{"id":3160,"date":"2026-08-24T15:57:12","date_gmt":"2026-08-24T15:57:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cpiran.net\/english\/?p=3160"},"modified":"2026-08-25T11:10:17","modified_gmt":"2026-08-25T11:10:17","slug":"in-memory-of-gholam-keshavarz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cpiran.net\/english\/in-memory-of-gholam-keshavarz\/","title":{"rendered":"In Memory of Gholam Keshavarz"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A condensed report based on Comrade Ahmad Eskandari\u2019s twenty-day notes in Larnaca, Cyprus, Summer 1989<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Thirty-six years have passed since the assassination of Gholam Keshavarz, a well-known figure of the leftist movement and one of the leaders of the Communist Party of Iran. This text is a condensed account of the daily notes that Comrade Ahmad Eskandari wrote during his twenty-day stay in Larnaca, Cyprus, from August 27 to September 16, 1989, in order to assist the bereaved family of Gholam. These notes are not only an account of a political crime and its human consequences, but also portray the complex network of solidarity, organizational communications, and administrative and security difficulties with which Iranian leftist activists in exile had to contend during that period.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

News of the Assassination<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the evening of Sunday, August 27, 1989, Kourosh Modaresi, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Iran, contacted the writer and informed him that Gholam Keshavarz had been targeted in an assassination attempt in Larnaca and, although still alive, was in urgent need of assistance. The writer was asked to travel to Cyprus immediately to assist his shocked family. At the time, the writer was simultaneously employed by a company and held an organizational responsibility as head of Komala\u2019s foreign representation office. He knew Gholam through their joint activities involving representation and refugees and was deeply saddened and shocked by the news.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The writer had never traveled to Cyprus and did not know Gholam\u2019s family, but because of the sensitivity of the mission, he asked the Central Committee to officially assign the task to him. That same night, Ebrahim Alizadeh, Komala\u2019s First Secretary, emphasized by telephone the necessity of providing every possible assistance. The writer spent the night in Uppsala, Sweden, with Hadi Rahimi, the foreign committee liaison, and arranged his flight. On the morning of Monday, August 28, he traveled from Stockholm via Athens to Larnaca and arrived in Cyprus that evening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Political Context of 1989<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The writer recalls that 1989 was a highly eventful year in Iran and the Middle East: the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, the mass execution of political prisoners, Khomeini\u2019s fatwa against the author of The Satanic Verses, the severing of relations between Iran and Britain, the activation of the Islamic Republic\u2019s assassination machine abroad, the end of the Anfal operations in Iraqi Kurdistan, and Rafsanjani\u2019s rise to power. At the global level, events such as the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan, the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, and the fall of the Berlin Wall were also unfolding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Family Visit That Turned into Tragedy<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gholam Keshavarz, after the Swedish Immigration Service had repeatedly refused to issue a visa to his mother, finally decided to travel to Cyprus with his brother Ali and his wife Farideh Arman to see his mother; his wife\u2019s brother and sister, \u201cDarya\u201d and \u201cYaqub,\u201d also accompanied their mother from Tehran. The family stayed at a hotel in central Larnaca. Only a few days before the trip, Gholam had delivered a speech at a public gathering in Stockholm with his face disguised for security reasons; nevertheless, the choice of Cyprus, a destination considered unsafe at the time due to the transfer of terrorist groups\u2019 activities from Beirut, raised questions for the writer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gholam\u2019s brother Ali, who was concerned for his life, repeatedly asked him to change hotels and cities, but Gholam reassured him that there was no need to worry. Every day, the family walked along a fixed route from the hotel to the beach. On the evening of Saturday, August 26, in the old part of the city and on a narrow street, two motorcyclists approached them from behind; one of them called Gholam by name and, as soon as he turned around, fired several shots, one of which struck him in the forehead. A bullet also struck Yaqub, Farideh\u2019s brother, in the abdomen. The assailants quickly fled, leaving behind only shell casings in a plastic bag inside a garbage bin near the scene.