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Little-known Arab group in Iran faces persecution-- |
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Ahwazis
call occupation of their land a plight worse than that of
Palestinians
Hugh Macleod, Chronicle Foreign Service
Sunday, November 5, 2006
For decades, the Persian shahs and ayatollahs of Iran have uprooted Ahwazi
Arabs from their oil-rich region in the southwest corner of the country, forcing
an estimated 1.5 million people off the land where their families have lived for
generations.
The result, Ahwazi activists say, is the occupation of an Arab homeland in
the heart of the Middle East that almost nobody knows about -- an occupation,
Ahwazis contend, that has stripped Arabs of more land than is at issue in the
dispute between Israel and the Palestinians.
"They came at me like a pack of wolves," said Abu Tarek, who asks that his
family name be withheld out of concern for his safety.
Abu Tarek is a native of the region that borders Iraq, Kuwait and the
Persian Gulf, once known as Arabistan after its ethnic majority but renamed
Khuzestan by the Iranian government. As a campaigner for the rights and autonomy
of Ahwazis, Khuzestan's Arab-majority population, he was considered a grave
threat to Iran's national security.
"For a year, they blindfolded me, electrocuted my hands, beat my penis and
smashed my head against the wall," he said, describing his torture at the hands
of Iranian security during 1987, a year before the end of the Iran-Iraq war.
"One time, I fell unconscious for two days, and when I woke up, I couldn't see
out of my left eye."
Like most Middle Eastern countries, Iran has a host of ethnic and religious
minorities within its borders. The dominant group is ethnic Persian Shiites, and
the government they control derives most of its wealth from oil.
Khuzestan's oil fields produce about 90 percent of Iran's oil, or nearly 10
percent of OPEC's total production. To replace the autonomy-minded Arabs of
Khuzestan, the Tehran government has sponsored a series of vast industrial
projects, coupled with massive, organized influxes of Persian workers and their
families to replace the Ahwazis.
The government accuses Ahwazi Arabs of plotting foreign invasions with
everyone from the CIA to Saddam Hussein.
"The security agents said I was a spy for the Iraqi regime. I told them I
didn't want to change the Iranian occupation for an Iraqi one," said Abu Tarek.
Six years into his second stint in jail, he escaped earlier this year and fled
to Syria, hoping for refuge from his persecutors. He has not found it.
Although Syria, an authoritarian, Sunni-majority country where political
Islam is outlawed, and Iran, a hard-line Shiite theocracy, make an unlikely
partnership, their strategic alliance transcends founding ideologies.
Abu Tarek may be considered a political refugee by the U.N. High
Commissioner for Refugees, and the rulers of Syria may still pride themselves on
backing the pan-Arab cause, but he nonetheless faces possible deportation back
to Iran -- and what would
probably be a death sentence.
"I thought I'd be protected here in this Arab state. In the past, we used
to ask Syria for help in our struggle; now I am asking Europe for help in
escaping Syria," Abu Tarek said. "I am afraid Syrian intelligence will hand me
over. I am even more afraid here than in Iran. I knew my enemy in Khuzestan, and
I knew where to run. Here I don't even have a house, so at night I sleep in
parks."
His fear may be justified -- other Ahwazis have been sent by Syrian
authorities to Iran, even one who lived in Europe.
Dutch citizen Faleh Abdullah Mansuri, the 60-year-old head of the Ahwazi
Liberation Organization, the Ahwazis' leading political opposition movement, was
arrested by Syrian security in April while he was visiting an Ahwazi friend in
Damascus.
Syrian authorities recently confirmed that Mansuri was deported to Tehran
in May at the request of Iran. He is now reportedly in prison in Ahvaz, the
capital of Khuzestan, facing what activists say could be death by hanging for
charges related to a string of bombings in Khuzestan last year that targeted
public buildings and oil fields. Tehran authorities blamed the attacks on Ahwazi
dissidents, although the main Ahwazi organizations denied responsibility.
Saeed Saki, a member of the Ahwazi Liberation Organization, had been
recognized as a refugee by the U.N. agency. He was living in Damascus and was
due to be resettled in Norway when he was arrested and extradited to Tehran.
Only high-level intervention from international officials prevented his
execution, and he remains imprisoned in Iran.
