Terry Glavin - The world’s stateless peoples are more vulnerable than ever:
If you have never heard of Al-Ahwaz, an ancient place of great rivers and mountains, and rich farmlands and oil wells, don’t be hard on yourself. It’s just as unlikely that you’ve heard of the Ahwazi people. There are perhaps six million Ahwazis, and they are some of the most viciously oppressed among the various religious and ethnic minorities that make up roughly half of Iran’s population.
Al-Ahwaz is not celebrated in the histories the Khomeinist regime teaches to Iranian children. Once an autonomous emirate, Al-Ahwaz was a place of amity between Muslims, Christians and Jews. For the refuge he provided Chaldean Catholics following the Ottoman genocide of Assyrian Christians in the 1920s, Pope Benedict XV awarded a knighthood in the Order of St. Gregory the Great to the Ahwazi emir, Sheikh Khaz’al Ibn Jabir.
The Ahwazi emirate was annexed by Iran in 1925. Sheikh Khaz’al, a fervent opponent of religious extremism of the kind the Khomeinist regime typifies, was quietly murdered in Tehran while under house arrest in 1936. Following the Khomeinist takeover in 1979, the Ahwazi homeland, centred in the southwestern province of Khuzestan, has been routinely rocked by uprisings—most recently in 2005, 2011 and 2018—along with waves of repression and ethnic cleansing.
The centre of Iran’s oil wealth—about 80 per cent of the country’s proven oil reserves lie in Khuzestan—the Ahwazi homeland was also, until recently, the country’s breadbasket, producing wheat, corn, rice and sugar. But river diversions and climate change are turning Khuzestan into a dustbowl, and the security of the China-dominated oil industry is the Khomeinists’ overarching priority in the province.
What all this has meant for the Arabic-speaking Ahwazis is the bulldozing of their villages, the ongoing obliteration of their culture, and the regime’s strangulation of Ahwazi life in a savage policy of routine and arbitrary arrests, torture and executions.
If you’ve heard of the Ahwazi people at all, it could be because every few years their nightmare attracts the attention of Amnesty International, or Human Rights Watch, or a United Nations committee. But what little the outside world knows about the slow death of the Ahwazi people is due largely to the Toronto-based Dur Untash Studies Centre, a refugee-funded archive and information clearing house, and to the efforts of the centre’s editor, Rahim Hamid.
And the only reason the 35-year-old Hamid has been able to undertake the work of keeping the world informed about the misery of the Ahwazis is that he escaped Iran in 2012. He’d been a student leader at Abadan Azad University in Khalafiya, and he’d been arrested in a roundup of Ahwazi activists in 2008. After enduring horrific torture in Khuzestan’s dreaded Sepidar prison, Hamid went underground, eventually crossing the mountains into Turkey and ending up in the United States as a refugee.
“Every day now we have Iranian security forces arresting Ahwazi people. Environmentalists, civil society people, or people making demands for the right to education in their mother language. But from even BBC Persian and the opposition groups, we see nothing,” Hamid told me. “Suppose it happens in Palestine. We have hundreds of human rights organizations condemning Israel. But when it is us, they are dumb and they are blind.”
On the left there's only one group whose predicament is worthy of interest - and it's not the Ahwazis.
In their own uniquely tragic way, the Ahwazis share something with the Palestinians, and with the Taiwanese, the Kurds, the Uighurs of Xinjiang, the Rohingya of Myanmar, the Baloch of Iran and Pakistan, the Tigrayans of Ethiopia, the Afghan Hazaras, the Tibetans, and the Hong Kongers. These are among dozens of distinct ethnic and national minorities and stateless nations around the world whose peoples are locked in intractable predicaments that the United Nations is proving increasingly incapable of even acknowledging, let alone resolving.
The UN may be hopelessly ineffective and incapable of resolving any of these issues - that much is true. But in terms of acknowledging, they seem to talk of little else but the Palestinians. And employ over 30,000 Palestinians through UNRWA.
Still, an enlightening read.
"river diversions and climate change"
As soon as I read that I knew I was dealing with a first class bullshitter with manufactured opinions based on manufactured facts. Unless Glavin plagiarised this from a reputable source, don't believe a thing he says.
Posted by: Michael van der Riet | July 20, 2021 at 09:15 AM