The Passion and Death of Rahman the Kurd

Versions

Kürt Rahman’ın Tutkusu ve Ölümü [Türkçe, İstanbul, 2009]

Pasión y muerte de Rahman el Kurdo [Español, Caracas, 2008]

The Passion and Death of Rahman the Kurd [English, Bloomington, 2009]

The Passion and Death of Rahman the Kurd: Dreaming Kurdistan

"Against the backdrop of the revolution that overthrew the Shah and through the shadowy back streets of the Cold War, Carol Prunhuber's Passion andDeath ofRahman the Kurd resurrects the doomed trajectory of assassinated Kurdish leader Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou. "A portrait against the grain: not a peshmerga with his bandolier, but a nationalist intellectual in a well-tailored suit turned movable target far from the Kurdish mountains. A Third World aristocrat who will quickly veer off the Marxist road from revolution to democracy.

"Professor of economics, bon vivant, and clandestine freedom fighter, Ghassemlou is tracked by the henchmen of the Shah only to be assassinated by the hit men of Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic Republic. Prunhuber guides us, through an opaque world of ambiguous friendships, uncertain complicities, treachery, and open threats, from Tehran to Prague, from Paris to Vienna.

"This portrait is a political whodunit, a truer-than-life reenactment of a destiny, and a journey into a trap a trap implacably closing, until his execution in an anonymous apartment in Vienna in 1989.

"A page of history, too: abundant notes allow the reader to navigate with ease through the subtle maze of reheated hatreds and deceitful alliances that give the account all its authenticity."

Jean-Marc Illouz
senior foreign correspondent, France2 TV, News, Paris

Contents

Acknowledgments / xiii
Preface / xix
Introduction / xxv
Photos will be found between pages / 190-201
Part One: The Crime / 1
I. Meeting in Vienna / 3
II.  A Tired Man / 9
III.  The Intermediary / 15
IV.  The Murderers / 17

Part Two: God's Revolution / 31
I. Mofsed F'il Arz / 33
II. Shah Raft! Shah Raft! / 39
III.  Kurdistan or Kabrestan! / 49
IV.  Mahabad, Nationalist City / 57
V. Peasants and Aghas / 67
VI.  The Three-Month War / 75

Part Three: Orphans of the Universe / 87
I. Kurdistan at War / 89
II. The French Connection / 99
III.  Iranian Offensive / 103
IV.  Journey to the Mountains / 109
V. Politics and Religion / 129

Part Four: Rahman the Kurd / 139
I. Sons of Simko / 141
II. The Forging of a Leader / 163

Part Five: The Investigation / 199
I. After the Crime / 201
II. Stunned / 205
III. Ben Bella Accuses / 209
IV. Two Police Reports / 213
V. Winter in Vienna / 217
VI. The Assassins / 231
VII. The Conversation / 237
VIII. Creaking on the Floor / 251
IX. Cobra II / 259 
X. An Unfinished Story / 271
XI. Simko / 281
Appendices / 285
Appendix 1: Testimony from Abolhassan Bani Sadr / 285
Appendix 2: Chronology of Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou / 288
Appendix 3: Historical Events / 295
Appendix 4: Dramatis Personae / 303

Glossary: Abbreviations and Foreign Words / 311
Notes / 315
Sources and Bibliography / 351

Preface

When I think of Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, whisky somehow comes to mind.

Neither of us—he the leader of Iran's Kurds, I a Washington Post foreign correspondent—in fact was much given to whisky. But our infrequent occasions for drinking the amber liquid had a purpose behind the pure pleasure of partaking of alcohol.

In the first instance the whisky was downed with a group of foreign correspondents in Mahabad, that emblematic site of twentieth-century Kurdish nationalism, in calculated defiance of the nascent zero-tolerance-for-alcohol Islamic Republic soon after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came to power in the winter of 1979.

And a decade later in July 1989, we drank whisky in my home in Paris to celebrate the first visa the United States had deigned granting him after decades on the blacklist as Communist or fellow traveler.

I think at the time I wondered idly if the visa was an outcome of the expiring Cold War or, more narrowly perhaps, the just recompense for his attempt to help American ambassador April Glaspie in Baghdad track down Saddam Hussein's use of gas against his own Kurds the previous year. I had suggested that she cultivate his friendship.

That July evening Ghassemlou credited me with helping obtain the coveted US visa in a bit of calculated flattery far from the truth, since at most over the years during his episodic visits to Paris I had called the political officer at the American embassy and suggested Ghassemlou was a man well worth listening to.

Such then were the very limited favors a journalist could render obscure leaders of Third World national liberation movements that the haughty United States, out of deference to the governments that oppressed them, officially pretended too inconsequential even to talk to, much less recognize…

Jonathan Randal

 

 

 

 

Copyright © 2009 by Carol Prunhuber

Translation copyright © 2009 by Carol Prunhuber and Ellen Porter

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ISBN: 978-1-4401-7816-0 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-4401-7815-3 (ebook)
ISBN: 978-1-4401-7814-6 (dj)
Printed in the United States of America
iUniverse rev. date: 12/30/09

Revision and expansion of a first edition published in Spanish by Alfa Editores,
Caracas, Venezuela, 2008, under the title Pasión y Muerte de Rahmán el Kurdo: Soňando el Kurdistán

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Venezuelan writer CAROL PRUNHUBER was educated in Caracas and Paris, where she completed her doctorate in literature. She began her career as a freelance journalist in Paris, then as a foreign correspondent in Madrid.

In 1985, she traveled to Kurdistan with a French TV crew to film the Kurdish conflict in Iran, where she became immersed in the plight of the Kurdish people. This book, twenty years in the making, is a distillation of her passionate concern.