Slemani Palace in centre of the city where the young Syrian Kurd sells tea

Fazel Hawramy, Slemani

On Tuesday night (2nd of April), I went for a long walk with a friend in Slemani (also spelt Sulaimani, Sulaymaniah) in Iraqi Kurdistan. Outside Slemani Palace in the centre of the city, we bought two cups of tea from a young man who was making tea on his cart.  He had a slight Arabic accent so I asked him in Kurdish if he was indeed an Arab? “Kurd from Damascus, Syria”, he replied.

I decided to try to understand why he ended up in Slemani selling tea. The day before the UNHCR announced that on a daily basis around 800-900 Syrian refugees were entering the Kurdistan Regional government (KRG) territory in northern Iraq. Here in Slemani, I was being served tea by a Syrian Kurdish teenager who introduced himself as Fakhraddin.

Here is his story based on a 15 minutes chat I had with him while he was selling tea to the passerbys.

Fakhraddin, 17,  lived in Damascus until around 8 months ago when the war between the Free Syrian Army and Assad army reached Haye Teshrin in the capital where he lived with his family.

Feeling frightened, his dad decided to move his family out of harm way to Qamishli in the Kurdish areas of Syria.  From there, the whole family travelled to the KRG territory where over 70,000 mainly Syrian Kurds live in Doumiz camp and the main cities of the region such as Hawler (Erbil), Duhok and Slemani.

Fakhraddin who has been working in Damascus cafes making Shisha and tea since he was 9 years old, arrived in Slemani city around five days before I spoke to him. He says he ‘misses Damascus’ and believes that ‘soon’, Assad regime will fall and he would be able to go back.

He pours two teas for me and my friend outside Slemani Palace where he work everyday from 3:30pm to the following morning at 6am. He has thrown an old carpet on the short wall of Public Garden outside the palace and lies there when it is quiet and there are no customers . He has a cart that carries his tea-making equipment and helps him to move his stuff to the Musaferkhane (hostel) where he stays for 5000 dinars per day (around $4 dollars) and manages to take a shower there.

He says he makes around 20-25000 dinars by selling tea and out of that money, he also tries to help his family. When he started selling tea from the space just outside the palace, another man who has been selling tea protested that he should move but Fakhraddin stood his ground.

I ask what he thinks of the future for Kurds in Syria? He replies in Kurmanci dialect of Kurdish that “all the Kurds will be free soon, Iran, Turkey, Syria” and they will form a greater Kurdistan.

Fakhraddin appears to me to be a determined young man who took on adult’s responsibilities in his childhood making money due to his family’s ‘poverty’. He says despite his family’s poverty and his work, he still managed to study for 9 years.

I ask about other Syrians in the KRG and he replies there are many of the, working like him in Hawler (Erbil), Duhok, Slemani sometimes living in dire conditions despite the best efforts of the Kurdistan Regional Government. He says he and his family have been treated with respect by the people in Kurdistan and the government provides staple food and other necessities.

I asked about the price of the tea we just had, he insists he would not accept money but with difficulty I manage to give him 1000 dinars for the two teas we had.

Mustafa Barzani with his son Masoud Barzani in USA 1976

This is a summary of part of an interview Lvin’s reporter Jiyar Muhammad did with a former senior official of Kurdistan Democratic Party, one of the two ruling parties in Iraqi Kurdistan headed by Masoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). (The interview is published on 1/4/2013 No. 228)

Muhammad Malla Qadir is a former member of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) Politburo. In this interview he is candid and has harsh words for the President of Kurdistan and the corruption that has engulfed the KDP and Kurdistan in general under his leadership.

Malla Qadir claims due to the KDP policies, Kurdish people are ‘angry’ with the party and the party’s social base has shrunk over the years because of this. One of the main reasons, he claims, is that the Barzani family are not following the path of late Malla Mustafa Barzani who founded the KDP and fought for over four decades against successive Iraqi regime for Kurdish rights. Barzani senior passed away in 1978 in Washington where he had being treated for prostate cancer.

As an example of Malla Mustafa Barzani’s principles, Muhammad Malla Qadir recalls an event in 1966 when the president of Iraq at the time visited Barzani and brought him a new car but Barzani gave the car to the secretary of the KDP and not to his sons and he did not drive it either. He continues by saying that he could not elaborate in this short interview why the KDP leaders have deviated from Barzani’s path.

Muhammad Malla Qadir recalls another story and says after the 11 of March 1970 agreement between the Kurds and Iraqi government, the government wanted a Kurd to be the Vice President but Barzani did not allow neither of his sons to accept the post because he did not want his family to become part of the government, instead he wanted them to lead the Kurds in their struggle. Malla Qadir explains that Barzani did not want his sons and his family to become tainted with official posts and the wealth that comes with it.

