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Ahwazis join demonstration against Khatami in London-British Ahwazi Friendship Society |
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Thursday, November 02, 2006
Ahwazis
were among the hundreds demonstrating outside Chatham House in London
where former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami was lecturing on Iran domestic
and foreign policies.
Chatham House is one of the world's leading think tanks for the analysis of
international issues. At the meeting, Khatami discussed the use of torture and
the recent British debate about the Muslim veil.
Mohammed Khatami presided over an administration that executed hundreds of its
opponents, oppressed women and ethnic and religious minorities and crushed
student and trade union activism.
Yet, the British establishment is praising this human rights abuser as a
"reformist" and awarding him with an honorary doctorate at one of the
UK's
leading universities. Khatami is neither a reformer nor a democrat, but a
murderous tyrant. Numbering five million people, Iran's
Ahwazis are just one of many groups that faced violent persecution under
Khatami and continue to face state terrorism under his successor, Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad.
Khatami's stated plan, revealed in letters leaked to Al-Jazeera TV last year,
was to reduce the Arab population from 70 per cent of the total population of
Khuzestan - known to its Ahwazi Arab inhabitants as Al-Ahwaz or Arabistan - to
30 per cent by forcing Ahwazi Arabs out of their homes and enticing people from
outside the province with jobs and interest-free loans denied to the indigenous
population. Under Khatami, Ahwazi Arabs faced an official policy of
discrimination and repression that has led to African levels of poverty - yet
their homeland is one of the world's most oil-rich areas and the backbone of
the Iranian economy!
Last year while Khatami was still in power, UN Special Rapporteur Miloon
Kothari visited the areas devastated by Khatami's violent campaign which made
hundreds of thousands of Ahwazi Arabs homeless in their own land. This is what
he had to say: "[I]n Khuzestan [...] large development projects, like
petrochemical plants, are being built leading to the displacement of entire
villages - with thousands of people not consulted on the projects, informed of
the impending displacement, nor offered adequate resettlement and compensation
[...] the compensation being offered to the Arab villagers who were being
displaced is sometimes one fortieth of the market value - and there is nothing
they can do about it. It's a fait accompli. And all of these phenomena are
continuing. It's something that is happening almost every day."
In April 2005, Ahwazi Arabs staged an unarmed uprising against Khatami's ethnic
cleansing programme. The 'reformist' president moved swiftly to crush the
intifada, with 25,000 Ahwazis arrested and hundreds more executed, killed unlawfully
or 'disappeared'. Entire families have been imprisoned, including children as
young as two and four years old.
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