ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Kurdish activists in Iran are looking at the peace process in Turkey as a possible model, advocating engagement with the government in Tehran to achieve greater Kurdish rights.
But Iranian Kurdish parties, which for decades have believed Tehran will never relinquish rights to its large minority Kurds except through armed conflict, say that the political arena in Iran is so closed to the Kurds that there is no chance of a civil struggle similar to the one in Turkey.
In Iran’s presidential election this month, in which Hassan Rouhani was declared winner, Kurdish activists had asked Kurds to vote for the moderate in large numbers, while the parties had urged a near-boycott: More Kurds showed up to vote than in previous years, an increase largely attributed to Kurdish civil rights advocates.
Abdollah Sohrabi, a Kurdish activist and Rouhani supporter, told Rudaw, “The people in Eastern (Iranian) Kurdistan have carefully chosen this candidate. He has promised to grant some of the political and national rights of the minorities.”
Sohrabi, who formerly represented Mariwan city in the Iranian parliament, believes that local Kurdish activists will help Rouhani fulfill his promises to Iranian Kurds.
Kurdish activists have been closely observing the unfolding historic peace process in neighboring Turkey, where Ankara and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) are negotiating an end to a bloody three-decade separatist conflict, as a way to gain greater Kurdish rights.
The dialogue between the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, who has been imprisoned in Turkey since his capture in 1999, was facilitated by the Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) in Turkey.
While civil rights advocates in Iranian Kurdistan want to imitate that model to get closer to Iranian authorities, the old political parties that have been struggling against different Iranian regimes for decades -- without making headway -- warn that the political ground in Turkey cannot be compared to that in Iran.
Both the BDP and PKK have grown shoulder-to-shoulder in Turkey, they note, explaining that no comparable Kurdish party exists in Iran, since Tehran does not allow civil rights advocacy. Turkey, they note, is a semi-democratic state in which political activism is allowed and parliamentary freedoms exist.
The political parties believe the only way to get greater Kurdish rights is through the collapse of the current Iranian regime.
“The situation in each country is unique. We do not want to imitate others. We want to play our role as Kurds from Eastern Kurdistan,” says Dr. Raheem Farahmand, former spokesman of the Kurdish United Front in Tehran.
“Iranian Kurds have their own views and opinions. Therefore, if we play our role here, we will be much more victorious,” he adds.
Hamanazeef Qadri, a member of the Kurdistan Democratic Party-Iran (KDPI), believes: “The political battleground in Iran, unlike Turkey, is a closed one. There are no hopes that Iran will allow political parties to carry out their civil and political activism. Therefore, there are no hopes for Kurdish political parties to exercise their political rights.”
In the more than three decades since the Iranian Islamic revolution, efforts by Kurdish Iranian groups and individuals to engage with Tehran in pursuit of greater rights for Iranian Kurds have come to nothing.
Several prominent Iranian Kurdish leaders have been assassinated in different parts of the world – sometimes while negotiating with Iranian government representatives -- with suspicions and accusations for the murders pointing to Iran.
For decades no Kurdish politician advocating local Kurdish governance and demanding basic Kurdish rights has been allowed to take part in Iranian elections.
“Political activism needs structure and organization,” says Taher Khadew, a doctoral student in political science at Tehran University, adding that Kurdish politicians in Iran need to reinvent themselves in accordance with the current situation in order to remain relevant.