Three other Ahwazis -- Abdullah Abdel Hamid, whose family has resettled in
Norway; Jamal Obaidy, a university student; and Taher Mazra, whose family was
prevented from leaving Syria for Sweden last month -- were arrested in April,
and are believed to be in a Damascus prison and facing extradition to Iran.
Laurens Jolles, acting representative of the U.N. refugee commission in
Damascus, said that despite numerous requests, the agency had been given no
access to the three men.
"Syria is aware that its own Constitution prevents the deportation of
refugees to countries where they will face persecution, as do international
laws," he said. "There should be a clear understanding these men should not be
sent back to Iran."
A source at the Iranian embassy in Damascus, speaking on condition of
anonymity, denied that any prisoners of conscience had been extradited from
Syria to Iran. "There is an agreement between Syria and Iran that any Iranian
who has been jailed in Syria for a crime can be transferred to complete his
sentence in Iran. But no prisoners of conscience have been handed over to Iran
by Syria."
Before its annexation in 1925 by the British-backed shah of Iran, Khuzestan
was an autonomous Arab emirate. Britain, France and Italy all had consulates in
Ahvaz. Activists say about a third of the 5 million Ahwazis have been driven
from the province since the 1979 Islamic revolution that swept the monarchy from
power and installed the Shiite ayatollahs in power.
A quarter million have been displaced by the state seizure of more than 750
square miles of land for use in a huge sugar-cane project, while an additional
400,000 Ahwazis are set to be made homeless in the creation of a
military-industrial complex along the Shatt al-Arab waterway, which borders
Iraq. In December, Iran announced plans to build a nuclear reactor in Khuzestan,
despite the earthquake-prone nature of the region.
Discriminated against in education and access to health care, Ahwazis are
banned from speaking Arabic, and many students drop out of school early rather
than receive an education only in Farsi. The result has been soaring
unemployment and abject poverty: 80 percent of Ahwazi children are malnourished,
according to the governor of Dashte-Azadegan, a district of Khuzestan.
Many Ahwazi towns were decimated in the Iran-Iraq war, and the government
has made almost no effort to rebuild them. The land is riddled with millions of
land mines left over from that war, which continue to kill or maim Ahwazi
farmers. Chemical weapons used by the Iraqi military on Arab-majority cities
have led to heart disease two decades later and continue to poison Ahwazi fetus,
according to the British Ahwazi Friendship Society, an activist organization.
Since the Ahwazi intifada, or uprising, began in April 2005, Iran has
detained more than 25,000 Ahwazis, at least 131 have been executed and more than
150 have disappeared, according to the Ahwazi Human Rights Organization in the
United States.
The two-month campaign of civil unrest culminated in a bomb attack on an
oil installation east of Ahvaz, prompting Tehran to call on Hezbollah to help
quell demonstrations and strikes, said Abu Hisham, another Ahwazi fugitive in
Damascus. He also asked that his family name be withheld for his safety.
Hezbollah, a militant Islamist movement based in Lebanon, is financed by
Iran, and its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, became an Arab icon after he waged war
with Israel last summer. Iran's influence on the Shiite Arab factions in Iraq,
its sponsorship of anti-Israeli Islamist groups including the Shiite Hezbollah
and Hamas, the hard-line Sunni party that controls the Palestinian government,
as well as its defiance of Western demands that it curtail its nuclear
development program has gained the hard-line Iranian leaders popularity
throughout the Arab world.
The Badr Brigade, the militia of the Iran-backed Supreme Council for the
Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of the major parties in the Iraqi coalition
government, uses training camps in Khuzestan. Abu Hisham said he was
interrogated by Iraqi militants at one such camp.
Abu Hisham said he fled Khuzestan in 2000 after seeing his brother and most
of his friends arrested. He, too, now lives alone and in hiding in Damascus.
"Iran occupies more Arab land in terms of square meters than Israel does,"
said Hisham, his eye darting nervously as he talked. "Yet we get more attention
from the Dutch than from all the Arab states. I wish the world would unite for
our cause, like they did to liberate Kuwait, which is a third the size of
Khuzestan."
For Abu Tarek, however, it feels like the time for hope is running out.
"I am afraid. I feel like a bird trapped inside a cage, waiting to be
slaughtered. I know I will spend the rest of my life without my family," he
said, the tears welling up in his one good eye.
"The best friend to me these long years has been sadness. All I ask is
this: Do we have a land of our own, and will we ever be allowed to rest in peace
on this land?"
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