By Rahim Hamid  *

Protests in the Ahwaz region are entering their third week, as anger grows fast among the long-suffering people of the Arab Ahwaz region of the south and southwest Iran over the Iranian regime’s murderous reaction to protests at the damming of the region’s rivers and diversion of their waters to Persian cities, which have left the Ahwazi people without water for drinking, household use, or agriculture. 10 Ahwazi Arab protesters have been confirmed killed,  and hundreds  being arrested and dozens so far, with the regime deploying vast numbers of heavily armed troops, IRGC personnel and plainclothes Basiji militiamen, as well as tanks and armored vehicles in an increasingly desperate effort to crush the protests that have attracted international attention. The effect of the manmade drought on the region’s environment and wildlife also been horrendous, with hundreds of the native buffalo dying in excruciating pain. 

Ahwazi human rights groups have confirmed the deaths of at least 10 protesters in the demonstrations to date but this cannot be confirmed due to the regime’s repression and effort to impose a media blackout. Meanwhile, dozens more of Ahwazi Arab protesters  have been injured, some critically, by regime forces and snipers firing indiscriminately into the crowds of protesters, and hundreds of others have been arrested. Many of the injured  Ahwazi Arab protesters are reportedly too scared to go to hospital in case medical staff notify authorities of their injuries and participation in the protests and have them arrested. 

In fact, the water crisis in Ahwaz is just a trigger that evoked the Ahwazi Arabs to protest against structural grievances and inequalities. All the evidence shows that it is not merely about water shortages , indeed, the root cause of the problem is systemic racism against the Arab people of Ahwaz in Iran of approximately 8 million people. Ignoring the structural problems will not allow us to learn the real causes of the problems.

The water crisis in the Ahwazi region including which is rich in oil and gas as well as having 6 rivers is not merely due to a shortage. The Karoon River passes through Ahwaz region and normally this region should be impacted less compared to the other central provinces. However, Ahwazi Arabs suffer disproportionately due to the diversion of the Karoon River to the water-lacking Persian provinces of Kerman, Yazd, and Esfahan. According to experts, Karoon River water was not diverted for just drinking usage, but mainly for industrial purposes. These three Persian provinces have also been the main destination of Iran’s industrial investments, including automotive and steel industries. The investments have increased the provinces’ need for water.

Currently, the oil-rich Ahwaz region is one of the poorest regions in Iran. According to officials, the real unemployment rate in most in Ahwazi areas is between 45-50 percent. The life of Ahwazi Arabs in the Ahwaz region depends on agriculture and livestock. On the one hand, the water crisis left Ahwazis without any alternative in the Ahwaz region. On the other hand, Ahwazis have been discriminated against in the job opportunities of Ahwaz region ’s oil , gas and petrochemical industry. Since Ahwazi Arab applicants can be identified with their last names, their applications mostly have been rejected by Persian who control these companies in Ahwaz. According to a report, in a period of five years, only 4 out of 4,000 employed people in the Ahwaz region’s oil industry were Ahwazi Arabs. Ahwazis experience exclusion in politics as well, even at the provincial level. For instance, all the governors in the were non-Arabs, under the Pahlavi dynasty and after the Islamic revolution. It is not surprising that many of the appointed governors were from the central Persian provinces.

Ahwazi Arab activists consider these discriminations and exclusions as governmental tactics to force Ahwazi Arabs to emigrate from their oil-rich lands. Indeed, after the discovery of oil, people from different ethnic backgrounds, especially Persians and Lors, moved to the Arab Ahwaz region to work in the oil industry as a systamtic effort to change to the Ahwazi Arab demographic areas into the favor of Persians and making Ahwazis from the majority with 8 million to a minority in their homeland.  

There is strong evidence that Iran’s regime is orchestrating a systematic and ultra-nationalist policy to confiscate agricultural lands to displace Ahwazi farmers. For example, a top-secret letter was written by the former Iranian Vice President, Seyed Mohammad-Ali Abtahi in 2005, laying out a plan to change the demographic composition of Ahwaz from predominantly Arab to mainly Persian, with the leaking of Abtahi’s letter leading to a popular uprising unprecedented in scope, which engulfed the entire Ahwaz region. The letter proposes a 10-year time frame for completing the ethnic restructuring program in Ahwaz by displacing Ahwazis, including farmers, and replacing them with ethnic groups loyal to the regime, primarily Persians and Lors.

