ERBIL, Kurdistan Region—The Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI) has asked the public, members and supporters across Iranian Kurdistan to mark the 27th anniversary of their leader’s death by public strikes and civil disobedience.
The KDPI says in a statement on the party website that people must “turn the anniversary of the cowardly assassination of our heroic leader into a day of universal goals and renewed pledge to our martyrs,”
The Kurdish group which resumed actions against the Iranian army last month after nearly two decades of unilateral ceasefire is asking people to “avoid going to work” and all shops and markets in cities and villages to be closed.
KDPI leader Abdulrahman Ghassemlou was assassinated by Iranian agents in the midst of negotiations in the Austrian capital Vienna in July 1989.
The KDPI call for civil disobedience coincides with increasing tensions between the group and Iranian military across the border and the killing of at least eight KDPI Peshmerga and a number of revolutionary guards soldiers.
We ask people, says the KDPI statement, “to adorn public places with signs of the party and our just struggle such as the Kurdish flag and pictures of our martyrs,”
The message goes on to say that such a wide scale protest “needs the active participation of all classes of Kurdistan society and their solidarity with Dr. Ghassemlou and our martyrs,”
The KDPI leadership under Mustafa Hejri tries to link the group’s recent armed clashes with the army in the border areas with public strikes under the name of the fighters of mountains and cities.
The statement says that it is time “People in the cities responded to the sacrifice of the mountain fighters with their participation in the struggle for the nation,”
