Marivan Conspiracy

Memories of Martyr Mustafa Chamran

Faezeh Sasanikhah
Translated by: Zahra Hosseinian

2023-7-4

Twenty-Five local Kurdish guards lived in Marivan, who were from Marivan, and had a house there, and their only fault was that they believed in the Islamic Revolution of Iran and did not want to follow the left parties. Hundreds of armed members of the left parties entered Marivan on July 14, 1979. They surrounded the guards, killed half of them, and injured or scared away the rest. One of the wounded guards was decapitated with a mosaic, and then his body was dragged across the pavements and rooms; his blood had flowed everywhere.

In this scene of crime, there was no army, no gendarmerie and no city police, but the left parties did not want to tolerate even the presence of 25 indigenous Kurdish armed men who were against them, and massacred them so brutally. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps sent 100 guards from Kermanshah [Bakhtran] to Marivan, but they arrive when the die was cast, so they are stationed in the Marivan military barracks, four kilometers outside the city. In order to protest against the arrival of the IRGC Forces in the Marivan barracks, the left parties took the people to a camp eight kilometers outside the city. They gathered them under a tent, and started a riot. Several thousand of their supporters moved from Sanandaj to Marivan. They wanted to attack the military barracks of Marivan using women and children. Many forces of internal and external Kurds surrounded all the heights of the barracks, and the atmosphere of barracks were extremely tense....

The government sent me on a mission to go to Marivan and settle the case peacefully. I entered the Marivan barracks with a helicopter together with Brigadier General Fallahi, the commander of the ground forces, while the city was occupied by the leftist forces, the encirclement of the enemy was getting tighter every moment, and the convulsions intensified. We stayed in Marivan for ten days, and with round-the-clock activity, and numerous long meetings with everyone around us, we finally managed to solve the Marivan issue peacefully. The elders of the city accepted our opinions, but the left parties strongly conspired to start bloodshed, and the scope of chaos and disorder became wider.

Our plan was that the region to be in safe, the rule of the government to be established, the party armed men and foreign forces to leave the city, armed men not to disturb others, and no party to disrupt the security of the city, even the family of those who have killed had no right to revenge, and only the prosecutor of Islamic Revolutionary Court or the Judiciary had the right to deal with the accusations of the injured and that's it....

The people accepted our opinions, because they did not want chaos and bloodshed, and they did not want the war in their city to destroy and kill innocent people; therefore, they asked the armed left parties to leave the city. They submitted the government's rule., and then women and children group by group returned to their homes from the camp outside the city, and happily went about their work and life; but on the same day, about 35 people of the Organization of Iranian People's Fedai Guerrillas, probably together with other parties, sat in at the behind of the Marivan prévôt building, where was also a public payphone center, and opposed this agreement!

Source: Mustafa, Chamran, Kurdistan, Islamic Culture Publishing Office, Shahid Chamran Foundation, 1985, p. 43.