London -- President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s four-day visit to Khuzestan last week was billedas a chance to listen to the province’s largely Arab population. Instead, it turned out to be a long lecture on foreign policy with little attempt to address the causes of ethnic unrest in the province.
Ahmadinejad’s series of rallies were more notable for what he did not say rather than what he did say. There was the usual litany of anti-Western slogans, the defiance of the UN Security Council’s censure of Iran over its nuclear programme, the promise of Israel’s demise and the Nazi Holocaust denial that has become the hallmark of the Ahmadinejad administration. Yet Arabs in the audience – who are a minority in Iran but a majority in Khuzestan – did not hear a single word on the civil unrest that has gripped the province since April 2005, when riots broke out after a letter detailing an “ethnic restructuring” plan for Khuzestan was publicised on Al-Jazeera.
There were signs that the audience wanted to hear more about more fundamental issues. Hand-written placards were held up indicating that a massive presence of Bassij paramilitaries had not completely suppressed dissent. One read "Inflation, unemployment, insecurity, drug addiction have desiccated the tree of the revolution" and another said “Oil and gas are our rights. Eliminate youth unemployment.”
For most Ahwazis, industrial development has not led to a significant increase in living standards.
Situated in south-western Iran and bordering Iraq, Khuzestan is the motor of the Iranian economy providing 80-90 per cent of its oil output. However, the province’s indigenous Ahwazi Arabs are among the poorest people in Iran, with Arab districts enduring African levels of child malnutrition, the highest illiteracy rates in the Middle East and low life expectancy. Poverty has fuelled social problems, such as drug addiction which has led to a dramatic rise in HIV/AIDS. Added to these economic problems are the lingering effects of Iraq’s invasion of Khuzestan, which most Ahwazi Arabs opposed and died in their thousands resisting. Saddam promise of sovereignty for Ahwazi Arabs was never realised, but he left in his wake wrecked cities, poisoned soil and the world’s largest minefields which continue to claim lives – although the sacrifices of the Arabs who bore the brunt of Iraqi aggression is rarely recognised and little has been done to clear up the devastation of one of history’s most bloody wars. The lack of progress in human development reveals that the promises of the Islamic Revolution – which the local Arab population had embraced in 1979 – have never been fulfilled, despite the province’s immense resources.
Economic inequality is underpinned by racial discrimination and state terrorism. In its first assessment of the Ahmadinejad administration’s human rights record, Amnesty International pointed out that Arabs have been “denied state employment under the gozinesh criteria.” The report adds that “hundreds of Arabs have been arrested since President Ahmadinejad’s election and many are feared to have been tortured or ill-treated. The prisons in Khuzestan province, and particularly the capital Ahvaz, are reported to be extremely overcrowded as a result of the large numbers of arrests … Children as young as 12 are reported to have been detained with adult prisoners. Some of those detained are believed to have been sentenced to imprisonment or death after grossly unfair trials before Revolutionary Courts.”
One of the main issues is land expropriation, which Amnesty says is “so widespread that it appears to amount to a policy aimed at dispossessing Arabs of their traditional lands. This is apparently part of a strategy aimed at the forcible relocation of Arabs to other areas while facilitating the transfer of non-Arabs into Khuzestan and is linked to economic policies such as zero interest loans which are not available to local Arabs.” Members of the European Parliament have described it as ethnic cleansing on a par with Serbia’s purges on Kosovar Albanians.
The problem of land confiscation predates Ahmadinejad’s appointment as president. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing Miloon Kothari appeared to be incredulous at the treatment of Ahwazi Arabs. In an interview following his visit to Iran in July 2005: “…when you visit Ahwaz…there are thousands of people living with open sewers, no sanitation, no regular access to water, electricity and no gas connections… why is that? Why have certain groups not benefited? ... Again in Khuzestan, …we drove outside the city about 20 km and we visited the areas where large development projects are coming up - sugar cane plantations and other projects along the river - and the estimate we received is that between 200,000 - 250,000 Arab people are being displaced from their villages because of these projects. And the question that comes up in my mind is, why is it that these projects are placed directly on the lands that have been homes for these people for generations?”
