On the Iranian Left and the Kurdish Question

(Letter)

Bay Area
September 2016

On Sept. 17, 2016, the elite Iranian Revolutionary Guards using phosphorus bombs began shelling the Iraqi border region of Kurdistan where Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI) forces are based, destroying structures in remote villages, killing several civilians, and injuring several Peshmergha (Kurdish soldiers). These atrocities against the Kurds are similar to and in footsteps of Turkish bombardment of Iraqi Kurdistan.

The bombardments of the KDPI positions are retaliation against KDPI’s new surge of military attacks against Islamic Regime. The attacks were launched in June just as WV raised the call “For a United, Independent Kurdistan.” (“Syria Quagmire,” WV No. 1091, 3 June 2016.)

The political significance of the above declaration is very unique as the KDPI declares that its military attacks have nothing to do with Kurdish independence, not to say a unified independent Kurdistan.

The KDPI upholds the ascendency of Kurdish nationalism. It calls the rebirth of its armed struggle “Rasan” or the struggle to free all of Iran from the tyranny of Islamic Republic. But the anticommunist KDPI and its sister party KDP in Iraq are both parties of Kurdish feudalism and landowners. After unilaterally declaring a truce with Teheran in 1996, KDPI moved its forces to the Iraqi Kurdistan, then governed by Kurdish parties that had forged trade and political relations with the Ayatollahs, not to mention the Iraqi KDP’s decades’ long military ties with the US military and intelligence services. The KDPI left Iranian Kurds defenseless while it continued to enforce its own patriarchal Islamic codes like the anti-woman bride price. KDPI pursues a federated Iran and sees itself as a player, as the KDP in Iraq was, after the overthrow of the Islamic tyranny, with the intervention of the imperialists of course.

The theocratic rule that came to power in 1979 [in Iran] showed its true nature when only after two months it dispatched the former monarchist army and air force to attack cities and mountainous regions of Kurdistan that had declared autonomy. Iranian Kurdistan has been under military occupation ever since.

The Iranian left claims to be for Kurdish “freedom.” But nothing but hostility or indifference can be detected or expected from them when it comes to the struggle for a united and independent Kurdistan; not even a hint of opposition to Persian chauvinism. They oppose the breakup of Iran, and see no difference between nationalism of the oppressed and the chauvinism of the oppressor nation.

Having rejected Leninism the Iranian reformist left has no need for the right of oppressed nations to independence as essential for the fight to unite the workers against dominant Persian, Turkish and Arab chauvinism, as a struggle in the here and now. This perspective can only come about from a revolutionary program based on the proletarian internationalism that Lenin fought for.

Communist Greetings,
Avetis