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Kurdistan and Prospects for Red Political Power
by Nejimeh Siavush
The best songs are sung to the tune of rifles ,
says one popular revolutionary song. The staccato of machine guns
ricocheting through the mountain ranges has long been a familiar
feature of the Kurdish landscape, which spreads through the countries
of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. Not only has this been the native
territory of the Kurdish national movement for decades, but it has
also provided favourable political and military terrain for the
revolutionary forces fighting to overthrow the reactionary vassal
states whose borders divide Kurdistan.
Since the First World War, the Kurdish question
has figured prominently in the calculations of the imperialists
and their commissioned puppets to establish and hold on to their
seats of power throughout the Middle East. Although such calculations
have invariably called for vicious national oppression of the Kurds,
executed by the lackeys of imperialism and later on of social-imperialism,
they ironically only helped to create and train a formidable enemy
with a long history of waging armed struggle against oppression
and enslavement, in all parts of Kurdistan. No small credit will
go to the reactionaries when the armies of red peshmergas (the Kurdish
word for fighter) charge down the mountains and across the plains
from four directions singing their best songs to the tune of rifles ,
orchestrated this time around by the class-conscious proletariat.
Developments over the past several years in Kurdistan
and in the region as a whole strikingly confirm the truth of this
assessment; beyond that, they have catapulted the international
and regional significance of Kurdistan, and thus the complexity
of the struggle there, onto a decidedly higher plane. This is what
compels veteran executioners of the Kurdish people like the French
imperialists to scurry around with a garish pretence of concern
for the rights of the Kurds while the bloc leader, the US, and its
trusted hangmen prefer genocidal suppression campaigns. And of course,
the Soviet social-imperialists never pass up an opportunity to support
the Kurds...like a rope supports a hanging man, as Lenin once said
in another context. Clearly the more that objective developments
hurl the Kurdish people towards the centre stage of conflicts in
the region, the more variegated becomes the motley array of the
concerned . This is, at once, both a reflection and a cause of the
greatly heightened prospects and difficulties the current situation
holds for the revolutionary forces in Kurdistan.
For many decades now a relentless struggle has
held sway across the Kurdish landscape. It flares up amidst thunder
and gunfire and retreats only to suddenly erupt again where the
enemy expects it least.
The revolutionary struggle of the Kurdish people
has been on a long march. It has outlasted many of its sworn enemies
and significantly contributed to their demise from the Ottoman
Empire to the dynasties of the Hashemee and Pahlavi monarchs. And
it continues to be a major current that can play an indispensable
role in initiating and carrying out the final ushering in of (a)
truly revolutionary state(s) in the region. Its historical development
has been conditioned by and intertwined with the momentous international
events that have punctuated this century. The First and Second World
Wars and both the inspiring victories and the bitter setbacks the
international proletariat has experienced, particularly in the Soviet
Union and in China, have exerted a profound influence over the development
of the movement in Kurdistan.
Furthermore, Lenins statement that, One of the
main features of imperialism is that it accelerates capitalist development
in the most backward countries and thereby extends and intensifies
the struggle against national oppression ( The Military Programme
of the Proletarian Revolution , Collected Works, 23)
has proved to be a valid assessment of the historical impetus propelling
the revolutionary and national movement in Kurdistan, which has
not lost but gained momentum in the face of the suppression and
annihilation campaigns led against it.
A bold revolutionary initiative based on a critical
evaluation of the movement, of its specific historical character,
is urgently demanded of the revolutionary internationalist proletariat.
This is essential if the opening that is greatly magnified by the
increasing instability of the crisis-ridden reactionary states,
within the overall crisis of the world imperialist system, by the
Iraq-Iran war and by the rapidly intensifying rivalry between the
war-bound imperialist and social-imperialist blocs, is going to
be seized for the revolutionary cause of the oppressed.
With respect to this task and obligation of the
revolutionary communist forces in the region, it is instructive
to recall one of Lenins remarks: The dialectics of history are
such that small nations, powerless as an independent factor
in the struggle against imperialism, play a part as one of the ferments,
one of the bacilli, which help the real anti-imperialist
force, the socialist [revolutionary communist AWTW] proletariat,
to make its appearance on the scene. ( The Discussion on Self-Determination
Summed Up , Collected Works, 22.)
Although it is undeniably true that the struggle
of the Kurdish people against national oppression has already tremendously
facilitated the proletariats ability to make its appearance on
the scene (particularly the Communist Party of Turkey / Marxist-Leninist
(TKP/ML) and the Union of Iranian Communists (UIC) Sarbedaran),
still much more, qualitatively more, is required from the proletariat
to prepare and organise the Kurdish masses for the general onslaught
against the seats of reactionary power. The predatory and anarchic
drive of imperialist economics and politics, despite untold suffering
and misery brought down on Kurdistan, have ultimately strengthened
the material basis of the revolutionary struggle in Kurdistan. As
Lenin pointed out, Capitalism is not so harmoniously built that
various sources of rebellion can immediately merge of their own
accord, without reverses and defeats. On the other hand, the very
fact that revolts do break out at different times, in different
places, and are of different kinds, guarantees wide scope and depth
to the general movement; but it is only in premature, individual,
sporadic and therefore unsuccessful, revolutionary movements that
the masses gain experience, acquire knowledge, gather strength,
and get to know their real leaders, the socialist [revolutionary
communist AWTW] proletarians, and in this way prepare for
the general onslaught. ( Self Determination Summed Up , Collected
Works, 22.) Without overlooking or legitimising the past
shortcomings and weaknesses of the international communist movement
and the national movement in Kurdistan, it can be said that the
revolutionary struggle has accumulated immeasurable valuable experience
and acquired the raw material necessary for a deeper knowledge of
its open and disguised enemies and of its true leader, the international
proletariat, in a long and tortuous ascent to maturity. Now, from
the terrain of Kurdistan, history presents great opportunities for
the proletariat to co-ordinate a crippling onslaught against imperialism
and reaction.
The Sheikh Said Rebellion of 1925, the Agri Rebellion
of 1928, the Zilan Rebellion of 1930 and the Dersim Rebellion of
1938 in Turkey; the armed rebellions raging through the decades
of the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s in Iraq; the struggle for the Kurdish
Autonomous Republic of Mahabad during the early 1940s in Iran: in
spite of their weaknesses, all these have contributed tremendously
to the political awakening and preparation of the terrain in Kurdistan
and the revolutionary movements in general in the countries containing
Kurdish regions. Though the terrain in Kurdistan can by no means
be considered asleep, the assessment of the Declaration of the
Revolutionary Internationalist Movement that, The heightening
of contradictions is now drawing and will do so even more dramatically
in the future, all countries and regions of the world and sections
of the masses previously lulled to sleep or oblivious to political
life into the vortex of world history highlights the regional and
world-wide significance of both the potential and the impact of
the struggle in Kurdistan. With their militant history of armed
struggle, the Kurdish people stand as one of the principal actors
capable of exerting powerful influence in determining the resolution
of the world-wide contradictions in the region.
Considering the highly charged terrain in Kurdistan,
where all contending political forces with their corresponding ideologies
are being compelled to deploy and manoeuvre troops amid increasing
tension and where issues have a long history of being settled by
force of arms, even though not often commanded by revolutionary
proletarian politics, it has become absolutely imperative for the
genuine proletarian forces to establish and fortify a decisively
stronger presence. The objective conditions are more than favourable
for this since the proletariat alone is capable of taking and fighting
for the consistently revolutionary stand that is required to unite
and lead the vast majority of the Kurdish masses, especially today.
The history of the national and revolutionary struggle in Kurdistan
is itself forceful testimony to the necessity of proletarian leadership
for the victory of the liberation struggle. Powerful upsurges as
well as bitter setbacks experienced by the Kurdish people in the
past, along with the currently despicable and patently counter-revolutionary
practices of some of the forces there, have awakened among the masses
a keen sense of yearning, even if in a spontaneous form, for truly
revolutionary politics and ideology. Only the class conscious proletariat
and the revolutionary communists with the science of Marxism-Leninism-Mao
Tsetung Thought can respond to and satisfy this yearning and thereby
unleash the masses to generate a tremendous fighting capacity, both
politically and militarily, that can transform the Kurdish landscape
into an unsuppressable red base area for the world proletarian revolution.
That can and will be a thunderous blow to the imperialist and social-imperialist
war preparations and to the ongoing strife for strategic entrenchment
that has taken on particularly feverish dimensions in the region.
All the reactionary intrigue and sanguinary measures
employed against the revolutionary forces in Kurdistan by imperialism
and its regional puppets reveal their deep seated and well-founded
fear that the emergence of red political power in any part of Kurdistan
would inexorably spread its influence not just throughout the Kurdish
territory in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey but through the whole
of these countries and even beyond. That is the fear that sends
chills down the spines of these reactionaries at the sight of a
peshmergas (the Kurdish word for fighter), particularly one armed
with the science of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought. The material
basis for this agonising fear is yet to be fully appreciated and
acted upon by the revolutionary forces. A vigorous presence of the
proletarian internationalist line is both possible and desirable.
Moreover it would induce a new alignment of forces, particularly
among the revolutionary and progressive elements active there. The
current intensification of the international contradictions has
already impelled a high degree of polarisation among the various
forces, and the middle ground between revolution and counter-revolution
is rapidly disappearing.
Furthermore, on such terrain, a qualitatively more
powerful injection of revolutionary communist politics could only
be given and sustained through revolutionary warfare that is capable
of fully realising and developing the revolutionary potential of
the masses politically and militarily. Mao Tsetung did in fact sharply
state that, Without a peoples army the people have nothing , and
Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. The Kurdish
masses experience has borne out these basic truths. Now, more than
ever, the question is to take up and wield revolutionary communist
politics, which, to paraphrase Mao, can direct the performance of
many a drama, full of sound and colour, power and grandeur. The
formation of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, which
already embraces 21 genuine communist parties and organisations,
including the TKP/ML and the UIC (Sarbedaran), has qualitatively
enhanced the ability of revolutionary forces to provide leadership
for such a performance in all parts of Kurdistan.
I. Kurdish Cauldron
Such a spectre is indeed haunting the regimes and
their imperialist mentors from both blocs. The Declaration of
the RIM points out that The current intensification of the
world contradictions while bringing forth further possibilities
for these movements also places new obstacles and new tasks before
them. Despite efforts and even some successes of the imperialist
powers in subverting or perverting the revolutionary struggles of
the oppressed masses, especially in the hopes of turning them into
weapons of inter-imperialist rivalry, these struggles continue to
deal powerful blows to the imperialist system, and to accelerate
the development of revolutionary possibilities in the world as a
whole.
Despite a certain unevenness, the Kurdistan region
remains the Achilles heel of these states. This fact, bearing crucial
significance for the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat,
has by no means escaped the attention of the contending imperialist
powers, even as they frantically try to undermine each others strategic
positions in the Middle East and project and entrench themselves
according to the requirements of their global calculations. This
makes Kurdistan a most coveted piece of territory, one where the
contradiction between the Western imperialists and the social-imperialists,
and the contradiction between imperialism as a whole and the oppressed
peoples and nations, sharply interpenetrate and aggravate each other.
The fundamental difference between the thorough-going
revolutionary internationalist outlook of the class-conscious proletariat
and that of the Kurdish bourgeoisie, which can still play a progressive
and even a revolutionary role at times, comes into sharp relief
as the contradictions in the region sharpen further. Under the powerful
traction of inter-imperialist rivalry, various Kurdish bourgeois,
petit bourgeois and feudal forces inevitably tend to find it difficult
to maintain even a consistently revolutionary nationalist
stand, either falling prey to the manipulations of rival reactionaries
or outright succumbing to counter-revolutionary schemes and abandoning
the revolutionary road.
