By Scott Brinton
Partowmah, 65, of East Meadow, is a founder of Bellmore's Jaam' Masjid mosque. A naturalized U.S. citizen who emigrated from Iran as a young man, he is, ethnically, a Kurd, as well as a Sunni Muslim.
Partowmah, the father of five, has led a good, prosperous life in America. He earned his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in nuclear physics and went into radiology at the Nassau County Medical Center, treating cancer patients before he retired.
Partowmah's thoughts often return to the Middle East, where thousands of his people, the Kurds, were slaughtered by Saddam Hussein's regime. Also in Iraq and several other parts of the Middle East, Kurds have been forcibly displaced from their ancestral lands and banished to poverty-stricken neighborhoods, in much the same way that Jews were exiled to ghettos by the Nazis during World War II. Up until 10 years ago, simply saying the word "Kurd" was illegal in Turkey, according to Partowmah.
"We have suffered in the hands of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, and no one has come to our rescue yet," he said.
Last week, Partowmah sat down with the Herald at the Islamic Center of Long Island in Westbury to offer his views about the Kurds' plight, his insights about the war in Iraq, and his concerns about future American involvement in Iraq and the Middle East.
Partowmah, who now serves on Jaam' Masjid's board of directors and as vice president of the Kurdish American Fraternity, said he sided with what he called world opinion on the war in Iraq. That is, he didn't want to see the U.S. invade the country. He believed that too many innocent Iraqis would lose their lives during combat. To date, the number of reported Iraqi civilian deaths ranges from 1,200 to more than 2,000.
"There were so many ways to get Saddam out," said Partowmah. "They didn't have to plow the country. They didn't have to send a quarter-million" U.S. troops to the Persian Gulf.
Partowmah, who once served as a political adviser to Iranian President Banisadr Abolhasan (see shaded box), holds this view despite years of vicious attacks by the Iraqi regime against Kurds to suppress their desire to form an independent state.
Fifteen years ago, Saddam Hussein ordered chemical weapons to be used against the Kurdish town of Halabja. More than 5,000 Kurds, many of them women and children, died in the attack. The press reported the massacre, but the world did nothing about it.
Now, Partowmah said, coalition forces should search for mass graves of Kurds who were buried alive by Hussein's regime in southern Iraq. According to Partowmah, 25 years ago Hussein had 8,000 of the most able-bodied Kurdish men trucked away from their villages in northern Iraq, and no one has heard from them since. Kurdish political organizations recently uncovered what are believed to be the mass graves of the men. The groups haven't yet found all 8,000 of the missing, but they assume that if many were killed, they all were.
In total, Partowmah said, Hussein is believed to have had 5,000 Kurdish villages destroyed, leaving their inhabitants to forage the land as beggars.
Partowmah believes that Kurds should now be given control of Iraq. Kurds, he noted, have for the past decade maintained an autonomous, democratic -- though unrecognized -- state in northern Iraq, where, since the first Persian Gulf war in 1991, American and British war planes have protected them from Iraqi incursions.
Kurds, who fought alongside coalition forces during the most recent war, could restore order to the chaos that is now Iraq, said Partowmah. "Let them run it for nine, 10 years, and try it out and see how it works," he said.
Beyond reparations for years of injustice, allowing Kurds to run Iraq would give them a semblance of a homeland, Partowmah believes. Numbering anywhere from 20 million to 40 million, Kurds are now the largest ethnic population in the world without a country of their own.
Speaking a language derived from Persian, they are a non-Arabic and largely Sunni Muslim people who lived for thousands of years as nomads in the mountains between what are now Turkey and Iraq. When the Ottoman Empire was carved up at the beginning of the 20th century, the Treaty of Sevres promised them a country, but they never got one, and they scattered among Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Partowmah doesn't hold much hope that Kurds will take control of Iraq. Shiite Muslims, who make up 60 percent of Iraq's population and are receiving heavy backing from Iran, appear to be gaining the upper hand in the power struggle now taking place there.
Last week, the U.S. installed one of its own to lead the country until a permanent democratic government is established. Partowmah warned that the U.S. must quickly assign Iraqis to lead the government. If it does not, Iraqis will see America as an invader rather than a liberator. "They should rely on the locals," Partowmah said.
He also said that the coalition forces must maintain law and order in the country and not permit the kind of looting that has occurred in recent weeks. "They are responsible to keep the innocent from harm," he said.
Partowmah's greatest hope is that the world will now recognize the plight of the Kurds, and that, as a people, they will receive justice. "I hope the case of the Kurds is not dropped this time," he said. "There have been many times when we have been used for a purpose and then dropped."
How to advise an Iranian president
On the sunny but brisk Friday that Dr. Mozaffar Partowmah was interviewed for this story, he appeared professorial in a grayish, perfectly pressed suit vest and tie, a pair of thick glasses and a beard. He was soft-spoken, humble.
Partowmah's deep understanding of the Islamic world quickly became apparent as he spoke. He was able to see it both as an American citizen who has spent most of his adult life in the United States, and as an Iranian Kurd who, as a younger man, was heavily involved in Middle Eastern affairs.
In fact, Partowmah served for 15 months as a political adviser to Iranian President Banisadr Abolhasan, who assumed power in 1980 and oversaw the release of many of the 66 hostages seized by Iranian students at the American embassy in Tehran in 1979.
Partowmah was in the adviser's post for 15 months and had an office just down hall from the president. But with Abolhasan considered a moderate during turbulent times, when Shiite conservatives controlled Iran, the president didn't last long. In 1981 he was ousted, and Partowmah returned to the U.S. and his family here.
How Partowmah became one of Abolhasan's closest advisers is a story in itself. A political activist during the 1970s, he had gone to Iran shortly after the Islamic revolution to see how his homeland was faring under new leadership. Mohammad Raza Shah Pahlavi, better known as the Shah of Iran, had been removed, and the Ayatollah Khomeini, who had been living in Paris, assumed power as supreme religious leader of the new Islamic republic.
Partowmah used a press card he received during a stint with the American newspaper Islamic Horizons to gain access to Abolhasan, who was Iran's minister of foreign affairs at the time. During his "interview" with the soon-to-be president, he offered suggestions about how to release the embassy hostages. For example, he suggested, let them go during major American holidays -- Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's -- to help rebuild Iran's reputation in the eyes of the world.
Abolhasan liked Partowmah's ideas, and took him on as his adviser for Kurdish affairs when he rose to the presidency.
