IN MAHABAD WAS a traffic circle still known among Kurds as Chowar Chira—Kurdish for the “four lamps” that once stood on its corners— though now officially renamed Shahradari, or “municipal.” Nothing to look at, the circle marked a more modern—and much more legendary— Kurdish historic site. Here, on the sunny morning of January 22, 1946, fresh snow dusting the ground, a wiry man in a Russian army uniform and a shiny white turban climbed up on a wooden podium. Before him stretched a crowd of tribesmen and chiefs in traditional dress, and politicians and businessmen in dark suits, while from the surrounding rooftops watched the women. The man, Qazi Mohammed, began to speak: the Kurds were their own people, with their own country, a powerful new friend (the Soviet Union), and the same right of self-determination as all other nations, he said. He then formally declared the establishment of the autonomous Kurdish Republic, and off went a three hundred-rifle salute.
Fourteen months later, in the secret dead of night, Qazi Mohammed, his brother, and cousin were hanged in the Chowar Chira circle by Iranian authorities. No one living nearby heard or suspected a thing until the next morning. The hangings so shocked the town that Mahabad remained politically quiescent for the next thirty years.
Shortly after leaving Mahabad, on my way back to Tehran from Iranian Kurdistan, I myself saw three hanged men, in an odd, coincidental echo of 1946. Traveling overnight by bus, to enter the capital’s Azadi Square just after dawn, I unsuspectingly pushed aside a window curtain to see an inert form hanging from the arm of a crane. I couldn’t believe my eyes at first—he looked just like a rag doll, in a loose, long-sleeved shirt and mop of dark hair, but stiller and heavier than seemed possible. He and his companions had been hanged—a rare punishment in the Islamic Republic these days, though it once was common—for operating a prostitution ring, an especially serious offense under sharia. The early-morning mists both muted and augmented the scene, turning the particulars into the generic, to create a portrait of human cruelty that lay, and lies, uneasily within me.
For the Kurdish people, the 1946 Kurdish Republic of Mahabad carries enormous resonance. It marks the only real moment in modern times that the Kurds have been in near-total control of their own government and administration. Even the semiautonomous Iraqi Kurdistan of the 1990s— dependent on Western air patrols and the United Nations’ oil-for-food program—does not compare, at least in the Kurdish imagination.
The Mahabad Republic came about during the tumultuous years of World War II, when the Russians were occupying northern Iran and the British were occupying the south. Due to his Nazi sympathies, Reza Shah was forced to abdicate in favor of his son, Mohammed Reza. In the fall of 1942, a group of Mahabad Kurds secretly organized into a modern nationalist political party, Komala, with the help of the more politically mature Iraqi Kurds of the Hewa Party. Three years later, the Russians supported the Kurds in their bid for an autonomous state, and Komala, joined by members of Hewa and other groups, became the Kurdistan Democratic Party, precursor of today’s KDP in Iraq and the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI).
Elected as president of the new republic was Qazi Mohammed, a judge of Islamic law from Mahabad’s leading family. The descendant of a long line of judges, Qazi Mohammed had both a religious and informal secular education. A decisive, charismatic, and sociable man who had married late in life to a divorced woman—an unconventional move in those days—he often offered his home as a safe haven to those fleeing the wrath of their families, tribal leaders, or the Iranian authorities.
Protecting the fledgling Kurdish Republic was a small army of about twelve hundred men from the immediate area and a larger group of twelve thousand tribesmen from farther afield, under the control of their traditional leaders. Most formidable among them was Mulla Mustafa Barzani, leading a contingent of twelve hundred peshmerga, their skills well honed after years spent fighting in Iraq. In a piece of fortuitous timing, Barzani and his forces, along with their families, had just been forced out of Iraq in the wake of their 1943 to 1945 revolt.
The Mahabad Republic aspired to control all of Iranian Kurdistan, but its reach did not include the important Kurdish city of Sanandaj and other regions to the south, which remained under Iranian control. And not everyone in Mahabad supported the idea of an autonomous Kurdish state. Among the less enthusiastic, and one of the first to surrender to the Iranians after the republic’s fall, was my friend Rojeen’s grandfather, patriarch of an influential Mahabad family.
