The Financial Times

By Gareth Smyth

March 14, 2006

Two illegal Iranian Kurdish parties are launching satellite television stations - joining the five Kurdish-language channels already beamed into Iran - and stepping up their long-running conflict with the government in Tehran.

Half Iran's population of 68m is Persian and half from other nationalities. There has been unrest recently in Kurdish areas, the mainly Arab south-west and among Baluchis in Iran's far east - sparking fears among politicians in Tehran that the US may see ethnic conflict as an opportunity to bring about political change in Iran.

A Tehran-based Kurdish intellectual said the growth in Kurdish television reflected the achievement of political autonomy in a federal Iraq and a wider cultural renaissance among the 25m Kurds divided between Iran, Turkey, Iraq and Syria.

The Kurdish parties turning to TV - the Kurdistan Democratic party of Iran and Komaleh - are far longer established than opposition parties among Iran's other ethnic groups. Both have roots in the 1940s, when the Kurds briefly set up an independent republic in the city of Mahabad.

Komaleh, a leftwing party, has launched Roj Halat (Rising Sun) with so far an hour every evening, and the larger KDPI will soon open Tishk (Light). Both parties have operated clandestinely under the Shah and, after 1979, the Islamic Republic.

Existing Kurdish channels - either from the Iraqi Kurdish parties or European stations backing Turkey's Kurdistan Workers party (PKK) - have an immediacy and intimacy for Kurds lacking in Los Angeles-based Iranian opposition stations whose outlook is Persian nationalist.

Iraqi Kurdish TV beams in art and culture as well as images of a Kurdish parliament, endorsed by Iraq's new constitution, and of Iraq's Kurdish president and foreign minister.

The contrast with Iran, which has twice as many Kurds as Iraq, is stark. Iran's Kurdish areas had the lowest turnout in last year's presidential election of any region.

Many Kurds say they are disillusioned after eight years of unfulfilled promises from the former reformist president Mohammad Khat-ami of job opportunities and posts in central government. They now feel, as Sunni Muslims, alienated by the focus on Shia Islam by President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad.

"For Kurdistan, the policy of reformists and conservatives is the same, since the Islamic Republic inherited the centralism of the Shah," says Bahram Valad-Baigi, former editor of Ashti, one of several Kurdish newspapers closed last year. He faces court charges of undermining national security and encouraging separatism.

"In general, the situation of the Kurds in Iran has been better than Iraq or Turkey because our language and culture is closer to Iran," he says, "but politically Iraq is now ahead of us."

Mr Valad-Baigi insists he wants "equality" within Iran and not separation. But he refuses to condemn the exiled parties, who last year abandoned a policy of autonomy with a call for a federal Iran. "They are abroad, we are here in Iran," he says, "but our demands are the same."

It is nine years since the KDPI gave up "armed struggle" after Iranian troops attacked its headquarters in northern Iraq. But Iranian Kurdistan has grown restive, with periodic demonstrations since Iraq's interim constitution was agreed in 2004.

A new militant group, Pejak, apparently allied to the PKK, has clashed intermittently with Iranian security forces.

Many Kurds say they have no wish to return to violence. "Our priorities are knowledge and increasing education," says the intellectual. "Kurds never attack unless they are first attacked themselves."

Kurds are also wary ofthe US, despite America's role in bringing about afederal Iraqi Kurdistan and its recent talk of funding opponents of the Islamic Republic. But Iran's Kurds also sense that a new era is opening when history may finally move in their direction.

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