Persecuted Peoples

In the barren, wind blown mountains between Iran and Iraq, lays the small provincial town of Sardasht. Alcohol smugglers occupy the corners of the bazar, and land mines keep the shepherds from going too far into the mountains. Sardasht is officially a part of Iran, but the citizens of this small town are split between their national affiliation to the Islamic Republic and their ethnic bond to the Kurdish people. People who have a long history of suppression and persecution. Iranian tourists whiz through the town in bunches, to the significantly freer Iraqi Kurdistan, where some of worst persecution of the Kurdish people took place  during the Iran/Iraq war in the 1980's. Chemical attacks were common throughout the Kurdish areas in both countries, including the town Sardasht. In the early morning of June 28 in 1987, the Iraqi army threw several mustard gas bombs over civilian areas of this bustling border town:

"Early that morning, the people were gathered at a local shrine. The smoke was yellow, green, red and black. One man said it was like a rainbow, another said it was as if the sky was covered in plastic cling film", recalls the 56 old Peyman, to the BBC.

The attacks are a shameful scar in the Iranian past – a scar that was torn open when chemical attacks happened in Syria this August. Tehran was particularly angry by the use of chemical weapons, and looking at the aftermath, it now seems that a long diplomatic impasse between the notorious enemies – Iran and USA – is beginning to loosen up. The countries’ leaders are talking for the first time in 34 years. And the attacks in Sardasht seem of significant importance, when Iran was forced to take an in-depth look at their probably closest ally.

“We completely and strongly condemn use of chemical weapons in Syria because Islamic Republic of Iran is itself victim of chemical weapons,” newly elected president Hassan Rouhani wrote on Twitter. While the Iranian government seem to have plenty of sympathy for the Kurdish people’s bloody history, this doesn't mean that the life of Kurdish people in Iran is particularly easy. The majority of Kurds are Sunni-Muslims, unlike the Iranian Shia regime, and any separatist engagement - political, ethnic or religious  is being heavily monitored and/or persecuted.

The regime arrests Kurdish people deviant of their Islamic revolution without hesitation. I encountered this first hand when I was arrested for photographing a crew of young Kurdish separatists. They were all connected to the Sunni-mosque of Imam Golnavaz. Imam Salam Golnavaz is on the Iranian Human Rights Watch list, and in August was convicted to six years in prison for being a threat to national security, as well as  collaborating with forbidden political groups. Or as the local lieutenant put it for me: "He was political".

The same accusation was also made against myself, after I had met with the Imam. I was able to spend only 24 hours in Sardasht before the police arrested me and imprisoned me for 12 days. These images show what happened in these 24 hours.

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