IRAN: ‘Peaceful Dictatorship Better than Democratic Chaos’

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Aaron Glantz

ARBIL, Iraq, Feb 23 2005 (IPS) - The two Kurdish guerrilla fighters, if anyone, should have wanted the United States to overthrow the regime in Iran. They have just escaped after five years in an Iranian prison for membership of the banned Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran.

The two Kurdish guerrillas, peshmerga as they are called, huddled around an oil heater in the KDP office just outside Koysenjak by the snow-covered peaks that mark Iraq’s border with Iran. “They tortured us,” says Idris Hormazina. He is 34, but his hair is already white.

“They covered our faces and bound our hands and beat us with cables and with the butt of a gun,” he said. “They tried to break our spirit by telling us lies that our families and relatives were in the next cell or that they had fled the country and we would never see them again.”

After three months of daily torture, Idris and his fellow confessed to KDP membership. They were sent before a secret military tribunal.

“They told us that we could not have a lawyer because the Islamic Republic itself represents god on this earth,” Idris said. “They said you were working against the Islamic Republic. That means you were working against god, so you will be punished.”

The two fighters were declared guilty and sent to Karaj prison, one of Iran’s largest facilities for serious, violent criminals. The two peshmerga said 90 percent of inmates were addicted to opium. Communicable diseases ran rampant through the prison, they said, and authorities made no effort to separate common criminals from political ones.

After five years behind bars the two peshmerga bribed their way to a week’s furlough and fled towards the Iraqi border. They crossed the border in the mountains near Haj Omran and arrived at the KDP base earlier this month.

But now, watching U.S. President George W. Bush’s tough talk on Iran, they have mixed feelings. They want the regime to fall, but they are against a U.S.-sponsored war.

In this their feelings are similar to those of many Kurds in Northern Iraq. Mohammed Amin is a translator who spent much of his early life as a refugee in Iran before the founding of the Kurdish autonomous area in Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War.

“Before the war in Iraq people in Iran were complaining, please America come and liberate us,” Amin said. “But now they know that if America goes there, Iran will be another Iraq. They know that a peaceful dictatorship is better than a democratic chaos like Iraq where nobody knows what will happen.”

Iranian Kurds also differ with the Bush Administration on the imposition of strong sanctions on Iran. Tough sanctions were put in place after 1979 and were strengthened in 1996 when Bill Clinton was president. Idris Hormazina hopes Bush will lift the sanctions.

“For more than 20 years Iran has been living under American sanctions, and that is having its biggest effect on the people,” he says. “When the people face these kinds of sanctions, of course, it leaves them poorer and their situation gets worse, and they just think about how they will feed their children. It’s a good chance for the government to control these hungry people.”

The Bush Administration’s policy is, however, to root for even tougher sanctions. When Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice toured Europe earlier this month, she did so in part to drum up support for worldwide United Nations sanctions against the Islamic Republic.

“I’m quite clear and I believe everybody is telling the Iranians that they are going to have to live up to their international obligations,” she told reporters Feb. 9. “It is obvious that if Iran cannot be brought to live up to its international obligations…the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) statute would indicate that Iran would have to be referred to the UN Security Council.”

That would mean wider sanctions. “I think the message is there, the Iranians need to get that message,” she said, and added that Tehran should know “there are other steps” the international community can take.