About a half hour later, Mr. K arrived. Lean and balding, with a concave chest, he greeted me distantly, which I initially attributed to Iranian formality. But as the day wore on, I realized that his reserve went deeper than that. Although he treated me with great condescension at first, assuming that I knew nothing about Iran, he became increasingly nervous and suspicious when he realized that I was already well informed. By early afternoon, he was trying to convince me to leave Sanandaj on the next bus. “Sanandaj has little to interest you, you should go farther south,” he said. He also followed many of his statements, innocuous though most were, with, “You can’t write that.”
Mr. K was not the only nervous middle-aged Kurd I met in Iran. The man who had deposited me at the conference had been vastly relieved to get rid of me, and others later made it plain they wanted nothing to do with me. It wasn’t personal. These men had lived through the violent, desperate years following the Islamic revolution, and knew the cruelty of the Islamic regime all too well. They’d seen friends and family mowed down in cold blood, and some had been imprisoned and tortured themselves. They were always alert to danger and being seen with an American could cause problems.
Or not. The reactions of the Islamic regime are unpredictable, and Iran today is a more tolerant place than it was in the 1980s. Most young Iranians have no memory of extreme repression and so flout all kinds of Islamic laws, for which they usually receive nothing more than a reprimand or fine. And certainly most Iranians I met, young or old, Kurd or non-Kurd, did not hesitate to be seen with me, were indeed eager to be seen with me.
Why Mr. K agreed to show me around Sanandaj in the first place remains a mystery, but I suspect it had something to do with the Iranians’ great politeness and sense of hospitality. It was better to take a small risk than to insult a guest.
At any rate, Mr. K and I left the conference center to wander downtown, past the nineteenth-century Friday mosque with its lovely Qajar tiles and the closed Sanandaj Museum, through the busy bazaar, and down a side street crowded with shops in which artisans were tooling exquisite inlaid backgammon sets. Woodworking, along with hand-woven kilims, is an art for which the Sanandaj Kurds are well known, although both industries are dying out. The younger generation has no desire to learn their parents’ crafts, preferring to obtain university degrees.
Sanandaj was much as I remembered it—bustling and spacious, set high on a plateau, peaks soaring all around. The town had both an attractive devil-may-care air—young men defiantly strutting down the streets, as if they owned the world—and the feel of poverty. Sanandaj was neglected by the central Iranian government, which left its roads filled with potholes, its city services meager, while at the same time serving as a magnet for poverty-stricken villagers seeking work. Kurdistan was one of the poorest and least developed of Iran’s provinces. Officially, its unemployment rate hovered around 20 percent, but unofficially it was at least twice and perhaps three times as high.
I did notice one significant change in Sanandaj since 1998, however: only a handful of Revolutionary Guards roamed the streets. Four years earlier, there had been many more. Though of course, a continuing steady presence of plainclothes intelligence agents could not be discounted. This was Iran.
Yet even Mr. K agreed with me—there were fewer guards on the streets. “We are going forward little by little,” he said. “It’s mostly related to changes in the world, not the government. We have the Internet now, we have satellite TV, we aren’t so isolated.”
Here and there in Sanandaj stood rectangular palaces made of a fine brown brick, built in the 1800s under the Qajar shahs. Constructed around overgrown courtyards, the romantic and largely abandoned buildings had a magnetic draw, seeming to hold within them dark secrets far removed from the modern world. Most were closed to the public, but one was being restored, and Mr. K and I ducked inside to wander through dust-filtered rooms, some adorned with intricate tiles and hand-carved wooden shutters. As we were leaving, a tall, bearded young worker addressed me in good English, startling me.
“Where did you learn your English?” I asked.
“In my town.”
“Where is your town?”
“My town is Sanandaj and my country is Kurdistan,” he said, proudly pulling back his shoulders and again startling me, this time with his Kurdish nationalism.
A handsome village couple walked by. The wife wore a long red dress with a heavy black headdress ringed with coins—once common among Kurdish women, but now increasingly rare—while her husband wore a shal u shapik and a black turban with a cloth tail in back. The couple was probably in town just for the day, to sell their wares in the market, and contrasted sharply with the manteau-clad women and men in Western clothes who dominated the streets.