He continues by saying that Masoud Barzani has not managed to follow his father’s path and guidelines and the reason for this disobedience is power and money. Most of Barzani’s offspring are engaged in exerting their power, spending their wealth and are mired in corruption. I was fed up with the way things have turned out, Malla Qadir says,  and did not want to stay in KDP but Masoud Barzani insisted and that is why I lasted that far.

What would be the first step you suggest Masoud Barzani do to follow his father’s path, Lvin reporter puts to him? “Before anything he needs to start from himself and leave the presidency of Kurdistan and should not nominate himself for the next election… Because the law says he can only run for presidency twice…I criticized Masoud Barzani for the corruption that exists and called on him to carry out reform but he did not listen the way he should.”

a child observes a public execution in Iran in recent years

Fazel Hawramy, 24 March 2013, Article 19

It was a hot day in June 1986 in the Kurdish region of western Iran. In the picturesque town of Paveh, I and two friends were walking down the steep road towards our primary school. All of a sudden, we heard the roar of vehicles approaching from behind. We turned to see a convoy of three to four pick-up trucks we recognised as belonging to the Islamic Republic’s Revolutionary Guards. On the back of the trucks as they passed us, we could see several men and young children.

Six years earlier in September 1980, the Iraqi forces invaded Iran and forced my family and many other villagers in the countryside to seek sanctuary in this mountainous town in the heart of the Zagros Mountain range. The town was less than 40km from the Iraqi border so the inhabitants of the town had become accustomed to shelling from Iraqi positions across the border and to the bombs dropped from the fighter jets overhead.

As the revolutionary government of Ayatollah Khomeini strengthened its position of power, it started cracking down on public dissent and maintained a closed eye on the media  and the channels from which the public could access information about what was happening inside the country. In Kurdistan region, it is fair to say that there were more reasons such as the Kurdish insurgency for the government not to tolerate any dissent and therefore the crackdown was severe.

As if the war with Iraq was not enough to brutalize the population and in particular the children, an armed struggle for autonomy was being waged by the Kurdish forces known as Peshmargas (those facing death) against the central government of Ayatollah Khomeini. When in August 1979, the Kurdish Peshmargas were about to capture Paveh, Khomeini became incensed. The Ayatollah issued a fatwa (religious edict) demanding that Revolutionary Guards from across Iran move immediately to the town to defend it against the Kurdish forces.

It would take another 9 years and a fatwa against the British Indian author Salman Rushdie with his novel The Satanic Verses before the world awoke to the power of the Ayatollah’s religious edicts (http://is.gd/8Fp136) and his intolerance for the freedom of information.

This was the context to what my friends and I were about to see that day in June 1986. Although, the type of Toyota pick-up truck driven by the Revolutionary Guards had been dubbed a “Land MiG” by the locals for its high speed, the guards were driving them very slowly as they wanted the locals to see the fate of those who opposed the revolution. I stopped with my friends to see what was happening. I was 9 years old and my friends were around the same age. As the first truck passed by, the scene panned out as if in a slow motion in front of our eyes. On the back of the truck, there were two teenagers with what appeared to be wooden clubs in their hands. Next to them, stood two adults who seemed to be supervising. Then the two dead bodies in baggy Kurdish trousers tied to the railings on the back of the truck slowly became apparent. The teenagers were being encouraged by the adults to hit the faces and bodies of the two dead men with their wooden clubs. The bodies of the dead Peshmargas had gone blue because of beating and an oozy liquid was coming out of the places were the skin was torn.  The parade passed by and things turned back to normal. My friends and I continued walking towards the school as if nothing had happened. What we had seen was beyond our comprehension as children. But the government with its network of agents allowed no one to talk about incidents like this and we as children had to pretend as if nothing had happened.

The political repression continued and the Iranian government carried out waves of executions. At the time there were no satellite channels but I remember that people listened to BBC Persian Radio more than 4000 km away in heart of London, in order to find out what was happening in their backyards.

In the summer of 1988, in particular, more than 5000 political prisoners were executed across Iran most of whom individuals who exercised their basic right to speak their mind. Almost no one dared to mention the early incidents of the Iranian revolution let alone hold those responsible for the atrocities.

I was part of the “Revolution’s Generation”, and taken on many demonstrations to chant against the West, the US, Israel and the British Government. Over time, the memory of what I had witnessed in Paveh became hazy and its existence turned into a dream in my head. There were no investigations by independent journalists if there were any left as many had been detained or simply executed. We had to believe everything that the Big Brother and its ministry of information was saying.

More than two decades later in London, as a refugee again, I found myself drawn to highlighting the human rights abuses carried out in Iran. With the advances in technology, transferring information across national borders has become easier and  less dangerous.

I met a few fellow refugees, from my hometown Paveh in Britain and other European countries, who still vividly remembered that notorious scene which for a long time I had thought was a dream.

