The Passion and Death of Rahman the Kurd: Dreaming Kurdistan (review)
2011; Middle East Institute; Volume: 65; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1940-3461
Autores Tópico(s)Turkey's Politics and Society
ResumoKURDS The Passion and Death of Rahman the Kurd: Dreaming Kurdistan, by Carol Prunhuber. Trans. by Ellen Porter. New York and Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, Inc., 2009. $24.95 paper. Reviewed by Michael M. Gunter On July 13, 1989, Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou - the urbane, preeminent Iranian Kurdish leader since the execution of Qazi Mohammed, the president of the Mahabad of Kurdistan in Iran in 1947 - was assassinated by Iranian agents in Vienna, Austria while negotiating with them. More than 20 years later, we still do not know for sure who these Iranian agents were, why the Austrian authorities failed to follow up on the case, and how was possible for such an intelligent and experienced person as Ghassemlou to be so naively led to his death. Carol Prunhuber - a Venezuelan journalist who knew Ghassemlou well and spent some time with his Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI) guerrillas in the Kurdish mountains - has written a fast-paced, stirring account of what we do know and suspect. Her investigative journalism is largely based on interviews with numerous knowledgeable figures, including the famous Iraqi Kurdish leader and current Iraqi president Jalal Talabani, and the former Iranian president Abolhassan Bani Sadr, among numerous others. She also uses as sources police reports, reputed tapes of fatal meeting with the Iranians, and various books and articles. Kak Doctor (p. 14) - as he was affectionately known to his close associates - was born in Urmia, Iran in 1930, the same year that Ismail Agha Simko, a famous earlier Iranian Kurdish leader, was also assassinated by the Iranian authorities false pretensions of negotiation, an event Ghassemlou frequently mentioned. Ghassemlou earned a PhD in economics and political science from the university in Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1962, taught at two different universities, and later published his doctoral dissertation as Kurdistan and the (1965). He spoke eight languages with ease (p. xxv), lived for many years in France and Czechoslovakia, but also spent several years fighting against Iranian forces in the mountains during the early 1980s. Revealingly, Ghassemlou once vouched that there is nothing harder than organizing the Kurds (p. 45). Ghassemlou knew Saddam Husayn and once even acted as a mediator between him and Jalal Talabani. Ghassemlou was allowed to come and go through Baghdad, which revealed his secret relations with the Iraqi regime (p. 90). No wonder the Iranians believed that Ghassemlou was a foreign agent (p. 80). On the other hand, Ghassemlou also met twice with the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the first time in March 1979 when Ghassemlou was not even searched and it would have been very easy to kill him [Ghassemlou] (p. 62). Ghassemlou's murder [on July 13, 1989] was the culmination of a long hunt for the Kurdish leader by the Islamic Republic (p. 217). Indeed, Khomeini had condemned ... Ghassemlou to death ten years before (p. 33). Ironically, Jalal Talabani, a longtime friend of Ghassemlou, had participated in some of the first round of negotiations several months earlier. For this earlier round the had taken better precautions, making sure that things were under our control and mediation (p. 219), as Talabani later explained. I had a gun and so did Ghassemlou ... We did not tell the Iranians where the meetings would be held (p. 219). However, the Iranians were able to omit Talabani from the final fatal meeting by falsely blaming his party for leaks which they themselves purposely had committed in order to isolate Ghassemlou. …
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