Kurdish revolt
Socialist Press1979 1979-03-28Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 2 →
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The hopes of the Iranian masses for freedom are coming into deeper conflict every day with the 'revolutionary' government of Khomeini and Bazargan.
Women are continuing to organise against the fetters with which the Islamic leaders and the bourgeois politicians are conspiring to bind them once again in oppression.
The oppressed nationalities within the borders of Iran are now straining to step forward into freedom, with demands that the Tehran-Qom government recognise their right to self-determination.
In the revolutionary ferment of the last year, it has been the Kurds who have been in the forefront of these struggles.
Independence
The Kurds live mostly within the borders of Iran, Iraq and Syria, with smaller numbers inside the Soviet Union and Syria.
For decades they have fought for national independence and a Kurdish state.
In Iran, the latest phase of this liberation struggle opened in 1975, when the Shah signed an agreement with the 'progressive' Ba'athist regime in Iraq for the complete suppression of the Kurdish people and their political organisations.
This phase reached a peak last week in an armed uprising of the Kurds, centring on the city of Samandaj in western Iran.
The garrison was besieged as fighting continued for several days as the Kurds set up their own Provisional Revolutionary Disarray With the state army in disarray and still not re-formed the central government was in no position to smash the rising by force.
And as one Kurdish militant massacre us."
Messengers were sent postheste to negotiate with the Kurds.
In the end it was none other than the Ayatollah Talegharisecond only, to Khomeini in authority-who hammered out a In this seven point agreement, major concessions, are made to the demands of the state.
Not satisfied Such compromises will not satisfy the demands of the Kurds.
But such a partial vic Bazargan will encourage them to continue their struggles further.
The agreement will also encourage the Baluchis, Azerbaijanis, Turkomenis and Arabs within Iran to press more actively for their demands from the Khomeini-Bazargan government.
But its effect will not be contained within Iran-the Kurds have long been a piercing thorn in the side of the Turkish and Iraqi governments.
The example of the achievements in Iran will certainly drive the Kurds to renewed activity in these other countries, and that old thorn will strike newer and far deeper wounds.
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put it, "if they wish to disarm us, they will first have to
Kurds, but all within the frame- work of a centralised bourgeois