Salah al-Din is buried in the Old City of Damascus, in a modest mausoleum adjoining the Umayyad Mosque, one of the most magnificent buildings in the Islamic world. Several hours north of Damascus reigns the well-preserved Krak des Chevaliers, or Krak des Kurds, which Salah al-Din recaptured from Reginald of Chatillon just prior to his successful siege of Jerusalem.
And yet for all the accolades heaped upon Salah al-Din by both the East and the West, he is not especially appreciated by the Kurds, many of whom seem to believe he betrayed them by paying more attention to his Muslim rather than his Kurdish heritage. "If Salah al-Din had been a better Kurd, we would be ruling the Middle East today," was typical of the comments I heard. An unrealistic fantasy, I mused, given all that could have gone wrong between then and now.
WHILE IN DAMASCUS, I met a prominent modern-day Kurd living in exile: Karim Khan Baradost, agha of Iraq"s powerful Baradosti tribe. Originally from Iran, the Baradosti are a fabled people, celebrated in one of the Kurds" most famous epics, the battle of Dem Dem castle.
Karim Khan was an imposing-looking man, dressed in a cream-colored, three-piece suit. We met in a four-star hotel over a welcome lunch organized by the PUK. The party"s prime minister, Dr. Barham Salih, was in town to talk to Syrian politicians. Both the KPD and PUK had a good relationship with Syria and offices in the capital.
At the luncheon, I sat across from Karim Khan and next to his twenty-something son, Sidqi, who spoke good English and translated for his father. Educated in the United States, Sidqi helped to run an apparently highly successful family business that involved selling surge protectors throughout the Middle East. Another example of the Kurds" amazing ability to adjust to change, I thought as I listened to Sidqi"s accounts of twenty-first-century capitalism with one ear and his father"s accounts of the epic of Dem Dem with the other.
As the tale goes, Shah Abbas I, the Safavid king who ruled Persia from 1588 to 1629, once had a close alliance with a Baradosti prince, who supported the shah in many battles. During one, he lost his hand, which the shah replaced with a hand of gold, leading to the prince"s nickname, Khan Lepzerin, or the "Prince with the Golden Hand."
The shah and the khan had a falling out. The shah invited the khan to his palace to discuss the matter, but the khan, fearing a trap, refused to go, and declared independence. The shah then laid siege to his headquarters in Dem Dem castle, situated atop a mountain south of Urumieh, Iran. The Baradostis put up a fierce resistance, fighting off their enemy for a year, but finally, the shah"s army shut off the castle"s water supply and the tribe knew that defeat was inevitable. Rather than wait for the end, the khan led his forces into battle, while the women of the royal family committed suicide, holding hands as they jumped off the castle"s battlements. The khan and many warriors were killed, but one of his sons and the rest of the tribe escaped to Iraq, where they took up residence in Sidakan, near the Barzan Valley.
The Baradostis" modern history was also dramatic. In 1931, when Shaikh Ahmad, Mulla Mustafa"s eccentric brother, apparently instructed his followers to eat pork and burn the Quran, it was the Baradosti religious leader Shaikh Rashid who led the attack against the Barzanis. This in turn led to a rout of Baradosti territory by Shaikh Ahmad, who forced Shaikh Rashid into Iran. Shortly thereafter, the Baradostis returned, and, a decade later, joined the Iraqis to force the Barzanis into Iran.
So it went throughout the rest of the twentieth century, as the Baradostis sided first with King Faisal, then with Brigadier General Abd al-Karim Qa.s.sem and, finally, with Saddam Hussein against their traditional enemy. King Faisal II was an especially close friend of the tribe, arriving on horseback with his retinue every year to spend a few days in Baradosti territory, known for its pristine lakes and mountains.
During the Iran-Iraq War, the Baradostis provided the Baathists with many troops, and Saddam Hussein awarded Karim Khan six medals in recognition of his tribe"s efforts. But when the war ended, Saddam betrayed the tribe by demanding that they abandon their traditional lands, as they border Iran. "I gathered the tribe together and told them the matter," Karim Khan said, "and they said, we fought Iran for eight years, and now we are ready to fight the government. So from that time, our relationship with Saddam was cut."