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Difficult Days of Assistance and Interrogation<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Upon arriving at the hotel, the writer learned from Farideh that Gholam had died, but the news had not yet been conveyed to his mother. His duties in the following days included providing emotional support to the family, coordinating with Sweden, arranging the transfer of Gholam\u2019s body to Stockholm, following up on visas for his mother and his wife\u2019s sister and brother, translating throughout the police interrogations, and answering police questions about his own political background. The Central Police Department of Cyprus stated that it had no leads on the perpetrators of the assassination while simultaneously interrogating all witnesses to the incident. All of whom were members of a shocked and grieving family. Translating these interrogations was emotionally extremely difficult for the writer, as the mother, wife, brother, and other family members recounted the details of the incident through tears and while recalling the painful moments before and after the assassination. Yaqub, who had been wounded, was interrogated at his hospital bedside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From August 29 to September 15, a recurring pattern appears in the notes: daily visits with the family at the Hermes Hotel, accompanying family members (Ali, Darya, the mother, and Yaqub) to the police station for lengthy and tearful interrogations, visiting the wounded Yaqub in hospital “where the medical staff behaved appropriately but the administrative staff were unfriendly” and frequent trips to the Swedish Consulate in Nicosia to follow up on visas. Every evening, the writer returned to his own hotel, which he changed several times for security and cost-saving reasons, and maintained telephone contact with organizational friends in Sweden, Germany, Paris, and the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The writer points to several sensitive security matters in this report: the Cyprus police escorted him from hotel to hotel and advised him not to use taxis; the chief of Larnaca police recognized him at a remote hotel, suggesting extensive surveillance; and on one occasion, the hotel clerk presented him with a complete printed list of his telephone calls, increasing his security concerns. His wife in Sweden, who had become familiar weeks earlier with the details of the assassination of Dr. Qassem Lou, was extremely worried; for this reason, Hadi Rahimi asked the newspaper Expressen not to mention the writer\u2019s name in subsequent reports.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The writer was also active in communicating with the media: on the very day he arrived in Larnaca, he transmitted news of the assassination through the telex machine of Komala\u2019s foreign representation office to Agence France-Presse, Reuters, and the BBC. An Austrian journalist named Ferdinand Bischler, whom he knew from his years of activity in Kurdistan, quickly contacted him and asked whether there was a connection between this assassination and that of Dr. Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, which had taken place in Vienna approximately forty days earlier. The writer responded that the source of the terrorists in both cases was the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the following days, the special correspondent of Sweden\u2019s Expressen newspaper, who had been dispatched to Larnaca to cover the assassination, remained in contact with the writer almost around the clock, even calling him once in the middle of the night to obtain the latest information about the case. The journalist was simultaneously in contact with Gholam\u2019s family and Larnaca police officials, and in one of his reports he also mentioned the writer\u2019s name, causing further concern for his wife in Sweden. The writer also met with Titti Nylander of Swedish Radio and Patrick Tyler, a New York Times correspondent, in Cyprus. In the final days of his stay, David Hirst, the prominent Guardian journalist covering the Middle East, spoke with him at length by telephone about the assassination of Gholam Keshavarz and the situation in Iran and Kurdistan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was evident that from the moment Gholam\u2019s mother had applied for a passport, all of her communications had been monitored by agents of the Islamic Republic; even conversations by airline crew members with the family during the flight had taken place, indicating that they had been followed step by step in order to trap Gholam.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alongside his daily work with the family and police, the writer was also responsible for diplomatic coordination. The Swedish consul in Nicosia, a Cypriot citizen who also held consular responsibilities alongside his business activities, cooperated with the case. The writer also met and contacted the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees office in Nicosia several times in order to expedite the process of issuing residence permits and visas for family members. During this period, there were also repeated contacts with Omar Sheikhmous, who had close relations with members of Sweden\u2019s Social Democratic Party, and through him with Lars-G\u00f6ran Eriksson, a well-known liaison between Sweden\u2019s Social Democrats and Kurdish parties and organizations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The difficulty of finding accommodation was also a serious part of these days: because of security considerations as well as the need to save money, the writer was repeatedly forced to change his hotel, while finding an available room during Cyprus\u2019s peak tourist season was no easy task. Nevertheless, nightly communication with organizational friends in Sweden and Germany and follow-up on news and the progress of the case never ceased.