Middle East Institute Will Host Iranian Kurdish Experts

26 Feb 2010 – Medya News – As part of its study of the region, the Middle East Institute (MEI) has scheduled to host three Iranian Kurdish experts to discuss Iranian Kurds past, present and future within Iran.

  The event titled “The Kurds of Iran: A Look at their Past, Present and Future” will hear from three experts on the subject, Carol Prunhuber, Sharif Behruz and Idris Ahmedi.

On the framework of the discussion the MEI announcement stated “Prunhuber will speak about Kurd leader Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou whose untimely assassination by the Iranian regime twenty years ago robbed the Kurdish nation of one of its most prominent and forward-thinking leaders. Her recently published book The Passion and Death of Rahman the Kurd: Dreaming Kurdistan (iUniverse, 2010) situates the life and political struggle of Ghassemlou in the wider Iranian political context.”

Carol Prunhuber has published the first book in English on the life and death of one of the most legendary leaders of Iranian Kurdish reistance movement and the leader of Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan.

According to the MEI’s announcement “ Sharif Behruz will address the impact of Iran’s Green Movement on minority groups like the Kurds and the need for Iran’s opposition to be more inclusive in order to gain significant political ground.”

Idris Ahmedi will discuss contending perspectives on the future of Iran with respect to its ethnic diversity. Is diversity a threat to Iran’s territorial integrity, or a facilitator to the rise of meaningful democracy?

Carol Prunhuber is the author of The Passion and Death of Rahman the Kurd: Dreaming Kurdistan (iUniverse, 2009), which has been published in Spanish, Turkish and Kurdish. Through Gamma TV, Prunhuber traveled to Iranian Kurdistan in 1985 to film the struggle of the Kurds in Iran. She currently writes for the Venezuelan journal El Nacional and travels extensively speaking on the Kurdish issue.

Sharif Behruz is the current US Representative of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI), the first modern Kurdish political party and one of the most prominent Iranian Kurdish opposition groups. Behruz graduated with honors from the University of Western Ontario with a degree in political science. Aside from his political involvement with the Kurdish resistance movement in Iran, he has also appeared before the US Congress and Canadian Parliament to provide testimony on human rights conditions in Iran – in particular the treatment of the Kurds in Iran by the regime of the Islamic Republic.

 Idris Ahmedi is a visiting scholar at Georgetown University. He is a PhD candidate at the Department of Political Science, Stockholm University, where he also teaches political theory and international politics. Ahmedi’s main areas of research include US foreign policy toward Iran and Iraq, and Kurdish politics. He has published articles about US policy toward Iran in Internationella Studier, a journal published by the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, and articles pertaining to the Kurdish issue in the Kurdish press.