Joining forces with the PUK, Karim Khan remained in Iraqi Kurdistan until 1996, when the Baath forces entered the region during the internal war. "That was the most dangerous time for me," he said. "I was in a very bad situation. I was in Erbil when the Iraqi army arrived, but fortunately I had seven hundred fighters with me and no one attacked. Saddam said, "Stay, I will help you and give you weapons." But I didn"t trust him and I escaped, first to Iran and later to Damascus."
One year later, after the Iraq war of 2003 ended, I was in touch with Sidqi via e-mail. His family"s exile was over; they were back in Iraq. "My father sends his best regards, he is very busy with the people of our tribe, and is very happy," wrote Sidqi, reminding me of an old Kurdish proverb: "Damascus is sweet, but home is sweeter."
CHAPTER SIXTEEN.
Of Politics and Poetry DEEP IN THE MOUNTAINS OF WESTERN IRAN RISES A SMOOTH-SIDED peak. In mid-May it is the green-blue color of flies" eyes, but by mid-September it has become gray and dark. The roads that skirt the peak to the east are narrow but paved, lined with clay homes sprouting ladders leading to roofs, and fields peppered with crackling mounds of harvested hay. Orchards spill small green apples out onto the street so that drivers must proceed with caution. The top of the mountain is bare, but to one side is a drop-off cliff, over which the women of the royal family are said to have jumped in the epic of Dem Dem. Up until the 1980s, when the Islamic regime cracked down on the Kurds, parts of the legendary castle still stood, and, in more recent years, the PKK used the mountain as a hideout. Now though, all is quiet atop the majestic peak, as it awaits the next chapter of its storybook history.
Less than an hour north of Dem Dem lies Urumieh, Iran"s largest northwestern city, cut off from the rest of the country by a vast salt lake, its edges encrusted with lines of wavy white. Only the most primitive of fish can survive in its highly salty waters, but the lake attracts thousands of migrating waterfowl, including flamingoes, whose pink bodies bob upon its shiny surface like pieces of origami for a few weeks each year. Part Azeri Turkish, part Armenian and other Christians, and part Kurdish, Urumieh is said by some to be the birthplace of Zoroaster, the prophet who founded the Zoroastrian religion between 1000 and 700 B.C.
All around Urumieh stretches a fertile plain, once known as the "Paradise of Persia." Here, Ismail Simko, the Kurdish rebel who ambushed and drank the blood of the ninety-plus-year-old Armenian leader, staged his revolt against the Iranian government in the 1920s. The plain was also the battleground of what may have been the first revolt in the name of Kurdish nationalism. In 1880, Shaikh Ubayd Allah, a spiritual leader headquartered in Hakkari (Turkey) ordered his followers to invade Urumieh because the Persian authorities had harshly punished local aghas without first consulting the region"s Kurdish governor. Sending a message to the British consul-general in Tabriz, Shaikh Ubayd Allah made an early call for Kurdish autonomy: "[The Kurds] are a nation apart. We want our affairs to be in our own hands."
The shaikh"s Hakkari troops were joined by numerous Persian Kurdish tribes. With eight thousand men, the shaikh laid siege to Urumieh, while one of his sons-leading fifteen thousand men-captured Mahabad farther south. Still others marched on Tabriz, but were badly defeated by the vastly superior Persian army, who went on to end the siege at Urumieh. Thousands of Kurdish troops and civilians fled to Hakkari, but many were ma.s.sacred on the way. The Ottomans exiled the shaikh to Mecca, where he died a few years later.
During the siege of Urumieh, the Kurds had taken care to keep one population safe-the American Christians who had established the first Presbyterian mission in Persia in Urumieh in 1834. Though in general there was no love lost between Kurds and missionaries-hostilities at times erupting into ma.s.sacres of the intruders-the shaikh owed the Urumieh mission a debt. Six months earlier, a Dr. Cochrane had saved him from a severe bout of pneumonia, remaining in the Hakkari mountains for ten days until the Kurdish leader was cured. Thus, Shaikh Ubayd Allah contacted the doctor before attacking, asking for the location of his residence and those of his people, so that no one connected with the mission was harmed. Honor takes many different forms among the Kurds.
