my guest is abdullah mohtadi, leader of the komala party of iranian kurdistan. is his a fight for rights orfor independence? abdullah mohtadi, welcome to hardtalk. thank you for having me. it s a great pleasure to have you on the show. i began by referring there to the tragic death of mahsa amini. would you say that her death last september in custody inside iran has changed the political dynamic inside iran? it has because, on the 16th of september, she was declared dead in the hospital. the day after, on the 17th, there was a funeral in her hometown of saqqez in the province of kurdistan there are four kurdish provinces in iran and it was a spontaneous protest movement erupted in saqqez, her hometown, and it soon spread to sanandaj, the capital city of that province. and two days after that, on the 19th, it was a general strike called by the cooperation center the kurdish political parties called by cooperation center of kurdish political parties which was fully observe
for example, many of the people around mr palavi would like to see frankly, would like to see the return of the monarchy. there are people in your group were more concerned with safeguarding kurdish rights, through a highly federalised future system, which is an anathema to many iranian nationalists, and when you put all these people together, there simply isn t a coherent, unified position. but we were able to sign a charter which was reasonably good and balanced, where we declared our programme for democratising iran, a new system, new constitution, a new referendum for the people to decide the future of their own government, and also, minority, ethnic, religious rights. it sounded pretty impressive on paper. it was progressive.