For the regime, land confiscation, drying up rivers and sabotaging the fertility of agricultural lands are the fastest ways to displace Ahwazi rural residents. Although Ahwaz is home to about 33% of Iran’s total water resources), the regime’s policies of river-damming, diversion and dumping of chemical waste into the remaining waterways mean that much of the region’s remaining agricultural land, once renowned for its rich fertile nature, is rapidly turning to desert due to the severe water shortages.

With the protests ongoing in Ahwaz, there are also multiple reports of the regime blocking internet services across the region which continues to suffer from the horrendous water shortage crisis that triggered the protests.  

Activists said that the Iranian officials are trying to block access to reports providing video and photos showing the situation on the ground by cutting off the internet, as well as deliberately cutting the electricity supply to Ahwazi cities, slowing down the transfer of information about events in the region. These measures also led to resentment among other citizens, creating problems in citizens’ day-to-day lives, especially given the need for power for fridges and air conditioners as summer temperatures exceed 120o Fahrenheit. 

This is not the first time that the regime has cut internet services to prevent news from getting out about events in Ahwaz or other parts of Iran. Despite Iranian officials complaining that blocking internet services creates financial losses for the state, these measures are taken every time the country witnesses widespread protests against the regime, which have become regular events in the past couple of years. 

As noted above, thousands of protesters in the Azerbaijani areas of northwest Iran, in the cities of Tabriz, Urmia, and Meshgin Shahr, answered the calls for solidarity with the protests in Ahwaz.

Video footage posted by social media users showed thousands of Azeris chanting slogans against the regime. Among the slogans chanted by the demonstrators were ‘Azerbaijan and Ahwaz…Unity, Unity!’. The northwestern part of Iran is home to Azerbaijani Turks who are subject to the same racist treatment as Ahwazis at the hands of the regime, and who have similar demands, such as the right to education in their mother tongue, an end to discrimination and marginalization, and a need to have political representation in their respective regions. 

Just less than half of Iran’s population is Persian, with Ahwazi Arabs, Azerbaijani Turks, Turkmen, Kurds and Balochis – accounting for over 60 percent of the population. Although successive regimes have attempted to enforce assimilation, this has been unsuccessful, largely due to Tehran’s Persian supremacist worldview.  

 

The regime’s racism towards the indigenous Arab population of Ahwaz is relentless, extending to every area of their lives. In media, music and TV, Arabs are routinely reviled and mocked with derogatory terms and insulting language.  In Farsi literature and even in news media, Arabs are routinely described as savages and brutes “who buried their women alive before Islam”. A typical recent front-page headline in the Hamdali newspaper(pictured below) stated that Arab women had gone from being buried alive to being miniseries in UAE current cabinet”, a grossly offensive and wholly untrue and irrelevant slur in a report on the appointment of eight women as UAE government cabinet consuls.

When Ahwazis demand the right to establish cultural institutions to promote their own millennia-old Arab culture, they are denied and brutally persecuted in response, with even supposedly enlightened Persian Iranian writers and journalists supporting the regime in this overtly racist oppression and expressing similar anti-Arab bigotry with statements about Ahwazis such as “They’re not Arabs”, “We don’t have Arabs in Iran, “We have Arabized and Arab speakers which means they only speak Arabic but originally they were Persian. ” and “If you want to be Arab, please get lost and go to Arab desert.” 

Iranian anti-Arab racism is clearly seen in the state’s legitimization of the oppression of Ahwazis through land confiscation, arbitrary arrests, imprisonment and hundreds of executions of dissidents simply for the ‘crime’ of demanding human rights. The regime, like its predecessors since 1925, has also changed Arabic place names to Farsi alternatives and encouraged a large-scale transfer of Persian Iranians to Ahwaz in an effort to change the demographic composition there, particularly in the three provinces of Khuzestan (the Persianised name of northern Ahwaz), Bushehr, and Hormozegan (southern Ahwaz). The regime has also constructed well-appointed ‘Persians-only’ settlements on land cleared of its indigenous Ahwazi Arab population to encourage this relocation; Persians are offered well-paid jobs denied to the local Ahwazi people at the oil and gas fields and refineries that blight the region (where over 95% of the oil and gas resources claimed by Iran are located).