I ARRIVED IN Urumieh one midmorning in September, traveling by plane from Tehran. What once must have been a beautiful town was now bursting from overpopulation, as is much of urban Iran.
At the Urumieh airport, I met Jaleh, a pleasingly plump, heavily made-up, Iranian-English Kurd, back in Iran after twenty-odd years of living in England, due to a second marriage. Her husband was away at the time of my visit, and, delighted to meet a fellow English speaker, she invited me to stay with her for a few days, to deluge me with stories about how much she missed England and hated Iran. Some of her complaints sounded legitimate: her neighbors ridiculed her for driving a car, and she"d had much trouble finding a live-in maid, as the Kurdish women couldn"t stay away from home overnight. Others were more suspect: she"d heard of "many" Iranian stepmothers burning the babies of their husbands" earlier wives. Jaleh had had a difficult life, as she"d been forced to flee Iran at age sixteen, due to her brothers" political activities. In England, she had married a man who abused her for ten years. After finally breaking away, she"d become a dental hygienist and raised a son, now a college student. She was happy in her second marriage, but lonely; her husband was often away on business. The word love, encircled by hearts, was writ large in Magic Marker all over her bedroom walls.
Jaleh took me to the Kurdish village of Band, just outside Urumieh, where "people live like they did a hundred years ago," she said, clucking over the villagers" simple dress and homes. Like many who have left earlier worlds behind, Jaleh had something to prove.
Beyond Band stretched hundreds of round hills bristling with tan gra.s.ses cut evenly as a crew cut. Between them meandered a river framed with poplar trees and grazing cattle-a yawning vista that made me yearn to keep traveling along the empty highway before us, to roll on into oblivion, or at least Iraq.
That evening, Jaleh and I ate dinner in one of Band"s outdoor restaurants, draped with multicolored lights and overlooking a small stream clogged with trash. Joining us was her cousin, a twenty-five-year-old civil engineer interested to hear that I"d been to Iraqi Kurdistan. He hoped to visit there himself one day, he said.
He had some bitterness toward the Iraqi Kurds. "The Iraqi Kurds have had many good chances, many more than the Iranian and Turkish Kurds," he said, "but the Barzanis and Talabanis have thrown them all away. They think only about their own pocketbooks. They are weak and corrupt."
Jaleh nodded in agreement, though I doubted she was paying much attention. She was much more interested in when her husband was coming home, and in whether she could convince him to move to England. "If I can"t, I might go without him, or else take along this cousin," she said, making eyes at the young man as she openly poured us all another round of beer.
I glanced around nervously. We were in the conservative Islamic Republic of Iran, after all, where the consumption of alcohol can lead to arrest. I"d already noticed the inhabitants of a nearby table looking at us askance, and had double-checked my head scarf and long black raincoat- they or something similar required wearing for all women in public in Iran-to make sure that no illicit body part, such as a knee, was showing. Jaleh pooh-poohed my worries. "They"re drinking, too," she said. "And they"re only giving us looks because they think we shouldn"t be out alone with a young man."
"Jaleh says you"re going to Mahabad," her cousin said. "You must be very careful. Three people were killed there last month for smuggling a carton of cigarettes, and four people were killed in a demonstration last week. They have an eleven-thirty curfew. It is a very dangerous city."
This was the first I"d heard of possible danger in Mahabad, and his words rattled me a little. However, when I arrived in Mahabad a few days later, the atmosphere was calm and quiet. Three people had been killed for smuggling a carton of cigarettes, but that was unusual; smugglers were usually fined or imprisoned. And during a demonstration protesting the killings, shots had been fired in the air, but no one injured or killed. Mahabad did have a curfew, but then so did Urumieh, and neither was enforced.
As I"d learned during my first visit to Iran in 1998, Iranians love conspiracy theories and related plots, often embroidering simple facts and rumors until they become complex tales filled with ulterior motives and nefarious misdeeds. Part of the tendency has to do with Iran"s history-the Iranians have been betrayed many times, with some conspiracy theories turning out to be true-and part of it has to do with living under a regime that is repressive but also inefficient and unpredictable in its enforcement of that repression. In Iran, people never know exactly where they stand. "We have a red line that we cannot cross, but no one knows where it is," goes a popular saying.
