Photos from Wezê

In my previous post I wrote how Iranian shelling destroys the Rawand culture in Kurdistan of Iraq. I put here some photos from Wezê village.


Villagers in Weze say that Iranians shells only agricultural areas. They don't dig here vegetables but pieces of Iranian rockets in their tomato field.


13 years old Basoz Jabhar Agha (who was murdered by the Iranian army the 30th May 2010) in the middle in the first line, in brown dress.


Basoz Jabhar Agha's sister shows a family album.


Aisha Abdullah continues to plant tomatoes two weeks after the death of her grand daughter Basoz Jabhar Agha.

Iranian shelling destroys the Rawand culture

Since 1991 Iran has been shelling Iraqi Kurdistan almost every spring. Shelling starts when farmers and Rawand people arrive to the mountains for agricultural work. The Rawand people are half nomads who spend winters in the plain lands and summers in the mountains.

On Sunday the 12th June 2010 I travelled to Wezê village near Choman to get information about the shelling of this year.

In this village thirteen years old Basoz Jahbar Agha was killed by Iranian rocket the 30th May. I met her grand mother Aisha Abdullah.

“At that day a group of teenager girls planted tomatoes on a mountain field. She had made a fire to prepare tea at 9.30 AM”, told Aisha Abdullah.

I met in Choman Kaymakan Abdul Wahid Gowani. He told that he meets often representatives of the Iranian state. Iranians say always that they shell PJAK guerrillas and enemies of Iran.

"How ever, they have killed only Kurdish civilians”, said Abdul Wahid Gowani.

“When we meet Iranians we say to them that this is high technology war fare. They have equipment to see everything on our side, so they are surely aware that PJAK is not here”, he said.

“Iranians shell only agriculture areas, not forests”, said the villagers. Their target is unarmed civilians, PJAK fighters do not wait Iranian army in day light in tomato fields.

“Here are no armed men. We have not seen in years armed guerrillas”, said the villagers.

”The target of Iran is not PJAK but destabilization of Kurdish region”, explained Abdul Wahid Gowani.

“Iran wants Kurds to be refuges in big cities. Shelling makes people afraid to come here, so they stop practising agriculture here,” said Abdul Wahid Gowani. He gave statics of the shelling during spring 2010: one girl died, one woman was injured, 25 sheep died and 237 families left their homes or did not return to mountains from the plain lands as they have done earlier.

The villagers in Wezê told that many men are afraid to come there, it is mainly women and children who remain in these mountain villages.

“The amount of shepherds decreases every year”, told Abdul Wahid Gowani. About one hundred Rawand families leave the job every year because they are afraid to go to the mountains despite they like them very much.

“ Iran wants to destroy by shelling the culture of the Rawand people”, claimed Abdul Wahid Gowani and continued: “The Rawand culture is not only Kurdish heritage, it is international heritage. Their culture and way of living is ancient, only few people are able to live like this.”

Kurdistan has been for decades target for various types of genocides. Saddam destroyed in Iraqi Kurdistan almost all villages. Iran is now destroying those villages which survived the Ba'ath government period. The destruction of traditional Kurdish way of living by Iranian bombings is one method of cultural and economical genocide. The target is to destroy the Rawand culture which is original Kurdish way of living. And Iran wants to empty villages near its boarder and to create so called security zone as decided in Algiers Accord 1975.

Because of the Iranian shellings the ancient Rawand culture is in danger to disappear completely. We may not let this happen. For the survival of their culture there is need to make research about the effects of the shellings. Also the Rawand way of living must be surveyed. Rawand people need support which benefits their survival as a group. I think the best way is to let them to practise their original livelihood and provide market for their products.

But the first thing is that Iran must stop immediately the shelling the Rawand people and other civilians.

Sulaymanian newspaper Aso published this text the 20th June 2010.

Information in Kurdish here:
http://www.dengeazad.com/NewsDetailN.aspx?id=4920&LinkID=137

Speech at the demonstration of the Yezidi-Kurds in Berlin the 28th August 2007

Tilman Zülch, President of Society for Threatened Peoples International, held this speech at the demonstration of the Yezidi-Kurds in Berlin on August 28, 2007.

Today we gathered here and mourn about the 500, maybe even 600 children, women and men – Yezidi from the Sinjar area at the border to Syria. So far we do not know for sure who the murderers were. But we have the impression that there are forces all around this area that try to destroy and drive away the thousands of years old community of the Yezidi, and thus have the goal to erase a very old culture and religion. Many of the victims are still hospitalized in Kurdistan, struggling to survive. Our thoughts are now with them.

The Sinjar area is an obstacle for terrorist, fundamentalist or chauvinist movements which have been active ever since the invasion of US troops in southern and middle Iraq. Some of them are Al-Qaeda, forces of the former Baath regime, Sunni and Shiite fundamentalists, and probably also terrorist groups that are supported from Syria, Turkey or Iran.

The Yezidi religious community experienced many persecutions – during the Ottoman times, during the Saddam regime. So far no one knows the exact number of how many Yezidi were killed under Hussein. Tens of thousands of them were deported and forcibly settled in camp-like ghettos.

