After a month of organization, the major towns and cities of Kurdistan were shut down by a general strike on the twentieth anniversary of the assassination of Abdol-Rahman Qasemlu , the leader of the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran (KDP (Iran)). This action was organized preceded by efforts by Kurdish activists in different cities. This is the fifth of these annual protests. Not all of them met with much success at all. The strike which was promised in 2006 was hastily converted to a three-minute black-out. And there is no visible sign of the earlier protests.
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The sources for this information is entirely from KDP (Iran) sources, and the reader should keep this in mind. However, the claims do not seem exaggerated and failure, total or partial is acknowledged, and so I find the material convincing, for want of anything better.
In Sanandaj, two thousand leaflets bearing an appeal by local “political activists and literary and cultural figures” to support this strike were distributed the day before the action. Young people strolled the town in groups of three or four wearing Kurdish clothing. The strike was fully successful in some bazaars, though left a few of the bazaars half-functioning, according to one report.
In District Three of Kurdistan (north-west of Urmia), a public meeting was held on this theme. Taxi traffic also came to a halt there, and the the government blocked telephone and internet connection with the outside.
In Urmia itself, some bazaars were almost completely closed down, while another was half-closed. In any case, traffic in the bazaars was steeply reduced. Urmia is a mixed Kurdish-Azerbaijani Turkish town, and relations between the two communities has not always been good. In the surrounding countryside, the movement has been active in the Kurdish villages. But, according to a report, the Azeris expressed their solidarity with the strike. The KDP(Iran)’s representative abroad, Shaho Hoseini, said that it was 70% successful.
The central government poured extra troops into Mahabad in order to provoke or intimidate the bazaar, but with no apparent effect. The central government poured security forces into the city to try to break the strike, resorting to breaking the shop keepers’ locks. Prominent figures in the town, including its city council, threatened to unleash a mass uprising if they security forces continued doing this, and they were forced to back off. The Kurdish Democratic Party underground poured red dye in all the fountains and pools of the city that day to symbolize the assassination.
In Baneh, not only was the bazaar completely closed, but the villagers refrained from carrying on commerce with the town. In Sardasht, the strike was completely successful. In both these cities, the Chamber of Commerce and the government organs sought to forbid the strike, but to no avail. Even the white collar workers and government functionaries took the day off, according to an interview conducted by Deutsche Welle with Shaho Hoseini, the KDP (Iran)’s representative abroad.
In Oshnaviya, the strike was completely successful or generally successful, despite threats and promises by the local repressive forces. Quotations from Dr. Qasemlu were read from the town’s mosque.
The Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran's emblem.
In Saqqez, Kurdish activists flew Kurdish flags all over the city and daubed walls Iranian Kurdistan’s national color, sky blue.
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The central government mobilized its forces and occupied the town’s squares, roads, and bazaars. Among other things, the government’s forces smashed the main locks on most of the town’s bazaar’s passages, but the strike held. In some parts of the town, the security forces fired their weapons in the air to try to panic the people. Troops were sent to the homes of another of shopkeepers and tried to intimidate them into opening the bazaar.
The strike had some impact in the largely Azerbaijani Turkish towns of Salmas, Khoy, and Maku. It had an impact as far south as Maku, where a number of largely Kurdish towns such as Paveh reported that a large part of the towns’ bazaar were closed, but the government forces were able to get the upper hand and intimidate shopkeepers into reopening their shops. In the above-mentioned interview, Shaho Hosein put its success rate in Kermanshah in general at 70% and in Paveh itself, 90%.
“All the Kurdish neighborhoods of Naqqadeh and some of the Azerbaijani Turkish parts closed their shops,” despite threats from the central government.
The
The Kurdish national flag.
strike in Rabat was completely successful, again despite pressure by the the regime’s agents in the town.
The demonstrations were organized without any explicit mention of the demonstrations over the elections which swept the Persian heartland. In his above-mentioned interview, however, Shaho Hoseini observed that the success of the current demonstrations was due to these actions:
[T]his year, the people showed greater courage. The demonstrations in Tehran and other cities in Iran have cased the people to answer the call more than the previous years. They have become more hopeful in their struggle with the current government.”
Moreover, whereas in previous years, the government was able to finger individual activists and haul them before the authorities and fine them, or exact retribution against some white collar workers by docking their pay or by revoking a shop keeper’s permission to keep his shop open, since the protests were so widespread this time, the central government’s agents were forced to tread more softly. Indeed, Mr. Hoseini’s only concern as of the day of the strike was that hot-headed young people would pour into the streets, sparking a physical confrontation with the security forces for which the KDP (Iran) did not feel itself prepared. The security forces, for their part, had learned from the demonstrations in Tehran that they had to cut or curtail communication in the region. Thus, mobiles and SMS and even landlines were interfered with. Finally, the Deutsche Welle interviewer asked about the relationship between the Kurdish people and the recent elections. He replied,
The Kurds did not participate much in the elections, and most of them boycotted them. During the previous elections, the participation in Sanandaj was 22%. If we were to assume that the level of participation in the recent elections had risen by ten or fifteen percent, that would still mean that about 65% of the people were boycotting them. Of course, if the movement which has arisen in Iran, and particularly in Tehran, were to continue, the Kurdish people must also be present in it.
Here are some videos claiming to show the extent of the strike’s success.