During the Mahabad Republic, the Kurds published their own newspaper and magazines, established a radio station, set up a Kurdicized school curriculum, founded a Kurdish theater, and survived economically through agriculture, taxes, and smuggling. Citizens were free to carry arms, while the Soviet influence remained distant and muted.
But the hopeful days of the Kurdish Republic were short-lived. As 1946 wore on, the Russians began preparing for the breakup of their wartime alliance with Britain and the United States. They abandoned Mahabad, deciding to bolster pro-Soviet support within Iran instead. Withdrawing from the region, they left the Kurds to fend for themselves. On December 16, eleven months after proclaiming independence, Qazi Mohammed surrendered to the Iranians without a fight. The Mahabad area was disarmed, the teaching of Kurdish prohibited, and all Kurdish books burned. Three months later, Mulla Mustafa began his famous retreat to Russia and Qazi Mohammed, his brother, and cousin were hanged.
WHILE IN MAHABAD, I stayed with Ahmad Bahri, the editor of Mahabad magazine, and his family. They lived in a dark but spacious home near the edge of the city, making me think of the nineteenth-century traveler Isabella Bird (no relation), who had approached Mahabad through another of its lesser-known neighborhoods. Exploring the region on horseback in 1890, when she was sixty, Bird took a wrong turn, to find herself “on a slope above the town, not among the living but the dead. Such a City of Death I have never seen. A whole hour was occupied in riding through it without reaching its limits. Fifty thousand gravestones. . . . Weird, melancholy, and terribly malodorous.”
One evening, Mr. Bahri arranged for me to meet with Mahabad’s literary elite; the city was almost as well known for its writers as it was for its politicians. The Kurdish Republic of Mahabad had catapulted two modernist poets, Abd al-Rahman Hejar and M. Hemin, into Kurdish fame, and sparked a literary movement in the city that still continued.
Oversized pastel portraits of Hejar and Hemin dominated the Bahris’ living room. And Mr. Bahri and two of his guests that evening—Mrs. Jaferi and Mr. Ashti—had been students of Hemin. Mrs. Jaferi, who had written a novel about the epic of Dem Dem from a woman narrator’s point of view, was also Hemin’s niece. Rounding out the party that evening was Mr. Khosrow, an Iraqi Kurd who had lived in Mahabad for years.
Each of the party was distinctive. Mr. Bahri, a small man in a three-piece green suit, was an expert in Kurdish folktales—especially rich in the Mahabad region, due to its historic isolation. Mahabad was home to the Mukrian people, a powerful tribal confederacy, and over the past twenty years, Mr. Bahri had recorded over two hundred cassettes of folktales told and sung by storytellers and troubadours.
This is the kind of scholarly research that is desperately needed in Iraq, I thought as Mr. Bahri described his work, especially when he told me that, no, unfortunately, he couldn’t take me to meet any traditional storytellers and troubadours. They had all died out.
One of Mr. Bahri’s favorite folktales was the story of Khadje and Siyabend, a tale popular among many Kurds. Beautiful Khadje is the daughter of a wealthy family; handsome Siyabend, the son of a poor one. Loving each other against their family’s wishes, they run away to the mountains, where they spend three happy days and nights together. On the fourth day, Siyabend falls asleep with his head in Khadje’s lap. A herd of deer passes by, and one, a big buck, seizes a pretty doe and runs away with her. Khadje weeps at the sight and one of her tears falls on Siyabend’s cheek, awakening him.
Siyabend grabs his bow and chases the stag. As he takes aim,
the buck attacks, flinging him into a deep ravine, where Khadje finds him mortally wounded. Weeping bitterly, she curses the beautiful forest around them for nurturing the evil buck and dies of heartbreak. A tree that is forever in bloom shoots up on the spot.
I could well understand why the tale was one of Mr. Bahri’s favorites. It is so filled with contradiction.
We talked about Kurdish literature for a while. Modernism and post-modernism, and the dearth of both in Kurdish letters, seemed to be a favorite topic among my companions. They also lamented the limited number of Kurdish novels, as Kurdish literature has traditionally meant poetry— also the strongest literary form throughout Iran, where even illiterate villagers can recite long reams of poetry by heart.
