A bill to ban “direct shooting at kolbars” is on its way to the Iranian parliament.

The Piranshahr MP says that the bill banning direct shooting at Kolbars will be put on the parliament's agenda with two urgent issues next week. The Sanandaj MP also believes that it would be much more effective if the government drafted a bill to solve the Kolbar problem.

After the heartbreaking death of two teenage kolbars from Marivan who froze to death in the mountainous region of Oramanet on the border of Iran and the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, the debate has once again flared up about the plight of the deprived people of these areas who face various dangers to provide for their families.

Rasoul Khezri, a representative of Piranshahr in the Islamic Consultative Assembly, told ISNA on Monday, January 2nd: "For years, a number of kolbars have been killed or injured in border areas due to frostbite, avalanches, or shooting by military and law enforcement officers."

According to Khazri, a number of parliamentarians have developed a plan that, if approved, may at least reduce the risk of kolbars dying from police shootings.

The Piranshahr representative says that he and a number of other members of parliament prepared a bill to "ban direct shooting at kolbars," and that the bill is scheduled to be placed on the parliament's agenda next Sunday, with two urgent provisions.

The drafters have called for a note to be added to Article 3 of the law on the “Use of Weapons by Armed Forces Officers in Necessary Cases” for cases other than those in paragraphs 1, 2, 4, and 7 of this article.

In these four paragraphs, the cases in which law enforcement officers have the right to shoot directly at individuals are described as follows: "To defend themselves against someone who attacks them with a cold or hot weapon, to defend themselves against one or more people who attack without a weapon but the circumstances are such that it is not possible to defend themselves without using a personal defense weapon, to arrest a thief or a highway robber, and someone who has attempted assassination, destruction, or explosion and is fleeing, and to protect a weapon that is in their possession for the purpose of carrying out a mission."

Criticism of the “brutal massacre of Kolbars”

The drafters believe that law enforcement and border guards should not be allowed to shoot directly at kolbars except in these cases.

The killing and wounding of kolbars by police officers has repeatedly been met with severe criticism. In one such incident, about two years ago, 250 civil society activists signed a statement criticizing the “brutal killing of kolbars,” and representatives of western Iranian cities wrote a note to the Minister of Interior demanding an explanation for the police shooting of kolbars.

In recent days, the deaths of Azad and Farhad Khosravi, 14 and 17-year-old teenagers from a deprived Marivani family, due to frostbite, have received widespread coverage in the media and cyberspace.

“A shame for us contemporaries”

Parvaneh Salahshouri, a member of parliament, reposted a picture of the body of one of the two brothers in a Twitter message, calling their deaths "a shame for us contemporaries."

Meanwhile, Hassan Norouzi, a representative from Rabat-e-Karim and spokesman for the Parliament's Legal and Judicial Committee, criticized those who advocate the legalization of kolbari and the "tahalanji" trade, calling this a defense of smuggling.

On January 2, Nowrozi told Etemad Online: "Instead of defending Kolbari and Tehlanji in Kurdistan or the south, we should mandate the government to develop agriculture in these areas, establish factories, and provide loans for livestock, agriculture, etc. so that we can properly witness the export of products and imports. When we legalize Kolbari and Tehlanji, it means smuggling."

Contrary to this opinion, the representative of Piranshahr in parliament says that according to official statistics, kolbari only accounts for half to one percent of unauthorized imports of goods.

Ahsan Alavi, a representative from Sanandaj in the parliament, believes that it would be "much more important and effective" if the government could present a bill to solve the problems of kolbars and organize their activities.

Alavi told ISNA: "The number of kolbars in the country is more than 500,000, and they must be recognized and their working conditions must be regulated and systematized."

The government's unfulfilled promises

There are different statistics published about the exact number of Kolbars and the incidents that happen to them. The representative of Sardasht and Piranshahr in the parliament says that about 75,000 Kolbars live this way in this region. The Etemad newspaper, January 1, quoted Mohsen Biglari, the member of parliament from Noushne, as saying that about 80 percent of the population of the five border provinces are Kolbars due to the lack of welfare and financial facilities.

Referring to the recent promise of First Vice President Eshaq Jahangiri to examine "out of turn" the issue of establishing and operating border markets to organize the activities of kolbars, the Sanandaj representative emphasized that this promise is important and must be implemented and "not lost and forgotten amidst the economic turmoil."

The Ministry of Interior's information website reported in May of last year that Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli had approved a plan in the cabinet to "regulate the activities of kolbars" and announced that he had asked his deputy for security and law enforcement to hold a joint meeting with border governors and responsible agencies to examine the obstacles facing kolbars in the border provinces "within a week" and present suggested solutions.

The deaths of two Marivani kolbars in the border mountains occurred about 20 months after a "week" in which the Deputy Minister of Interior was supposed to present him with proposed solutions to remove obstacles to the kolbars' activities.

Source: DW