MANY THINGS WERE different in Iranian Kurdistan as compared to Iraqi Kurdistan. The place felt more settled, less raw. In Iran, there were few signs of recent war and many signs of a long-functioning, sophisticated society at work-one into which many Kurds, numbering about 6.5 million out of a total population of 68 million, were comparatively better integrated. For all the problems that the Kurds have had with the Iranian government-almost as many as the Iraqi Kurds have had with their government-they have much in common with their compatriot Persians. Kurds and Persians share a similar language, a similar tolerance, a similar independence of spirit, and a similar outlook toward the Arabs, who conquered both their lands in the name of Islam in A.D. 637.
Iranian Kurdistan is not as isolated from the rest of Iran as the Iraqi safe haven was from the rest of Iraq, and many parts contain not just Kurds but large concentrations of other ethnic groups. Between a half million and a million Iranian Kurds also live in Tehran, where they go about their business much like any other Iranians, often unable to speak Kurdish, and often more concerned with issues that affect all Iranians-economics, for one- rather than just the Kurds.
Indeed, a major difference between Iran and Iraq, as well as between Iran and Turkey, is its considerably more heterogeneous population. Iran is only about half ethnic Persian, and holds many major minority groups- including Azeri Turks, Baluchis, Qashqais, Turcomans, Arabs, and Kurds. In contrast, in both Iraq and Turkey, the Kurds are the only sizable minority and make up a much larger proportion of their respective country"s total population-about 23 percent in Iraq and 20 percent in Turkey, as compared to 10 percent in Iran. The Iranian government has therefore immediately cracked down on the separatist movements of all its minority groups, as the autonomy of any one group could lead to the breakup of the entire state. The sort of semiautonomy offered to the Iraqi Kurds in 1970 has not occurred in Iran. Conversely, the Iranian government has seldom felt quite as threatened by its Kurds as has its neighbors, and in recent decades has offered Kurds more cultural rights-though not political ones-than has Iraq or Turkey.
There are important historical differences as well. As early as the 1300s, much of Iranian Kurdistan was already a quasi-state, ruled by the Ardalan dynasty, whose territory reached far into today"s Iraq. Later, with the rise of the Safavids, who ruled Iran while the Ottomans ruled Turkey and Iraq, the shahs used the Kurds to defend their territory, but never allowed most Kurdish princes the free rein that the Ottomans granted. After the Qajar shahs came to power in 1794, they replaced the region"s Kurdish governors with their own administrators, a tradition that continues today with most of Kurdistan administered by non-Kurds-Azeri Turks in the north and Persians in the south.
When Reza Khan, founder of the Pahlavi dynasty, came to power in 1923, his first priority was uniting the many different Iranian peoples. This meant the enforced settlement of tens of thousands of nomads, including many Kurds. The shah"s settlement policies were ruthless and disastrous, sometimes resulting in the near extermination of entire tribes. The Lurs, closely related to the Kurds, were decimated, while nearly ten thousand Jalalis, a Kurdish tribe, died following deportation to central Iran. Nonetheless, the government"s policies toward the Kurds and others were never completely successful, as various unruly chieftains managed to retain their power, some through their cooperation with the regime.
Once the tribes were settled, they became easier to control and a.s.similate into society. Taxes became easier to collect; conscription into the army became easier to enforce; and trade across the frontiers became forbidden, forcing the Kurds to conduct more business with the central government, and erasing much of their previous self-sufficiency.
The power of the tribes revived somewhat in the 1940s and early 1950s, as the central government weakened during the turbulent World War II years. It declined again in the 1960s and 1970s as land reform broke the stranglehold in which the aghas had once held their const.i.tuents. A developing domestic capitalism and ma.s.sive migration to the towns and cities also contributed to the breakdown of the tribe, leading the Iranian Kurdish leader Abd al-Rahman Qa.s.semlou to say that by the 1970s, "Kurdish society in Iran can no longer be considered as a tribal society." Nonetheless, many tribes continued to exist and to exert considerable influence. Members of powerful tribal families still play leadership roles in Iranian Kurdistan today, and in some border areas, armed tribes are still used as government patrols.