Jahangir Hatami, who is now a 38 year old man and who spent three years in prison in Iran for his political beliefs was one of those children who saw the parading of the dead bodies in Paveh. He wrote to me from Germany where he resides now with his wife and a10 year old boy: “ When I was imprisoned I suffered a lot but the parading of those dead bodies had hurt me more…  Even now I feel sometimes the spirits of those dead men coming back to me and torment me asking why I went to watch their bodies being paraded. At the time I was 12 years old and I think I can never forget this experience in my whole life…” Jahangir has researched this incident and points out that there is strong evidence that the men paraded though the town centre were killed in captivity to avenge the death of a local Revolutionary Guard commander. In his research, Jahangir found that the children of the guards whose fathers had been killed by the Kurdish Peshmargas were persuaded to inflict all kinds of indignities on the bodies of the dead fighters in public, including filling up the body of a dead fighter with animal dung.

At the time there were no mobile phones to record the scene on camera and tell the world what the children of that town were exposed to that day. While this extreme level of violence used during the early years of the revolution was motivated by the 8 years war with Iraq and the ongoing Kurdish insurgency, its application continues and remains as important a tool of repression to the regime as ever.

One evening in May 2011, I was with a friend in a cafe in London, when I received a phone call from an activist in Kermanshah, a city in western Iran, alerting me to the public execution of three individuals earlier that day. Remarkably this activist had risked his own safety to record the gruesome scene of the executions on camera, even going as far as to film the crowd to show that there were a few dozen children watching the scene. This activist wanted the world to see what the Iranian government was doing to brutalize the population, with no regard for the well-being of children, in order to force them into submission through violence and fear.

With the help of the right group Amnesty International, that video was distributed across the world and many people realised the barbarity of public hanging. Since then, there have been several reports and campaigns to highlight the brutality of public executions across Iran and the long lasting psychological damage that it inflicts on the general population and on children in particular.

As for me, those who made the decision and carried out the orders to parade the dead bodies of those Kurdish fighters in June 1986 so as to frighten me and the many other children who saw that scene did not achieve their goal. I know at least several children from that town who observed that scene and have now become fierce opponents of the Iranian regime and the death penalty.

The brutality of the Iranian regime may have stayed the same if not worsened, but fortunately with the new advancements in mobile technology, it is much easier now to tell the world what is happening in far corners of the world. The new technology makes accessing information in many closed societies easier and with that technology they hope to allow the citizens in these regimes to express themselves freely.

Fazel Hawramy, 16 January 201, Slemani in Iraqi Kurdistan

Last week, three Kurdish female activists originally from the Kurdish region in southeast Turkey were gunned down in Paris. One of the women, Sakine Cansiz was a founding member of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), an insurgency group which originally aimed to establish an independent Kurdish state but later changed its aim to creating an autonomous region within Turkey. Cansiz was present at the first meeting in the village of Fis near Diyarbakir (known as Amed by Kurds) in 1978 where the PKK was formed by a group of poor but dedicated Kurdish students from the rural areas.

The French Interior Minister Manuel Valls visited the scene of the crime in Paris the same day the bodies were found (Thursday, Jan 10) and labelled the murders ‘political assassination”. He vowed to do everything possible to bring the perpetrators to justice. President Hollande called the murders “terrible” and claimed that he and other French politicians knew the women as they had gone to see the French politicians.

The murders sent shock waves through the Kurdish communities and Turkey, and as veteran Turkish journalist Cengiz Candar put it “the Kurds were profoundly upset, while Turks were strongly disturbed.” Notwithstanding this, the Turkish Prime Minister rushed to judgment by stating without providing any tangible evidence that the ‘internal feuds’ within the PKK may have been behind the murders. He, however, stays cautiously hopeful peace talks could end a conflict that has brought nothing but “pain, blood and tears” to Turkey.

The Kurds on the other hand point out that shadowy groups associated with the Turkish army and the Turkish “deep state” we’re responsible for the murder of hundreds of Kurdish activists, politicians, lawyers and journalists in the 1990s and they maybe behind these murders too. The Independent Newspaper stated in an editorial (Turkey and its Kurds must keep talking)  that the element within the Turkish deep state maybe responsible. The Foreign Policy took a similar line by pointing to the ultra Turkish nationalist elements opposed to the recent and nascent peace process between the PKK and the government of Prime Minister Erdogan.

It has now transpired that the French, German and possibly other European  police forces were aware of the high profile nature of the main victim Sakine Cansiz and may have some leads to pursue those behind what Amnesty International called ‘political killings“. The right group called on French authorities to conduct a “prompt and thorough” investigation and called on the Turkish authorities to “cooperate fully in the investigation to bring those responsible to justice.”

The New York Times revealed that Sakine Cansiz told her brother before her death that she believed she was “under frequent surveillance“.  A 2007 State Department cable from its Ankara Embassy  released by whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks in 2010 warns about Cansiz as one of the “most notorious PKK/KGK financiers…weapons and tactical strategist” in Europe. The lawyer of one of the victims has stated recently that the French police have many leads as two of the women were under surveillance. Prime Minister Erdogan also stated last week that Turkey informed France in November 2012 about Cansiz’s presence in France.

