This article by Daniel Brett, a member of Arab Media Watch and chairman of the British Ahwazi Friendship Society, was originally published in The Arab magazine.
March 2008
Residing mainly in the south-west of Iran, the Ahwazi Arabs are one of the Middle East's most disadvantaged and persecuted ethnic groups. The overwhelming majority of the Ahwazi Arabs live in Iran's Khuzestan province (accounting for some 67% of the province's population), which occupies a geo-strategically crucial position. Not only is it the gateway between the Arab world and Asia, but it also accounts for up to 90% of Iran's oil resources. This 'accident of natural geography', far from being to the benefit of the local population, though, has been the source of much hardship.
While Khuzestan's oil forms the backbone of the Iranian economy, its indigenous Arab inhabitants have been viewed, at best, as an inconvenience, or, at worst, a threat, by the Iranian government. Oil revenues from the province are largely spent elsewhere - to the extent that the Iranian government has consistently refused to allocate just 1.5% of oil revenues to Khuzestan, as requested by the province's representatives in the Majlis (parliament).
From autonomy to persecution
For centuries, Arab sheikhs enjoyed virtual independence from Tehran and the region became known as Arabistan (meaning "land of the Arabs" in Farsi). The distinctiveness of Arabistan was noted by the British colonial administrator Sir Arnold Wilson, who wrote in his memoirs that Arabistan was "a country as different from Persia as is Spain from Germany." Sheikh Khazaal, of the powerful Muhaisin clan, came to power as the Sheikh of Mohammerah in 1897 and co-operated with the British in the areas of trade, security and investment. His ability to broker agreements without the prior authorisation of Tehran was a testament to the virtual independence of Arabistan.
The overthrow of Persia's Qajar Dynasty and the rise to power of Reza Pahlavi in 1925 brought a new era of centralised power, with the new ruler defining the country in terms of a Persian identity. The Pahlavi dynasty's ethnic chauvinism was a major break with the devolved and multi-national character of the Persian empire. Reza Pahlavi deposed Sheikh Khazal in 1925, ended Arab autonomy and in 1935 changed the name of the region to Khuzestan; at the same time, Persia's name was officially declared as Iran, "land of the Aryans". The Persians were declared to be of pure Aryan blood, with the Semitic Arabs regarded as members of an inferior race. Non-Persians were forcibly assimilated through ethnocide, linguicide and genocide.
The fall of the Pahlavi dynasty in February 1979 led to an upsurge in demands by non-Persian nationalities for autonomy. Kurds, Turkmen, Balochis and Ahwazi Arabs issued similar demands for social, cultural, linguistic and economic rights, with a federal government responsible for foreign policy and control over defence, finance and the economy at a national level. The 1979 Ahwazi Arab uprising led to the biggest massacre in modern Iranian history, with 817 unarmed Ahwazi Arabs slaughtered in the streets of Mohammerah (renamed Khorramshahr) by Ayatollah Khomeini's Revolutionary Guards. Most died during one single day of carnage, which has become known as Black Wednesday.
Khuzestan continues to bear the scars of the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. That war was, in part, brought about by Saddam Hussein's attempts to exploit the legitimate grievances of the Ahwazis for his own ends. Believing that, as Arabs, the Ahwazis would side with him, Saddam initiated the war by sending his army across the Iran-Iraq border in an attempt to annex Khuzestan. As it was, at least 12,000 Ahwazis died fighting against Saddam's invading force.
Despite this demonstration of their commitment to Iran's territorial integrity, the Ahwazi Arabs have continued to be viewed with suspicion, if not outright hostility, by Tehran. Consequently, they have faced a sustained programme of land confiscation and 'ethnic restructuring' from a government determined to secure access to energy resources at all costs. This has entailed a concerted effort at 'Persianisation', with the government of Tehran attempting to force the supposedly 'treacherous' Arabs out of Khuzestan, to be replaced by 'loyal' ethnic groups.
Sugar, oil and ethnic cleansing
Since the 1979 revolution, Arab-owned land has been forcibly taken, or 'legally' stolen, by the government for sugar plantations, oil and petrochemical facilities, military bases and settlements for non-Arabs brought in from other provinces. Indigenous Arabs have been forced into slums that are separated from non-indigenous areas with concrete separation walls, similar to those constructed by the Israelis in the West Bank. Even the slums, where the landless are forced to move, are not immune from the confiscation campaign. The homes of 4,000 Arab residents of Sapidar, many of whom fought for Iran in the Iran-Iraq War, were destroyed and bulldozed over in 2003. More than 15,000 Arab farmers, who have been made landless by the government's land confiscation programme, have been forced to resettle in a camp named "Bhehsheti" outside city of Mashahd in the north eastern Iranian province of Khorassan.
In all, at least 300,000 hectares of Arab land has been stolen since 1979. By way of comparison, in almost 40 years of occupation of the West Bank, the Israelis are estimated to have confiscated some 394,000 hectares of Palestinian land. In addition to sustained land confiscation, the Ahwazis have faced not only social and economic discrimination (enduring hardship, poverty, illiteracy and unemployment at higher rates than the national average), but also a prolonged 'kulturkampf', waged against them by the Iranian regime. Land confiscation and forced migration are in line with the "ethnic restructuring" programme outlined in a top secret letters written by Mohammad-Ali Abtahi when he served as Iran's Vice-President and Brigadier General Gholamali Rasheed. The Abtahi letter was leaked to the international media in 2005, prompting the April intifada in Ahwaz in which over 100 Ahwazis were killed by security forces.
