@@ Neocons exploiting unrest in Iran @@
Arash
May 11, 2005
Neocons Exploiting Domestic Unrest in Iran?
By Jim Lobe
editors at ipsnews.net
Amid rising tension between Iran and the United States, a major U.S. human rights group
said Tuesday that at least 50 people were killed during week-long protests in southwestern
Khuzestan province last month and urged Iran to permit independent journalists and rights
monitors to go to the strife-torn region across the border from Iraq.
New York-based Human Rights Watch (http://hrw.org/doc?t=mideast&c=iran / Email: hrwnyc at
hrw.org) also called for the immediate release of Yusuf Azizi Banitaraf, an Iranian
journalist of Arab descent who was arrested in Tehran April 25 during a press conference
to call attention to government abuses in Khuzestan by the independent Center for the
Defense of Human Rights.
"The Iranian authorities have again displayed their readiness to silence those who
denounce human rights violations," said Joe Stork, Washington director of HRW's Middle
East division. "We have serious allegations the government used excessive lethal force,
arbitrary arrests, and torture in Khuzestan".
The violence, which was centered in the provincial capital, Ahwaz, but spread to other
towns in the region, began April 15 and continued for the better part of the following
week. Because the province was closed to foreign media, rights groups and others have had
to depend on accounts by the government, residents, and other sources with firsthand
knowledge of what took place.
The protests were sparked by the circulation of a 7-year-old letter that was attributed to
then-Vice President Mohammad Ali Abtahi and called for displacing Arab residents in the
oil- and gas-rich region, replacing them with ethnic Persians. Both the government and
Abtahi said the letter was a forgery.
According to reports, demonstrators, nearly 400 of whom were arrested, looted government
buildings and police stations. Opposition Web sites said as many as 160 people were
killed; the government has said that only five people died. As many as 1200 people were
arrested, said local sources in contact with HRW.
Tehran blamed the unrest on "foreigners" and "hypocrites", an apparent reference to the
Mujahedin-e-Khalq,(http://www.irandidban.com) a rebel group sustained by former Iraqi
President Saddam Hussein until his ouster two years ago whose current relationship with
the U.S. occupying forces in Iraq is ambiguous.
While regional specialists say ethnic Arabs in Khuzestan have long-standing reasons to be
angry with the central government, the province's proximity to Iraq and rising tensions
between Tehran and Washington over issues ranging from alleged Iranian influence in Iraq
to its nuclear program make the government's charges at least superficially plausible.
The speed with which the Bush administration denounced the government's repression has
helped bolster that impression. "In our view, this unrest and these arrests involve the
denial of rights of minority groups in Iran", State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said
at the time. "Suppression of minority rights is obviously to be denounced".
The administration, which has not yet formally adopted "regime change" as its Iran policy,
has become increasingly convinced, despite the negotiating efforts of the so-called EU-3
(France, Britain, and Germany), that Tehran is determined to acquire nuclear weapons, an
eventuality that Bush himself has declared "unacceptable" in the past.
Pessimistic about the EU-3 negotiations and the possibility that it could get enforceable
sanctions against Iran approved by the UN Security Council, the administration has
considered carrying out military strikes against specific nuclear-related targets in Iran.
As recently noted by Richard Perle, an influential neoconservative hawk close to Vice
President Dick Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, military strikes would be a
high-risk option that could prove counterproductive both by bolstering support for the
Islamic regime and further isolating the U.S. from its allies.
Thus, the preferred option at this point, even if it is not officially endorsed, is regime
change.
Under one plan released last year by the mainly neoconservative Committee on the Present
Danger (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_the_Present_Danger), Washington hopes to
help mobilize a pro-democracy movement similar to Solidarity in Poland and to last year's
Orange Revolution in Ukraine that would challenge the government in the streets. Congress
has already cleared several million dollars for this purpose and last week the State
Department, or U.S. foreign ministry, began soliciting bids from eligible groups.
A second option, backed by harder-line forces, calls for covert action designed to bring
down the regime – through more active backing for the MEK (http://www.iran-interlink.org)
and/or fomenting unrest, especially among minority groups such as the Khuzestan Arabs that
together make up about half of Iran's 70 million people.
These include Turkmen in the northeast, Tajiks along the border with Afghanistan, Balochis
near Pakistan, Azeris and Kurds in the northwest, and Ahwazi Arabs, who altogether number
about two million, or roughly three percent of Iran's population. Disturbances have been
reported in both Iranian Kurdistan and Balochistan, as well as in Khuzestan, in recent
months.
"It's certainly the case that there are long-standing ethnic and regional disputes in Iran
that come about in part because the Iranian plateau, whose inhabitants are
Persian-speaking and Shia, is surrounded by a periphery that is either not Persian or not
Shia", said Juan Cole, a regional specialist at the University of Michigan.
"The most recent incidents in Khuzestan certainly fit into a general pattern of uneasy
relations between the center and periphery", Cole told IPS. "The question on everyone's
mind is whether it is connected in any way to the situation in Iraq or U.S. policy, and
about that, we can only speculate".
HRW's chief Iran researcher, Hadi Ghaemi, said the situation faced by the Arabs was enough
to trigger unrest.
"What we do know for sure is that there are very serious local grievances that the
government needs to address, including agricultural land was taken from the residents
during the Iran-Iraq war, has not been returned since, and is now being used for
agribusiness development by people outside the region", Ghaemi said.
Khuzestan's Arabs, who, because of the influx of Persians, now make up only about half
of the province's population, suffer economic hardship, disproportionate levels of
unemployment, and discrimination. Many remain displaced from the war, said Ghaemi.
"I believe there are foreign interests that would like to exploit these kinds of events,
but this particular incident has many local roots based on legitimate grievances", he told
IPS.
* Jim Lobe, works as Inter Press Service's (http://www.ipsnews.net) correspondent in the
Washington, D.C., bureau. He has followed the ups and downs of neo-conservatives since
well before their rise in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=5907
Who is behind Human Rights Watch?
http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/HRW.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Rights_Watch
* Hadi Ghaemi (http://www.uuforum.org/hadi1.jpg) is a researcher with New York based
Center for Economic and Social Rights (http://www.cesr.org) and former professor of
physics at the City University of New York (http://www.brooklyn.cuny.edu). He is currently
working on a book about the cultural revolution in Iran.