What is possible to state with almost certainty is that Sakine Cansiz was the “real target” of the assassination as Kendal Nazan the head of Kurdish Institute in Paris who knew the woman stated on France 24 a few days ago. The other two women Fidan Dogan and Leyla Söylemez were activists in Europe but not prominent enough to be targeted in such a way in the capital of a European country.

Sakine Cansiz was a 55 year old Alevi Kurd from Dersim region in southeast Turkey where Turkish forces in 1938 put down a rebellion and in the process killed more than 40,000 Kurds mainly women and children. Sabiha Gokcen, the adopted daughter of Mustafa Kemal, the founder of modern Turkey, who was the first female warplane pilot in the region dropped bombs over the Kurdish villages.

Sakine Cansiz was imprisoned in Diyarbakir’s notorious prison Number 5 known as “The Hell” by the Kurds and tortured throughout her incarceration. Cansiz reportedly defied her interrogators and in one incident spit in the face of the notorious prison director. Almost all the current leadership of the Kurdish movement in Turkey including prominent politicians such as Ahmet Turk and Gultan Kisanak were tortured in the same prison around the same time Cansiz was imprisoned there.

Cansiz was close to the PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan who has been imprisoned in Imrali prison in the sea of Marmara  since February 1999 when he was detained in an operation in Kenya allegedly involving the CIA, Mossad and the Turkish intelligence agents. His arrest sparked worldwide violent protest by the Kurds and in particular across Europe, the memory of which still troubles the police forces across Europe and Britain.

The Kurds have been protesting peacefully since the death of the three women was revealed and many are impatiently waiting for answers from the French police which maintained a close eye on Cansiz before her death.

Almost all the parties involved in the conflict which has cost the Turkish economy $300 billion dollars since 1984 have stated that the contact between the Kurdish leader Ocalan and the Turkish government continue. Aliza Marcus, a Turkey Kurd expert who reported for Reuters from Turkey in the 1990s and who was put on trial by the Turkish government in 1995  for reporting the atrocities of the Turkish army in the Dersim areas wrote in the New York Times that the Turkish government should talk to the pro Kurdish Peace and Democracy party (BDP) as the main interlocutor for peace rather than Ocalan’. She also called on the Turkish government to put everything on the negotiating table apart from the territorial integrity of the country and stated that disarming the PKK should be at the end of the process and not the beginning.

Hugh Pope of the International Crisis Group also writes about the peace process for Bloomberg and stated:

“To reach its goal of disarming and reintegrating the PKK insurgents, such a policy will have to include: removal of discrimination from the constitution and laws; releasing from custody the thousands of nonviolent Kurdish activists arrested since 2009; full mother-language education where there is sufficient demand; a lowering of the national election threshold from 10 percent to the European norm of 5 percent, to allow the legal Kurdish party to compete fairly; and real work on Turkey’s political decentralization.”

Kadri Gursel, a Turkish Journalist-political columnist, wrote in Al-monitor that the government of Justice and Development Party (AKP) approach to the peace process “negotiations with Ocalan, combat against the PKK.” Is unhelpful and “the sooner the Turkish officials realize that this can’t go on like this, the better will be the odds of salvaging future peace.”

As the bodies of the three activists are flown to Turkey for burial on Wednesday in the Kurdish region, Reuters reports that the French investigators have given no indication as to who might be responsible for the deaths.

A father walks with his children through the rubble after a war plane bombed the Salahadin neighborhood of Aleppo, Syria on Aug. 1, 2012 (Nicole Tung - GlobalPost)

Fazel Hawramy, 15 Oct 2012, Slemani, Iraqi Kurdistan

It was the night of the 24th day of Ramadan (13th August 2012) and Halima from the Selymaniyah neighborhood of Aleppo was trying to comfort her granddaughter Fatima, 5 years old, who was crying for her parents. In the city around them a war was raging between the Free Syria Army and Assad’s forces. Fatima’s parents lived just outside Aleppo in Al-Dana, a town with a population of around 20,000, close to the Turkish border. Still unable to console Fatima, Halima and her husband Mohammad gave into their granddaughter’s cries and agreed that Halima would take the five year old to her parents.

They thought it was safer to travel the 50 Kilometers journey to Al-Dana (Ad Dana) at night. Halima had been fasting, After breaking her fast and saying both evening and night prayers, she set off with the five year old Fatima and her own 10 year old daughter, Esra.

They walked for several minutes through the neighborhood before they heard the roars of missiles being fired in their direction. Later it became clear that three Assad’s army missiles had hit the residential area killing 10 people instantly. Halima could see that her own daughter Esra was unhurt and so was she. Looking over to her granddaughter, she saw that a piece of shrapnel had hit Fatima’s head injuring her badly.