The Ahwazi Arabs are looking over the waters to their brothers in the rich oil emirates and wondering what life would be like if they had sovereignty over their homeland, which contains oil reserves of over 100 billion barrels – more than the combined total of Kuwait and the UAE. They are also looking back to the time when Khuzestan was known as Arabistan, a large part of which was ruled from Mohammara, now Khorammshahr. The British guaranteed protection for the local Arab ruler Sheikh Khazal Khan in return for an agreement for exclusive oil rights for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now British Petroleum), which discovered oil there in 1909. Khazal’s rule was ended in 1925 when Reza Pahlavi’s forces overran Arabistan, deposed him and imposed direct control. By then, the British had decided that a powerful central government led by a Persian monarch was essential to halt the tide of Bolshevism and ditched their support for the Mohammara sheikhdom.
The Ahwazi Arabs are well aware of what might have been had Pahlavi not imposed central government control over their homeland. Most regard the resurrection of Arabistan as a pipedream. Separatism is unpopular not because Iran’s Arab population is overcome by mindless patriotism. The Ahwazis are predominantly Shia, which makes them unworthy of solidarity in the minds of the Sunni dominated Arab League. This may change due to geopolitics and an intensive campaign of international lobbying by Ahwazi groups in recent years. In an article in the British Arab magazine Sharq, Arab Media Watch chairman Sharif Hikmat Nashashibi wrote that “Iran\'s indigenous Arabs are one of our best-kept secrets, so well kept that many, if not most of us, do not know they exist. Just try finding any information about them on the Arab League website. Nonetheless, due to current internal and external factors, we may be hearing a lot more about them in the near future.”
The Iranian intelligentsia is already warning that failure to deal with the crisis in Khuzestan threatens to turn it from a provincial problem into a regional geopolitical issue. In a recent letter to the Chief of the Judiciary Ayatollah Hashemi Shahroudi appealing for clemency for a number of Ahwazis sentenced to death, writer and human rights advocate Emad Baghi wrote that “this kind of ethnic issue is rooted in the poverty, socio-economic deprivation and accumulated repressed complexes abused and exploited by foreign forces. It is only through the pursuit and implementation of justice that ethnic concerns can be addressed and external manipulation neutralized.” He urged Shahroudi to end the mass execution of Ahwazis “to avoid costly mistakes not only in relation to the taking of precious human lives but also because of the real potential for heightening and injuring ethnic sensibilities.” Yet the regime does not appear to be listening to Baghi’s words of wisdom. Instead, Baghi has been repeatedly detained for criticising government policy.
There is little evidence to support Tehran’s claims that foreign governments are involved in ethnic unrest. Senior Ahwazi leaders are mindful of the dangers of aligning too closely with the interests of foreign powers, following Saddam Hussein’s attempts to rouse Arab nationalism in the province during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88). However, their attempts to organise constitutional means to advance the Arab rights agenda have been violently suppressed by the government. The Lejnat Al-Wefaq (Reconciliation Committee), which formed in 1999 and won a seat in the Majlis and control of Ahwaz City Council, was recently outlawed and founding members were executed. In doing so, the government undermined the Ahwazis’ rights to equality, as outlined in Article 15 of the Iranian Constitution.
Meanwhile, an underclass of disenfranchised and enraged young men is seeking out new ideologies to oppose the regime and neighbouring Iraq has become a breeding ground for armed radicalism. There are ominous signs that Khuzestan is becoming a new front in Iraq’s nascent civil war, with videos of armed men purportedly from a resurrected Ahwazi Arab nationalist militant group, the Mohieldain Al-Naser Martyrs Brigade, speaking of revenge against the Iranian regime with Iraqi accents. And the moderate Ahwazis are being sidelined due to the growing confrontation between the government and the ethnic Arabs. The rhetoric of militant groups has given unhappy young men a sense of hope that Ahmadinejad’s lectures on Israel and nuclear weapons have failed to provide.
The regime would be wise to study the story of Prophet Daniel, who was buried in Khuzestan. He warned the Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar that regardless of his kingdom’s wealth, it had feet of clay that could be broken with just a small stone. Iran’s feet of clay – its oil reserves – are in Khuzestan and if the level of despair compels Ahwazi youth to seek martyrdom, the province’s Arabs could strike a blow that could topple the Islamic Republic
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