Iraq
The current configuration of forces and the specific
intertwining of the major international contradictions have brought
about a rather favourable setting for the revolutionary movement
in Iraqi Kurdistan. The outbreak of the February 1979 revolution
in Iran and the emergence of liberated areas or controlled by the
masses large sections of whom were led by revolutionary nationalist
and genuine communist forces in the Kurdish region in western
Iran, provided a tremendous opening for the development of the revolutionary
struggle in Iraqi Kurdistan as well. Having suffered crippling losses
to the Iraqi regime in a number of major engagements with the army
prior to this period, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), founded
in 1975 and currently based in the central parts of Iraqi Kurdistan,
was able to use this opening to reorganise its forces and to expand
its activity through participating in the revolutionary struggle
unfolding in the Kurdish region and the rest of Iran. The Komala
Ranjedaran [Organisation of Toilers], a major component of the PUK,
was founded in the early 1970s by revolutionary Marxists, such as
Dr Aram, who were profoundly influenced by the accomplishments of
the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China. They upheld
Mao Tsetung Thought and firmly opposed the social-imperialists of
the Soviet Union. Until the infamous treachery of the thoroughly
reactionary feudal Barzani clique and the Kurdistan Democrat Party
(KDP) of Iraq in 1975, the Komala Ranjedaran was forced to work
clandestinely in Iraqi Kurdistan. The Barzani clique, with the aid
of the US imperialists and their puppet the Shah of Iran, applied
a policy of terror and intimidation in order to drive the communist
and revolutionary forces out of Kurdistan, while simultaneously
applying pressure on the Iraqi regime in order to pry it out of
the social-imperialist orbit.
The Barzani clique harassed, terrorised and jailed
these revolutionaries under the guise that they harm the national
cause of the Kurds and they either should accept the leadership
of Barzani or stay inactive and not expose the betrayals of the
KDP-Iraq. Otherwise they would face arrest and imprisonment. But
these revolutionaries were not terrified by these reactionary threats
and secretly organised the advanced masses to prepare for an opening.
Following the exposure of the reactionary feudal-bourgeois
Barzani & Co. when they concluded a deal with the US imperialists
and the states of Iran and Iraq, openly selling out the struggle
in Kurdistan, the Komala Ranjedaran enjoyed wide support among the
Kurdish masses, many of whom they trained to be militant fighters.
With such historical roots, the Komala Ranjedaran,
a component part of the PUK led by Jelal Talebani, actively participated
in the revolutionary war against the holy crusade of the Khomeini
regime to suppress the movement in the Kurdish region of Iran. In
most of the major military actions, the Komala Ranjedaran effectively
co-operated with the Komala of Iran (the Organisation of the Toilers
of Kurdistan-Iran).
Co-operation between revolutionary groups has shown
the highly conducive nature of the Kurdish terrain for transmitting
revolutionary potential across the official state frontiers. After
the temporary setback of the struggle in Iran and the loss of open
liberated zones in the Kurdish region in Iran, Iraqi Kurdistan has
assumed the role of providing access and base areas for the activity
of the revolutionary forces. However, not all the areas currently
inaccessible to or unsecured by the armed forces of the Iraqi regime
are controlled by revolutionary nationalist or progressive Kurdish
forces. In the northern parts of Iraqi Kurdistan, the so-called
Provisional Leadership of the Kurdistan Democrat Party of Iraq (Guyadeh
Movaghghad), and a number of groups consisting of reactionary nationalist
forces and revisionist hirelings, such as the organisations Hassak
and Passok, have established a presence.
KDP-Iraq was reorganised by Barzanis sons, Masood
and Idris Barzani, under the guidance of the US imperialists with
local assistance from the Turkish National Intelligence Organisation
(MIT), SAVAK of Iran, and the Mossad of Israel. In 1976 Idris Barzani
opened offices in Washington, Tehran and Ankara to register volunteers
for the family trade: serving as a willing tool of the imperialists
and reactionaries. In his memoirs, William Colby, head of the CIA
between 1973-76, openly admits that their fear of the Kurdish movement
in Iraq led them to the decision to support [!] the separatist
movement. As a first step we assisted them in getting organised.
(30 Years of the CIA). What Colby refers to is none other
than the Barzani set-up, which was intended to contain the revolutionary
movement in the Kurdistan of Iran, Iraq, and Turkey. After 1976,
the KDP-Iraq (GM) was particularly built up by the imperialist and
local reactionary media as a legitimate (!) force representing
the Kurds in Iraq and was aided in establishing an affiliate in
Turkey. Plenty of references could be found in the June-July 1976
issues of the Washington Post and the New York Times about
the criminal activities of the KDP-Iraq (GM), which were aimed at
destroying the influence and the forces of the PUK in Iraq. The
18 June 1978 issue of the reactionary Turkish newspaper Hürriyet
even went so far as publishing pictures of Turkish special counter-insurgency
commandos arm-in-arm with members of the KDP Iraq (GM), who had
been conducting joint operations against PUK militants in the Hakkari
region of Turkey under the leadership of Zeki Bey and Mejid Haci
Ahmed of the Turkish secret service.
The list of the mercenary services of the notorious
Barzani warlords does not end there. During the revolutionary upsurge
in the Kurdistan of Iran, the KDP-Iraq(GM) made every effort to
aid the Khomeini regime by training its Pasdaran forces, who were
not very effective in suppressing the Kurdish insurgents, by actively
conducting armed suppression of revolutionary peasant committees,
by hunting and killing revolutionary militants, terrorising the
masses, launching attacks on revolutionary workers in the cities,
and so forth. As befits these despicable mercenaries, the KDP-Iraq
(GM) were at the forefront of the columns of the Pasdaran whenever
they entered revolutionary strongholds of the masses that had fallen
to the enemy.
Certainly this long and brazen devotion to counter-revolution
and to the conscious sabotage of Kurdish national and social emancipation
has aroused the hatred of the broad masses. They are mercenaries.
They can enlist in the service of any imperialist or reactionary
states army. No matter what cover they may use they are sold out ,
as the Kurdish masses say of them, and must be exposed, isolated
and defeated.
In the recent period, especially since the outbreak
of the Iran-Iraq war, the various states in the region along with
the imperialist powers have sought to build up and utilise Kurdish
forces along the principle of the enemy of my enemy is my friend .
For example, the Khomeini regime has armed and backed different
forces in Iraqi Kurdistan while carrying out savage repression in
Iranian Kurdistan. Similarly, the Soviet social-imperialists
are trying to use different Kurdish groups as bargaining chips and/or
pressure groups to increase the Soviets own leverage in the region.
One recent important tactic of the Soviets in Iran, Iraq and Turkey
seems to be efforts to pull together a front of different Kurdish
groups of various political persuasions, including those like the
Barzani forces who had been linked up with the US. Even some forces
who previously condemned social-imperialism are finding the Soviet
carrot and stick difficult to resist.
Turkey
The Western imperialist bloc, with the US as its
gang leader, is striving to savagely clamp down on the revolutionary
movement in Kurdistan in order to shield its puppet states from
any potential mortal blows. This is an important component of its
policy of fortifying these reactionary states as strongholds against
the rival social-imperialist bloc.
This suppression campaign has involved bloody
counter-insurgency operations, the forced migration of Kurdish villagers,
the fanning of religious differences, and has brought about the
calculated resettlement of refugees from Afghanistan in rebellious
Kurdish areas in Turkey following the coup détat of September
1980. With the wholesale arrest of the male population in Kurdish
villages and towns, the establishment of strategic hamlets, restriction
of freedom of movement by new martial law injunctions as well as
efforts to establish a network of informers enticed by bounty offers,
the fascist regime in Turkey hopes to reduce the danger it faces
there. In accordance with the overall plans of their US masters,
the Turkish ruling classes have relocated an important section of
their ground troops into the Kurdish region of eastern Turkey in
addition to upgrading existing air strips and building new ones
for the quick deployment of ground troops. All of the European imperialists,
especially Britain, West Germany, France and Italy, have been actively
involved in modernising and strengthening the Turkish armed forces
to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in order to increase
their capacity to maintain internal security and to effectively
confront a possible Soviet drive through the eastern borders of
Turkey. This underscores the international significance of the Kurdish
regions of Turkey, of the resurgence of the revolutionary movement
there, and particularly the establishment of red political power
bases.
Prior to the 1980 coup, the Kurdish region in eastern
Turkey, due to the sharpening of the national and land questions,
vigorously participated in the country-wide upsurge of revolutionary
struggle. The revolutionary upsurge that broke loose in neighbouring
Iran with the February 1979 revolution and the emergence of liberated
areas and large guerrilla forces under the leadership of revolutionary
nationalist and communist organisations in Iranian Kurdistan emboldened
the revolutionary movement in the Kurdish region of eastern Turkey
as well. Especially from the mid-1970s on, increasing numbers of
poor peasants, semi-proletarians and students demanded that they
be armed and organised for revolutionary war against the regime.
Within the Kurdish national movement certain changes
had taken place with the consolidation of the central state in Turkey
and years of genocidal suppression campaigns through the 1920s and
1930s. A section of the big Kurdish landlords had chosen to collude
with the Turkish ruling classes, and even a number of big Kurdish
bourgeois had defected to them. Through this period the Kurdish
bourgeoisie was able to strengthen itself, reducing the influence
of the feudals on the Kurdish national movement. By the early 1970s
the leadership of the movement was mainly in the hands of the Kurdish
bourgeoisie, bourgeois Kurdish intellectuals and small Kurdish landlords.
Some more passive and conservative sections among these strata fell
under the direct or indirect influence of the pro-Moscow revisionists,
sometimes through their connections with similar Kurdish forces
in neighbouring Iraq and Iran.
On the other hand, among the Kurdish proletarians,
semi-proletarians, peasants, university students and high school
teachers, Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought was also rapidly
spreading. In fact, from the founding of the TKP/ML (1972) onwards,
this section of the Kurdish masses has played an important role
in fighting for revolutionary communist politics.
Some revolutionary nationalist petit-bourgeois
Kurdish forces were also influenced by Mao Tsetung but, infected
with a narrow nationalist outlook, they could not avoid disintegrating
later on in the face of Enver Hoxhas attack on Marxism-Leninism-Mao
Tsetung Thought.
By 1980, different cliques within the Turkish ruling
classes were panicking and hysterically accusing each other of incompetence,
which, they said, was dragging the whole country into civil war.
Naturally the Kurdish region was a main tributary feeding the potential
for the revolutionary warfare that could cause the ground under
their feet to give way. The white terror unleashed by the Turkish
junta throughout the country, combined with intensified national
oppression, assumed atrocious forms in Kurdistan. However, even
after the coup, despite all the sanguinary suppression, a social
base for armed struggle has continued to exist among the Kurdish
masses. Oppression breeds resistance. During this period, TIKKO
(Worker Peasant Liberation Army of Turkey) guerrillas under the
leadership of the TKP/ML were able to carry on armed activity in
this region.
Iran
The Kurdistan region of Iran played a major role
in toppling the Shahs regime in February 1979, and this in turn
unleashed further revolutionary outbursts. Tremendous enthusiasm
for the revolutionary transformation of society was surging forward
in search of ways and means to uproot and sweep away all that is
responsible for the wretched conditions and the national oppression
to which the masses have been condemned for decades. Revolutionary
mass organisations, organs of peoples power, and small and large
units of armed peshmergas emerged almost instantaneously. This unrestrained
revolutionary fervour, particularly on the part of the poor peasants,
semi-proletarians, proletarians, and revolutionary intellectuals,
readily gravitated towards the leadership of Kurdish communist revolutionaries,
such as Kak Salah Sham Borhan (a UIC leader) and Kak Fuad Soltani
(the founder of Komala-Iran) who later fell as a martyr in battle
against the Islamic Republic. This occurred even though bourgeois-feudal
nationalist forces and the reactionary Tudeh Party did much to hold
them in check.
May Day 1979 celebrations were held all over Kurdistan,
including a ten thousand strong march in Kermashan under the red
banner of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought. Communists vigorously
led activities, such as organising revolutionary mass organisations,
peasant unions, the peasants fight against feudal elements, the
confiscation and redistribution of feudal landholdings, military
training of the masses, and so forth.
