A few years ago, at an event in Erbil, the provincial capital of the Kurdistan Region, the prominent Turkish sociologist Ismail Beşikçi spoke of two of the worst catastrophes in the 20th century affecting the Kurdish people. The first, he said, was the chemical attack on Halabja by the Iraqi state. The second, he added, was the assassination of the Kurdish leader Dr. A. R. Ghassemlou by the Iranian state.
Considering the national trauma that the assassination of Dr. Ghassemlou signifies, a recent piece by Ahmed Hamza, which appeared on the English website of Rudaw, is a defamation of Ghassemlou and his legacy as well as an attempt to inflict psychological harm on the Kurdish nation. Hamza’s piece appeared on the 29th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Ghassemlou, when Kurds all over the world commemorated their fallen leader.
It is not clear why Hamza wrote this piece. On social media, he justified the writing of this piece in terms of the right to criticize Kurdish leaders. Yet he evaded the question why “criticism” of Ghassemlou is warranted in such a context and, more important, what purpose it serves.
The piece by Hamza on Dr. Ghassemlou is not a “critical” undertaking. Rather, he has ulterior motives. Clearly, such defamation reflects Iranian propaganda and, furthermore, serves the interests of the Iranian state.
Hamza makes three overarching claims, all of which are either based on distortions of fact and omissions thereof, or outright falsehoods. First, he claims that Dr. Ghassemlou was authoritarian and intolerant. Second, he implies that Dr. Ghassemlou was responsible for splits and even incidents of violent infighting within the Kurdish movement in eastern [Iranian] Kurdistan. Third, he claims that Ghassemlou favored relations with Iraq over relations with the United States. None of these claims withstand scrutiny.
For starters, Ghassemlou was neither authoritarian nor intolerant. Historical evidence clearly indicates that while he had the opportunity to monopolize power in his capacity as the undisputed leader of PDKI, he in fact did the opposite. Power within the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI) was divided between the different institutions of the party. Ghassemlou also had the independent-minded and competent Dr. Sadeq Sharafkandi as his deputy. Ghassemlou stressed the importance of holding party congresses every four years, even under conditions of war with the Iranian state. He also promoted political deliberation within the party. He made sure to send gifted party members abroad for education and to engage in lobbying and public diplomacy in Europe in order to prepare them for taking over the leadership of the party.
Rather than monopolizing power, Ghassemlou strategically delegated power to gifted and committed individuals within the party. PDKI’s current leader Mustafa Hijiri was the head of the party’s Politico-Military Committee, while Dr. Sharafkandi was in charge of the party’s communication department and publication center. This power-sharing arrangement was intended to ensure that the institutions of the party were strong enough to survive in case the Iranian state assassinated members of the PDKI’s leadership.
In fact, Ghassemlou argued that the major vulnerability of past Kurdish movements stemmed from their lack of institutionalization, as well as the existence of personality cults within them. Every time the Iranian state assassinated Kurdish leaders, he used to say, the movements they led eventually collapsed. Institutionalization coupled with a clear stance against personality cults, Ghassemlou believed, were necessary steps to ensure the survival of the Kurdish movement in the face of war and assassinations. In fact, when Ghassemlou held his first public speech in Mahabad in 1979, he intervened when the crowd chanted “long live Ghassemlou” and averred that “in the Democratic Party of [Iranian] Kurdistan, there is no place for any form of personality cult!”
Not only does Hamza deliberately omit such facts, but he also gives a biased account of splits within the party. The first split at the beginning of the 1980s was ideological: a small clique of seven individuals split from the party because they were Marxist-Leninists and wanted to support the Islamic Republic of Iran, supposedly because the post-revolutionary Islamist regime was “anti-imperialist.”
As far as the second split is concerned, it was neither ideological nor a power struggle in the sense that those who split from the party adhered to any different ideology or questioned the leadership of Ghassemlou. Rather, it has to be analyzed against the backdrop of an drawn out and bloody war between PDKI and the post-revolutionary Islamist regime in Iran, which at the time of the second split in 1988 had entered its eighth year.
While there were differences over policy – which were openly debated within the party – some of the leaders of those who split from the party were undermining the war effort and the morale of the Peshmerga. They did so most likely because they were no longer capable of living under the difficult conditions of war in the mountains of Kurdistan. Instead of acknowledging this and stepping aside, they nevertheless wanted to maintain their positions in the leadership. If it was a power struggle, it was so in a secondary sense. Ghassemlou accounts for these realities in one interview with a Persian newspaper published in Europe at the time.
Basic principles of journalism mandate that Hamza should have accounted for Dr. Ghassemlou’s explanation of why there was a split in the party in 1988, or at least that he should have done simple fact-checking. What he instead offers is a flagrantly biased account of those events.
Ghassemlou and the rest of the leadership could not tolerate the situation alluded to above, which is different from being intolerant toward differences in policy preferences or even ideological preferences. In fact, the main criticism leveled at PDKI by rival Kurdish organizations during the Cold War was that it lacked ideological rigidity and even ideological coherence as the party was a self-consciously national party encompassing the diversity of Kurdish society. Hence, the party and Ghassemlou welcomed liberals, religious people, and socialists by highlighting national liberation as the common goal of all ideological currents.