I WENT TO talk with Ahmad Ghazi, editor of Sirwe, which means "word." The first and oldest continuously published Kurdish magazine in Iran, Sirwe was founded in 1985, and Mr. Ghazi became editor one year later. Prior to becoming editor, during the time of Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi, Mr. Ghazi was also imprisoned for four years for his political activities.
Sirwe"s offices filled several airy upstairs rooms on a side street in downtown Urumieh. When I arrived, I found a small, round-faced man in his sixties waiting for me. Dressed in pants belted high on his waist and a b.u.t.ton-down shirt, Mr. Ghazi spoke excellent, British-inflected English, perfected during his first career as a teacher.
The Iranian Kurds lived mostly in three provinces in northwestern Iran, Mr. Ghazi said, welcoming me with a gla.s.s of tea, which most Iranian Kurds drink Persian-style: through a sugar cube in the mouth. In the northernmost province, Western Azerbaijan, to which Urumieh belonged, Kurds spoke the Kermanji dialect and shared their territory with the Azeri Turks, a Turkic people with whom the Kurds often do not get along. The central province, Kurdistan, with its capital of Sanandaj, was almost 100 percent Kurdish, and its people spoke the Sorani dialect. And the southernmost province, Kermanshah, was again only part Kurdish and part other ethnic groups, most notably Lur and Persian. Most Kurds of Kermanshah also spoke Sorani, but at the edge of the province, bordering Iraq, lived the Hawraman, a "small and special colony" who spoke Gorani-a non-Kurdish Iranian dialect. They lived much closer to their traditional ways than did most other Iranian Kurds.
Another large group of Kurds lived separate from the rest in the Khorasan province of eastern Iran. They were the descendants of the tens of thousands of Kurds brutally deported from their homelands by the Safavids in the 1500s, to prevent them from siding with the Ottomans.
As in Iraq, most Iranian Kurds were Sunni Muslim, and of the Shafiite school, one of the four branches of Sunni Islam, which set them apart from the Arab and Turkish Sunnis in the region, most of whom were Hanafite. However, like the vast majority of Iranians, at least one-third of Iranian Kurds were Shiite, while others were Ahl-e Haqq. Both the Shiite and Ahl-e Haqq Kurds lived mostly in Kermanshah and neighboring Ilam.
"One-third of Iranian Kurds are Shiite?" I asked, surprised at the large number.
"At least, and one of the difficulties we have is that the Shiite Kurds don"t join the Kurdish movements-cultural or political," Mr. Ghazi said. "This is beginning to change, but historically, the Shiite and Sunni Kurds have kept apart."
About two-thirds of Iranian Kurds now lived in large towns and cities. But even for those who remained in the villages, life had changed dramatically over the past twenty years. "Even the most rural areas now have schools, roads, electricity," he said. "There"s a satellite television in almost every village. Illiteracy is going down, and we have universities in Mahabad, Sanandaj, Kermanshah, and other Kurdish cities."
Some tribal pockets did still exist, especially in the far northern and southern Kurdish lands, where the terrain was exceptionally mountainous-i.e., out of reach of the central authorities-and well suited for animal husbandry. A few genuine nomads could even be found. "But fortunately, these pockets are few," Mr. Ghazi said.
" "Fortunately"?" I was puzzled at his word choice.
"The breakdown of the tribes has been very good for the Kurdish people," he said. "The tribals were very traditional and fanatic. They were a great obstacle to our unity, governments played them easily off against each other. Fifty years ago, we weren"t a nation, we were tribes, and the leaders of our nationalist movements were heads of big families, like Barzani and Qazi Mohammed [leader of the 1946 Kurdish Republic in Mahabad]. But now, everyone feels our nationalism. We are learning from each other, getting stronger. And the same is true for the Kurds in Iraq and Turkey."
I"d heard similar thoughts expressed in Iraqi Kurdistan, but only now did their full irony hit home to me. How strange that traditional Kurdish culture, or at least an important aspect of traditional Kurdish culture, has to be destroyed in order for modern Kurdish culture to flourish.
"Do you think the Kurds will have their own country one day?" I asked.