During an official event held on 6 January of this year, Mohsen Haidari, the representative for Ahwaz in the Iranian Supreme Leader’s ‘Council of Experts’, admitted that the Ahwazi indigenous population faces serious racial discrimination at the hands of the Iranian authorities. In his speech at the event, Haidari said, “There is an unacceptable level of discrimination against Arabs in Ahwaz. Although Arabs constitute the majority of the province’s population, they hold less than five per cent of the local management positions. In job interviews, when the interviewers check the identity card of an Ahwazi applicant and realize that the person is Arab they reject them. Young Ahwazis have started changing their names to hide their Arab identity in order to get hired.” This rare admission of the regime’s racism from a regime official reflects Tehran’s concerns over growing discontent among Ahwazi citizens and the increasing unwillingness to tolerate the regime’s systemic racism and injustice.

Iranian Persian nationalism is strongly based on anti-Arab and anti-Turkish sentiment. Reflecting this, regime officials refuse to even recognize the existence of Turkish and Arabic languages, dismissing them merely as dialects and variants of the Persian language family; for Iran’s leaders, recognizing minorities such as Ahwazi Arabs and Turk Azeris as non-Persian people would create a frustrating and potentially far-reaching contradiction to the self-image of Persian nationalists who view Iran as a ‘pure Aryan’ Persian country. These supremacists avoid any recognition of the reality of their own racism and of the deeply uncomfortable reality (for them) of Iran being reliant on oppressing minorities to maintain power, instead finding solace in implausible fantasies in which Ahwazi and Azeri minorities only speak their native indigenous languages due to being misled, while in reality being Persian rather than Azeri, Turkish or Arab. Any admission that Arab people do indeed exist in Iran’s political geography would mean acknowledging that Iran’s ethnic composition is fragmented and based on Persian oppression of these minorities; in order to avoid any such acknowledgement, the regime and its supporters instead prefer to create a fantasy in which these minorities are actually Persians who choose to be ‘Arab speakers’. 

Earlier on Friday, the spokesman for the Iranian Armed Forces, Brigadier General Abolfazl Shekarchi, accused Saudi Arabia, the US, the UK and Israel – the ‘usual suspects’ for Iran’s regime – of inciting the protests in Ahwaz and a number of Iranian cities against the country’s water shortages and drought caused by the regime’s own policies. 

In a statement published by Iranian state media outlets, Shekarchi said that the regime security forces seek to “cut off the hands of criminals who have strong affiliations with Iran’s enemies, and work with the alert and revolutionary people to maintain the country’s security and stability.”

Like other regime officials who’ve made similarly implausible claims of the protests being incited by “outside influences” and 

external intervention, the official provided no evidence of these allegations, which are the regime’s standard method of attempting to delegitimize any protest.

This comes as protesters reiterated that their demands are peaceful and are solely a reaction to the regime authorities’ damming and diversion of rivers in Ahwaz, which are redirected to other areas of Iran, leaving Ahwazis suffering severe water shortages, which are not only devastating the region’s indigenous Arab people and leading to farmers’ crops shriveling and dying in the hard-baked fields, but causing massive destruction to the region’s natural environment and wildlife, killing hundreds of native buffalo, which lived in the rivers, as well as countless numbers of fish and birds in the region, once renowned for its bountiful farmland and marshlands. 

The Ahwazi citizens have been calling for opening the sluice gates on the upstream dams built on the regional rivers to allow water to flow for the people, as well as for irrigating farmlands and feeding creatures, including livestock. Ahwaz is in the grip of a drought, he added, saying its people cannot endure more than they are currently enduring. 

If the dams’ sluice gates are not opened and water is not allowed to flow, the people will be forced to migrate from their homes and lands, he said, adding, “They took to the streets, chanting ‘No, no to displacement’ because what’s happening is a scheme for ethnic cleansing.”

The rights activist also claimed that the regime is using new methods to crack down on protesters, deploying a particularly volatile type of teargas that has left many protesters with breathing problems, which he said seemed more akin to a chemical weapon than a teargas canister.

  Ahwazis’ oil, gas and water resources are vitally important to the regime in keeping the economy afloat. Ahwaz accounts for 95 percent of Iran’s domestically grown foodstuffs, but the regime’s greed for the region’s oil, gas and water resources means it would sacrifice these crops in order to make the region uninhabitable and drive the indigenous Ahwazi Arab population out. 

  the regime also confiscates vast sums of money from the oil and gas funds to spend on its expansionist schemes in the region. 

