COPENHAGEN, Denmark - Twenty five years ago, when Kurdish-Iranian leader Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou was shot dead by suspected agents of the Islamic Republic in Vienna, it took his widow all her strength to bear the news.
"I did not believe it. I thought I was asleep and it was all a nightmare,” Helen Krulich told Rudaw. “If I had had a bad heart I would have suffered a heart attack,” she said of the day on July 13, 1989 when she lost her husband.
Ghassemlou, secretary general of the Kurdistan Democratic Party-Iran (PDKI), was killed in a Vienna flat where he was in secret talks with representatives of the Islamic Republic.
The 81-year old Krulich, also known by her Kurdish name of Nasrin, was in Paris when she heard the news. A PDKI friend called her to say that the man she had been married to for 37 years was dead.
The rendezvous in Vienna, in which Ghassemlou was accompanied by two associates -- Fadhil Rassoul and Abdullah Ghaderi Azar – had come after several such meetings had already taken place.
"The meeting was about stopping the war in Kurdistan,” his widow said. “Ghassemlou welcomed the meetings because he had always been against the war."
Two men, introduced as journalists, shot and killed Ghassemlou and his two friends during the meeting.
Austrian police arrested the two suspects, revealed to be diplomats assigned to the Iranian Embassy in Vienna. The Austrians allowed them to leave for Tehran. When, four months later an Austrian court issued arrest warrants, the suspects were gone.
In September 1992 Ghassemlou’s successor to the PDKI, Sadegh Sharafkandi, was also killed by two gunmen at a restaurant in Berlin, along with three companions.
Krulich and PDKI protested against the Austrian authorities and launched a campaign against the Iranian government, but without much effect.
“In 1990, I began legal proceedings against the government in Vienna. But two years later the Austrian Supreme Court rejected my lawsuit,” Krulich said. “I felt defeated and alone. It was a very difficult time for me.”
But she is grateful for the support of many at that time, including the former French first lady Danielle Mitterand.
Mitterrand was known as a good friend of Ghassemlou, and declared after the assassination that the French Embassy in Vienna was to serve as "The embassy of the Kurds." She had Ghassemlou’s body transported to Paris, where the Kurdish leader was buried.
Krulich said that the government of mullahs in Iran should be overthrown.
“The regime does what they want and ignores protests by Kurds and the international community. Therefore, the regime has lost legitimacy," she said.
The Kurds are one of the largest minorities in Iran, with an estimated eight million population. But they have no legal political party in the country, and Kurdish education in public schools is not allowed. The Kurds have often been in conflict with the government in Tehran over the right to self-government, as well as cultural and linguistic rights.
Krulich believes that the solution is a new democratic Iran, with autonomy or federation for ethnic minorities, including the Kurds. “It will create equality for all groups in Iran and it was also what Ghassemlou fought for."
Krulich remembers the early 1980s, when PDKI Peshmerga forces were locked in a war with the Iranian regime, and controlled several areas of the country’s Kurdish regions in western Iran.
The Czech-born Krulich joined her husband in the Kurdish mountains and taught English to a classroom of Peshmergas. Besides her native Czech, she also speaks Kurdish, Persian, English and French.
Although the assassinations are history, 25 years after the murder suspects in the Ghassemlou case have still not been brought to justice. But the Iranian Kurdish leader’s legacy lives on, Krulich stressed.
“They killed my husband, but not his legacy as a leader of PDKI. The idea about freedom still lives on among millions of Kurds.”
Iran still denies being involved in the killings.
"I know very well that Iran killed my husband," his widow said.
