Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou

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Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou
Memorial plaque for Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, Abdullah Ghaderi-Azar and Fadhil Rassoul

Abdul-Rahman Ghassemlou ( Persian عبدالرحمان قاسملو; Kurdish Ebdulrehman Qasimlo ; * December 22, 1930 in Urmia ; † July 13, 1989 in Vienna ) was a Kurdish politician and chairman of the Democratic Party Kurdistan-Iran (short: DPK-I).

Life

Ghassemlou was born to a wealthy feudal Kurdish family in Urmia. His father Mohammed Ghassemlou came from the Eşiret der Schikak , while his mother Nana Jan Timsar - his father's third wife - was a converted Assyrian Christian . After finishing school in Urmia, he went to Tehran for further training . He became a contemporary witness of the Republic of Mahabad and became a member of the DPK-I.

Abroad

In 1947 he went to Paris to study . After a failed attack on the Iranian King Mohammad Reza Pahlavi at the University of Tehran on February 4, 1949, Iranian students held a demonstration against the king in Paris. Ghassemlou was put under surveillance by the Iranian embassy for speaking at the demonstration and was unable to continue his studies for financial reasons. However, he received a scholarship and went to Prague in Czechoslovakia . There he became a member of a student organization, took part in the World Festival of Youth and Students in Prague in 1949 and in East Berlin in 1951, and declared himself a Stalinist .

In the ČSSR he met his future wife Helen Krülich. They had two daughters named Mina (* 1953) and Hiva (* 1955). When Mohammad Mossadegh became Prime Minister of Iran , Ghassemlou returned to Iran after graduating from university in 1952 . He began his political work there by reorganizing the DPK-I and separating it from the tutelage of the Tudeh party (1955). In 1959 he went to Iraq for a year to teach Kurdish history at a university in Baghdad.

Five years later and after the fall of Mossadegh, Ghassemlou went back to Czechoslovakia, where he obtained his doctorate in economics in Prague in 1962 . There he wrote the book Kurdistan and The Kurds in Czech , which was later translated into several languages. In this book he gave a Marxist-Leninist view of the Kurds. The invasion of Warsaw Pact troops to end the Prague Spring led Ghassemlou to turn away from communism towards social democracy . He taught there at the University in Prague until 1970 and then returned to his homeland.

There he worked in his profession and was elected chairman of the DPK-I in 1971. His political motto was: "Democracy for Iran, autonomy for Kurdistan".

Between 1975 and 1978 he stayed again in Prague and Paris. He then returned to Iran to join the movement against the Shah ( Islamic Revolution ). He supported Ruhollah Khomeini because he believed that Khomeini could overthrow the Shah. On the side, Ghassemlou modernized the party, rejuvenated the cadres and, after a few decades, led the party out of the underground. He held a political meeting in Mahabad in March 1979, in which he declared that he was ready to work with the new regime if it complied with the demands of the Kurds. The Kurds in Iran saw the overthrow of the monarchy as an opportunity for more rights and self-determination. The DPK-I and the Komalah then contacted the new government in Tehran.

In August 1979 a new parliament was elected to draft a new constitution. Ghassemlou won a mandate but was unable to attend the opening of parliament because there was fighting against the troops of the new regime in the Kurdish areas. The new regime had no interest in Kurdish autonomy and had only played for a time. In the long battles that followed, the Kurds were able to take control of large areas. In this situation Ghassemlou wanted to negotiate again with the regime, but was again turned away. The government troops were gradually able to push the Kurdish fighters out of many cities. The DPK-I withdrew to the border region with Iraq and could count on the help of the Iraqi government.

During the First Gulf War , the DPK-I was supposed to fight on the side of Saddam Hussein and found a Kurdish state in Iran. But Ghassemlou refused because Iraq itself had a problem with its Kurdish minority in the north and even fought them with poison gas . In addition, Ghassemlou only wanted Kurdish autonomy within a democratic Iran.

murder

After two mediation talks between representatives of Tehran and a delegation of Kurds in Vienna in December 1988, another meeting took place on July 13, 1989 in Vienna. However, the “negotiating partners” who entered Vienna with Iranian diplomatic passports killed Secretary General Ghassemlou and his two companions at the negotiating table. The suspects went into hiding in the Iranian embassy and were able to leave the country unmolested after Tehran's pressure on the Austrian authorities. One of them, a high functionary of the Revolutionary Guard "Pasdaran" , was escorted to Vienna Airport under police protection. Ghassemlou was buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris . In 1991 his widow charged the Austrian state with its misconduct, but the lawsuit was dismissed in 1992.

On August 11, 2017, Ali Schirasi's blog published an article about Mohammad Jafari Sahrarudi, who is referred to there as the head of the terrorist squad that Dr. Ghassemlou and his companions shot dead in Vienna. The article describes the further career of the murderer in Iran.

Works

  • 40 years of the fight for freedom , Rohrbach 1985
  • Iran Kürdistani , Istanbul 1991
  • Kurdistan and The Kurds , 1959

literature

Web links

Commons : Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ali Schirasi : Iran: greetings from the underworld. In: Ali Schirazi's weblog. August 11, 2017. Retrieved July 13, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Ghassemlou, Abdul Rahman
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Qasimlo, Ebdulrehman
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Iranian Kurd, chairman of the DPK-I
DATE OF BIRTH December 22, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Urmia
DATE OF DEATH July 13, 1989
Place of death Vienna