Rojhilat's Relations with the US, Part 1: Why Did Washington Abandon Mahabad?

Rastinews — Early in the morning they took us to a building that had apparently served the Soviets as a headquarters for Mahabad's fledgling army. Its walls were covered with Soviet propaganda and portraits of Soviet leaders. When we were shown into Qazi Muhammad's office, we found him seated behind his desk beside a large map of Kurdistan. He was a short, dignified-looking man in an old Iranian army private's uniform, his pale, careworn face framed by a thin beard. He later told us he suffered from a serious stomach ailment and ate little besides yogurt. After we explained who we were and the nature of our mission, he picked up a sheet of paper and, in a clear but subdued voice, glancing at us now and then with his mystical eyes, read out a speech prepared in Persian. The speech recounted the oppression the Kurds had suffered, their national aspirations, and the need for freedom-loving peoples — the United States above all — to help the Kurds secure their freedom and human rights, in keeping with the principles for which the war had been fought.

I replied: 'The United States has always championed the freedom of all peoples and their free enjoyment of human rights. We hope this ideal will one day be realised throughout the world. We have come to examine the condition of the Kurds in Kurdistan and report back to our government; we hope their situation has improved, and that the Kurds have not simply traded one tyranny for another.'

Qazi Muhammad said: 'Everyone in the territories under my government is free to say and write as he pleases.' 'I have seen that for myself,' I replied. 'In Democratic Azerbaijan people are permitted to listen only to Tabriz and Moscow radio, yet last night in the street here I heard both London and Ankara broadcasts.' Qazi said the Kurds had to accept help from whoever offered it, but would submit to no one's domination, adding: 'At the Potsdam Conference we submitted a petition of our grievances to the Big Three, but Britain and the United States ignored us.'

Invoking the Atlantic Charter, he said he hoped the United States would help the Kurds overcome their backwardness. 'The Kurds ask nothing extraordinary,' Qazi said, 'only the same natural rights and freedoms that are the privilege of all humanity.' He added that the United Nations ought to take up the Kurdish question, and that it could at least compel the relevant states to establish autonomous regions.

Archibald Roosevelt — known as Archie Roosevelt, grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt and a CIA officer — recounted his meeting and conversation with Qazi Muhammad, president of the Republic of Kurdistan, in these words. The account appears in Chapter 21, titled "The Mahabad Kurdish Republic," of his 1988 memoir, For Lust of Knowing: Memoirs of an Intelligence Officer.

Roosevelt was the only government official among four Americans who visited Mahabad, the city in Rojhilat (Eastern Kurdistan) where the Republic of Kurdistan was founded, on 15 and 16 September 1946 — a republic that would survive just 330 days. Serving as assistant military attaché in Tehran from March 1946 to February 1947, Roosevelt tracked and reported on political developments in the region, particularly Soviet activity.

On his second day in Mahabad, 16 September 1946, Roosevelt spent the morning at the republic's press, leafing through its publications and deciding to take some away with him. At midday he called again on Qazi Muhammad. According to Roosevelt's memoir, Qazi Muhammad, seeing the publications in his hand, turned to him and said: "I am glad to have you take copies of our publications, since I want the United States to know everything about Kurdistan. We have nothing to hide."

Before Roosevelt left the city, he was served melon after a meal, and it was at that moment, inside the Kurdish republic's modest building, that the now-famous photograph was taken. The image would go down in history as more than a moment of hospitality — one of the most vivid records of Mahabad's proud stance, caught between the vast gears of world politics.

Strategic silence: Washington's Mahabad file

Founded on 22 January 1946 with Soviet backing, the Republic of Kurdistan nonetheless spent its short life seeking recognition, reaching out to Washington and London according to the period's documents and diplomatic correspondence. Qazi Muhammad and the Kurdish leadership sent letters, memoranda and appeals both to the United Nations and directly to American and British officials, hoping to win the support of the Western powers. But Washington and London regarded the Mahabad venture as a Soviet "satellite state" project, and neither ever granted the Republic of Kurdistan diplomatic legitimacy.

In the run-up to the Truman Doctrine, Washington was working to break Soviet influence in the Middle East, and its priorities were the Tehran government's control of the country and the security of the oil fields. The Kurdish bid for self-rule at Mahabad was read as part of a Soviet strategy to break up Iran and push toward the Persian Gulf. George V. Allen, the US ambassador in Tehran at the time, openly backed the Iranian army's march on Mahabad and the Azerbaijan People's Government.

