TIMMERMAN: Release the Iranian ‘hostages’

Obama’s sanctions against PJAK are unjustified gift to Tehran regime

By Kenneth R. Timmerman -The Washington Times

With the Middle East coming apart at the seams and no coherent policy or set of principles to guide policy, the Obama administration should support the people of Iran, the one country where the population remains resolutely pro-American and firmly opposed to the dictators who have been waging war on America for the past 31 years.

President Obama appeared to be contemplating such an approach in March when he delivered traditional greetings on the occasion of the Iranian New Year (Nowruz) and named Iranian dissidents. While greater emphasis on the human rights abuses of the Iranian regime is a welcome shift, the president spent the first two years of his administration in a failed effort to make nice to Tehran’s terrorcrats, responding with stony silence in June 2009 when millions of Iranians took to the streets to protest the fraudulent “election” of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and were calling out to the United States to give them the type of moral support the president offered on Nowruz.

If Mr. Obama really wants to assist the Iranian people in their struggle for freedom from a wretched regime, he could free the Iranian “hostages.”

Hostages? Yes, the United States is holding Iranians hostage. And it ought to be front-page news.

The hostages are Iranian Kurdish freedom fighters who were placed on the Treasury Department’s list of international terrorist organizations on Feb. 4, 2009, as part of Mr. Obama’s much-touted “outreach” to the Iranian regime.

On paper, the Treasury sanctions against the Free Life Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PJAK) merely prohibit PJAK from conducting business with any U.S. person. Because the group has no U.S. office, does not raise funds in the United States and does not lobby Congress, this might appear slightly less forceful than a slap on the wrist.

But in reality, the Treasury action has had a chilling effect on PJAK’s ability to interact with other Iranian opposition groups, which fear guilt by association. “Some groups won’t deal with us because of this,” a member of PJAK’s political leadership, Sherzad Kamangar, told me during a trip to the group’s base in northern Iraq in February.

Iranian opposition groups know that PJAK has played a significant role in the nonviolent protests that have rocked Iran since the June 2009 elections. Hundreds of PJAK members and sympathizers have been arrested. Scores have been executed, including Mr. Kamangar’s younger brother, Farzad, a secondary school teacher who was hanged last May along with four other Kurdish activists.

But PJAK’s efforts to help forge a united opposition front that would be able to challenge the Iranian regime all across the country, not just in Tehran, have come to a screeching halt because of the Treasury designation. “This decision has clearly benefited the Iranian regime,” another PJAK leader, Amir Karimi, told me.