Many of Sanandaj’s brick palaces had once belonged to the Ardalan family, who governed the city during the Qajar period and all of Persian Kurdistan for centuries earlier. Still a powerful family, the Ardalan dynasty was founded in the early 1300s, and Sanandaj, then known as Senna, was their capital. Renowned for their love of culture and the arts, the Ardalans nurtured sophisticated courts filled with poets and musicians, and established Gorani as the Kurds’ first literary language.
Prior to the rise of the Ottoman and Safavid Empires, the Ardalans controlled vast areas of land on both sides of the Zagros Mountains, in both Iran and Iraq. After the dueling empires came to power, the Kurdish dynasty was forced to choose sides. With their capital to the east, they cast their loyalties with Persia. The Ardalans were the only Kurdish princes allowed extensive semiautonomous rule under the Safavids.
In the early nineteenth century, the Ardalan ruler Aman Allah Khan came to power. A passionate builder, he greatly expanded Sanandaj, erecting a new mosque, public bathhouses, caravanserais, a bazaar, and other buildings, many of which still stand. But Aman Allah Khan was also a ruthless and pitiless man. Claudius Rich, an East India Company representative who traveled through Kurdistan in 1820, describes visiting him in the town of Baneh, where he found the khan “settling accounts”—i.e., pulling out the eyes of three men who’d displeased him and sending their wives and daughters to Sanandaj under guard.
One of Aman Allah Khan’s projects was the palace of Khosrow Abad, built on a small hill. Rich describes coming upon it: “We were ushered up avenues of poplars of great height and beauty, to a magnificent garden-house of great elevation, with a fine square tank full of jets d’eau in front and at the back of it. . . . The pavilion was lofty, and elegantly painted and gilded in the Persian taste.”
Khosrow Abad still stands. Although dilapidated, it is more magnificent in some ways now than ever. I went to visit it one evening, wandering through the empty, darkening streets of the quiet neighborhood that surrounds it, to arrive suddenly at its massive front door, studded with iron nails. With me were two companions, and we had to plead long and hard with the caretaker to let us in, as shadows gathered, obscuring an overgrown garden and leaf-clogged reflecting pool, its jets d’eau long gone. The caretaker finally relented, and we climbed up a dark steep staircase to view the haunted courtyard into which Aman Allah Khan and his retinue had once galloped on their steeds, splattering splendor and suffering in their wake.
WHILE IN SANANDAJ, I stayed with Arash, the physics teacher, and his family. His parents were both retired teachers, while his sister, Darya, and brother, Askhan, were university students. The family lived in a multistory apartment complex on the edge of the city, where the paved roads petered out into dirt and there were few taxis and no buses—meaning we often had long waits before catching transportation into town.
Like those I’d met in Mahabad, Arash, his family, and various friends had little good to say about President George W. Bush. “We call him Mullah Bush, because he is not smart enough to be an ayatollah,” Arash said, chuckling. To become a mullah takes only a year of religious study, to become an ayatollah takes twenty years or more.
Also like most Iranian Kurds I met, Arash’s family had l
ost loved ones in the Kurdish struggle of the 1970s and 1980s, and endured much bombing and suffering during the Iran-Iraq War—one of the bloodiest conflicts of modern times, with an estimated five hundred thousand dead on each side. Three on Arash’s mother’s side of the family had died due to politics, while one uncle had lost his mind following a five-year stint in prison during the time of the shah.
Arash took me to meet his uncle one morning. A middle-aged man wearing a tall skinny hat, he was sitting on the floor behind a small desk when we arrived, his atrophied feet folded beneath him as he dipped pens into various colored inks. He was hard at work on an English lesson, writing out sentences in a child’s copybook, “l’s” and “f’s” looping above and below lines in a neat, confident hand.
“Why are you studying English?” I asked as I sat down beside him.