The revolutionary stand of the UIC, together with
its policy of unleashing the agrarian revolution and setting up
peasant committees, led to the strengthening of the UIC in a relatively
short period of time.
Revolutionary masses also enthusiastically supported
the militant positions taken by Komala of Iran, then under the leadership
of Fuad Soltani. Despite certain nationalist tendencies, Fuad was
a Marxist-Leninist and a strong defender of Mao Tsetung. He made
tremendous efforts and contributions to organising and arming the
peasant unions. When the Islamic Republic of Iran first moved to
establish its law and order in Kurdistan by erecting army posts
in Marivan, a major Kurdish city, Fuad initiated and led the famous
mass March of Marivan . Thousands joined in, from peasant unions,
from revolutionary mass organisations in different cities, along
with armed peshmergas; they beat back the reactionary armed forces
of the Islamic Republic and gave a small taste of their revolutionary
power. This march was a bold initiative in unleashing the revolutionary
energy of the masses and drawing them into political life. It taught
them to guard the revolution and carry it forward by force of arms.
This march also played an important role in spreading the influence
of Komala.
During this same period, the Kurdistan Democrat
Party (Iran) was enamoured with the possibility of coming to terms
with the clerics and securing regional autonomy in Kurdistan without
disturbing the pre-capitalist social relations and the feudal landlords.
KDP (Iran) leaflets had a distinctly Tudeh revisionist flavour,
introduced through the agency of the arch revisionist Bullurian,
who was the Tudeh Party connection in the KDP (Iran) leadership
at that time; they did not fail to heap praise on the Khomeini regime.
It is important to keep in mind that all this was to no avail: the
mullahs had no intention of attenuating the national oppression
of the Kurds, let alone sharing any of their newly acquired power.
Furthermore, the policy of KDP (Iran) did not win
it credit with the masses. Even in Mahabad, which is considered
one of their base areas, mainly due to the historical prestige they
inherited from the short-lived Kurdish Autonomous Republic of Mahabad
in 1946 and its revolutionary nationalist leader Gazi Mohammed,
thousands of people supported Komalas activities. And when the
Kurdish counter-revolutionary forces chose to resort to such reactionary
actions as murdering UIC leader Kak Salah in order to hold on to
their base and avoid being exposed, outraged masses showed where
their sympathies lay when tens of thousands attended his funeral
in Mahabad in the spring of 1979.
As for the UIC in this period, its revolutionary
work, despite shortcomings, demonstrated that new, small forces
armed with the revolutionary communist outlook can establish and
expand a mass base and a revolutionary army in a relatively short
period on the political terrain of Kurdistan, which had grown even
more favourable with the fall of the Shah.
The emergence of a communist led peasant movement
and the peshmergas army under the leadership of the UIC, which won
the confidence of the masses during the first (summer of 1979) and
second (spring 1980) wars launched by the Khomeini regime against
the revolutionary struggle in Kurdistan, demonstrated the correctness
of this point.
The Khomeini regimes counter-revolutionary war
against Kurdistan, directed by then Prime Minister Bani Sadr, was
a major and quite risky effort by the new ruling class, and was
prompted by their need to consolidate power and to clamp down on
the overall revolutionary upsurge that had broken loose throughout
the country. The clerics were quick to detect the dangerous potential
of the revolution to gather momentum in Kurdistan and to become
a base area for the deepening and even the consummation of the anti-imperialist
anti-feudal revolution in Iran. The struggle in Kurdistan had a
long history and, being deeply rooted among the Kurdish masses,
could easily generate a mighty mass revolutionary movement against
national oppression, imperialism and the feudal relations of production,
particularly if it were led by the proletariat and genuine communists.
As it was, the movement in Kurdistan had already been a very significant
ingredient of the popular revolutionary upsurge that swept away
the blood-soaked throne of the Shah; a new and qualitatively higher
upsurge in Kurdistan would send tremors through the country once
again, awakening the vast army of peasants in the Iranian countryside,
invigorating the struggle of other national minorities and overall
strengthening the revolutionary forces.
Across the country the masses were still in motion,
expecting that all the socio-economic props and buttresses of imperialist
domination and exploitation would be completely dismantled and that
full democracy for the people would be achieved. Doing away with
national oppression and uprooting the wretched semi-feudal economic
relations in the countryside were crucial parts of the revolutionary
transformations that were required to extricate the whole country
from the international imperialist network of bondage and to fulfil
the peoples aspirations for new-democratic revolution. And Kurdistan
was a territory not a small one at that where the proletariat
could lead the masses in realising these aspirations and forcing
their way out of the straitjacket of the Khomeini regime, which
was gearing up to resurrect the bourgeois comprador-feudal dictatorship.
Due to national oppression, the urgent land question and other historical
reasons, the revolutionary communists could have mobilised the masses
to carry out armed agrarian revolution and other revolutionary democratic
transformations both in the economic base and the superstructure.
All this would have greatly enhanced their ability to build a revolutionary
peoples army to both take part in and defend these revolutionary
transformations against all obstacles. The clerics fear aside, this
would have been nothing short of raising the red flag in its full
grandeur as an inspiration, not merely in Iran and the region, but
for the oppressed around the world.
Undoubtedly in a more immediate sense the emergence
of such a red base in Kurdistan that could defend its new-democratic
peoples power by a genuinely revolutionary army of peshmergas would
have dramatically transformed the political climate in Iran. The
Khomeini regime did not fail to sense that the red storm from Kurdistan
could blow away the mask of Islamic obscurantism blended with phoney
anti-imperialist rhetoric, exposing and isolating it even more among
the Iranian masses. The class struggle would have taken a dangerous
turn for the aspiring clerical compradors and feudals, with the
advanced sections of the masses rallying to the banner of the advancing
revolution led by the proletariat in Kurdistan. The support for
the revolutionary war and the revolutionary transformations in Kurdistan,
closely integrated with the revolutionary struggle in the cities
and other regions, would have spurred and strengthened the social
base of the communist movement and popularised its programme for
new-democratic Revolution country-wide. This type of situation would
have enabled the revolutionary communists to politically train the
masses and increase their military capacity for the decisive engagements
shaping up in the future. Furthermore, even in the event of setbacks
suffered by the revolutionary forces in the rest of the country,
Kurdistan could still have provided a base area for the revolution
until the conditions matured again for a new all-around offensive
against the regime.
However the political and ideological crisis that
came to a head following the reactionary coup détat in China
shortly after the death of Mao Tsetung seriously impaired the ability
of the revolutionary communists in Iran to fully grasp and act upon
the revolutionary opportunities. Within this context, the outbreak
of the Iran Iraq war particularly exacerbated the shortcomings and
errors of the revolutionary communists, giving rise to a tendency
to liquidate the national question and the strategic significance
of the armed struggle in Kurdistan as part of the overall struggle
for political power. The UIC (Sarbedaran), in a lengthy article
published in its central organ, Haghighat which was later
reprinted in the fourth issue of AWTW discusses the causes
of these errors and states that: ...ideological deviations in our
policies and political line were the breeding ground for economist
and bourgeois democratic tendencies in our ranks. A more general
practical result of this was losing our strategic perspective and
tailing behind the spontaneous events. Even more important, we neglected
the possibility of our preparing the proletariat for seizing political
power in that period.
The fact that the regime chose to commit itself
to a bitter military campaign against the struggle in Kurdistan,
despite the great risks involved, underscores what a formidable
potential this terrain held and continues to hold for advancing
the revolution. Within a month after the Shahs demise, the struggle
in Kurdistan was already challenging the new regime with arms, distinguishing
Kurdistan as an advanced territory, which, under proletarian leadership,
could indeed set the standards for the other regions. The regimes
first military campaign of suppression proved that the Kurdish landscape
could be quite treacherous for the reactionaries. With no quick
victory in sight and wary of the political cost of the war, which
was pushing the more revolutionary section of the nationalists,
as well as the communists, to the head of the struggle, the clerics
tried to manoeuvre to exploit the contradictions on the Kurdish
front through negotiations for a ceasefire, hoping to sow confusion
and reformist illusions and thereby gain time.
As later events proved, there was nothing to be
gained from negotiations; the regime had no intention of recognising
the right of the Kurdish nation to self-determination or even autonomy.
It was trying to gain time to reorganise its own forces by enticing
the nationalist forces to slacken their struggle. Indeed, in the
spring of 1980, the regimes army was pounding at the gates of Sanandaj,
with the commander in chief, Bani Sadr, hollering, We must not
take off our shoes till we take power in Kurdistan. During this
period the Mujahadin maintained a conspicuous and treacherous
silence on the regimes attack on Kurdistan, reflecting the Fars
[largest and dominant national group in Iran] ( great nation ) chauvinism
typical of this group.
II. Kurdistan: Some Historical Background
Britain and the Kurds
The Lausanne Treaty of July 1923, in a flagrant
but typical imperialist violation of the rights of nations to self-determination,
carved up the Kurdish territory into four parts and annexed them
to the reactionary states of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. There
is evidence, however, that for a brief period after the war the
British were entertaining the idea of forming not one but two vassal
states in the regions of Basra, Baghdad and Mosul. Naturally these
would have remained under a strict mandate and protection of His
Majestys Government for no less than 25 years, in order to allow
these uncivilised peoples a necessary period of maturation acceptable
to the taste and interests of the British crown. According to this
imperialist concoction, King Faisal of the Hashemee monarchy was
to be the superintendent over the Basra and Baghdad regions while
Sheikh Mahmond Barzanji from the feudal clans of the Barzan area
in the north was to be responsible for the Kurdish region. At the
time, the British political supervisor Sir Arnold Wilson was of
the opinion that with Sheikh Mahmoud in charge of Iraqi Kurdistan
not only would the prominent feudal Kurdish leaders of Hamawend
and Sulaymaniyah be appeased, and thus willing to be used against
the Turkish military campaigns that were then being conducted to
seize back the oil-rich Kirkuk area, but also all this could lend
itself handsomely to establishing a puppet Arab regime in the south.
The Kirkuk area had been under British Army occupation since early
May 1918, but it was not fully secured for British interests due
to the raids by Turkey. Under these circumstances, with the injunction
from the British, Sheikh Mahmoud Barzanji was declared sovereign
in what was to become Iraqi Kurdistan. In a letter of November 1918
bearing the signatures of forty feudal clan chiefs, Sheikh Mahmoud
offered his services to the British political commissioner of Mesopotamia:
Since His Majestys government had declared its intention to free
the peoples of the East from Turkish oppression and to help them
gain their independence, the chiefs who are the representatives
of the Kurdish people request that they be taken under the British
governments protection and be incorporated into Iraq in order not
to be deprived of the benefits of the union. They request from the
Mesopotamia civilian commissioner that a representative with the
necessary authorisation be sent in order to provide the Kurdish
people with the aid of the British and the opportunity of peacefully
advancing on the path of civilisation. If the government assists
the Kurds and protects them, then in turn they will guarantee to
accept its orders and views.
As a side point, the outlook and aspirations expressed
in this letter reflect the rather strong feudal trend that existed
in most of these nascent Kurdish national movements at the time,
rendering them vulnerable to manipulation and armed suppression
by the imperialists and their regional puppets. Speaking of the
early Kurdish movement in Turkey, Ibrahim Kaypakkaya points out
that, Alongside the national character of these movements; there
also existed a feudal character. (See article in this issue.)
However, the expectations of Sheikh Mahmoud and
other feudal leaders were not always in harmony with what the British
demanded in Iraq. Sheikh Mahmoud was seeking an autonomous Kurdish
state under British protection, and in May 1919 he had already taken
a new initiative by declaring himself the King of Kurdistan after
a successful seizure of Sulaymaniyah from British forces. The British
were not willing to tolerate such unruly behaviour. In fact, by
May 1924, their better imperial judgement no longer favoured an
autonomous Kurdish state in the north; King Faisal from Shirnaq,
who had established friendly relations with certain feudal leaders
and had already been crowned in August 1921, was to be backed as
the King of Iraq.
