The Passion and Death of Rahman the Kurd

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