“It is amusing to me,” he said in clipped English. “It is my hobby. I have written many books.” He opened the cabinet beside him, to reveal several shelves weighted down with copybooks filled with his lessons.
“Tell me about when you were in prison,” I said.
“I went to Iraq to fight, but Barzani put me in prison,” he said. “I stayed five years. They beat me very bad, and now I can’t walk.”
“Were you in prison in Iraq or Iran?” I was confused by the reference to Barzani.
“Both. Prison is a business.”
“Why were you arrested?”
“I can’t tell you. You must read my secret dossier.”
“When were you arrested?”
“I can’t remember. I have a headache.” He bent more closely over his copybook, willing me to desist, and I did, trying not to imagine what he had once been through.
Later, I learned that Arash’s uncle had been the victim of another turbulent period in inter-Kurdish affairs. Though relations between the Iranian and Iraqi Kurds have usually been good, such was not the case in the late 1960s, when the Iranian government played them off against each other. The Shah of Iran was then sending aid to the Iraqi Kurds in the hopes of destabilizing the Baath government, and in return Barzani agreed to evict the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI) from Iraqi Kurdish territory, where some of its members were hiding. In 1968, he executed one Iranian Kurdish leader and handed his body over to the Iranian authorities, who paraded it triumphantly in Mahabad and elsewhere. Barzani then shipped others back across the border, to their death or imprisonment.
Two years later, alliances shifted again, as the Baath regime opened negotiations with Barzani, and the Iranian Kurds began operating out of Baghdad, with the support of the Iraqi government. But Barzani was still receiving aid from the shah, and despite everything, based on a long earlier history of cooperation, the Iranian Kurds did not feel they could attack the shah while he was still supporting Barzani. Thus, the Iranian Kurdish struggle was subjugated to the Iraqi Kurdish struggle until the Algiers Accord of 1975 when the shah withdrew his support of the Iraqi Kurds and the KDPI embarked on an armed revolt under its new leader, Abd al-Rahman Qassemlou, a socialist intellectual educated in France.
Once again, just business as usual in the wild and woolly world of Kurdish politics.
WHEN THE IRANIAN revolution swept the authoritarian, out-of-touch Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi off his throne in 1979, Iranian Kurds seized control of their region, believing themselves to be on the cusp of achieving both democracy for Iran and self-rule for Kurdistan. They hadn’t bargained on the installation of an Islamic regime, and a Shiite one at that, or on a government so insecure that it immediately clamped down on all minorities. The regime’s new constitution did not even acknowledge the Kurds’ existence, leading them to boycott the referendum for its adoption. When the KDPI leader Qassemlou won over 80 percent of the Kurdish vote in the March 1980 parliamentary elections, but decided not to go to Tehran, Ayatollah Khomeini reportedly said, “It’s too bad. We could have had him arrested and shot.”
During the first years following the Islamic revolution, the Kurds found themselves in near constant battle with the newly formed Revolutionary Guards, who were aggressively imposing sharia on all of Iran. By as early as February 1981, an estimated ten thousand Kurds had died either at the hands of the Revolutionary Guards or in one of the many mass executions ordered by Ayatollah Sadiq Khalkhali, the “hanging judge.” Attempts at negotiation were broached by both sides, but all failed.
When the Iran-Iraq War began, with Saddam Hussein invading Iran in September 1980, many Iranian Kurds initially viewed it as a way to distract the Iranians from the Kurdish struggle. But as the war escalated, with Kurdistan bearing the brunt of many battles, it proved disastrous. Thousands of civilians were caught between the Revolutionary Guards, the Iraqi army, the KDPI, Komala (a more left-wing Kurdish party), and the Iraqi Kurds, armed by Ayatollah Khomeini to keep the KDPI from escaping to Iraq. The year 1984 was especially devastating, as the Revolutionary Guards launched a huge offensive against the Iranian Kurds, capturing over seventy villages and towns. The KDPI fought back with aid from the Baathists, only to lose control of most of Iranian Kurdistan. By 1984, about 27,500 Iranian Kurds had died during the war. A mind-boggling 90 percent were civilians.
