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We begin tonight’s edition of A Window to the Fatherland with Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh reading one of his poems from the book of his collected works.
Dr. Alireza Nourizadeh:
In tonight’s program we have Mr Abdullah Mohtadi as our special guest and we would like to hear from him as a leader of an Iranian Kurdish opposition group that is regarded as a major force of opposition to the regime in Iran what changes he himself and his organisation have gone through during the last four decades while subjected to the regime’s repression.
Abdullah Mohtadi:
Naturally when one is in socio-political action one would always make errors and learn from them and we are not an exception.
During the late 1990s it was time for us to review our strategy as well as our ideology.
One of the main issues in the course of our struggle that we had to revise was the way we used to look at the events of 28th of Mordad of the year of 1358 when Khomeini issued a statement and declared a war against the Iranian Kurdish independent organisations that were challenging the religious despotism that the clerical regime was trying to spread across the country.
While the new regime had managed to stifle many secular and democratic groups in many parts of Iran, it had failed to do it in the Kurdish areas of the country.
We had made these areas a truly democratic region within which many political organisations had established a base and were operating free from any restrictions or crackdowns.
We had even helped members of our Bahai communities to find a safe heaven away from the bloody persecutions that they were facing.
Obviously these conditions were not to be tolerated for the despotic regime in Tehran and it waged a bloody war against the Kurdistan of Iran and the opposition groups based in the region.
The consequent atrocities by the regime against our people have been well documented and will be remembered by generations to come.
Nowadays you can see that our struggle for freedom and democracy is in the form of general strikes and through political and cultural resistance.
We now pursue the same objectives via civil rights movements and our fellow Iranians must not listen to the regime’s lies about our struggle.