Many of the writers’ opinions were closer to those of the pessimist Mr. Valadbaigy’s in Tehran than to the optimist Mr. Ghazi’s in Urumieh. Publishing conditions were still a long, long ways from being satisfactory. “We all practice self-censorship in order to publish,” Mr. Bahri said. The foursome also felt that the recent rise in the number of Kurdish magazines was misleading, as many were financed by the Islamic regime and so were perhaps being used to deflect the Kurds from more controversial goals.
“The life here is not good, not bad,” Mrs. Jaferi said, summing up with a phrase that I heard often in Iranian Kurdistan, and one that contrasted in my mind with the Iraqi Kurdish expression, “This is the life,” so often used after describing an atrocity. Both sentences implied endless suffering and stoic endurance, but one was muted in tone, the other an acute cry.
ONE AFTERNOON, MRS. JAFERI took me to a Kurdish wedding, only the third I’d attended in Kurdistan—a surprisingly low number considering how central weddings are to Kurdish culture. Since many weddings last two or three days, and involve hundreds of guests, I was constantly bumping into someone who knew someone who was giving a wedding and wanted to invite me along. But for one reason or another, most invitations hadn’t worked out.
The first wedding I’d attended had been with my host family in Dohuk. Held in a vast modern hall built expressly for weddings, the party was mobbed, with a hired band playing amplified music so loud that it hurt the ears. “Awful,” my companions said as we hurried away after a rushed “Congratulations” to the family.
The second wedding had been in Suleimaniyah. This had been an unusual mass celebration held in a sports arena, with a professional troupe of dancers and band. Fifty couples from poor families had married at the same time in order to defray the wedding costs—a brilliant idea, I thought, as the traditional Kurdish wedding has become prohibitively expensive. The brides wore billowing Western white; the men, dark suits with flowers in their lapels. They made a handsome sight as they wove in and out, dancing in the long gilded rays of the late-afternoon sun. The PUK subsidized the event, even providing each couple with a small monetary gift.
For the wedding in Mahabad, I was asked to dress in traditional Kurdish clothes—a request to which I had become accustomed. Everywhere I went in Kurdistan, people liked to dress me up and take my picture, often chuckling with great glee whenever I self-consciously emerged from an impromptu dressing room. Some costumes I modeled were everyday attire, but usually I was handed an elaborate affair of bright colors, shiny fabrics, brocades, and sequins. I never minded posing for my hosts—it was a small price to pay for their generous hospitality—but I was always happy to take the garments off. Wearing a stranger’s clothes is too close to another’s shape and smells, to another’s life.
The costume of Mahabad differed from those I’d worn earlier. This was a long one-piece dress, worn with a cowl-like piece of cloth around the neck, and a thick sash around the hips. The sash looked stunning on younger women, as it elongated their slim waists, but thickened the silhouettes of the middle-aged.
The wedding was given by Qazi Mohammed’s descendants, still one of Mahabad’s leading families, and when Mrs. Jaferi—Nasrin—and I arrived at the compound at about two P.M., it was already packed with people. The main building was divided in two—men sitting on the floor to one side, women to the other—with constant traffic through wide, open doorways in between. Most of the women dressed traditionally, in brilliant gowns and much gold jewelry, but some of the younger women wore T-shirts and jeans. About half the men wore dark Western suits; the other half shal u shapik. Only a few older men wore turbans, different from the ones I’d seen in Iraq, with bits of string framing their faces and a tail-like piece of cloth descending in back.
We had arrived just in time for lunch, and, after kissing us three times on alternate cheeks, as is the Kurdish custom, young women took our hands to lead us into the middle of the women’s side, where the others somehow made room for us on the crowded floor. Men balancing huge silver-colored trays laden with dishes wove through the crowd, serving everyone kebabs, rice, vegetables, and a thick Iranian stew known as ash. I expected one of the men to lose his footing at any moment and rain plates and food down upon us, but there were no mishaps.
Most of the women around us were under thirty, heavily made up, and clad in brightly colored dresses, no head scarves. They eyed me with curiosity.