Mohammad and other members of the family ran to the scene and found Fatima injured and Halima hysterical. They took Fatima towards Al-Dana town and then to the Turkish border in the hope of reaching a hospital inside Turkey. As they approached the border Fatima took her final breath. Her father Ammar a Syrian Arab and her mother Shiraz a Syrian Kurd were devastated. They fled across the border to Turkey to save their only remaining daughter, Aya, a three year old.

Fatima was a very clever and sweet little girl, Mohammad, her grandfather tells me in a shop in Diyarbakir (Amed) in the Kurdish region of Turkey. Mohammad says that the whole family is traumatized by her violent death: Her little sister Aya screams if anyone puts anything on her head, knowing that her older sister died from her head wound. Fatima’s mother Shiraz curses Bashar Al Assad “day and night” for bringing this tragedy upon their family.

The family now live in a tent in a camp outside Sanliurfa city set up by the Turkish government for refugees fleeing the war in Syria. But Fatima’s father Ammar has returned to Syria alone and joined the Free Syrian Army to revenge his daughter’s death.

Mohammad, the grandfather of Fatima, was born in 1944. His own father was a Kurd originally from Turkey but he was raised in Syria. He has two wives and 10 children. Reflecting on the actions of Assad’s army, Mohammad condemns the killing of children. He says,”Let’s accept I am an Irhabi (a terrorist) but what about Fatima, a child!” Mohammad says everything we see on TV about the brutality of Assad’s army against its own people is true. “If my own brother killed innocent people the way Assad kills people, I would not hesitate to kill him.”
“In Slemaniyah neighborhood, I lived with Christians and we, Muslims, and Christians were like brothers. Aleppo was like heaven but Bashar turned it into what it is now.”

Mohammad believes that the Syrian people fighting Assad regime for freedom because freedom is like oxygen and without it people cannot survive.

On my journey from Hawler to Slemani (the new official spelling of the  city in English) last week I was reminded why taxi drivers are known the world over for furnishing their customers with local insights.

I asked Qader (not his real name), aged 32, who was taking me towards the Slemani bus garage about prostitution in Erbil. (known as Hawler in Kurdish)

Hawler (Erbil) Taxi, Photo: October 2012

He explained in a Halweri accent that a few months ago, a girl who got out of a pick-up truck with two men, waved at him to stop. She was ‘wearing very tight jeans and was very attractive’. One of the young men followed her into Qader’s taxi and sat in front while the girl sat in the back. The young man introduced himself as Bakhtyar and he said the girl was his wife. “As we drove, the girl received a phone call from the other young man in the pick-up truck and asked me to drive slowly so he can follow us to a hotel. After a while, the young man parked the pick-up truck  and I waited till he got in to the back of the taxi next to Bakhtyar’s wife. I noticed from the window that the man at the back was touching the girl’s breasts. I drew Bakhtyar’s attention to what was happening in the backseat, but Bakhtyar dismissed me and told me I could touch her too.” Then I realised that she is a prostitute. The girl and the two men were Kurds.”

“I carry a Tariq pistol with me all the time even though I am not supposed to. I work for Yakyati. [Yakyati in Kurdish refers to the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the three main political parties in Iraqi Kurdistan]  She was very attractive and I wanted to have sex with her. So I prepared my pistol and drove into a side street. Bakhtyar had no problem with me having sex with the girl but the man at the back did not like the idea.”

I asked Qader about the girl and if she wanted to have sex with him?

He said a woman can’t say no if she is doing prostitution! “I took my gun out and asked the two men to move away from the car. I fucked the girl at the back seat of my taxi.”

I pointed out to Qader, that he is talking about Hawler – a very conservative city by Kurdistan standards! “Is it really possible that this happens in this city” I asked. “Hawler is big like the sea and it is no one’s business what I do in my own car and that is what the law says. Besides it was getting dark”, he replied.

“I gave 20,000 Dinars [around $12] to the girl even though she did not ask for any money and then let them go. Even now I still have contact with Bakhtyar and the girl”

-So did you use protection? I asked.
- Such as what?
‘Condom’?
-No

-So what was her name?

“She is a prostitute and works under different names but that day her name was Narmin.”

Then he started telling me stories of other girls and women he picked up and slept with, including a Turkish woman that he recently drove to Ibrahim Khalil crossing with Turkey and ‘fucked’ her twice as he puts it.

-So what is the highest money you paid for sex? I asked.

-”$700 for an amazing Arab woman, she was great in bed” he replies. Qader says he prefers Arabs although he claims he frequently sleeps with Kurdish and Turkish women too.

I was curious to know if he is married and as we were approaching the Slemani garage, I asked him hesitantly:

-Are you married?

-”Praise to Allah, yes and I have two children” Qader replied .

Relatives of Kurdish activists outside Istanbul Adalet Sarayi on Tuesday (25 September)

Fazel Hawramy, Thursday 4 October 2012

Last week on Tuesday (25 Sept) I attended the hearing of six Kurdish political prisoners in two separate trials in “Istanbul Adalet Sarayi” (Istanbul Palace of Justice) in Sisli district. I had met a few Kurdish and Turkish lawyers the night before who told me that they are part of a group of 100 lawyers who are ‘super busy” working on these cases.