The deprivation in Ahwazi Arab areas means that they constantly stand on the brink of civil unrest. Most rioting in Khuzestan occurs in Arab areas that endure African levels of poverty. According to research by the Middle East Forum (formerly Iran Bulletin), a group of progressive and left-wing Iranian activists, "Khuzestan has a population of 4.35 million, of which about a million are shanty town-dwellers - one third of the urban population. Khuzestan is the richest province in Iran, where all the oil is located, yet one third of its urban population lives illegally in appalling conditions." Shanty towns "lack basic amenities and are threatened both by the natural elements and by the effects of the social infrastructure."
Poverty is largely related to forced displacement and land confiscation, which, according to the Middle East Forum, was "designed to take the labourers off the land and drive them into the towns. The combination of ethnic repression, the language barrier and the unskilled nature of their work meant they had to compete unequally in the labour market. So within the proletariat, minorities ended up at the bottom of the pile. The role of the state was and remains central in this - not only because it used the security argument to bring about their dispossession, but because it is also the biggest single employer."
According to the Middle East Forum's research, "The official unemployment rate for the whole of Iran is said to be around 12% and increasing, but the actual figure is way above that. In Khuzestan over the last 10 years official unemployment has risen from 16% to 18%. So in this, the richest province, already high unemployment is rising. It is here that the largest movement of the workforce from the official to the unofficial economy takes place."
Following a visit to Khuzestan in July 2005, UN Special Rapporteur for Adequate Housing, Miloon Kothari, condemned the land confiscation programme aimed at Arabs and the fact that economic development was by-passing the indigenous population. In an interview, he said: "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? I asked the officials, I asked the people we were with. And there is other land in Khuzestan where projects could have been placed which would have minimised the displacement." Kothari criticised the "attempt being made by the government to build new towns and bring in new people from other provinces", singling out Shirinshah for criticism.
Official statistics tend to underplay the real extent of unemployment, which rises to well over 50% among Ahwazi Arab youth and women. Statistics show that 1.46 million live in the countryside, where official unemployment reaches 20%, although problems of under-employment mean the actual rate is likely to be far higher. Despite the province's fertility and potential in agriculture, farms are suffering from a lack of investment and are under-performing, leading to rural poverty. (Khuzestan is the richest province, but ..., Karoon newspaper, 6 May 2007) Ahwazi NGOs believe that urban poverty is far worse than the government is prepared to admit.
High poverty rates are the result of racial discrimination in employment. Ahwazi Arabs are denied jobs, while the government confiscates their land for residential developments to house non-Arabs enticed from outside the province with incentives such as zero-interest loans. Even in the formal economy, Ahwazi Arabs are faced with non-payment of wages and the severe restriction of labour rights. Arabs are faced with discrimination in the civil service. Of the top 25 governmental positions, only two or three are Arabs. This 10-15% ratio of Arabs to non-Arabs in the Ahwaz City administration drops to less than 5% at the provincial level. This means that almost 70% of the population of Khuzestan (the Arabs) hold less than 15% of the key and important governmental positions. Added to this is the high level of illiteracy (over 50%) among Arabs, child malnutrition rates approaching 80% in Arab districts and the contamination of rivers and the water supply with sewerage and industrial pollution.
Marginalising the dispossessed
Although all Iranian citizens suffer political repression and serious restrictions on freedom of expression and assembly, state violence against Ahwazi Arabs is more extreme than against critics in Tehran. Any form of Arab political mobilisation has been crushed, with the government executing anyone suspected of engaging in minority rights activism.
Ahwazi Arab minority rights activists are portrayed by the Iranian government as representing all that it regards as "evil". The government and its supporters routinely denounce Ahwazi rights activists as Satanic, Wahhabi (Sunni extremists), Ba'athist or agents working on behalf of the Israeli, British, US or Saudi governments. Although Ahwazi activists campaign against social, cultural, economic and political exclusion, the government insists they have a religious agenda that is antithetical to the theocratic establishment, the "source of truth." Consequently, Ahwazi dissidents are often put on trial for "enmity with God", which is punishable by death.
Yet, the Ahwazi Arab struggle has been marginalised by exiled opposition groups, such as the monarchists, republicans and even some communists. This is, in part, a legacy of the Pahlavi dynasty's racial nationalism. These "opposition" movements have often declared that they would stand beside the current regime against Ahwazi Arabs to prevent what they see as the destruction of their country by an "alien" race, even when Ahwazis themselves do not advocate secession. Often, supporters of these movements seek to play down the suffering or Ahwazi Arabs or the importance of their struggle to freedom and democracy in Iran, and have lobbied international human rights organizations to eliminate all mention of ethnic discrimination.
Ahwazi Arabs also have few friends in the Arab world, although there is growing recognition of their suffering by some Gulf states such as Kuwait. As they are predominantly Shi'ite, Ahwazis elicit little sympathy from their Sunni Arab brothers. Moreover, many governments in the region are careful not to upset the militaristic and aggressive power lying to their north, viewing the Ahwazi issue as a struggle that could cause them unnecessary problems were they to be involved.
In the international community, the British government, members of the House of Commons, the European Commission and the European Parliament have condemned ethnic discrimination against Ahwazi Arabs and other national groups. However, they have concentrated on individual cases of human rights abuse against Ahwazi Arabs, particularly the use of the death penalty, rather than broader issue of ethnic persecution. British government ministers have voiced concern that any proactive stance could cause more problems than it would solve, confirming Iranian propaganda that claims the British government is funding, training and arming separatist organizations. Neither the UK nor the EU have endorsed the Ahwazi Arabs' right to self-determination or the Mohammerah Declaration of 1979, which embodies the aspirations of Ahwazi Arabs. Yet, if the Iranian regime is to be prevented from driving the Ahwazi people literally off the map, then it's vital that their predicament be placed firmly on the 'political map' here in the West as well as the Arab world. Ahwazi Arabs can neither rely on their Iranian compatriots nor their Arab brothers for support. International solidarity is therefore essential to ending their persecution.