Mr. Ghazi hesitated. "The time for fighting is finished," he said, echoing another statement often heard in Iraq. "We must now work for Kurdish rights through politics and other ways. But life is changing rapidly in the Middle East altogether. We have satellite TV and the Internet, we are in contact with others all over the world. . . . And I believe that a hundred years from now, borders will be regarded as a small thing."
I then asked Mr. Ghazi to compare the situation of the Iranian Kurds before and after the 1979 Islamic revolution. Before the revolution, Iran had been ruled by Reza Shah Pahlavi and his son Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi, both strong-armed authoritarian kings. After coming to power in 1923, Reza Shah had dragged the then-undeveloped nation into the twentieth century at a relentless clip, not only settling its nomadic peoples and establishing a strong central government, but also brooking no dissent and banning the wearing of the hejab, or Islamic covering for women-much to the horror of traditional believers. Mohammed Reza Shah, though a milder version of his father in some ways, had continued Reza Shah"s policies of modernization, repression, and the denigration of Islam, while also forming a close alliance with the United States, establishing a powerful secret police known as SAVAK, and spending millions of petro-dollars-much needed elsewhere-on a sophisticated military a.r.s.enal.
By the late 1970s, many Iranians had had enough. Taking to the streets by the hundreds of thousands, they forced Mohammed Reza to flee Iran, to be replaced by the pious Shiite leader Ayatollah Khomeini, called back from exile in France. Representing all that the shahs were not, Ayatollah Khomeini and his supporters established the world"s first Islamic Republic, to be governed in accordance with sharia. Women were forced to wear the hejab, an Islamic school curriculum was established, strict religious observance was expected, and all Western influences, including alcohol and music, were outlawed.
As a people who had been brutally repressed by the Shahs Pahlavi, the Kurds initially supported the revolution, seeing a chance to gain autonomy. During the 1970s, several dissident mullahs hid out in Kurdish territory and when in exile, Ayatollah Khomeini expressed sympathy for the Kurdish cause. But after the revolution, these quasi-promises were quietly forgotten. Khomeini cracked down on Kurdistan as early as August 1979.
"During the time of the shah, we could say we were Kurds, but we couldn"t publish a book, or read a Kurdish poem in public," Mr. Ghazi said. "And many were in prison because of their political activities. I was in prison because I talked about autonomy, nothing more. It was a very bad time for the Kurds.
"With this Islamic regime, we have fought politically also, and after the revolution, conditions were very bad. There were many shot, many fled, it was unbearable. But now, especially culturally, things are much better. We have many publishing centers, we have about twenty representatives in parliament, we can vote freely. In the time of the shah, the Kurdish language and culture was being forgotten little by little, but now, it is blossoming."
"Did this happen before or after President Khatami?" I asked, referring to the moderate leader elected by a surprise landslide vote in 1997. Though much thwarted by the conservatives who largely control the Iranian government, Khatami has ushered in a period of some reform.
"The process began in the mid-1980s, but hastened in the time of Khatami. Since his election we have many more cultural publications and can speak more openly. Our faction in parliament is pressuring the government for more Kurdish rights . . .
"Of course, we still suffer much discrimination. We are not allowed to speak of the destiny of Kurdistan or criticize too much. But I believe our situation is improving."
OTHER IRANIAN KURDISH intellectuals I met did not have as rosy an outlook as did Mr. Ghazi. After all, Kurdish political parties were still illegal in Iran and demonstrations were forbidden-although they took place. The Kurds had little administrative control over their own districts and, despite many parliamentarians, had no governors or ministers. Kurdistan was significantly poorer and less developed than was most of Iran, with few large factories or businesses, and extremely high rates of unemployment. The regime"s Revolutionary Guards also kept a close eye on the Kurds, quick to throw into prison anyone suspected of political activity. Hundreds of Kurds were said to be languishing in Iranian jails, and three Kurdish activists were executed in the year before my visit.
Among the more pessimistic intellectuals I spoke with was Bahram Valadbaigy, director of Tehran"s Kurdistan Cultural Inst.i.tute. Only established in 2001, the inst.i.tute was widely regarded as an important step forward for the Iranian Kurds-their first formal cultural inst.i.tute.