The British imperialists, who were anxious to consolidate
their gains in the Arab world and to secure their monopoly over
its rich petroleum reserves and the rest of the wealth in the region,
chose to prop up the Hashemee monarchy and to rely on the infamous
Royal Air Force (RAF) to force the Kurds into accepting the Arab
government. Besides, the Lausanne Treaty with the puppet Kemalist
regime in Turkey had provided sufficient security for their interests,
greatly reducing the need to use the Kurdish rebellion as a battering
ram against the new Turkish comprador-feudal state, which itself
was adamant about refusing any concession to or encouragement of
the Kurds.
The concern of the British as well as their European
partners generally about overdoing the charade of liberating the
peoples of the East was hardly mitigated by the establishment of
a truly revolutionary state run by the proletariat in what had been
Tsarist Russia, which was both assisting and inspiring the oppressed
around the world to throw off the yoke imposed on them. The new
Soviet state replaced the Tsars prison house of nations with
genuine national equality which sent shock waves through Central
Asia and the Middle East. As soon as they seized power the Bolsheviks
had exposed and denounced all the secret negotiations of Tsarist
Russia the Sazonov memorandum of February 1916 and the April 1916
Agreement bargaining over the terms of the Treaty of Sykes-Picot
proposed by the allied imperialists about annexing the Kurdish
region all the way to the south of Van and Bitlis in Turkey. Had
the Kurds gained any real autonomy or a separate state in any one
region then this could have fanned the flames of genuine national
liberation and possibly become a rallying point for the emerging
national movement in the neighbouring states. In such an eventuality,
the imperialists dreaded the possibility of the Kurdish national
movement gravitating towards the victorious Bolshevik revolution
in Russia and further extending its popularity and influence in
the area.
The feudal nature of the leadership of the movement
and the ongoing problems among the different feudal clans were exploited
by the British and the Hashemee monarchy in order to contain and
suppress the Kurdish movement. Britains strategic interests in
the Middle East also required the establishment of a pro-British
Arab government in Iraq; in order to achieve that, the British imperialists
were more than willing to back the Hashemee monarchy in appropriating
the wealth of the Kurdish region. In December 1927 the League of
Nations passed a resolution on the annexation of Mosul by Iraq.
Elbowing the Kurds out, the Hashemee monarchy was going to be able
to monopolise the high revenues from the Mosul petroleum reserves
and the export-oriented tobacco crop of Sulaymaniyah. According
to one estimate, during this period 30 per cent of the total income
of the Arab regime was coming from Iraqi Kurdistan. Naturally much
of this was funnelled to the raising and training of an army in
order to reduce the burden on the British forces being used against
the Kurdish rebels.
Indeed, without the massive aerial bombardment
by His Majestys RAF, the British and Iraqi troops were no match
for the Kurdish insurgents in the mountains. Successive punitive
expeditions never really succeeded in putting out the flame of armed
rebellion among the Kurdish masses, despite the obvious limitations
of their leaders. As Britain was preparing the basis to bestow independence
on Iraq (1931) with a British-Iraqi agreement (June 1930), leaving
the responsibility of maintaining internal security to the Baghdad
regime, a new round of struggle broke out in Kurdistan. The Iraqi
army and the RAF conducted a large-scale terror campaign against
the Kurds under the leadership of Sheikh Mahmoud and later Sheikh
Ahmed Barzani, which lasted until 1934. In the first eight months
alone of this internal security operation more than half of the
Kurdish villages were razed. The gravity of the situation prompted
the British imperialists to intervene under the cloak of non-partisan
mediators and arrange a cease-fire; they were so generous as to
propose an increase in the number of civil servants of Kurdish nationality
in Kurdistan and of the Kurdish youth in the Iraqi Army.
Mistakes of the Communist Movement
The coup détat of Khrushchev and the revisionists
in the Soviet Union was also, it is clear now, the coup de grâce
to the communist movement as it had previously existed. The widespread
cancer of revisionism had already consumed many (including some
of the most influential) parties that made up the Comintern. (Declaration
of the RIM.)
The damage inflicted on the revolutionary movement
in Kurdistan by the revisionist parties, particularly after the
rise of the modern revisionists to power in the Soviet Union, is
no secret. However the cancer of revisionism that had already
consumed many of the communist parties prior to the reactionary
coup of the revisionists in the Soviet Union reared its ugly head
with respect to the Kurdish national liberation movement much earlier
than even the degeneration of these parties. Starting in the middle
1920s, the Communist Party of Turkey abandoned the Marxist-Leninist
orientation, negating the positions adopted at its founding congress
in Baku (1920) under the leadership of Mustafa Suphi. With its 1926
Programme under the leadership of Shefik Hüsnu, the TKPs line
became openly revisionist, capitulationist and class-collaborationist.
It not only hailed the regime of the new Turkish comprador bourgeoisie
and landlords but openly supported its counter-revolutionary policies
under the pretext of encouraging and strengthening the so-called
anti-imperialist and anti-feudal capacity of the Kemalist regime.
These unmitigated revisionists felt no shame in
giving open and full support to the genocidal campaigns the Kemalist
regime launched to suppress the Kurdish rebellions in eastern Turkey;
in fact, they were even inclined to spur the ruling classes on to
be more consistent, resolute and thorough-going in these campaigns.
Just before the famous Sheikh Said Rebellion of 1925, the TKP delegation
to the Fifth World Congress of the Comintern made the following
remarkable assessment of the national question in his speech to
the Twentieth Session of the Congress: The most significant national
minority are the Kurds; during the last fifty years, the Kurdish
question has come on the agenda three or four times as a partial
question and in a feudal context. The Kurdish national question
has never appeared on the scene in its full dimensions. The current
laws grant the same constitutional rights to the whole Muslim population.
Therefore, the intellectual and bourgeois elements among the Kurds
have put forward no national and separatist demands whatsoever.
Nine months after this speech the Turkish Army was receiving help
from the French imperialists to use the railroad through Syria in
order to encircle the insurgents of the Sheik Said Rebellion. What
the TKP delegation described as no national or separatist demands
whatsoever turned out to be a full-scale armed rebellion and
that was not to be the last of it.
However, it appears that the revisionist TKP was
successful in persuading some in the Executive Committee of the
Comintern (ECCI). An ECCI report from the period 1925-26 says that:
&The Kemalist bourgeois republican party, which came to power through
revolution and continues to hold power, succeeded in putting down
the rebellion led by Sheik Said in the east. The suppression of
the Kurdish rebellion has increased the respectability of the Turkish
government at home and abroad. The expectations of the British imperialists
about the weakening of the national state power of Turkey have come
to naught.
Even in 1928 at the Sixth World Congress, an ECCI
report on the Middle East and Turkey had the following evaluation:
Like everywhere else, capitalist development in Turkey is also
being realised on the backs of the labouring masses. Although the
Kemalist revolution owes its victory to the support of the peasant
masses, the latters situation has not improved at all. Economic
and political power in the Eastern provinces is still in the hands
of feudal lords and Sheiks as in the past. The Kemalist government
could not even utilise the famous counter-revolution in Kurdistan
(1925) to eliminate the feudal fiefdoms in this region. The Kemalist
government was content with just punishing a few feudal landlords.
It is reasonable to suspect that the TKP revisionists
were influential in formulating such evaluations. Furthermore, they
used them to justify their brazen support for the completely counter-revolutionary
Kemalist regime even in its brutal aggression against the Kurdish
people. The TKP revisionists thus chose to abandon the Kurdish proletarians,
peasants and broad masses in the face of bloody genocide. Naturally
it could not have occurred to the revisionists to lead the Kurdish
proletariat in organising a mighty revolutionary movement to channel
the Kurdish masses righteous anger against this.
The revisionist policy led to the strengthening
of the leadership of the nationalist bourgeois and feudal forces
to the detriment of the proletariat and working masses of Kurdistan.
It provided support to the Turkish chauvinist propaganda of the
ruling classes to befuddle the minds of the Turkish workers and
peasants.
In Iran during and after the Second World War,
the line of the Tudeh Party did serious damage to the Kurdish national
movement, which held great potential for the development of a revolutionary
struggle throughout the country. Instead the Tudeh Partys reformist
outlook served only to strengthen illusions about achieving autonomy
for both the Kurdish and Azerbaijani national movements. With promises
of cabinet posts, the Iranian regime was able to have the Tudeh
Party pull the reins on the tremendous revolutionary potential that
existed among the working class at the time. Though the Tudeh party
fulfilled its promises of holding the revolutionary masses in check,
the regime clamped down on it shortly before the elections in 1947.
Further, in 1946 the Autonomous Kurdish Republic of Mahabad faced
assault by the regime and received no substantial support from the
revolutionary masses in the rest of the country due to the class-collaborationist
policy of the Tudeh Party.
Mababad Kurdish Autonomous Republic
The resounding collapse of the Shahs monarchy
under the blows of the February 1979 revolution in Iran, together
with the US-sponsored September 1980 coup détat in neighbouring
Turkey which was an integral part of the calculated imperialist
response to the revolutionary ferment of the Iranian masses and
the Iran-Iraq war, now entering its sixth year, have all laid bare
the depth of the crisis of the imperialist world order and profoundly
influenced the situation throughout the Kurdish regions of these
countries.
The period after the mid-1960s was a prelude to
the February revolution and provided tremendous impetus for the
revolutionary process in the Kurdistan region of Iran. There emerged
new lines of demarcation and a new alignment of forces within the
more revolutionary sections of the national movement, which had
earlier suffered a serious setback. In the late 1940s the Iranian
regime had unleashed an annihilation campaign against the Kurdish
nationalist movement, culminating in the genocidal murder of thousands
of Kurds. The head of the Kurdish Democratic Party (Iran), Gazi
Mohammed himself, was caught and hung by the regime to demoralise
the Kurdish rebels who had been fighting with inspiring heroism.
Under the leadership of Gazi Mohammed, the Kurdish rebels had developed
political and military strength and had gained some autonomy. This
came about through the opening created by the Second World War,
particularly following the entry of the Soviet Red Army from the
north and the British troops from the south. On 11 January 1946,
in Mahabad, Gazi Mohammed publicly announced the founding of the
Mahabad Kurdish Autonomous Republic.
His speech at the founding ceremony of the republic
reveals the political thinking that had been guiding the movement
up to that point: A salute to you, Flag, you who symbolise justice
and law, we give our word that we shall live in unity and do away
with strife forever. Flag, now you fly over only one part of Kurdistan.
Tomorrow when you fly over all parts, you will sweep away oppression
and injustice. Long Live Great Kurdistan! Gazi Mohammed and the
KDP (Iran) in that period had a revolutionary nationalist outlook
and were opposed to the national oppression perpetrated on the Kurdish
people. Their struggle was limited to securing national equality
for the Kurds. Their programme did not call for an anti-feudal struggle,
and it reflected the illusion that there could be equality between
oppressed and oppressor nations in Iran, or at least that the regime
would respect Kurdish autonomy, without any kind of proletarian-led
revolutionary overthrow of the central state power.
The same illusion held sway in Azerbaijan as well,
where the nationalist movement led by the Azerbaijani Democratic
Party also obtained the recognition of regional autonomy for the
Azerbaijani people on 19 June 1946 from the representatives of the
government of Gavam-o-Saltaneh in Tehran. The presence of the Red
Army in the north played a decisive role, along with the militancy
and wide scope of the nationalist movement, in forcing the central
government in Tehran to yield to the demands for autonomy of the
oppressed nations in Iran. The standing army of the regime had practically
disintegrated after the entry of the Soviet and British armies in
1941; the regime had no means to crush the nationalist movements,
other than diplomatic demagogy designed to bring the US and its
European allies to bear on the Soviet Union, which it charged with
instigating civil war through the presence of its armies in Iran.
