Diako Shaswari
Writing memoire has become a popular idea among the people of Kurdistan in the past decade. Nowadays, everybody from the political, and intellectual, leaders and even old Peshmergas write down their memoirs. This wave of memoire writing has had some consequences. First, this question has arisen whether every memoire needs to be written down. Second, is it worth reading everybody's memoires? Obviously, the answer to both of these questions is negative. That is, neither all kinds of memoire need to be recorded nor everybody's memoire is worth reading. Only those memoires are worth reading that give us a special incident that happened at their time. And this incident or political, social, cultural, economic or any other topic that is discussed in the memoire must give a description of the people's lives. Thus, it is obvious that some memories must be recorded that are worth researching and analyzing.
Among the written memoires, a book has been published for almost twenty years that has not been read by many. It is the memoire of "Qader Mahmoudzadeh" known as "Dr. Aso". This is one of the first books in the genre of memoire in the East part of Kurdistan, however, it did not get very popular. It can be said that it has not been read by the majority of people so it has not received much attention. This book that is published under the title of: "The memoires of Dr. Aso's Adventurous Life" is published in B5 size and 628 pages.
The writer of these memoirs has narrated the main point of these memories which goes back to seven years before his birth very wisely. What is very interesting for the reader is how can a writer retail a memory that belongs to seven years before his birth date and why it is necessary to do so. The answer to this question shows how smart the writer had been.
Dr. Aso was born in 1923 that is a century ago in Mahabad. He was from a middle-class family of that society whose family was rich. However, since the writer wants to narrate a major part of the oral history of the political and social situation of Mahabad in addition to his autobiography, he begins with a huge incident that happened in Mahabad. This incident affected his personal life and the social and political situation of Mahabad city later, thus, the writer had to mention it at the beginning of his book.
He narrates that incident from his father's perspective who witnessed it himself and was aware of every detail of it. It was the massacre of Mahabad city by the Russian Tsar forces in 1916 which is known as "Russian Saldati". This catastrophe has been mentioned in other books, too; however, the difference of Dr. Aso's narration is that he has heard it directly from his father who was present during that event.
I believe that due to the direct narration of that event's narrator in Dr. Aso's book, the reader gets more familiar with the Russian Saldati cruelty and criminal actions and will also feel the misery and loneliness of Mahabad city in that catastrophe.
The writer says: Seven years before I was born, a horrible massacre happened in Mahabad by the Russian Cassocks at the beginning of World War I which led to ten thousand people's massacres out of the fourteen thousand citizens of that city including women, children, old and young in the winter of 1916. They were killed by the Russian Cossacks' criminal swords. The small and helpless city of Mahabad and the surrounding villages turned into a blood bath. The bodies of those who were killed were lying around in the alleys and streets of the city becoming vultures, wolves, and foxes' meals because there was nobody to bury them. The bodies' smell filled the air. The writer also mentions that this massacre did not just happen in Mahabad alone but the villages around the city had the same fate. For example, Inderqash was completely ruined by the invaders and all the men had been killed by them.
From here, the narration differs from other narrations of this event. The other narrations point out that the reason for invading Mahabad was that the city was supporting the Ottomans because the people were Sunni Muslims, thus, the Russians had attacked it and this leads the reader to assume that Qazi Fattah had played the political game in a wrong way. However, Dr. Aso talks about that time when Qazi Fattah had known the Russian's intentions clearly and had informed them directly that the people of Mahabad did nothing to do with the Ottomans and most of the people were living their normal lives. And if there are some people with such ideologies, they have nothing to do with the civil citizens of Mahabad. The Russians, however, attacked the city anyway.
Indicating the brave resistance of Qazi Fattah and his followers is an important point of that event that the writer mentions. Later, he discusses that after the Russians' invasion, the Ottomans, too, attacked Mahabad which is a reason to decline the previous claim of this city's support of the Ottomans.
Narrating this significant event clears out this important point that the writer not only narrates the massacre of the Mahabad people, but he also talks about the consequences of this attack. He also mentions how people's lives were influenced and more curiously, Dr. Aso's life also begins from that point. That is, Dr. Aso's mother was a girl whose brothers and father had been killed and she was one of the miserable survivors of Inderqash village. Dr. Aso's father saw her in Mahabad while she was very poor. He took her to his house. She worked as a waitress in their house for two years but later, Dr. Aso's father married her and Dr. Aso was born.