Society for Threatened Peoples still remembers the expulsion of the Yezidi from Turkey in the 1980s very vividly. Thousands of them fled to Central Europe, especially to former West Germany. Here these refugees were supposed to be deported. Together with the evangelical churches and the support by Prof. Gernot Wiesner and his wife Irina – both long standing members of our human rights organization – we managed to achieve the recognition of the Yezidi as collectively persecuted religious refugees. Regarding this achievement, we will never forget the support of the Minister of the Interior of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), Dr. Herbert Schoor. Back then we published a whole series of documentations, articles, appeals, flyers and special editions of our journal "Pogrom".

Together with the Organization of the Yezidi in Germany we organized a rally at the former concentration camp Bergen-Belsen, which initially had been prohibited. This rally, the demonstration in front of the Ministry of the Interior of NRW, our Yezidi-Congress in Hannover on the very day of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, and the book "The Kurdish Yezidi – A People on the Way to Ruin", had led to the final breakthrough. Today, there are about 60,000 Yezidi living in Germany. Here they have found a new home.

„The Way to Ruin" is now threatening the Yezidi of the Sinjar area. What can we do about this in Germany? Our possibilities are very limited. Even the German government, would it be willing to help, would have only little influence in Iraq. We have already asked the German Ministry for Foreign Affairs and the one for Economic Co-operation and Development for urgent help for the people in Sinjar. But protection for the people in the Sinjar area can probably only come from within Iraq.

The Yezidi speak Kurdish, and the majority considers itself being part of the Kurdish people. Already in 2003, before the beginning of the American-Iraqi War, representatives of Yezidi organizations gathered at Society for Threatened Peoples in Göttingen, after an initiative by Malah Izdian in Oldenburg. Their resolution demanded for a self-governed Sinjar territory as part of the Iraqi state of Kurdistan. Two Yezidi ministers belonged to this government. From this government, help was sent to the injured. From there police forces were delegated to protect the inhabitants of Sinjar. The Yezidi in Sinjar have a right to self-government. This right is guaranteed by Article 140 of the Iraqi Constitution. Let us hope that the mostly peaceful situation in the Iraqi state of Kurdistan will have a positive impact on the region of Sinjar, as well. Let us hope that that was the last terrorist attack. The Sinjar region has a right to unite with the Iraqi state of Kurdistan – as an autonomous, self-governed region. This will provide protection for the Yezidi religious community.

Gulan: The roots of Islamic terrorism

http://www.gulan-media.com/h629/krestina629.pdf

President George W. Bush is running a crusade against Islamic terrorism. Who created this monster? Believe me or not: his father George Bush in cooperation with his predecessor Ronald Reagan.

Who gave weapons to Islamic militants? CIA, the American intelligence service. CIA also trained them to kill. It was the period when many African and Asian countries had got their independence after colonialism. It was the cold war era.

Open involvement in other countries policies had not given CIA the results it wanted. CIA replaced the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosaddeq in Iran 1953 by Shah Reza Pahlavi. But it was only a short term solution to get American minded administration in Iran. And of course the Vietnam war was the real catastrophe.

So CIA learned its lesson. When the government of a third world country made cooperation with Soviet Union CIA’s strategy was to arm their opponents like The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jamaat-i-Islam in Pakistan.

The peak of these activities was the war in Afghanistan. Soviet Union soldiers entered there 1979 and CIA started to arm Mujahedins to fight against them. Mahmood Mamdani calls this war an American jihad: CIA armed militant Muslims from all around the world to a holy war against Soviet Union. Mamdani is professor of anthropology in the American Columbia University. He is born and grown up in Uganda. He lived in South-Africa during the change period from apartheid to democracy. Now Mamdani lives in New York. He observed there the 11.9. attack and has written a sharp analysis about it.

The name of Mamdani’s book is ”Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror”. He criticizes CIA for running secret military operations against the will of the American congress.

The Vietnam war caused an anti-war movement in USA. Many senators who wanted peaceful foreign policy were elected to the congress. Most famous of them were John Tunney and Dick Clark. The congress accepted the so called Clark Law 1976. It gave the congress good possibilities to get information and control American military operations abroad. Due to ”the Clark Law” CIA could not involve openly in wars abroad. So it started to finance secretly Islamic groups abroad. This law was annulled 1985 during the second era of president Ronald Reagan. Mahmood Mamdani pays attention that CIA’s secret operations abroad are an attack also against the American democracy.

CIA tried to turn the Afghan war into Soviet Union’s Vietnam. But then happened something CIA had not expected: the cold war ended to the collapse of Soviet Union. There were thousands Islamic fighters in Afghanistan. It became the training centre of Islamic militants. When the war ended they returned to their home countries. They were well trained and had built an close network. Islamic terrorist groups were formed from these troops.

In South Kurdistan the situation is totally different than in the wars during last decades in Laos, Angola, Nicaragua and Afghanistan. US army is making openly co-operation with a well functioning administration, not with marginal groups fighting against the legal administration. CIA’s target in Afghanistan was to win the Soviet troops, not to form a new government. They knew it was impossible. By using Mamdani’s terms the cooperation between the Afghan clans was ”like putting five different animals into one cage”. Taliban movement is a consequence of this war.

Islamic militants have not arrived to South Kurdistan. But in America there are now some similarities to the post-Vietnam war period. Anti-war movement is growing. And so are the demands to remove American troops from dangerous Iraq.

I am sure that every politician in both South Kurdistan and the Arab parts of Iraq think all the time what to do when American troops go home from there. I hope they will do anything else but not secret deals with CIA.

Mamdani, Mahmood: Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror. Pantheon Books, New York 2004.