I sat in the public gallery with seven relatives of the prisoners. There were four defendants sitting next to each other surrounded by five young police officers.  There were two lawyers defending the accused and four big bundles of documents in front of one of the three clerks.

The first three defendants stood up and said a few sentences in Kurdish. Each one demanded that they give their testimonies in their mother tongue. The judge responded in Turkish and then the lawyers stood up and offered their defence in Turkish language. The trial was over in less than 25 minutes. The prisoners who have been in custody for three years. were more interested in talking to their relatives and friends sitting immediately behind them than listening to the judge.

Later outside the court room I spoke to some of the friends and relatives. Kerim Bilan who looked in his late 40s introduced himself as a Xabatkari Party, “[BDP] Party activist”. Pointing to his throat he said “it has reached here” …let them do what they like.” He then told me that his own son has already been in prison for seven years.

The second hearing started around noon and there were 22 relatives in the court room including four women. The two defendants Ali Canakci and Ali Kilinc have been in prison due to their political affiliation with the PKK for five years.

Ali Kilinc stood up to say a few words in Turkish and sat down. His lawyer then talked about the torture they had suffered where they were arrested. The second defendant stood up and said in Kurdish that he wants an interpreter. The judge responded to the lawyers in Turkish. Then the female lawyer stood up to give her defence and the trial was over in under half an hour.

After the hearing, relatives of the accused burst into cries of happiness and started hugging and kissing each other outside the court room. It turned out that both Ali and Ali were going to be freed later that day. I was later told by Firat, one of their three lawyers, that they were tortured when they were arrested.

One relative told me outside the court that Turkey has become an enemy to the Kurds and he was very happy that his brother has been freed after five years in jail. He said he was driving to Adirne prison that afternoon to bring his brother home. His parents were crying outside the court and calling relatives and friends to say their son had at last been freed.

Across Turkey there are over 8000 Kurdish lawyers, journalists, academics, students, activists, politicians and members of pro-Kurdish party BDP in detention across Turkey.

Kurds in Beirut, Lebanon, hold a giant Kurdish flag and portraits of jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan at a protest on September 9, 2012. Photograph: Anwar Amro/AFP/Getty Images

Fazel Hawramy, the Guardian, Friday 14 September 2012

Turkey has put 44 Kurdish journalists on trial this week in what Reporters without Borders called the “criminalisation of critical and activist journalism”.

They are among about 100 Kurdish journalists who face lengthy jail terms on various terrorism charges, including accusations that they have supported the KCK – an illegal pan-Kurdish movement that includes the armed Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK).

While the crackdown on the press has escalated in recent years under the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey has always had a chronic problem with tolerating a free press. From 1959 to 2011, out of 479 cases brought to the European court of human rights under freedom of expression, 207 originated from Turkey.

The Kurdish journalists who report on the widespread oppression of their identity and the 28-year-old conflict between the Turkish army and the PKK have borne the brunt of Turkey’s intolerance for decades – and the current government’s approach is no exception. The imprisonment of the Kurdish journalists and more than 8,000 activists, politicians, lawyers and academics is part of a strategy by Erdogan to intimidate the media into toeing the government’s line when it comes to the Kurdish question.

The government sees the Kurdish journalists as no different from PKK fighters and often labels them as terrorists or supporters of terrorism so that their long-term pre-trial detention is more palatable for the general public. While the government is unable to label non-Kurdish journalists as terrorists, it often pressures their employers (often mainstream newspapers) to terminate their contracts for their critical stands on the Kurdish question, as in the cases of Ece Temelkuran and Ali Akel.

Even foreign journalists are not immune. Those who file critical reports about the conduct of the Turkish army in Kurdish areas often face difficulties and at times they are put on trial, as happened with Aliza Marcus, a Reuters journalist, in 1995.

For many Kurds, the imprisonment of a large number of journalists and the recent escalation of violence between the PKK and the Turkish army is reminiscent of the violence and the suffering that the Kurds endured throughout the 1990s.

Twelve of the journalists on trial are current or former employees of the pro-Kurdish newspaper Ozgur Gundem (“Free Agenda”) which has received an International Press Freedom award from the Committee to Protect Journalists for its reporting on “the persecution of Kurds within Turkey”. In the early 1990s, a group affiliated with the Turkish army assassinated 76 employees of the paper, including 30 journalists. No meaningful steps have been taken by the government to bring the perpetrators to justice despite repeated calls by international human rights organisations.

But while more prominent non-Kurdish journalists such as Nedim Sener and Ahmet Sik were released from jail this year under international pressure, lesser-known Kurdish journalists like Selahattin Aslan waste away in prison. From his cell, Aslan wrote that a vital piece of evidence against him was the fact that he used the original Kurdish name “Amed” to refer to the city of Diyarbakir in his writings. According to the prosecutor, that meant he was advocating PKK ideology because the banned organisation also uses the same name for Diyarbakir. It is worth remembering that the reason given by the state for changing the names of Kurdish places in 1960 was that they “hurt public opinion and are not suitable for our national culture, moral values, traditions and customs”.

