Lead Article:KURDISTAN WILL NOT BE EXECUTED

Saeed Valadbaygi

The most difficult moment of last week that was heartfelt by everyone was the execution of a hardworking activist. The Islamic Republic executed Ehsan Fattahian, one of Kurdistan’s tall and proud youth. Ehsan was of a working class family in the province of Kermanshah in western Iran, who was arrested and sentenced to death for his political struggle as member of a Marxist group in Kurdistan. His execution made people worldwide protest once again against organized crime in the name of killing political prisoners.

The execution of political and civil prisoners in the Islamic Republic has a 30 year history. But in recent days the wave of concern provoked among the people and human rights activists has reached an international level. The executions and death sentences issued against the detainees have prompted the question: Is another wave of executions imminent? How far can the government continue in this path and what is the purpose of these executions and what does the Islamic Republic hope to gain from this?

Ehsan Fattahian, a poltical activist in Kurdistan was executed on Wednesday last week. Shirko Moarefi and Habib-Allah Latifi, two other political activists are in danger of execution now. One woman and 11 more men, also in Kurdistan languish in prison with the burden of a death sentence. These executions are designed to create an atmosphere of terror in society and hold back the people from the streets in an effort to stabilize the system after the electoral coup d’etat. The Islamic Republic that today faces a big challenge by the name of the people’s revolution against their rulers, has no choice but such encounters. This way of suppressing for us who remember as a lesson for the current revolution, the first years of the 1357 (1979) revolution, is very familiar. In those years too, the Islamic Republic went to war with people with the same vast wave of imprisonment and execution of political prisoners in order to take control of social and political conditions in Iran.

Each day and each month a list of political executions in the prisons of Iran was announced on the radio and in newspapers. Their crime was warring with God. But today after 30 years of the Islamic Republic many men and women throughout Iran are strung by the same title and sent to the gallows. But these days the executed and those who have in effect fought God and his representatives on earth are the people’s heroes and symbols of political and religious tyranny in Iran. Just as we saw with Ehsan Fattahian , who for the crime of membership of a Marxist-Leninist group, they imprisoned and in the end killed. A few days later at Tehran University, a gathering of people in their hundreds took place in commemoration of him. People attacked the government and all its factions with all their might and fitting to the political balance in society and in recent months they have shown that this movement will not die even if people like Moussavi and Karroubi stay silent in the face of such proceedings. Recent executions have posed a very clear question to reformist leaders in Iran and that was their stance on the death sentences. In another respect the recent executions showed that people like Moussavi, Karroubi, Khatami and…not only have no clear answer regarding the execution of political prisoners and the death penalty overall, but in defending the integrity of the Islamic Republic, have been and are accomplices in these killings. That these men don’t have actual power is a much debated subject of recent months, but silence when the people on the streets and even bazaars in groups and various organizations have expressed their condemnation of this murder conviction, showed their apparent complicity in the face of such a crime.

This movement is a vibrant and human flow against the mass execution of people, for the freedom of women, and the welfare of workers. A flow that has seen two revolutions and a few blatant hidden coups against it. Our people have been the victims of the political and military games of political powers in the region and the world, from the Constitutional Revolution to the 28 Mordad coup (1953) and finally the ’57 revolution (1979) and the 30 year protests against the Islamic Republic. But the recent protests have been unique in several aspects. This movement is very aware and gripping in the sense that you can simultaneously be a female university student who for her own livelihood needs a worker for long hours, and takes a stand against the integrity of discriminatory norm and have tasted prison for her crime, and the latent representative of the women’s movement, the student, the worker, the political prisoners or one of thousands of the Islamic Republic’s unique phenomena. It’s enough to be on the streets of Iran to hear the most profound political and social language of the masses. You should be among the people to hear the depth of hostility in the movement for a secular and equal society. It’s enough to take a few steps in the surge of the crowd to see the depth of solidarity and unity for change in the political governance of Iran. Even if the executions continue, they will not only fail to succeed in keeping the people back, but rather will drive stronger nails into the Islamic Republic’s coffin. The people of Kurdistan have in recent months been less present in the scene of protests. The reasons for this must be explored in another discussion. But that which is clear to all is that Kurdistan is the hub of the radical revolutionary movement and has long been at the centre of political upheaval in Iran. As long as this trend against the honourable people of this immense part of Iran continues, a great force will hit the streets and this ultimately is not to the benefit of the Islamic Republic.