Qazi Muhammad, for his part, had taken Washington's talk of "democracy and the self-determination of peoples" at its word, sending messages directly to President Truman and the State Department. His letters insisted the Kurds were neither communists nor a Soviet "puppet," but were simply asking for humanitarian and democratic rights.

How Washington responded to Mahabad's diplomatic overtures is recorded in detail in the official archives of the period. The Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) volumes for 1946, in particular, show how these overtures were met with what can only be called a "strategic silence." The Truman administration never established diplomatic contact, and the Kurds' basic demands went formally unanswered.

This distant, dismissive stance hardened into formal doctrine with a "Top Secret" memorandum, "SWN–4818," dated 12 October 1946. Drafted by the State–War–Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC), the document classified the autonomy movements in Kurdistan and Azerbaijan outright as "an instrument of Soviet expansionism," and made preserving Iran's territorial integrity, whatever the cost, a US national security priority. Paragraph 3(b) of the document reads:

"The establishment of a Soviet-dominated autonomous Kurdish state, potentially covering northwestern Iran and adjacent areas in northern Iraq, would harm US strategic interests by introducing into the region a state that owes its existence to the USSR and is therefore likely to fall under strong Soviet influence, thereby becoming a willing instrument for the USSR to create dissension, opposition, and revolt throughout the Near and Middle East. Such a state would likely encompass the British oil resources in the Kirkuk area within its borders. In that case, the revenue Iraq currently receives from Britain in exchange for the use of these oil resources would pass to the newly established Kurdish state. Such a situation would likely lead to the collapse of the current Iraqi government and give rise to a chaotic situation in which a new government oriented toward the USSR, rather than Western democracies, could emerge. Since Iraq extends to the head of the Persian Gulf and the Abadan oil refineries are practically located on Iraq's border, our strategic resources in the region would be endangered."

Returning to Archibald Roosevelt, the CIA's intelligence officer in Tehran: he was so affected by his trip to Mahabad that he was angered when the Iranian state, following a sham trial, sentenced Qazi Muhammad and his associates to death on 23 January 1947, and he persuaded his superior, Ambassador George Allen, to intercede with the Shah. Roosevelt said: "If they are executed, we will be counted as the party responsible for an act that will be viewed with horror by Kurdish nationalists everywhere."

Meeting with US Ambassador Allen, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi replied arrogantly, "Are you afraid I will have them shot? If so, you can rest easy, because I will not do that." But true to the tradition of the Iranian state, the Shah would disregard the promise he had given to US officials in Tehran. Qazi Muhammad, who had been under arrest for more than four months, along with his brother Sadiq Qazi and his cousin Sefer Qazi, were brought before dawn, around three in the morning, in a military truck to Chwarchira Square, and while Mahabad slept on, they were hanged on the gallows.

This is how it was recorded: the relations between the United States and the republic that sprang up in Mahabad, the ancient city of Rojhilat. In preparing this piece, I inevitably combed archives and books for the United States' relations with every part of Kurdistan over the past century. I came across the letter Mele Mistefa Barzani wrote to then US President Jimmy Carter in 1977, two years after the 1975 Algiers Agreement — architected by the White House — that defeated the revolution in Southern Kurdistan.

Mele Mistefa packed a long struggle, including Mahabad, into his 76 years of life. In that letter, written two years before his death on 1 March 1979, on the very soil of the United States that had abandoned his movement and left it to be crushed in the vice between Iran and Iraq, he set down this note for both American and Kurdish history:

"We were not defeated militarily by our enemies. We were killed by our friends. Can a great nation like the United States, which found for all peoples such declared basic principles as democracy, freedom, truth, and honor, hold its head high after its role in the Kurdish collapse?"

Sources:

• Archibald Roosevelt Jr., For Lust of Knowing: Memoirs of an Intelligence Officer, Little, Brown and Company, 1988.
• Jonathan C. Randal, After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness? My Encounters with Kurdistan, Avesta Publications, 1998.
• Chris Kutschera, The Kurdish National Movement, Avesta Publications, 2001.
• US Department of State (1946). Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1946, The Near East and Africa, Volume VII. (Ed. Caspar H. Nannes).