Iran pardons Kurd and Azeri political prisoners held for 30 years

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Two political prisoners were released on Thursday after being pardoned by Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamanei having spent 30 years behind bars for allegedly supporting the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI).

Some 3,552 prisoners, including 32 “security prisoners”, were granted an amnesty to mark the occasion of the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday, according to Tasnim News Agency, an outlet close to the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).  

This is the first time so-called “security prisoners” have been pardoned, Tasnim said, which include those with alleged ties to parties opposed to the Islamic regime.

Hengaw, a leading Kurdish human rights organization which documents abuses in Iran’s Kurdish areas, reported the release of Osman Mostafapour and Mohammed Nazari, who have both been in jail for the past three decades for allegedly supporting the PDKI.   

The PDKI is a Kurdish party outlawed by the Iranian regime. It has waged an on-and-off guerrilla war against the Iranian government since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Clashes resumed in 2015 when a ceasefire deal brokered two decades earlier collapsed.

PDKI, along with the Kurdistan Democratic Party-Iran (PDK-I), and two branches of the left-wing Komala party, have been based in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq since 1992. The groups often engage in sporadic military confrontations with Iran’s elite IRGC along the Iran-Kurdistan Region border.

Nazari, an Azeri, has been in jail for 25 years, since May 1994, on charges of fostering ties with the PDKI.

He was convicted of “enmity against God (moharebeh)”. 

The court handed down its verdict based on “confessions” which Nazari claimed were “forced”, according to human rights monitor Amnesty International. 

According to Hengaw, Mostafapour was taken prisoner in July 1991 following clashes between the PDKI and the IRGC in Urmia. He was initially sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted in 2000 to 10 years in prison. 

However, a Revolutionary Urmia court slapped him with an additional 25 years for KDPI membership, increasing his prison sentence to 35 years.

The Kurd and the Azeri were both incarcerated at Central Urmia Prison and were not allowed leave to attend family funerals.

Nazari lost his mother and his brother while serving time in prison. Both had been actively fighting for his release.

Nazari had lost hope in ever being freed. A successful case review by the state public prosecutor in 2012 offered a glimmer of hope, but Tehran’s Amnesty Commission did not implement the decision.

The timing of their release may be connected with the mass protests currently sweeping Iran.

US economic sanctions, reimposed after US President Donald Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal in May 2018, have emptied in Iranian government’s coffers as its oil revenues vanished and its currency collapsed.

On November 15, the cash-strapped Iranian government imposed petrol rationing and tripled the price of a liter of petrol, further squeezing the public. 

The move led to mass protests across several Iranian cities, which have been brutally suppressed. 

According to Amnesty International, 106 people have been killed across Iran since the protests began last weekend. 

Ethnic minority groups including Kurds and Azeris are disproportionally detained and more harshly sentenced for acts of political dissidence, according to a July 2019 report from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights in Iran. 

Since the re-imposition of US sanctions and the heightening of tensions, authorities in Iran have started tightening the noose on labor activists, journalists, satirists, environmentalists, anti-death penalty campaigners, and researchers, who have been detained in droves, with some sentenced in trials whose fairness has been questioned.