Turkey Accused of Handing Over Kurdish Dissidents
September 08, 2003
AFP
IranMania
ARBIL -- An Iranian Kurdish opposition group accused Turkey of handing over 16 Iranian Kurdish dissidents to the Tehran government, putting their lives at risk.
"The Turks handed over to the Iranian (government) 16 Iranian Kurds who were formerly active in the Union of Kurdistan Revolutionaries (UKR) and the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI) under an agreement between the intelligence services of the two countries," UKR secretary Hussein Yazdanpana told AFP.
"This puts their lives at risk," he said, adding that two Iranian Kurdish dissidents handed over by Turkey to the Islamic Republic were executed in January and November 2002.
Yazdanpana was speaking a day after his party issued a statement in this Iraqi Kurdish town charging that Turkish authorities had moved a number of Iranian Kurds from a refugee camp in Van in southeast Turkey to an area along the border with Iran as a prelude to their expulsion to the Islamic Republic.
The statement said the Iranian Kurds were registered with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and were living at the refugee camp in Van from where they intended to move on to a third country.
Yazdanpana accused the UNHCR of failing to prevent the expulsion of the Iranian Kurds and urged human rights organizations to intervene to protect more than 1,500 Iranian Kurds living in the camp. Iran has a six-million-strong Kurdish minority.
The two main Iranian Kurdish rebel groups active within the Islamic Republic are the leftist Komala, or Revolutionary Organization of Kurkish Toilers, and the rival KDPI.
After briefly allying themselves with the Islamic regime following the 1979 revolution, the rebels were ruthlessly crushed by Iranian security forces, particularly the Revolutionary Guards, in the 1980s.
http://www.iranmania.com/News/ArticleView/Default.asp?NewsCode=17860&NewsKind=Current%20Affairs"The Turks handed over to the Iranian (government) 16 Iranian Kurds who were formerly active in the Union of Kurdistan Revolutionaries (UKR) and the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI) under an agreement between the intelligence services of the two countries,"
"The statement said the Iranian Kurds were registered with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and were living at the refugee camp in Van from where they intended to move on to a third country."
Apparently being registered with UNHCR means nothing.