Dr. Sadegh Sharafkandi
Dr. Mohammed Sadegh Sharafkandi was born on January 1st, 1938, in the Bokan region of Kurdistan, Iran. He went to elementary for two years in Bokan and finished his primary and secondary education in Mahabad. He married and had 3 children; besides speaking Kurdish, he also spoke Persian, Arabic, Turkish and French. Dr.Sharafkandi graduated with a degree in chemistry from the Institute of Higher Education in Tehran in 1959. From then till 1965 he became a chemistry teacher in Kurdish towns. When he became involved in political activities the Shah's regime transferred him to the city of Arak and then to Karaj before he was selected as an assistant professor in chemistry at the Teachers' Higher Training College in Tehran.
In the year 1972 he went to study at the University of Paris VI in France, receiving his Ph.D in analytical chemistry in 1976, he also met Dr.AbdulRahman Ghassemlou, the secretary-general of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan(DPKI), joined the party and when he went back to Iran he was assigned as Dr.Ghassemlou's representative. Dr.Sharafkandi went back to the Teachers' Higher Training College in Tehra to teach that same year. In February 1979 he joined the renewed Kurdish movement after the Shah's regime had fallen, that year Ayatollah Khomeini declared a Holy war agains the Kurdish movement. When the next Congress came in 1980, Dr.Sharafkandi went to the Political Bureau and since then he was always re-elected and put in charge of DPKI's publications, he also became assistant to the secretary-general of the party in 1986.
When Dr.Ghassemlou was assassinated in Vienna July1989, Dr.Sharafkandi was temporarily the party's leader until December 1991 when he was voted as secretary-general during the IX Congress. He showed the DPKI that he could be an excellent successor of Dr.Ghassemlo and an ideal leader for Kurdish people through a distraught period of its national independence fight. Dr.Sharafkandi pursued to bond the party's struggle to fight with Iranian population nationwide and with other Iranian democratic oppositions. During a meeting with the Iranian opposition groups, Dr.Sharafkandi was maliciously killed by the enemies of the peoples' liberation forces of Iran on September 17,2001 in Mykonous Restaurant in Berlin. Dr.Sharafkandi's goal was to attain the international community's awareness to the Kurdish issue and to acquire its complete collaboration.