One Kurd I met, originally from Baneh near the Iran-Iraq border, told me that during the war, two thousand of his town’s population of fifty thousand had been killed, with six hundred people, including seventy-six children, dying in a single Iraqi bombing attack. “Many border towns were attacked in this way,” he said with a shrug. “Every morning, we went to the mountains for the day, when the Iraqis attacked, and came back at night. Except on cloudy days. It was safer on cloudy days.”
After the war ended in 1988, over two hundred thousand Revolutionary Guards were stationed in Iranian Kurdistan, and Qassemlou, a passionate yet moderate leader who was always searching for peaceful solutions even while leading armed rebellions, decided to negotiate rather than continue fighting. In early July 1989, he flew to Vienna for a secret meeting with the Iranian authorities. On July 13, the Viennese police found his body crumpled in an armchair of a fifth-floor apartment, shot through the head. Two other prominent Kurds lay on the floor, also shot through the head. Many believe the killers were the very Iranians with whom Qassemlou was negotiating.
Qassemlou was regarded by many observers as the most capable of all modern Kurdish leaders, and his death decimated the Iranian Kurdish political movement. Three years later, his successor, Dr. Mohammed Saddeq Sharfkandi, was also assassinated, and under similar circumstances—while negotiating with members of opposition groups at a restaurant in Berlin. Today, the KDPI is largely based in Iraqi Kurdistan, where it is pushing for greater Iranian Kurdish rights through peaceful means, not separatism.
HIWA, THE CAMERAMAN I had met at the ecology conference, was a pale and serious young man with steady brown eyes. An artist and a dreamer, he aspired to become a filmmaker—his job as a TV cameraman was just a job. He had taken photographs for the conference’s exhibit on pollution, and spent much of his time exploring the region’s villages. Like other artists and scholars, he visited rural Iran as often as he could, to document the traditional life there before it faded away.
One afternoon, Hiwa took Arash, four other friends, and me into the countryside. We passed several dilapidated-looking villages and more of the dry, elephant-skin mountains and tall, elegant poplars I knew from Iraq. I also spotted ten-foot-high cones made of round, flattened pieces of cow dung, which the Iranian Kurdish villagers used for fuel during the winter. I hadn’t seen any such cones, or as many cattle, in Iraq.
We headed east because there were no immediate checkpoints in that direction. I had to worry about those. My taxi had been stopped twice en route to Sanandaj, and although the Revolutionary Guards had been cordial enough, simply checking my passport, there was no telling when they might suddenly become suspicious about what I was doing in Iran, especially now that I was off the tourist path.
As we rolled over the wide brown hills, my companions talk
ed about the September 11 attacks. With the exception of Arash, all believed that the attacks had been planned by the U.S. government, as a way to justify future American assaults against the Muslim world. Nothing I could say would convince them otherwise. Many other Iranian and Turkish Kurds I met shared the same viewpoint.
From the roadside, the village of Kelana looked much like the others we’d passed, but as Hiwa led us back into its winding maze of streets and alleyways, I realized that we had arrived in a small paradise, older and more settled than anything I’d seen in Iraq. Everywhere stood sturdy charming houses built of clay, stone, and brick, many with balconies brimming with flowers. The streets were spotless and the houses freshly plastered, some sporting nineteenth-century door knockers—round ones for female visitors, straight ones for male visitors; different tones alerted residents as to which gender was at the door. Women in brightly colored dresses gossiped on sod rooftops, amid sprouting grasses, and they called out an eager “Welcome to our village!” as we walked by.
“When my father was a boy in his village, they had a beautiful Newroz tradition,” Hiwa said to me. “Groups of boys went up on the rooftops and lowered their belts”—i.e., the long cummerbunds—“through the holes for smoke, and the adults filled the belts with fruit and sugar. Then they tugged on the belts for the boys to pull up. And once, as a joke, they tied a big sheep to a belt. But my father’s friend was very strong, and he pulled the sheep all the way to the ceiling!”
I loved hearing stories about the Kurdish past, which seemed so lush and magical.
A Thousand Sighs, A Thousand Revolts Page 35