Aslan spent four years in jail for his journalism from 2007 until 2011. He was freed for eight months and re-arrested again in December last year and now faces 15 years in prison for being a “member of the media committee of the PKK/KCK organisation”. Vedat Kurşun, the editor-in-chief of Azadiya Welat daily was sentenced to 166 years and six months’ imprisonment in May 2010 for disseminating 103 articles and photographs about the PKK war with the Turkish army.

The evidence presented by the army to prosecutors in cases involving links to the PKK is often questionable. In a recent case about the murder of three Christian missionaries in 2007 by an ultra-Turkish nationalist, it was revealed in court that some units of the Turkish gendarmerie used forged documents to prove that the missionaries were working with members of the PKK, and were receiving orders from the CIA.

None of these claims turned out to be true but they are stories that often go unquestioned in the rest of the Turkish media – partly because many investigative journalists are detained, and those who try to cover the Kurdish issue are at risk of being accused of supporting “terrorists”.

All this enables the state to shape a one-dimensional narrative of the Kurdish question – that it is a “terrorist issue”. The Kurdish issue has become so divisive now that it is not only the state that helps maintain the government’s line. When some prominent Turkish journalists questioned the premise of approaching the Kurdish question as a security issue rather than a political one, an Islamist-nationalist daily started a hate campaign calling them “PKK propagandists” and a “despicable enemy of the Turks”.

As the European court of human rights pointed out, “one of the principal characteristics of democracy is the possibility it offers of resolving a country’s problems through dialogue, without recourse to violence” (the Socialist Party and Others v Turkey, 25 May 1998). The Turkish government ought to create the possibility of dialogue with its Kurdish population to end the conflict with the PKK by guaranteeing the Kurds “full equality and rights”.

Instead of trampling on the rights of journalists to shut down discussion on an inconvenient issue, Erdogan – himself a former political prisoner – should remember what Yasar Kemal, a leading intellectual from Turkey, wrote in Der Spiegel in January 1995: “We in Turkey should always be aware that the road to true democracy must lie in a peaceful solution to the Kurdish question.”

The first new Kurdish police car in Kobani, the first city freed from Assad forces in Syria. Photograph: Benjamin Hiller/ Benjamin Hiller/Corbis

The Guardian, Fazel Hawramy, Thursday 26 July 2012

Almost unnoticed last week, as attention focused on battles in Damascus, Kurdish activists in north-eastern Syria started taking over control of a few towns without encountering much resistance from the Assad regime’s security forces.

It was a significant development, as Syria’s Kurds number about 2 million people and could potentially tilt the balance of power towards the opposition.

President Masoud Barzani of the Kurdistan regional government (KRG) in northern Iraq, who is a fierce opponent of the Assad regime, is credited with bringing together the main Kurdish opposition groups from Syria to form a united front.

A few days before last week’s attack that killed four of Assad’s top aides in Damascus, the main Syrian Kurdish groups – the Kurdish National Councils (KNC) and the Democratic Union party (PYD) – signed an important agreement in Erbil to set up a Supreme Kurdish Council to co-ordinate their efforts.

They agreed to form a popular defence force consisting mainly of Kurdish Syrian soldiers who have defected to Iraqi Kurdistan since the uprising began in March last year. These soldiers are being retrained in military camps funded by the oil-rich KRG and are preparing to enter the Kurdish areas in Syria to defend towns such as Kobani (Ayn al-Arab) that are in the hands of the Kurdish activists.

President Barzani is also developing close political and commercial ties with Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has considerable influence over the Syrian National Council (SNC). It seems almost inevitable that in the near future the SNC and the Kurdish opposition groups will co-ordinate their efforts to accelerate the downfall of the Assad regime.

Against this backdrop, the Syrian National Council, the main umbrella organisation for Syrian opposition groups, has tried to alleviate the concerns of the Kurdish people during the last 16 months of the struggle against Assad. Last month the council took the unprecedented step of appointing an independent Kurdish activist, Abdulbaset Sieda as its leader.

In April, the SNC issued a National Charter to “redress the injustice … the Kurdish people have faced for decades …” and work towards “the abolition of all discriminatory policies … and compensate those affected.”

While this is an important starting point, the Kurds – who have faced years of discrimination at the hands of successive “Arab” regimes in Syria – find it difficult to trust a guarantee by the SNC, which is dominated by Arab nationalists and members of Muslim Brotherhood movement. The Kurdish parties believe the charter falls short of full constitutional recognition.

The insistence of SNC members to retain the word “Arab” in the official name of the country – the “Syrian Arab Republic” – has been one of the main stumbling blocks for the Kurds to trust the SNC as their legitimate voice in a post-Assad Syria.

