of the rial in
March, regions has hard, hit compounding the Kurdish
the
sense of discrimination in one
of the poorest parts of Iran.
The KDPI has a long-established
policy of eschewing terrorism
which has survived the
assassination of its past two
leaders, Mr Abdolrahman Qassemlou
Mr Sadiq in Vienna Sherefkindi in 1989 and
in Berlin
last year. "I want to talk to
people with my tongue, not
with my Kalashnikov," l3ays
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