The Red Army pulled out of Iran on 6 May 1946, but the US imperialists
were the ones who bellowed the most about the alleged danger of
the Soviet move to seize the oil reserves and to extend its influence
in the region. True enough, the victory of the USSR, then a socialist
country, over German imperialism did in fact gain genuine sympathy
from the oppressed, including in Iran. But the socialist Soviet
Union then, unlike the social-imperialist USSR today, was not motivated
by the need to establish world hegemony. Coming out of the Second
World War on top among the imperialists, it was the US that was
aggressively pursuing a policy of consolidating its hegemony and
containing the revolutionary upsurges that had erupted during and
after the war.
The Mahabad Kurdish Autonomous Republic emerged
under these conditions and, given that the situation in Iran and
internationally had more or less stabilised and that the US imperialists
were backing Iran, it now had to face a murderous backlash by the
regime. The limitations of the nationalist ideology guiding it meant
that the Republic could not withstand this attack, despite heroic
resistance by the masses.
Confusion and demoralization characterised the
ensuing years. In the mid-1950s, the seizure of power by the revisionists
in the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism there caused
great damage to the world-wide revolutionary front, dragging many
communist parties into the swamp of class collaboration and degeneration.
In Iran, the Tudeh Party, which had never been a genuine Marxist-Leninist
party, was in no position to resist this international malady or
the attacks of the regime. The 1953 CIA-engineered coup détat
was a heavy price paid for all reformist illusions and marked the
consolidation of US domination in Iran.
However, as Lenin remarked on one occasion, history
does not stand still even in times of counter-revolution. The liberation
struggles of the oppressed peoples and nations in the colonies and
semi- (neo-) colonies were experiencing a powerful new upsurge.
Under the leadership of Mao Tsetung, the Communist Party of China
gave invaluable political and material support to these struggles
and launched a stinging critique of the Soviet revisionists betrayal
of revolution at home and abroad.
III. Crucial Questions of Political Line
The experience accumulated over decades of bitter
struggle, the historical limitations of the various feudal-bourgeois
and bourgeois leaderships, the further development of the proletariat
as a social class and especially the painful lessons of the repeated
betrayals and back-stabbings by the revisionists all this bore
down on the more revolutionary sections of the Kurdish movement,
compelling them to search for a truly revolutionary orientation.
The Soviet Union, after the Twentieth Congress
of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1956, was anxious
to collude with the Western imperialist powers, particularly the
US. The new bourgeoisie that had usurped power after the death of
Stalin was aggressively pursuing a policy of restoring capitalism
at home and opposing the revolutionary struggle of the oppressed
peoples internationally. The new Soviet bourgeoisie was heaping
praise on the Iranian constitution and on the White Revolution
instituted by the Shahs regime, which had been a mortal enemy of
the Kurds. Attuned to Moscows directives, the counter-revolutionary
Tudeh Party was a willing abettor of the regimes bloody measures
to suppress the Kurdish revolutionaries.
Similarly, the pro-Moscow revisionists of the
Communist Party of Iraq chose to condone all the savagery against
the Kurdish people in a despicable complicity of silence as the
regime of Abdul Kerim Ghassem launched a full-scale military campaign
against Iraqi Kurdistan in 1961 in order to consolidate the central
state authority. As Iraq was pulled increasingly into the social-imperialist
orbit, it was the Soviets who armed, trained and advised the Iraqi
military apparatus particularly after 1968 to rain death and
destruction on the Kurdish landscape, while the CP of Iraq naturally
stood by and gave full consent to avoid jeopardizing its chances
of getting a few token seats in the government.
In Turkey, the revisionists had long since succumbed
to the unbridled Turkish chauvinism of the Kemalist ideology, which
did not even recognise the existence of Kurdish as a language. They
were more than willing to assist the ruling classes in brutally
clamping down on the Kurdish national movement in exchange for being
granted the legal status they had long cherished.
Mao Tsetung Thought
Against this background, the momentous international
battles waged under the leadership of Mao Tsetung against Khrushchevite
modern revisionism and the new capitalist class in the Soviet Union
as well as the capitalist-roaders in China could not but have a
profound effect on the revolutionary struggle in Kurdistan. As observed
in the Declaration of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement:
If the theoretical struggle against modern revisionism
played a vital role in the rebuilding of a Marxist-Leninist movement
it was especially the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, an
unprecedented new form of struggle, itself in large part a fruit
of this combat against modern revisionism, that gave rise to a whole
new generation of Marxist-Leninists. The tens of millions of workers,
peasants and revolutionary youth who went into battle to overthrow
the capitalist-roaders entrenched in the party and state apparatus
and to further revolutionise society struck a vibrant chord among
millions of people across the world who were rising up as part of
the revolutionary upsurge that swept the world in the 1960s and
early 1970s.
...The Cultural Revolution was waged as part of
the international struggle of the proletariat and was a training
ground in proletarian internationalism, manifested not only by the
support given to revolutionary struggles throughout the world but
also by the real sacrifices made by the Chinese people to render
this support...
The Cultural Revolution was the living proof of
the vitality of Marxism-Leninism. It showed that the proletarian
revolution was unlike all previous revolutions which could only
result in one exploiting system replacing another. It was a source
of great inspiration to the revolutionaries in all countries.
The revolutionary movement in Kurdistan was no
exception. A significant number of revolutionary Kurdish intellectuals
and students around the University of Tehran were influenced by
the red storm that had broken loose in China sweeping away the revisionist
debris that cluttered the path of revolutionary struggle. The historic
significance of the revolutionary line represented by Mao Tsetung
and of the battle between Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought and
modern revisionism was certainly grasped unevenly by such forces.
Revolutionaries such as Fuad Soltani considered themselves upholders
of Mao Tsetung Thought, and others, such as Suleyman Moiini and
Ismail Sherifz Edeh took a militant stand against the revisionist
and reformist debasement of the revolutionary struggle, mainly regarding
the class-collaborationist thesis of the peaceful road to socialism ,
endorsed by the Tudeh Party renegades. They began to organise armed
struggle in Kurdistan.
The revisionist forces, with the Tudeh Party at
their head, were bitterly set against this nascent revolutionary
trend in Iran. During the mop-up operations of 1967, which were
launched in Tehran and Kurdistan to nip this trend in the bud, the
Tudeh revisionists did not hesitate to collaborate with the Shah.
The US-engineered land reform which, not surprisingly, enjoyed
the editorial praise of Izvestia and Pravda had
conspicuously refrained from changing the landholding arrangements
in Kurdistan, a move designed to enlist the support of the Kurdish
feudal landlords and khans (local feudal authorities) against the
progressive and revolutionary forces in Kurdistan. All this could
only reaffirm Mao Tsetungs scientific teachings on the nature of
modern revisionism and on the necessity of integrating armed struggle
and the agrarian revolution, so as to start a prairie fire across
the Kurdish landscape.
However, the shortcomings of this beginning revolutionary
current, along with early and savage repression by the regime, did
much to impede the development of a revolutionary movement guided
by Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought capable of unleashing the
full revolutionary potential in Kurdistan. Even among the forces
who claimed adherence to Mao Tsetung Thought, such as Fuad Soltani,
the ideological fetters of nationalism hindered their ability to
develop a thorough-going scientific understanding of Mao Tsetung
Thought as a qualitative advance in the science of Marxism-Leninism.
Mao Tsetung continually insisted on the role of revolutionary consciousness,
on the decisiveness of the correct political and ideological line
and developed his path-breaking theory and practice of continuing
the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat to transform
and further revolutionise society and the party, which, he warned,
must constantly renew itself to guide the revolutionary struggle
until the achievement of communism. All this was a brilliant application
and a qualitative development of Lenins teachings, particularly
on revolutionary theory and the role and necessity of the vanguard
party, yet even some of those influenced by the revolutionary vigour
and earthshaking victories of Mao Tsetungs line tended to interpret
it in a somewhat economist, tailist fashion, in fact separating
Mao from Lenin. As it was also viewed through the prism of Kurdish
nationalism, however revolutionary, the depth and scope of the integrated
whole of the science of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought was
inevitably distorted to varying degrees with nationalist and pragmatic
deviations.
The fact that the Soviet Union was at that time
colluding with the US (and the Western imperialists) in actively
suppressing the revolutionary struggle of the oppressed peoples
and nations (now it has adopted a more militant posture, providing
arms, etc., to these movements to try to turn them into instruments
of inter-imperialist rivalry) reinforced the tendency to reduce
Mao Tsetungs devastating all-round critique of modern revisionism
to merely siding with the armed struggle of the oppressed in opposition
to the Soviets. This has been, and still is, accompanied by the
tendency to narrowly view both the armed struggle and the revolutionary
struggle in a particular region of the world as well as to conceive
of this as a separate phenomenon in itself and not as an integral
component of the single process of world proletarian revolution,
however tortuous and complex. And clearly, the prism of Kurdish
nationalism ultimately blurs the significance of the all-around
development of the revolutionary struggle in Kurdistan, since it
underestimates the international factors and forces in its favour
and, reciprocally, the tremendous impetus this struggle can give
to the world proletarian revolution, particularly if led by a genuine
vanguard party firmly based on Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought
and taking proletarian internationalism as its point of departure.
Such shortcomings (by no means unique to them)
which marred the Kurdish revolutionaries evaluation of Mao Tsetung
and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution led them to belittle
the need both to form a vanguard party of the proletariat of all
nationalities and to take responsibility for leading the revolutionary
struggle as a whole. Tailist interpretations of Mao Tsetungs teachings
compounded the distortions resulting from the nationalist outlook.
Hence much of the revolutionary mass work carried out was characterized
by a slow, patient and at times even pedagogic approach. The reaction
to the emergence of the foco-ist Castro-ist distortion of armed
struggle strengthened these tailist tendencies. It was not until
immediately prior to the February 1979 revolution that the prospects
of struggle for political power were ever truly seen or acted upon.
These shortcomings and ideological deviations later
rendered political forces such as the Komala particularly vulnerable
to more open opportunist and revisionist trends. The Communist Party
of Iran (CPI), the product of a peculiar amalgamation of the Union
of Militant Communists (UMC) and the Komala (The Organization of
the Toilers of the Kurdistan of Iran, founded by Fuad Soltani in
1978), is a good example of this today. The line and practice of
the CPI merits criticism not only because it claims to be the vanguard
of the class-conscious proletariat but, more seriously, because
it strikingly embodies a number of dangerous deviations that have
plagued the revolutionary movement. These have culminated in a series
of ramshackle attacks on Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought, concentrated
against the immortal contributions of Mao Tsetung. Flowing from
this, the CPIs line also suffers from pronounced deviations from
the cardinal principles set forth by Lenin on the party, the role
of revolutionary consciousness and revolutionary mass work, the
national question, etc. Moreover, its inability and refusal to understand
the decisiveness of Mao Tsetung Thought as a scientific weapon in
the struggle against modern revisionism has completely disarmed
the CPI in explaining the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet
Union. This could well lead to capitulation to social-imperialism
in one form or another and, as is indicated in their party positions,
the CPI is already beating a hasty retreat from identifying the
Soviet Union as social-imperialist. This is indeed an alarming retreat
not only from a thorough-going Marxist-Leninist stand but also from
that of the founding leaders of Komala in 1978.
In Iraqi Kurdistan, the formation of the Komala
Ranjedaran was the most significant expression of the influence
of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. During the period
following its founding until after the seizure of power by the revisionists
in China, Komala Ranjedaran played an important role for the revolutionary
movement, not just in Kurdistan but in Iraq as a whole, due to its
open defence of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought. Nevertheless,
Komala Ranjedaran shared some of the same weakness of nationalism
and the failure to grasp the crucial role of the proletarian party.