For the Kurds, there have been some key events that have fuelled their suspicion of successive governments in Syria. In November 1960, between 200-300 Syrian Kurdish schoolchildren were burnt alive at a screening of an Egyptian film. No proper investigation into the fire was conducted to find out what happened. Since then many Kurds have come to believe that the nationalist Arab government was responsible for the atrocity, since Kurds were seen as a threat to the unity of the Arab nations.

Two years later in 1962, the Syrian regime carried out a census in the Kurdish areas that resulted in the government stripping more than 120,000 Kurds of their citizenship.

A decade later, in 1973, Hafez Assad, the father of current leader Bashar, started creating an Arab cordon around the Kurdish areas by bringing in Arab Bedouin tribes in order to create ethnic tension and keep the Kurdish people in check.

What Hafez Assad sowed in 1973, his son reaped in March 2004. After a clash broke out between Arab and Kurdish football fans in the main Kurdish city of Qamishlo, Bashar’s security forces intervened, killing 32 Kurds and arresting 2,000.

Despite this acrimonious and tragic history, the Kurds have been staging massive protests in solidarity with people throughout Syria since the beginning of the uprising to topple Assad’s regime. Bashar al-Assad initially tried to appease the Kurds by pledging to offer citizenship to 300,000 Kurds. He has also tried to restrain his security forces in the Kurdish areas for fear of collective action by Kurds, who account for 10% of the population.

Although the SNC has been mired in political bickering and slow to listen to the legitimate demands of the Kurdish people, it has taken important steps in the right direction in recent months. However, this is not enough. The SNC must become more inclusive, as the Kurdish people in Syria will be essential to a successful transition of power.

Mohammad Seddigh Kaboudvand impirsoned since July 2007 in Evin prison in Tehran. Photo: Sherko Jahani Asl, 2006

The Guardian, Fazel Hawramy
Wednesday 18 July 2012 15.43 BST

Three human rights organisations have called on the Iranian authorities to “immediately and unconditionally” release an ailing Kurdish journalist and activist whose health conditions “have drastically deteriorated” after staging lengthy hunger strikes.

Mohammad Seddigh Kaboudvand, 50, is currently serving a 10-and-a-half-year prison term in Tehran’s Evin prison after being found guilty of “acting against the national security” for establishing the Human Rights Organisation of Kurdistan and proposing a campaign to boycott the 9th presidential election which brought Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to office in 2005.

Amnesty International, the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), and its affiliate, the Iranian League for the Defence of Human Rights (LDDHI) said in a joint statement that “the Iranian authorities are responsible for any risks” to Mohammad Seddigh Kaboudvand as a result of his ongoing hunger strike.

Kaboudvand who was named the international journalist of the year at the British Press Awards in 2009, is on hunger strike since May in protest at the Iranian authorities’ refusal to grant him permission to visit his sick son. Kaboudvand’s son, Pejman, was diagnosed with a rare blood condition and has been “gravely ill” in a Tehran hospital for five months, putting the family under immense emotional and financial pressure.

“Mohammad Sadiq Kabudvand is a prisoner of conscience, held solely for his journalistic and human rights work and the peaceful exercise of his right to freedom of expression. He should never have been arrested in the first place, and must be released immediately and unconditionally so that he is free to be with his family at this distressing time,” said Ann Harrison, the deputy director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Programme.

Her comments were echoed by Karim Lahidji, the vice president of the FIDH and President of the LDDHI who warned that the responsibility for Kaboudvand’s health rest on the hands of the Iranian authorities.

“The Iranian authorities are responsible for any possible risks to Mohammad Sadiq Kaboudvand’s life as a result of his continuing hunger strike and his deteriorating conditions,” he said. “Under the UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, the Iranian authorities are obliged to take immediate action to provide urgent medical care to Mohammad Sadiq Kaboudvand. They must stop further tormenting a father by denying him the right to visit his ailing son.”

In an open letter sent from inside jail in May, Kaboudvand described the reasons behind his hunger strike as: “The Prosecutor and the security apparatuses continue to deny [prison] leave because of their enmity, grudge and malice towards me as a human rights activist; this despite my having served half of my illegal and unjust prison sentence and my son’s incurable diseases and acute emergency situation… Therefore, to protest the illegal and inhumane behaviour of these judicial and security officials, I launch an indefinite hunger strike as of 9 PM, Saturday 26 May 2012″.

In the latest round of harassment against Kaboudvand’s family, activists said that security officials have recently prevented his family’s access to the media by disconnecting their house landline and his wife’s mobile.

Before being imprisoned, Kaboudvand was the editor of the weekly magazine Payam-e Mardom (Message of the People) and co-founded the Human Rights Organization of Kurdistan with other activists which documented and publicised widespread rights’ abuses committed by the government security forces in the Kurdish areas in western Iran.

His commitment to the protection of human rights earned him international recognition from organisations such as New York-based Human Rights Watch.