“Who do you think is the prettiest among us?” asked one dark-haired beauty in a fire-engine-red dress with a gauzy black cowl and matching sash. Next to her, and seemingly waiting with bated breath for my answer, sat an older blond woman resplendent in creamy white and dangling gold earrings.
I couldn’t answer. Even if I could have, I would not have dared.
After lunch, we retired out front, where dozens of red plastic chairs had been set up under the trees, for an afternoon of socializing, drinking tea, and dancing. In the center of things sat two beaming middle-aged women from Qazi Mohammad’s family, who effusively welcomed me. A small band was tuning up to one side, while servants rushed to and fro with tea trays and three-foot-long blocks of ice, which they plopped into metal water coolers. The bride and groom were not in attendance, although the bride would arrive later, at around eight P.M., by which time Nasrin and I would be gone. It was the second day of a traditional Kurdish wedding, the time at which the bride says good-bye to her family and goes to the home of the groom.
The music started, and the dancing began. The line was short at first but grew steadily longer as people grabbed hands, including mine. We fell into a popular dance called saypah, or “three step.” I had learned it in Iraq, and had grown to appreciate its slow, simple rhythm, which has a hypnotic and comforting quality as the notes twine in and out, the dance line goes round and round, and lazy minute after lazy minute passes, everyone moving closely together, all accepted, all protected, no one left out.
When I took a break, some men came up to me to talk about—what else?—politics. One day soon, the men predicted, the Iranian Kurds would have a semiautonomous state within a federated Iran. After Saddam Hussein was gone and Iraq set up such a system, it was only a matter of time before the same thing happened in Iran. And what about an independent Greater Kurdistan? The men shook their heads. The Iranian Kurds were too well integrated into Iran, for one thing; and the Kurds in general didn’t have the economic or military might to support their own state, for another.
The youngest among the men, a medical student in shal u shapik, then said that he hoped the United States would soon bomb Iraq. All the other men disagreed, some vehemently. They wanted Saddam to go, but not if it meant the arrival of the United States. Like most Iranians, but unlike most Iraqi Kurds, most Iranian Kurds deeply distrust American foreign policy and intentions.
Writes the poet Hemin, in words that still resonate in Iranian Kurdistan today:
Young ones! Peshmerga! Brave ones! Fearlessness!
You pick up the sword and we sharpen the pen!
With God’s help we will take out of the hands of foreigners
The clean Kurdish homeland—
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Land of Lions
THROUGH AN ODD SET OF CIRCUMSTANCES, I FOUND MYSELF attending the regio
n’s first environmental conference, held in Sanandaj, the capital of Iran’s Kurdistan province. The two-day meeting had been organized by a Kurdish ecological society to address the growing problem of pollution in the Zagros Mountains. About a hundred men and women were in attendance, and most were professionals. Many were also hikers, a popular pastime in Iran.
The conference was held in a modern meeting center, complete with a hotel. The friend of a friend who suggested I attend the event—it would be a good way for me to meet Kurds from all over Iran, he said—deposited me in the cafeteria, where breakfast was being served, and then disappeared. Looking around, I wondered how exactly I was going to meet all these Kurds. But then the conference’s young organizers discovered me. Thrilled to have a foreigner in their midst, they took me under their wings for what would prove to be the rest of my stay in Sanandaj, showing me around, inviting me to stay with their families, and introducing me to others. It was the same kind of charming, magnanimous hospitality that I remembered from my first trip to Iran, when people couldn’t seem to do enough for me.
I could barely distinguish one organizer from another at first, as they ebbed and flowed around me, asking questions, making conversation. Later, though, two in particular took on a definite shape: Hiwa, a cameraman for a local television station, and Arash, a physics teacher.
I had no interest in attending the conference’s actual lectures. After breakfast, I told my new friends that I would leave to explore the town for a while and return for the social part of the program. I had been in Sanandaj before—it had been my only stop in Iranian Kurdistan in 1998. But my new friends wouldn’t dream of letting me go off by myself and insisted on helping me locate a contact name I’d been given—a middle-aged man who spoke good English and who was, in fact, expecting my call that morning.
A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts Page 34