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Difficult Return to Sweden<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The process of issuing visas for the family members proceeded very slowly. Finally, in mid-September, the mother and Ali returned first, followed by the issuance of visas for Darya and Yaqub. On September 15, when the family was preparing to board a flight via Vienna and Yaqub, who was wounded, was being carried onto the plane on a stretcher, the pilot of the Austrian airline requested an official medical certificate for travel, which was not available. Despite the writer\u2019s efforts to explain the situation, the pilot, in accordance with safety regulations, refused to accept them, and everyone was forced to leave the aircraft.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This incident left the writer deeply angry and frustrated; he blamed the airport police authorities for their failure to coordinate the administrative arrangements and pointed out that transporting a patient through an airport was not an exceptional matter and should have been properly arranged in advance. The family was forced to return Yaqub, exhausted and distressed, to the same unpleasant hospital environment, where, for security reasons, he was being cared for separately from other patients\u2014and the writer and Darya were also forced to look for temporary accommodation for the remaining night until the next flight. Meanwhile, one of the Larnaca police officers whom the writer had become acquainted with during his stay and who supported Cyprus\u2019s \u201cProgressive Party\u201d offered companionship and consolation, and they sat together in a caf\u00e9. At the same time, news arrived that a grand funeral ceremony for Gholam Keshavarz had been held in Stockholm that same day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, the following day, Saturday, September 16, with better preparation by the police and the medical certificate in hand, the family left Larnaca Airport without difficulty and, after a stopover in Zurich, arrived in Stockholm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These notes provide a close picture of the turbulent days following the assassination of one of the best-known figures of the Iranian left: the persistent and exhausting work of supporting a bereaved family in a foreign country, accompanying them through painful police interrogations, tireless efforts to secure visas, vigilance in the face of security surveillance, and the simultaneous news of the assassination of a second organizational comrade, Sediq Kamangar, only a few days later. Behind this account, a picture of the Islamic Republic\u2019s transnational apparatus of repression also emerges: the systematic pursuit of an exiled leader through surveillance of his family, possible coordination with agents inside Iran, and the continuation of this threat even after his death, in the form of monitoring the writer\u2019s telephone communications and movements among hotels in Cyprus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Gholam Keshavarz, about whom a book titled \u201cA Fighter Who Thought,\u201d written by Mazdak Chehraz\u0131 in his honor, was published, was only 33 years old when he was assassinated. The memory of him and of Comrade Sediq Kamangar, both of whom were killed within two weeks of each other, will forever be honored.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A condensed report based on Comrade Ahmad Eskandari\u2019s twenty-day notes in Larnaca, Cyprus, Summer 1989…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3161,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[86],"tags":[33,24,10,161,8],"post_badge":[],"class_list":["post-3160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-other","tag-abroad-committee-of-the-communist-party-of-iran","tag-communist-party-of-iran","tag-cpi","tag-gholam-keshavarz","tag-komala"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cpiran.net\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cpiran.net\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cpiran.net\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cpiran.net\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cpiran.net\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3160"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/cpiran.net\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3160\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3164,"href":"https:\/\/cpiran.net\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3160\/revisions\/3164"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cpiran.net\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cpiran.net\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cpiran.net\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cpiran.net\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3160"},{"taxonomy":"post_badge","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cpiran.net\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_badge?post=3160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}