Later on, with both crisis in the Marxist-Leninist movement following
the coup détat in China and changes in the world situation,
these weaknesses manifested themselves in the dropping of Mao Tsetung
Thought in their propaganda and their training of cadres. This retreat
from the positions adopted at the time of the groups formation
not only kept them from fully playing the kind of revolutionary
role they might have played in Iraq, but led in 1982 to reversing
the correct verdict on the social-imperialists. Ideological shortcomings,
blended with revolutionary nationalist tendencies, were responsible
for their inability to advance from their original stand and to
resist the spontaneous and pragmatic pull that tended to liquidate
the political and ideological independence of the proletariat. The
organisational expression of this was a tendency to replace the
role of the party with that of the front.
The class struggle in Turkey opened up a different
path for those Kurdish revolutionaries in Turkey who were influenced
by the achievements of Mao Tsetung and the Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution. Ibrahim Kaypakkaya led the revolutionary communists
to split from a revisionist organisation that was pretending to
uphold Mao Tsetung against modern revisionism. His struggle to forge
a genuine proletarian party through a fierce political and ideological
debate over the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung
Thought enabled the communist movement in Turkey to attract the
most revolutionary forces among the Kurdish people into its ranks.
Ibrahim Kaypakkayas vigorous exposition of the Marxist-Leninist
stand on the national question helped the Kurdish revolutionary
masses to gain a scientific understanding of national oppression,
the chauvinism of the ruling Turkish nation and the nationalist
aims of the Kurdish bourgeoisie and small landlords in opposition
to the interests of the proletariat.
In addition, Ibrahim Kaypakkaya ruthlessly exposed
the pacifist and economist distortions of Mao Tsetungs brilliant
contributions to the military science and the strategy of peoples
war. As he pointed out, peoples war is the scientific approach
to waging revolutionary warfare and seizing power in Turkey, particularly
in order to create red political power in the Kurdistan region where
the savage national oppression and the suffocating pre-capitalist
(semi-feudal relations) had long rendered the prairie dry. Ibrahim
Kaypakkaya made the first serious attempt of the Marxist-Leninists
of that country to launch armed struggle, precisely in the Kurdistan
region of Turkey.
Revolutionary Warfare
For long decades revolutionary warfare and the
objective conditions for it have continued to prevail in Kurdistan.
But particularly now, it is of crucial importance that such warfare
must be carried out resolutely and according to the military science
and outlook of the revolutionary proletariat, which has been qualitatively
enriched by the contributions Mao Tsetung made on the basis of summing
up the experience of long years of revolutionary warfare in China.
Many armies currently exist on the Kurdish terrain.
They are led by various political forces, ranging from those with
a revolutionary communist political and ideological line, to those
with a revolutionary nationalist or progressive outlook, to those
that have been or are becoming tools of reactionary nationalism
and imperialism. As much as this situation makes the political and
military terrain extremely complex and difficult, it also lays bare
the nature and programme of the political forces leading these peshmerga
armies, providing the raw material for the revolutionary masses
to grasp the international significance of the struggle and the
necessity of proletarian leadership to lead it to victory.
War is the highest form of class struggle , Mao
Tsetung said, for resolving contradictions, when they have developed
to a certain stage, between classes, nations, states, or political
groups, and it has existed ever since the emergence of private property
and of classes. ( Problems of Strategy in Chinas Revolutionary
War .) For this reason, the troops involved in the armed struggle
concentrate the aspirations and the political and ideological aims
that move them to action in the first place. Hence, it is unavoidable
that the organisational principles, composition and structure of
a peshmerga army and the way in which it carries out the actual
fighting and relates to the broad masses, its allies and enemies
will be fundamentally determined by whether in essence it is waging
warfare to preserve society based on inequality, oppression and
exploitation in one form or another or it is fighting to destroy
all this, and those representing this, in order to advance society
towards communism as part of transforming the whole world. All armies
in the field without exception will have to be tested by the revolutionary
Kurdish masses according to this criteria. In effect this has already
begun to occur, since those who deserve their wrath are being labelled
Josh or josh-e hafif (sold out or semi-sold out!).
Furthermore it is self-evident that with an army
of peshmergas that is not guided by revolutionary principles and
a revolutionary military doctrine, it is impossible in the final
analysis to wage and win warfare for social or national emancipation,
since the armed forces of the old order have a wealth of experience
and superiority in non-revolutionary warfare. Therefore it is indispensable
and imperative even from a military standpoint that an army fighting
for a genuine revolutionary cause must be revolutionary in the
fullest sense of the word.
The longer the duration of the fighting, the more
apparent becomes the qualitative difference between an army of revolution
and one of counter-revolution, thereby facilitating the victory
of the former over the latter. It is not without reason that the
reactionaries are always anxious to achieve quick victories and
worry about prolonging the war, particularly when they are challenged
by revolutionary armies. Or they feel the need to periodically introduce
cease-fires in order to impede the dissemination of the revolutionary
ideals embodied in the discipline, heroism and social practice of
the revolutionary army. Mao Tsetungs reference to the Long March
as a seeding machine underscores this basic truth.
The revolutionary army epitomizes the new, revolutionary
society rising up in arms, locked into battle with the old order.
Warfare conducted by the revolutionary army is thus assured of victory
to the extent that it also comprehends persuasion by arms: by its
fighting spirit and style, a revolutionary army can and must induce
and spread demoralisation among the troops and the social base of
the reactionaries, persuading them of the hopelessness of their
predicament and the invincibility of the revolutionary cause. More
importantly, it can arouse and persuade ever-broader sections of
the masses to become part of consciously transforming the world.
All this very much depends on the way a revolutionary army conducts
its criticism of weapons . And as pointed out by Lenin, only the
proletariat can create the nucleus of a mighty revolutionary army,
mighty both in its ideals, its discipline, its organisation and
its heroism in struggle.
Based on this understanding of Lenin and on the
experience of the Bolshevik Party, Mao Tsetung, summing up the development
of Chinas revolutionary war, said ...in an era when the proletariat
has already appeared on the political stage, the responsibility
for leading Chinas revolutionary war inevitably falls on the shoulders
of the Communist Party of China. In this era, any revolutionary
war will definitely end in defeat if it lacks, or runs counter to,
the leadership of the proletariat and the Communist Party... Hence
only the proletariat and the Communist Party can lead the peasantry
and the urban petit bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie, can overcome the
narrow-mindedness of the peasantry and the petit bourgeoisie...
the vacillation and the lack of thoroughness of the bourgeoisie
and can lead the revolution on to the road of victory. ( Problems
of Strategy... ) The importance of proletarian leadership as the
most crucial condition enabling the revolutionary war to be carried
through firmly to the end is also sharply expressed by Mao Tsetung
in another statement emphasising the inseparable connection between
political and military affairs: Our revolutionary war has proved
that we need a correct Marxist military line as well as a correct
Marxist political line. ( Problems of Strategy... )
Thus, for the revolutionary movement in Kurdistan,
Mao Tsetungs contribution in the field of revolutionary warfare
and military strategy which cannot be divorced from his contribution
to the line for revolution in colonial and semi- (neo-) colonial
countries, specifically the theory of new-democratic revolution
has, as an integral whole, direct relevance and utmost significance.
And it must be bluntly stated that among the revolutionary peshmergas
in Kurdistan, those who are not armed with Mao Tsetungs teachings
on political and military affairs cannot be in spite of the weapons
they might carry considered armed against imperialism, social-imperialism
and local reactionaries.
The Declaration of the Revolutionary Internationalist
Movement pointedly says: ...revolutionary war and other forms
of revolutionary struggle must be carried out as a key arena for
training the revolutionary masses to be capable of wielding political
power and transforming society. Only this orientation can increase
the depth and scope of the revolutionary war, strengthening its
social and political base and drawing larger sections of the masses
into the war effort. Due to the leadership of non-proletarian forces,
much of the armed struggle currently conducted in Kurdistan suffers
serious shortcomings in this regard. And the practices of reactionary
mercenary armies in the field serve as good lessons by negative
example.
Red Base Areas
The establishment of liberated base areas provides
a foundation for waging a peoples war. A new-democratic political
power of the masses can be established under the leadership of the
proletariat through the political mobilisation of the people for
the armed struggle integrated with agrarian revolution and other
necessary revolutionary social transformations. Such liberated areas
are the embryo of a new independent regime where the masses who
have been oppressed, exploited and, as Kurds, subjected to the most
brutal national oppression, can exercise political power. Such red
base areas hoist the red flag of revolution and become living political
manifestos calling to the ranks of people in the respective states
and even beyond. The birth of the revolutionary new regime in liberated
areas is not an end in itself; it must serve as a base for expanding
the armed forces of the revolution, deepening the agrarian revolution,
transforming the backward relations of production, and hence creating
better conditions both politically and militarily for engaging the
enemy in revolutionary warfare on an even grander scale and moving
towards final victory. As Mao Tsetung said, ...spreading political
power by advancing in a series of waves, etc., etc. Only thus is
it possible to build the confidence of the revolutionary masses
throughout the country&.Only thus is it possible to create tremendous
difficulties for the reactionary ruling classes, shake their foundations
and hasten their internal disintegration. Only thus is it really
possible to create a Red Army that will become the chief weapon
for the great revolution of the future. In short, only thus is it
possible to hasten the revolutionary high tide. ( A Single Spark
Can Start a Prairie Fire )
Such red base areas can only emerge through the
political mobilisation and struggle of the people and through warfare
based on their initiative. Neither defending nor spreading the revolutionary
political power can be accomplished without relying on the masses.
Their revolutionary energy and initiative can only be truly unleashed
through warfare that targets the centuries-old social relations
enslaving them in the interests of the exploiting classes as well
as foreign imperialism and its agents. Furthermore, actively participating
in and supporting such revolutionary warfare enables the masses
to revolutionise and train themselves to wield political power as
masters of the new society. Herein lies the meaning and superiority
of peoples war, against which the army of the enemy and its technical
superiority will inevitably prove ineffective. Ultimately not weapons
but people and their politically conscious revolutionary activism
will be decisive.
Leaving aside the reactionary nationalist organisations
such as KDP of Iraq (GM), even among the progressive and revolutionary
organisations of the Kurdish nationalist forces, their class outlook
and nationalist ideology severely hinders their ability to conduct
warfare against the reactionary regimes. In contrast to the outlook
of the revolutionary proletariat, the outlook of the Kurdish bourgeoisie
and other landed property owners naturally does not and cannot allow
the full mobilisation and political awakening of the peasants, proletarians
and semi-proletarians, whose revolutionary aspirations cannot be
fulfilled by just exchanging one set of oppressors for another but
requires instead the victory of the new-democratic revolution over
feudalism, bureaucrat capitalism and imperialism.
These nationalist forces strive to confine the
revolutionary struggle of the proletarians and peasants, trying
to befuddle the minds of the masses with Kurdish nationalism to
the detriment of the interests of the labouring classes and the
class struggle of the proletariat. Ironically, this has only prolonged
the subjugation of the Kurdish nation to national oppression.
The effort to avoid the integration of the armed
struggle with the agrarian revolution in order to enlist the support
of feudal property owners in the struggle against national oppression
has only dampened the revolutionary enthusiasm of the peasants,
who are the main force of the armed struggle. Those who today stand
in the way of the poor peasants confiscating the land or storming
the warehouses and granaries of the feudal landlords will later
on bemoan the shortage of peshmergas or their unwillingness to engage
the enemy. Without boldly unleashing and relying on the revolutionary
enthusiasm of the broad masses of the people as a bastion of iron
for the revolution, as Mao Tsetung put it, revolutionary warfare
cannot be successfully waged. And against those who accused the
peasantry and the masses of going too far and of committing excesses
in their revolutionary vehemence, Mao Tsetung upheld the revolutionary
initiative and enthusiasm of the people by saying, Where there
are two opposite approaches to things and people, two opposite views
emerge. It is terrible! and It is fine! riffraff and vanguards
of the revolution here are apt examples. ( Peasant Movement
in Hunan )
In the areas controlled or contested by the revolutionary
or progressive Kurdish nationalist forces, the policy of not tampering
with the existing social relations, of not carrying out and spreading
the agrarian revolution, of complicity with the old feudal authority,
with sheikhs, mullahs and other reactionary elements, of not establishing
an independent regime of peoples new-democratic power in an appropriate
form this can only erode and sabotage the social and political
basis of revolutionary warfare.
