Iran’s Rouhani and the Kurds: Don’t Hold Your Breath

By Zuber Hawrami

WASHINGTON DC – As the outside world expects Iran’s new President Hassan Rouhani to mend Tehran’s relations with the international community, his country’s own ethnic groups – the Kurds, Azeris, Arabs and Baluchis -- expect him to redress their cultural and political grievances.

Rouhani was the ideal candidate for many Iranian Kurds, who backed his campaign and voted for him in the June polls.

Abdullah Suhrabi, former Kurdish MP in the Iranian parliament, says that Rouhani has not kept any of the promises he made to the Kurds in the city of Sanandaj in the last days of his campaign.

“The first article of the 10-point statement (by Rouhani) that the minorities would be included in the cabinet as ministers and presidential deputies has been broken,” Suhrabi told Deutsche Welle’s Persian service in an interview.

With a doctorate in law from the University of Glasgow, and years of experience in dealing with the West, Rouhani is nicknamed inside Iran as “Sheikh Fox.”  Yet, he was largely unknown until his election.

Iran’s 26 percent Kurdish population live in energy-rich and agricultural lands that have been neglected by successive Iranian regimes. As a result the Kurds and their regions are among the most impoverished in Iran.

On Wednesday, Hamid Qaderwrazi, a Kurdish member of parliament in Iran, urged Rouhani and the parliament to elect Kurdish governors in the Kurdish areas in order to speed up development there.

The Kurds in Iran enjoy limited cultural rights, but their basic demand of education in the mother tongue is denied. Political assembly is strictly forbidden and many Kurdish civil rights activists linger in jail, with the risk of execution.

It may not help the new president that he has appointed Mustafa Pourmohammadi as justice minister.

As prosecutor in the Revolutionary- and the Armed Forces Court and deputy intelligence minister in the 1980s, Pourmohammadi is said to have been behind the killing of hundreds of political prisoners and others labeled as opponents of the regime. At the time of the killings in the late 1980s, he served as one of the three members of a “Death Commission” in Tehran.

Though most Iranian Kurdish groups have renounced armed struggle in the past decade, Tehran seems to still consider the Kurdish areas a military zone, with ever increasing security and military presence.

In his election campaign Rouhani promised: “Iran will change and review Iranian minorities and cultures from a security lens to an effective political strategy, scientific management and efficient security system.”

However, a close look shows that since his election a number of Kurdish political prisoners have been executed and critics of the regime feel growing pressure and police surveillance.

“As of now, nothing has changed, but persecution, executions of Kurdish and Sunni prisoners has persisted,” Hassan Amini, a Kurdish judge told the Persian service of Deutsche Welle recently.

Amini was summoned in October to the intelligence ministry over his objection to the recent execution of Kurdish prisoners.

Most recently, Abdulsalm Gulnawaz, the preacher of the Omar Mosque in Sardashat city was stripped of his post and sentenced to six years in prison. He was accused of being a member of the outlawed Maktabe Quran, A Sunni organization founded by influential Kurdish religious thinker Ahmed Muftizadeh, who died in 1993 shortly after being released from prison.

Gulnawaz was also charged with disseminating propaganda against the Iranian regime, preaching in favor of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI) and inciting division between Shiites and Sunnis.

Rouhani has a history of working inside the regime from the beginning of the Islamic Revolution in 1979. He has held important posts such as nuclear negotiator, and membership in the powerful council of experts.

“Rouhani comes from a security background and therefore he will never look at the Kurdish question from a cultural or political perspective,” said Abdullah Muhtadi, leader of the Kurdish Komala Party of Iran.