Although almost four decades has passed since the rise of the Islamic Republic, the so-called Revolutionary Courts once ruled by the hanging judge, Ayatollah Khalkhali who gained notoriety for his Sanandaj summary executions, continue their rite of terror. According to Human Rights Watch Iran continues to be the top executioner with at least 230 executions since January 1 and over 1,000 last year. The execution of 20 Sunni Kurds on August 2 at Rajai Shahr prison, all charged with alleged association with a “takfiri Group” (Apostates), and the hanging of the Kurdish nuclear scientist Shahram Amiri on the charge of “conspiring with “ the great Satan” divulge a cruel retribution against Kurdish prisoners irrespective of their ideology, creed, and religion. The new litany of executions evokes not only in the words of Sarah Leah Whitson, the director of Middle East Human Rights Watch “a shameful low point in the human rights record” but horrific sights of recurrent hangings of political prisoners in Iran. As human rights organizations denouncing the recent executions have noted, there were no justifications for these tribunals in which the victims were summarily re-tried and then executed. The new executions may be distinguished from other instances in the ways in which the Islamic Republic has represented them regionally and globally as a part of the war against terrorism. In a furious diatribe to the UN Human Rights High Commissioner Zeid Ra’ad al- Hussein who had called the executions “Injustices”, Iran’s Foreign Ministry charged that “Instead of adopting double standards on the issue of terrorism, the West has to show serious resolve in bringing together the global community’s will and efforts to eradicate takfiri terrorism, including the DAESH terrorist group,” Those executed are labeled as takfiri or DAESH “terrorists” albeit all had been arrested long before ISIS had even come into existence. The executions reveal a more insidious and interventionist behavior on the part of Iran as it claims to occupy a new status in the post nuclear deal as an emerging power to be reckoned with in the region in its fierce competition with Saudi Arabia. If in the past it remained non-complaint with the international law under religious codes and traditions or was simply nonchalant in its response to world community protests about its human rights violations as a pariah state; now under the guise and guide of the Iran Project, presumably non-governmental organization created to promote the nuclear deal- is camouflaging its repression as the war on terrorism expects the world community to be oblivious to its invidious record of human rights and instead concentrate on the abysmal condition of human rights in Saudi Arabia. In attempting to camouflage its internal repression as the war on terrorism, Iran has now gained a free hand in its foreign policy to create instability, paradoxically, in the name of security as it has begun shelling Kurdish villages in the KRG region presumably to drive away the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran who has recently re-engaged in armed struggle against the Iranian government. The severity and speed with which the Kurdish prisoners were executed along with simultaneous threats against KRG reflect renewed efforts to intimidate Kurdish political opposition in the region by intensely securitizing the entire region within and beyond its borders. All the executed prisoners had been held without due process, tortured, re-tried, their sentences extended, charged falsely, and many held incommunicado, intolerable conditions to which, the prominent imprisoned Kurdish human rights activist, Mr. Kaboudvand protested through his moth long hunger strike in May. A cursory review of the number of Kurdish prisoners executed during the past years shows a clear and disproportionate bias against Kurds. According to Rudaw on Aug 9, 2016 six prisoners were executed in Urmia where the prison officials had refused to release the body of Mohammad Abdollahi, the hanged prisoner to his family. In yet another case in the same city, in May five Kurdish human rights activists, who had been arrested on a Wednesday, were hanged publicly on Friday of the same week, on the charge of membership in the Kurdish Democratic Party. The use of such brute force shows that the Islamic Republic of Iran continues to see Kurds as a formidable challenge to its image; it is well aware that Kurds were the foremost pro-democracy force that challenged the very foundation of the Islamic order at its inception in 1979. Therefore, the Islamic Republic’s ongoing hostility against Kurds is both ideological and rooted in the Kurdish opposition to the dominant political structure, culture and the very identity of the theocracy. The Kurdish struggle for human and civil rights with its vicissitudes has had a lasting effect on exposing the political tyranny, ethnic persecutions, religious intolerance, and sectarianism. That is why the Islamic Republic officials are relentlessly unforgiving in inflicting incomparable punishments on Kurdish human rights activists and prisoners of conscience. Dr. Amir Sharifi President of the Kurdish American Education Society Los Angeles
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