The regime targets the Ahwazis in particular, because if Ahwazis wanted to topple the regime, they would be capable of doing so, as they did in 1970 when they rose up to topple the Shah when they blocked the flow of oil, gas and water to thwart the work of the fuel companies there.  

“More than 87 percent of the Ahwazi people live below the poverty line”, according to Kamil Alboshoka, an Ahwazi human rights expert based in London , an assertion confirmed by a US foundation, which found that more than 75 per cent of  peoples in Iran live below the poverty line, with the highest percentage being Ahwazis. “Residents of Ahwaz are the poorest to this day, with the average income for a family of four being around US $ 5 per month.»

The regime has also sought to deliberately and systematically alter the demographics of the region, as it has brought many Iranian citizens to Ahwaz, encouraging them with incentives such as well-paid jobs denied to the Ahwazi people, along with specially built settlements, development loans and other financial incentives. These ethnically Persian settlers are automatically given all the high-ranking or well-paid jobs in the region, having absolute control of the oil and gas refineries and related infrastructure which provide Tehran with income and energy. Thus, the Ahwazis are further relegated to destitution even as their demographic importance is pointedly diluted.

The blatant racism practised by the Iranian regime towards these indigenous Ahwazis, denying them their most fundamental rights, along with employment and life opportunities, extends to every area. Another part of this demographic change policy is the regime’s large-scale confiscation of Ahwazis’ farmland and farms, with the farmers and their families being left destitute and without any hope of compensation. These farms are then ‘given’ as rewards to loyal ethnically Persian citizens from Isfahan, Shiraz and other areas. All of these policies collectively affect young Ahwazis worse than any other group, with unemployment among the Ahwazi youth standing at more than 93%.

The regime offers Persian settlers from other areas of Iran many incentives to move to the region to work in oil, gas and petrochemical companies in Ahwaz while denying Ahwazi Arabs any jobs there in an effort to change the demographic balance there, constructing modern ethnically homogenous settlements provided with every amenity which are strictly off-limits to the Ahwazis.

The settlers are provided with financial inducements, jobs, advanced educational and cultural institutions, and a wide variety of services, and well-equipped institutions designed to attract only Persian speaking families. There have even been expensive advertising campaigns offering favourable mortgage terms and inexpensive properties to attract the ethnic Persian and Lor people to live in these settlements.

In summary, it is impossible to convey the tragedy which Ahwazis are enduring, not due to climate change, it is not climate change , but to the regime’s shockingly callous policies designed very deliberately to drive them from their lands. The Ahwazi people are now protesting and fighting not just for the right to their water, but for their very survival.

In fact, In its pursuit of oil exploration, Iran has perpetrated ecocide, contributing to its ethnic cleansing campaign against the Ahwazi people, the indigenous Arab people inhabiting Ahwaz, an oil wealthy region in the south and southwestern Iran.

Water supply remains essential for the survival of the Ahwazis, who largely sustain themselves off of agriculture in their lands. In recent years, Iran has built dams, leveraging them as a political weapon to starve the Ahwazis of their pivotal water supply and to coerce their emigration.

While Iran claims these dams are built to preempt winterly floods, they have been used in some areas to flood Ahwazi villages and destroy their crops during winter, and in summer, to starve their water supply. The depopulated Ahwazis have since had to move from their rural communities into Ahwazi urban areas and mainstream Iranian cities, where they become susceptible to marginalization.

  What if Iran had not occupied Arab Ahwaz region in 1925 by Persia state , it’s fair to say that its Ahwazi Arab people would never have allowed it to become a blighted, desertified hellscape of oil rigs belching pollution with thousands of Ahwazis suffer from various types of cancer due to this pollution. There might be problems, but these would not be on the scale of the poverty, racism, repression, deprivation, hunger, thirst and unemployment that are all Iran has brought to the Ahwazi people. There would be better living standards and a sense of hope for the future, with its indigenous people not languishing in unimaginable poverty on pennies per month, struggling constantly simply to stay alive. But even for a largely uncaring world, it would mean that the nihilistic and imperialist Iranian regime would not have the means of pursuing its nefarious foreign agendas to destabilize the region and threaten its neighbors. The American Central Intelligence Agency correctly observed decades ago that Ahwaz is Iran’s Achilles Heel. So, we leave by posing two questions. What if Ahwaz had not been occupied by Iran? Or, perhaps, what if it is no longer occupied?

* Rahim Hamid is an Ahwazi author, freelance journalist and human rights advocate.  He tweets under @Samireza42.