By Hamma Mirwaisi and Alison Buckley
The lives of ordinary Kurds in Iran and other Iranians nowadays are so hard that they are barely sustainable. As a result KODAR, a new Kurdish organization in Iran has been formed to unite Kurdish people in Iran first and then to unite the Iranian people to bring about change in the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI).
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the Kurds and Lurs of Iran, owner
In 1979 two Iranian leaders, namely Karim Sanjabi from the Kurdish Sanjabi tribal family's leadership, and Shapour Bakhtiar from the Lurish Bakhtiari tribal family's leadership had the chance to take over the Iranian Government after the departure of the Shah of Iran. Although both men had PhD degrees, unfortunately, because of their tribal thinking they could not agree on one plan to run the Iranian Government.
Karim Sanjabi, a veteran Iranian politician was born in Kermanshah in September 1904 to the chief of the Kurdish Sanj bi tribe. He studied law and politics at Sorbonne University in Paris, where he earned his doctorate in law. He subsequently worked as a law professor at the University of Tehran. He was associated with fellow Bakhtiari Mohammed Mossadegh, the nationalist Prime Minister who sought to nationalize the country's vast oil monopoly controlled by British interests. Dr. Mossadegh was ousted in 1951 in a coup engineered by the American and British intelligence services with the aid of the Shah's military.
Dr. Sanjabi emerged in the late 1970's as the leader of Iran's principal opposition party, the liberal and centrist National Front. With Shahpur Bakhtiar and Mehdi Bazargan he was among the first to criticize the Shah's policies openly. As popular unrest began to crest in 1978, Dr. Sanjabi turned down an offer to head a coalition government because the Shah insisted on keeping control of the army. He tried to strike a balance between the monarchy and the religious opposition led by Ayatollah Khomeini from exile in Paris.
Sanjabi was a veteran Iranian politician who fought both the heavy-handed monarchy of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi and the harsh Islamic fundamentalism of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini that followed. He died in exile in 1994 at his home in Carbondale, Ill. He was 90 years old.
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