To a great extent, the difficulty experienced in
defending these so-called liberated areas from enemy attacks stems
from this non-proletarian policy that hinders or even consciously
prevents the toiling masses struggle from establishing their own
revolutionary regime and transforming society. Therefore, the liberated
areas are in effect liberated only from the free roving of the
enemy troops but not, in essence, from the old structure of reactionary
political power and social relations of production. Under such conditions
the reluctance of the masses to go all-out in fighting to defend
so-called liberated areas can only be attributed to the nature of
the political line of the organisations that control these areas.
Especially when such a political line is more interested in using
the armed struggle to pressure the reactionary regime for concessions
at a negotiating table or relying on the support of the social-imperialists
or other reactionary states rather than maintaining and developing
the armed struggle and the base areas, the revolutionary masses
reluctance to fight for the defence of such liberated areas should
not be so difficult to comprehend after all, the political line
leading does not plan to hold on to them itself.
All this closely interpenetrates with military
affairs. Without building up and expanding genuine liberated areas
as rear areas from which the armed struggle can draw political,
social, economic and military support, without fully mobilising
and political unleashing the masses, it would be impossible to
lure the enemy in deep , to fight battles where tactical superiority
can be wrested from the enemy, to launch surprise attacks, to circle
around and trap the enemy, etc. All the military advantages of fighting
a peoples war would no longer be at the disposal of the peshmergas,
hence tendencies would emerge to rely on modern weaponry and aid
from at best dubious sources, to depend on foreign imperialists
and even to capitulate. As Mao was to put it, you fight your way
and Ill fight my way.
Pessimism, defeatism, overrating of the enemys
combat effectiveness, seeking the support of an imperialist power
(these days most often the Soviets) would inevitably set in. This
has been the fate of more than one erstwhile revolutionary nationalist
(even with pseudo-Marxist colouration).
Communist Party of Iran
This kind of outlook is both reflected in and reinforced
through the political line of the Communist Party of Iran (CPI),
among others. The opportunist line of the CPI, which includes a
lavish amount of Trotskyism, produces some most conservative and
liquidationist pronouncements concerning the armed struggle and
the seizure of power by the proletariat through protracted peoples
war. For the CPI, the armed struggle carried out even by their own
Komala peshmergas in Kurdistan is a phenomenon that hinders the
task of organising the proletarians in party cells that should be
constructed at the production place and in the urban working class
districts. The implication of this losing proposition can be nothing
but preparing to get rid of this nuisance. Considering the CPIs
deep-seated economism, this should by no means come as a surprise.
The most unmitigated economist and liberal-reformist
recipes are being tossed back and forth between the CPI and infamous
pro-Soviet revisionists such as Rah-e-Karghar (Path of the Worker)
regarding the most efficient means for keeping the workers as isolated
as possible from revolutionary politics. The CPI proposes to organise
a movement for workers councils in the factories as the most suitable
way to develop the working class movement and to lay the basis for
some future Soviets, which the CPIs vision deems to be the road
to political power. Leaving aside the patently absurd caricature
of the experience of the Bolshevik Revolution on the Soviets as
organs of political power as well as the CPIs untenable schematism,
on at least two accounts the CPIs alleged concern for creating
organs for seizing political power cannot be taken seriously: firstly,
with such liberal bourgeois economism the working class can never
be trained in revolutionary communist politics to struggle for and
exercise political power; and secondly, such a miserable economist
recipe is only a justification for abandoning the revolutionary
potential for establishing red political power through armed struggle
led by the proletariat in Kurdistan, despite and in the face of
very favourable prospects for doing that. Thus, the CPI is, in effect,
to quote the Declaration of the RIM, appealing to the workers
on the narrowest of bases and negating the necessity of the working
class to lead the peasantry and others in thoroughly eliminating
imperialism and the backward and distorted economic and social relations
that foreign capital thrives on and reinforces.
The CPI, which proclaims to be a communist party,
happens to command a relatively significant army of experienced
Komala peshmergas and enjoys a respectably large mass base among
the more revolutionary sections of the Kurdish people who have a
burning hatred of the regime and the existing backward social and
economic relations. Yet it is somehow unable to appreciate the immense
potential that exists for waging armed struggle to establish red
political power in Kurdistan. The CPI is infatuated by the idea
of a bunch of workers councils managing the daily affairs of the
factory, allegedly to train the workers for exercising state power
sometime in the future - instead of fully developing the armed struggle
in Kurdistan to establish base areas.
The CPIs flight from the science of Marxism-Leninism-Mao
Tsetung Thought stands stark naked when its propositions and the
objective circumstances in Kurdistan are weighed against the following
scientific formulation of Mao Tsetung: The seizure of power by
armed force, the settlement of the issue by war, is the central
task and the highest form of revolution. This Marxist-Leninist principle
of revolution holds good universally, for China and for all other
countries. ( Problems of War and Strategy .) Especially when all
the objective conditions are present for the execution of this central
task, it is evident that the CPIs opportunist line will increasingly
be exposed, destroying the militant heritage and experience built
up by Komala in the past. The forces of Khomeini and the reactionary
nationalists will exploit their serious errors to try to consolidate
their own position and to suppress the revolutionary struggle of
the masses.
The Revolutionary Army
Warfare divorced from the struggle for the revolutionary
transformation of the old social order through the active and conscious
participation of the broad masses will ultimately degenerate into
warlordism. The imperialist powers of both blocs and their puppets
in the region exert every effort in this direction, each trying
to acquire armies on the Kurdish terrain that can be deployed for
their predatory aims. The intensification of inter-imperialist rivalry
in particular has been fuelling any latent potential for such developments.
Furthermore, the existing feudal social structures of ashirets
(a type of Kurdish clan) and the reactionary authority vested
in them provides a basis for this type of degeneration. The KDP-Iraq
(GM) stands as a most despicable manifestation of this phenomenon,
which can also be observed in KDP-Iran and PKK in Turkey.
A revolutionary army is distinguished by and draws
its strength from its revolutionary unity with the masses and the
revolutionary unity between the soldiers and the officers. Such
an army must avoid at all cost being a burden on the masses as gallant
warriors who deserve special services. On the contrary, they themselves
must serve the people, in addition to fighting battles, by conducting
revolutionary agitation and propaganda among them and by taking
part in production reorganised on a revolutionary basis. Correctly
combining fighting battles and taking part in production can not
only meet the cost of maintaining the army but more fundamentally
it can provide disciplined and politically conscious production
detachments that can lead the masses in achieving self-sufficiency
and laying the foundation of the new economic order with an eye
towards future socialist transformation. Thus, profound political
unity can be achieved between the people and their revolutionary
armed forces.
The violation of such principles, created and brilliantly
applied under the leadership of Mao Tsetung, has done great damage
in Kurdistan and provided opportunities for the reactionary regimes
to create hardship and to demoralize people. Continuous military
harassment, bombing of villages and fields, blocking of fresh-water
springs, planned raids to burn and destroy the harvest and other
retaliatory crimes by the regimes are all intended to daunt the
revolutionary masses. At the same time they graphically underscore
the dire necessity as well as the material basis for reorganising
production and the socio-economic order along revolutionary lines.
From the standpoint of the revolutionary communist line, any belittling
or neglect of these tasks would be tantamount to betraying the revolutionary
masses and sabotaging the material basis for consolidating and expanding
revolutionary political power and thereby immensely strengthening
revolutionary warfare. Indeed, the neglect or blatant refusal of
the nationalist forces to seriously take up these tasks has not
only demoralized the masses in these areas but forced them to seek
a livelihood in smuggling and other unproductive and harmful practices.
The fact that a truly revolutionary political power does not exist
to provide a rallying point for them has also made it easier for
the reactionary regimes to recruit mercenaries.
Radical Rupture Required
A revolution , Mao Tsetung insisted, is not a
dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing
embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so
temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. To enable
the masses to overthrow the oppressor, they have to also rebel against
and overthrow the ideas, values, and culture of the oppressors as
part of transforming the whole superstructure that rests on the
backward relations of production. A people still enslaved spiritually
and ideologically by the ideas, culture and world outlook of their
oppressor cannot be successful in smashing the material chains that
keep them in captivity either.
Perhaps more than anything else, the thoroughness
of the position taken against the oppression of women is
the measure of the thoroughness of ones revolutionary outlook.
Whether a political force stands for the complete abolition of all
forms of exploitation and oppression or for transplanting itself
onto the seats of political power and, thus, merely changing the
form of the system of oppression will be revealed by whether it
fights actively to unleash the fury of women as a mighty force
for revolution , as it is powerfully expressed around the world
in the May First slogan of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement.
The absolutely reactionary attitude of part of
the nationalist forces (and all of the reactionaries) towards women,
in defending and even reinforcing the social and ideological shackles
that bind them, is nothing but a reflection of the bourgeois outlook.
Those who vilify and try (!) to degrade women who join the peshmerga
army as fighters by openly insinuating that they are promiscuous
or of loose morality must be exposed as defenders of the enslavement
of women under the feudal, bourgeois-feudal male authority, which
serves and reflects the existing system of exploitation and oppression.
It is worth recalling that it was Karl Marx who said, Anybody who
knows anything of history knows that great social changes
are impossible without the feminine ferment. To be willing to have
half of its fighters in chains and bondage is not only to surrender
half of the revolutionary army to the enemy, but more significantly
it is to blind the remaining half to the real sources of oppression
and to fetter the overall struggle for social emancipation, which
must eliminate not some but all forms of oppression and exploitation.
The victory of the revolutionary struggle and warfare will greatly
depend upon to what extent the feminine ferment , as Marx called
it, will be not simply tolerated but consciously and actively encouraged,
unleashed and organised to produce peshmergas, military commanders,
and proletarian political leaders for revolution.
The revolutionary movement throughout Kurdistan
can, and given the current situation in the area, must make use
of the contradictions among the reactionary ruling classes of the
vassal states. However under no circumstances should such tactical
considerations take priority over or assume more prominence than
the correct revolutionary orientation. They should never be allowed
to blur the cardinal line of demarcation between the enemies of
revolution regardless of which country they are based in or which
of the two imperialist blocs they may represent or be allied with
and the genuine forces of revolution, particularly the revolutionary
communist forces.
In revolutionary struggle, some concessions and
tactical compromises are unavoidable, but the blatant betrayal of
the revolutionary cause has been justified only too frequently in
the name of down to earth politics allegedly intended to make
use of contradictions in the enemy camp. The annals of history
and the history of the revolutionary movement in Kurdistan is no
exception are cluttered with painful episodes of either serious
setbacks or outright betrayals that occurred either in blind pursuit
of, or under the guise of, such realism , strengthening the hand
of the oppressor and seriously undermining past victories as well
as the strength of the oppressed.
Tactical considerations must under all circumstances
be subordinate to the overall revolutionary strategy, which must
be based on firm principles that do not wobble in the face of changing
circumstances and the sugar-coated bullets or false promises of
the enemy. Under all circumstances, the tactics adopted to make
use of the contradictions among the reactionaries must drive a wedge
into the enemy camp and weaken the enemies of revolution overall,
and they must enhance the conditions for revolutionary struggle,
not just in one area or even in the Kurdish region of one of the
countries in question, but in all of them. It is not too late to
learn from the enemy. Even a cursory survey of the policies of the
British and US imperialists against the revolutionary movement in
Kurdistan reveals that they tried to avoid the mistake of encouraging
the overall revolutionary movement in Kurdistan to the detriment
of their loyal puppets. This is true, for example, when they resort
tactically to using certain forces in the Kurdish region of one
or another country as an instrument of their reactionary machinations
aimed at getting a more desirable performance from any of their
own puppets.