What Ghassemlou did in the face of the internal problems of the party in the late 1980s was to basically ask the delegates of the Eighth Congress to either vote for a list of candidates to leadership positions that he could work with – that is, individuals who shared his determination to continue the struggle in spite of mounting difficulties – or he would step down as the leader of the party. This was not a sign of authoritarianism or intolerance toward ideological differences. Rather, he relied on democratic procedures within the party to elect individuals who shared his commitment to the Kurdish struggle.
Ghassemlou used the institutional means available in the party in conjunction with the status he enjoyed as leader to bring about what was deemed as a strategic necessity in terms of organizational coherence and effectiveness. Had he been authoritarian, he would have acted differently, or similarly to other leaders in the Middle East. For a leader acting under conditions of war in a Hobbesian region like the Middle East, Ghassemlou’s moves were extraordinarily institutional and consistent with his commitment to internal democracy. That is to say, he was transparent with respect to his preferences for suitable candidates for leadership positions and, as it were, who he deemed as unfit for such positions; he used the institutional procedures of internal democracy in PDKI to bring about a reshuffling of the leadership of the party. And his list of candidates won a majority of the votes in the party’s congress.
Those who split from the PDKI in 1988 called themselves “Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran–Revolutionary Leadership.” This group rejected democratic socialism due to their supposed “revolutionary” commitment to socialism. While Dr. Ghassemlou regarded negotiations with Iran as the optimal means of finding a peaceful resolution to the Kurdish issue, the splinter group, on the other hand, regarded a negotiated settlement as “appeasement” once they split from the party, a position they shared with their new-found ally the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK). Available documents show that the MEK demanded the splinter group engage in character assassination of Dr. Ghassemlou in return for material support.
Nevertheless, the breakaway group adopted Ghassemlou’s brand of socialism once they founded their own party and held their first congress. This fact is also omitted by Hamza. Supposedly the cause of the split in PDKI in 1988, the form of socialism Ghassemlou advocated at the height of the Cold War and during a time when the Iranian opposition was under the spell of Marxism-Leninism, was “democratic socialism.” It was an eclectic ideological position that combined liberal democracy – as reflected in Ghassemlou’s emphasis on individual liberty and democracy in his writings during this period – with collective ownership of the means of production.
Having witnessed Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968, to which Ghassemlou was opposed and which cost him his job as university professor in Prague, made him disillusioned with socialism. He wanted to orient PDKI toward the West European model of social democracy. However, he could not do this until the mid-1980s because of the Marxist leanings of some members of the party. But by the time the second split in the party occurred, Ghassemlou’s vision of democratic socialism had prevailed for years. Also, those who split from PDKI in 1988 eventually reunited with the party.
As far as Hamza’s final claim is concerned – that is, that Ghassemlou favored relations with Iraq and was not willing to reach out to the United States – English-speaking readers of Rudaw can easily determine the falsity of it by a simply searching Wikileaks. A confidential cable, titled “Views of Iranian Kurdish leader Qassemlu,” clearly reveals Ghassemlou’s reservation vis-à-vis the Iraqi regime and, more important, his desire for relations with the United States. It is a central and constant element of Iranian propaganda to paint opposition groups as “agents of foreign conspiracies” in order to delegitimize and justify violence against them. Hamza is essentially pursuing the same strategy against PDKI and Dr. Ghassemlou. That PDKI had relations with Iraq was a geopolitical necessity, just as KDP and PUK in Iraqi Kurdistan had and still have relations with Iran.
PDKI’s relations with Iraq were never forged at the expense of the Kurdish national liberation movement in Iraqi Kurdistan or any other part of Kurdistan for that matter. Dr. Mahmoud Osman, a prominent politician in Iraqi Kurdistan, revealed in 2004 that captured Iraqi documents show that not only “were the relations of the Democratic Party [of Iranian Kurdistan] with the former Iraqi regime never forged at the expense of the interests of the Iraqi Kurds; on the contrary, they themselves suffered, but did not allow the Iraqi Kurds to suffer.”
In Dr. Osman’s words, “for geopolitical reasons, PDKI had no choice but to have relations with the former Iraqi regime. […] Also, all the documents of the [Iraqi] intelligence services that were captured following the fall of the regime, do not contain anything negative pertaining to PDKI; on the contrary, they contain many positive things as far as PDKI is concerned.” Dr. Osman correctly argued that this is a testament to truthfulness and patriotism of the leadership of PDKI.
Hamza does not consider these facts, not because he is unaware of them, but because his drive for defamation of Ghassemlou and his legacy evidently compels him to omit important facts and, worse, to produce a number of falsehoods that clearly reflect Iranian state propaganda against the Kurdish national liberation movement.
Had this piece not been published by an important Kurdish media outlet such a Rudaw, Hamza’s piece would not have warranted this reply.
Aso Saleh is a freelance journalist and Kurdish activist
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.
