Iran reformist presidential candidate promises to fix kolbar issue

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The reformist candidate for Iran’s June 28 presidential election promised the Kurdish people on Friday an economic policy that will benefit the border areas, saying It is “shameful” that people are forced to work as kolbars. 

Masoud Pezeshkian, Iran’s 69-year-old lawmaker and former health minister, is the only reformist candidate in the upcoming snap presidential election. Born in the Kurdish city of Mahabad, his father is Azeri and his mother is Kurdish.

“It is shameful that our young people have to become kolbars to put food on the table,” he said during a rally in Iran’s western Kurdistan province. “We have to make a border [economy] that will result in trade exchanges, not borders.” 

While he did not provide details, he said that his policy will help both sides of the border. Iran’s western provinces, where the majority of Kolbars come from, border the Kurdistan Region. 

Kolbars are semi-legal porters who transport untaxed goods across the Kurdistan Region-Iran border and sometimes the Iran-Turkey border. They are constantly targeted by Iranian border guards and are sometimes victims of natural disasters.

On Friday, a 29-year-old kolbar from Marivan was killed at point-blank range by Iranian border guards. Eyewitnesses told Rudaw he crossed the border to the Kurdistan Region but could not find any goods to carry over, returning to the Iranian side empty handed. He was his family’s sole breadwinner, and his parents and sister are sick. 

At least eight kolbars were killed by Iranian security forces in the month of May, according to the Hengaw Organization for Human Rights, a human rights watchdog. The fatality count doubled that of April, during which four kolbars lost their lives. 

Sanandaj, the capital of Kurdistan province, witnessed some of the worst protests during the Zhina (Mahsa) Amini antigovernment demonstrations in 2022 - the largest since the country’s Islamic revolution in 1979.  

Pezeshkian told the crowd in Sanandaj that authorities have to change their hijab and women policy, arguing that Islam regards men and women as equals and that the forced hijab rules have proven to fail. 

He said that the former Shah’s regime failed to force Iranian women to remove the hijab, and the current Islamic government’s decades-long rule could not achieve the opposite. 

“Just as they could not force the women to remove their hijab, we definitely cannot force hijab on women,” Pezeshkian said.

At the end of the rally, he shouted a slogan in Kurdish: “Long live Iran. Long live Kurds. Long live Kurdistan.” 

He was then approached by a reporter who asked him to convey his message “to the people of Kurdistan in their sweet language.” 

The reformist candidate replied in Kurdish and said he is “at the service of the people of Kurdistan.” 

“God willing, if we were elected and people voted for us, the situation that now exists in Kurdistan and the impoverished areas, we are definitely going to fix it,” Pezeshkian stressed. “We will not allow the status quo to continue.” 

Although the state funds several Kurdish broadcast channels and does not ban the use of the language in the public sphere, education is only provided in Persian. Kurdish teachers who provide Kurdish language classes often face arrest and prison sentences simply for teaching their mother tongue. The most recent case in late April saw a Sanandaj court sentence a Kurdish teacher to 11 years behind bars. 

Pezeshkian is supported by a number of reformist officials who served under former president Hassan Rouhani’s administration, among them is high-profile former foreign minister Javad Zarif. 

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