The ability to correctly handle these contradictions
and to correctly apply the policy of being firm in principle and
flexible in tactics requires, above all, a vanguard party of the
proletariat. As the Declaration of the RIM puts it:
The key to carrying out a new-democratic revolution
is the independent role of the proletariat and its ability, through
its Marxist-Leninist party, to establish its hegemony in the revolutionary
struggle. Experience has shown again and again that even when a
section of the national bourgeoisie joins the revolutionary movement,
it will not and cannot lead a new-democratic revolution, to say
nothing of carrying this revolution through to completion. Similarly,
history demonstrates the bankruptcy of an anti-imperialist front
(or similar revolutionary front) which is not led by a Marxist-Leninist
party, even when such a front or forces within it adopt a Marxist
(actually pseudo-Marxist) colouration. While such revolutionary
formations have led heroic struggles and even delivered powerful
blows to the imperialists they have been proven to be ideologically
and organisationally incapable of resisting imperialist and bourgeois
influences. Even where such forces have seized power they have been
incapable of carrying through a thorough-going revolutionary transformation
of society and end up, sooner or later, being overthrown by the
imperialists or themselves becoming a new reactionary ruling power
in league with imperialists.
Autonomy
It is indisputable that the Kurdish national movement
has consistently been a most explosive component of the revolutionary
ferment in this part of the world, even at times the sole movement
to raise and carry the banner of rebellion against the reactionary
regimes propped up by various imperialist forces. However, a number
of factors historically have also forestalled the full realisation
of the revolutionary potential in Kurdistan. Overall the movements
in Kurdistan have predominantly been under the leadership of bourgeois
nationalist forces or bourgeois-feudal nationalist forces whose
class interests and outlook have been an impediment to the Kurdish
revolutionary masses in their contribution to the world proletarian
revolution. Although ferocious national oppression has continued
to fan the flames of the struggle, it has also been a factor retarding
the development of the working class both economically and politically.
Lenin remarked that, The bourgeoisie, which naturally assumes the
leadership at the start of every national movement, says that support
for all national aspirations is practical . [Emphasis added.]
( The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, Collected Works,
20.)
Even revolutionary Kurdish nationalism has not
always proven practical to the Kurdish bourgeoisie and landlords.
The practicality of the bourgeois outlook has inexorably driven
the various leaders of the Kurdish national movement to concede
to what was acceptable to the state of the ruling nation. These
reactionary states at certain points, when in a difficult position,
manoeuvred to offer partial autonomy or cultural national autonomy
in order to split up or control the growing revolutionary ferment
in Kurdistan.
Examples of such fiendish moves can be observed
in the wake of the First World War in Iraq in the form of partial
autonomy under His Majestys mandate , and right after the Second
World War in Iran in the case of the Autonomous Republic of Mahabad.
In view of the longstanding vulnerability of the Iraqi regime in
the face of the movement in Kurdistan, the imperialist advisers
of the regime find it opportune to dangle hints of promises for
an autonomous Kurdish region in Iraq. Remember Lenins warning:
Like all reformists, our reformists of 1905 could not understand
that historic situations arise when reforms and particularly promises
of reforms, pursue only one aim: to allay the unrest of the
people, force the revolutionary class to cease, or at least slacken,
its struggle. ( A Lecture on the 1905 Revolution , Collected
Works, 23.)
It seems that the French imperialists, who have
been quite influential over the Iraqi regime, favour granting some
type of counterfeit autonomy status to Iraqi Kurdistan, an area
that has tied down a major section of the Iraqi Army that could
otherwise be deployed on the Iranian front. Undoubtedly such promises
are intended not to be kept but to create splits among the Kurdish
nationalists. Saddam Husseins granting of autonomy for Kurdistan
in 1970 stands as a typical example of what such promises hold for
the Kurdish people.
Nonetheless hopes of being granted autonomy ,
partial autonomy or cultural national autonomy continue to
exist among Kurdish nationalists, since this appears to be more
practical than overthrowing the reactionary state power of the
oppressor nations ruling classes. Lenins criticism of such practical-minded
reformism on the national question remains valid: A reformist change
is one which leaves intact the foundations of the power of the ruling
class and is merely a concession leaving its power unimpaired. A
revolutionary change undermines the foundations of power. A reformist
national programme does not abolish all the privileges
of the ruling nation; it does not establish complete equality;
it does not abolish national oppression in all its forms.
An autonomous nation does not enjoy rights equal to those
of the ruling nation; ...until 1905 autonomous Norway, as a part
of Sweden, enjoyed the widest autonomy, but she was not Swedens
equal. Only by her free secession was her equality manifested in
practice and proved&.As long as Norway was merely autonomous,
the Swedish aristocracy had one additional privilege; and
secession did not mitigate this privilege (the essence of reformism
lies in mitigating an evil and not in destroying it), but
eliminated it altogether (the principal criterion
of the revolutionary character of a programme). ( The Nature of
Self-Determination Summed Up , Collected Works, 22.)
It is practical for the nationalists to take
the capitulationist and reformist road, even when the struggle against
national oppression, far from just beginning, has already reached
the stage of full-fledged warfare against the oppressor. Nationalism,
even in its revolutionary form, inevitably embraces pragmatism and
deems it more feasible to strike a deal with the national oppressor
rather than to rely on the revolutionary masses in a protracted
struggle to eliminate the evil altogether. Although
there is a qualitative difference between the thoroughly reactionary
KDP-Iraq under the leadership of Barzani and progressive and revolutionary
nationalist forces today, still the ceasefire struck with the Iraqi
regime in 1975 stands as a most stinging indictment of such illusions.
How detrimental to the cause of the proletariat and other oppressed
masses and how unbearable was the anguish felt by the revolutionary
masses came through vividly when peshmergas committed suicide by
the hundreds rather than bear the humiliation of surrendering to
the enemy.
Lenin warns that The bourgeoisie of the oppressed
nations persistently utilise the slogans of national liberation
to deceive the workers; in their internal policy they use these
slogans for reactionary agreements with the bourgeoisie of the dominant
nation...in their foreign policy they strive to come to terms with
one of the rival imperialist powers for the sake of implementing
their predatory plans& ( The Socialist Revolution and the Right
of Nations to Self-Determination Summed Up , Collected Works,
22.) This assessment by Lenin forcefully depicts the character of
a number of nationalist forces in Kurdistan that portray themselves
as the champion of Kurdish national liberation while either flirting
or directly serving one of the imperialist blocs or sometimes straddling
the fence for a better offer. In particular, the KDP-Iran, which
has long been cashing in on the prestige of the 1946 Kurdish Autonomous
Republic of Mahabad, typifies the characteristics cited by Lenin
above. As late as 1985, on the heels of the biggest reactionary
military offensive ever by the Khomeini regime against Kurdistan,
the KDP-Iran, led by none other than Gassem Lu in secret collusion
with the Tudeh revisionists, noisily scurried about in an effort
to come to terms with the Khomeini regime. Internationally, as a
strong supporter of Soviet social-imperialism and as friends with
European social-democracy, it has been seeking aid and recognition
not from the revolutionary masses and genuine revolutionary communist
organisations and parties but from the imperialist powers. Lately,
under pressure from the social-imperialists, it shows inclinations
to sign up on the payroll of the revisionists. Recent reactionary
armed attacks by the KDP-Iran on Komala provide indisputable evidence
of the formers counter-revolutionary policies.
Greater Kurdistan
In terms of utilising slogans of national liberation
to deceive the workers , various Kurdish nationalist organisations
have put forward the slogan of Greater Kurdistan . More often than
not, this slogan has been used as justification for not waging a
militant struggle to overthrow the reactionary government, which
is the instrument of national oppression in that very same state.
The establishment of Greater Kurdistan would require the overthrow
of several, if not all, of the reactionary states that have divided
up the Kurdish territory. Moreover, the emergence of a Greater
Kurdistan would by no measure be an insignificant event in the
region and in the world as a whole; it would effect tremendous upheaval,
and, thus, a fracturing of the existing international and national
political matrix in the region.
Clearly all these factors must have entered into
the feasibility analysis of the practical-minded Kurdish bourgeois
forces, and the slogan of Greater Kurdistan is certainly not intended
to blow the biggest possible hole through the imperialist network
in the region. As Lenin observed, the bourgeoisie is most interested
in the feasibility of a given demand and hence the invariable
policy of coming to terms with the bourgeoisie of other nations&
( Right of Nations to Self-Determination , Collected Works,
20.) If, through the twists and turns of the struggle and the
unfolding of contradictions in the region and the world, the prospect
of establishing a Kurdish state comprising the Kurdish regions in
several of the existing states were to emerge, the communists would
evaluate the advisability of such a state on the basis of the overall
interests of the advance of the world revolution.
However, the cutting edge of the slogan Greater
Kurdistan is not so much directed against the reactionary states
and the imperialists backing them as it is nationalist demagogy
against the working class, pandering to national prejudices that
already exist among the masses in order to lead them by the halter
for the class interests of the Kurdish bourgeoisie. It serves to
segregate the Kurdish proletarians from the proletarians of other
nationalities, vindicating the failure to join ranks for the overthrow
of the existing state power in a given country.
The Declaration of the RIM states that:
Due to the establishment of central state structures prior to the
process of capitalist development, semi (neo) colonial countries,
in the main, have multi-national social formations within them;
in a large number of cases these states have been created by the
imperialists themselves. Furthermore, the borders of these states
have been determined as a consequence of imperialist occupations
and machinations. Thus it is generally the case that within the
state borders of countries oppressed by imperialism, oppressed nations,
national inequality and ruthless national oppression exist. In our
era, the national question has ceased to be an internal question
of single countries and has become subordinate to the general question
of the world proletarian revolution, hence its thorough-going resolution
has become directly dependent on the struggle against imperialism.
Within this context Marxist-Leninists should uphold the right of
self-determination of oppressed nations in the multi-national semi-colonial
states.
There is absolutely nothing sacred about the current
state borders dividing the Kurdish territory, nor is it written
in stone that the only possible or legitimate course for the development
of the world proletarian revolution must be in the form of a separate
revolution in each state, resolving the Kurdish national question
as part of the new-democratic revolution within the borders of each.
The following remark by Lenin is to the point here: Marx did not
make an Absolute of the national movement, knowing, as he did, that
only the victory of the working class can bring about the complete
liberation of all nationalities. It is impossible to estimate beforehand
all the possible relations between the bourgeois liberation movements
of the oppressed nations and the proletarian emancipation movement
of the oppressor nation (the very problem which today makes the
national question in Russia so difficult). ( Right of Nations to
Self Determination )
Theoretically it would be impossible to determine
in advance the exact course of the Kurdish national liberation movement;
it is certain, however, that it will play a tremendously significant
role in the revolutionary turmoil of the upcoming period. In any
event, the Kurdish class-conscious proletariat must be first and
foremost concerned with ensuring the development and the interests
of their class as part of a single international class of proletarians
world-wide. As Lenin put it, The proletarian cause must come first,
we say, because it not only protects the lasting and fundamental
interests of labour and of humanity, but also those of democracy;
and without democracy neither an autonomous nor an independent Ukraine
[in this case Kurdistan AWTW] is conceivable. ( Critical
Remarks on the National Question , Collected Works, 20.)
Conclusion
The possibility and necessity of hoisting the red
flag in Kurdistan more forcefully than ever before is confronting
the communists and the masses. The prospects for establishing red
political power in the form of base areas and independent regimes
are quite favourable. In this eventuality the revolutionary masses
in Kurdish regions in all of the bordering states will provide tremendous
support and rally around the red banner hoisted in any one particular
Kurdish region to wage revolutionary warfare for its defence and
expansion. A genuine peoples war under the leadership of the revolutionary
communists in any one of the Kurdish regions can quite easily rip
the existing political structure in the Middle East irreparably
apart, providing an opening for all the oppressed in the region.
Under these circumstances, the question for the international proletariat
cannot be to confine such a revolutionary storm to the borders of
any one particular state or nation but to liberate as much of the
worlds territory as possible from the bloody claws of imperialism
and reaction. <
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