The inst.i.tute had four basic objectives, Mr. Valadbaigy told me through a translator on the afternoon we met. One was to develop a standardized written Kurdish. Another was to strengthen relationships with the Kurds of Iraq and Turkey through such things as student and cultural exchange programs. In addition, the inst.i.tute advised and supported various Kurdish student publications, and published its own magazine.
Serious problems with the Islamic regime had already arisen over this last venture. The first issue of the magazine had run several political essays, and so the government had suspended its publication and was threatening to close the inst.i.tute.
"There are many Kurdish publications in Iran now, but it makes no difference," Mr. Valadbaigy said with bitterness. "We still can"t write about anything except folklore and culture. Tradition, only tradition . . . How does this help the Kurds? Our country has not improved. Khatami has done nothing. We were in the Islamic revolution and expected to gain our part. But all we have gained is war, fighting, poverty. . . ."
"But isn"t the situation better now than during the time of the shah?" I asked, remembering Mr. Ghazi.
"Yes, but only because now they allow us to breathe!" Mr. Valadbaigy said. "But that is not enough! You cannot compare now to then. And why do we have a better situation? Because we fought for it! Many died for it. It was not a gift."
Nonetheless, Mr. Valadbaigy did agree with Mr. Ghazi on one important point. "Fighting has failed," he said. "And the world has changed. We must now use other ways to achieve our goals."
MAHABAD, ABOUT A ninety-minute drive south of Urumieh, was prettier than I expected. Perhaps because of its volatile political history, I"d imagined the place to be flat, harsh, and scraggly. Instead I found a clean, orderly town, population about two hundred thousand, surrounded by wide rolling hills, with fields and orchards in the foreground, smoky whipped peaks in the distance. Many streets were lined with trees, while here and there stood traffic circles and plazas, marked by statues and the occasional shrine. Mahabad had its share of Internet cafes as well, and an all-pedestrian street bustling with families and shrouded women in the late afternoon, boys and men after the sun went down.
Showing me around Mahabad my first afternoon there was Rojeen, a striking Kurdish woman in her mid-twenties, whom I met while traveling in a collective taxi from Urumieh. Rojeen didn"t share my opinion regarding her good looks, however. She planned to get a nose job as soon as her life calmed down a bit. Try as I might, I couldn"t see any way in which her looks could be improved-her nose, straight and of average size, seemed perfect to me. But I had read that nose jobs were all the rage in Tehran, and Rojeen was a fashion-conscious Tehrani.
Rojeen, who spoke some English but no Kurdish, was in Mahabad for only a few days, on one of her biweekly trips to take care of her family"s estate. Her father, the son of a leading Mahabad family, had died of a heart attack three months before, and her mother was in no condition to look after anything. As the eldest of five daughters, it was up to Rojeen to make sure that the family"s orchards were running smoothly.
As Rojeen and I talked more, I realized that she came from an unusual family. Two of her great-grandfathers had been powerful Kurdish aghas, one living in Mahabad, the other in nearby Bukan. When her grandmother married, they laid out a red carpet all the way between the two towns-well, at least some of the way, Rojeen amended. But her grandmother had moved to Tehran when Rojeen"s father was seventeen or eighteen, and all the rest of her ten children had grown up there, learning only rudimentary Kurdish. Most had also married Persians, while their mother had become "very up-to-date," learning how to read and write, and becoming a film buff. "My grandmother is eighty years old, but always improving herself!" Rojeen said, laughing.
Rojeen"s father had also been unusual. When his wife bore no sons, he was pressured to take a second wife, but he refused. He loved his wife and daughters deeply and felt no need for a son. "When I was born, my father took me in his arms," Rojeen said. "And some in my family said, "Why are you doing that? You are an important man, and she is only a girl." But my father was happy, he never cared I was a girl."
"Do people still care so much about having boys today?"
"Some people care," Rojeen said, "but not like before. And for the new generation, it"s very different. We don"t care at all. Some have only one child, no problem. Some have no children, no problem."
"What about honor killings?" I asked somewhat hesitantly, but wanting to take advantage of the turn in the conversation.
"What?" Rojeen had never heard of honor killings, and neither had any of the young urban Kurds I met later in Sanandaj and Kermanshah. Middle-aged Kurds knew what I was talking about, but except in the traditional Hawraman region, most told me that they hadn"t heard of an occurrence in years.
"No one kills a woman for s.e.x before marriage," Rojeen said after I had explained, "but women are expected to be virgins when they marry."
Rojeen herself had already been married and divorced. Her husband had been a handsome Kurdish doctor, but he hadn"t liked the way she dressed-she"d shown too much leg. Also, he didn"t enjoy going to parties, which Rojeen adored. She"d felt trapped and unhappy. Her parents had supported her in her decision to divorce, and now she was "very okay. I have a boyfriend, I am free." She did not intend to marry again for at least three or four years.
Hardly a typical Iranian woman, but then again, not altogether atypical either. On my earlier visit to Iran, I had met many strong and independent women pushing the envelope of traditional Islamic society, especially in Tehran.
Our tour of the downtown finished, we headed out of the city, to Rojeen"s family orchards, pa.s.sing hills so shiny they seemed plated with gold. From the tape deck came the music of Kamkar, a family of musicians from Sanandaj, whose songs are known around the world. Rojeen drove- women drivers were accepted in Mahabad, she said. It was a relatively liberal city, though nowhere near as open as Tehran, of course.
"Why are you wearing black?" Rojeen asked me, suddenly changing the topic. "I must, because of my father, but why are you?"
"What do you mean?" I looked down at my shapeless black manteau- the French word for "coat" usually used in Iran-that I"d purchased on my first trip to the Islamic Republic in 1998.
"No one wears black anymore," Rojeen said.
Strictly speaking, that was not true. Most of the women on the streets still wore black. But now I knew what she was talking about. My manteau was badly out of style. Arriving in Tehran about two weeks earlier, I"d been shocked to see the amorphous black manteaus of my earlier visit replaced by tight, tunic-length coats of maroons, greens, and tans. Despite all the discouraging news that had come out of Iran since 1998-including crackdowns on the liberal press and arrests of liberal politicians-the atmosphere on the streets had lightened up. People were depressed over the failure of the moderate President Khatami to inst.i.tute as much reform as they"d hoped, and yet, in some intangible way, they also seemed more buoyant- or perhaps the word was brazen-than they had before. Suddenly, it seemed, everyone had cell phones, everyone was on the Internet. The Tehran streets had been cleaned up, many of the once-ubiquitous murals of Iran-Iraq War martyrs removed, and more Westerners were in town.
Rojeen"s family orchards grew apples and apricots as far as the eye could see. Her father had been a wealthy man who, like many prominent members of tribal families in Iran today, had operated as an absentee landlord. But Rojeen and her sisters had inherited only fifty of his hectares, in accordance with Islamic law, because the family had no sons. The other fifty had gone to male relatives. "It is still good because we have enough, but it is bad psychologically," said Rojeen.
Not far from the orchards was the FARHRIGAE STONE MASOLEUM, as a nearby sign read, though "Faqraqa" was a closer transliteration. It was one of Mahabad"s must-see attractions, and yet when I went to visit it the following evening-with other companions, as Rojeen was working-at first there seemed to be nothing there. Parking our car on a silent dirt road, we walked at least a half-mile through an empty field bristling with sharp, pointy gra.s.ses. The crescent moon was rising, and I cursed under my breath as I stumbled in the semidarkness up an increasingly steep slope riddled with depressions and boulders. Then, the ancient tombs suddenly appeared, three black holes separated by columns yawning above-tantalizingly, mysteriously, just out of reach. The tombs probably dated back to the early period of the Medes, a people who lived in the region from about the 800s to the 500s B.C. Once, the Medes controlled an area that extended from the Caspian Sea in the north to the Zagros Mountains in the south to the ancient a.s.syrian capital of Niveneh in the west-in short, the land of the Kurds. Many Kurds believe the Medes to be their direct ancestors, perhaps making the Faqraqa tombs one of the oldest of Kurdish sightseeing attractions.
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 "munic.i.p.al." 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 prost.i.tution 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 n.a.z.i 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 s.p.a.cious 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.