@@ The stench of British @@
Arash
April 28, 2005
Iran's government fails to read the warning in an Arab riot
Down in the Second Class
Conspiracy-minded Iranians have had a field day arguing over who circulated a provocative
letter which sparked three days of sectarian rioting earlier this month in Ahwaz, capital
of the southern province of Khuzestan.
Persian nationalists suspect Arab neighbours of stoking resentment in Ahwaz's big Arab
minority
Others recall the area's former subjugation by outsiders; one blogger detected “the stench
of British policies” in the unrest.
In any event, Iran's governing reformists suspect that their conservative opponents will
use the riots to add threat and fear to the presidential election in June. Do not expect
Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the canny former president who this week strongly hinted he
would seek to get back his old post, to make minority rights a plank of his campaign.
Few people think that the offending letter, which proposed measures to reduce the
proportion of Arabs in Khuzestan, was the work of the official whose signature—forged, he
insists—it carried. Broadcast by al-Jazeera, a popular Arab television station with a big
following among Khuzestan's 2 million or so Arabs, and widely circulated by hand, the
letter inspired crowds of young people to attack government buildings. This went on until
the police intervened with rubber bullets, say the authorities—though some Ahwazis say
live rounds were used—killing five and arresting more than 300.
Pro-establishment forces marched through Ahwaz on April 22nd. Aware that the precise
identity of the agents provocateurs may never be established, they contented themselves
with excoriating “all domestic and foreign enemies, especially Israel and the United
States”.
Missing from their statement was any acknowledgement that the riots could serve as a
warning that Iran, for all the stability of its ethnic Persian heartland, remains
vulnerable to dissatisfied minorities on the periphery.
Their dissatisfaction is less virulent than it was in 1980, when many Iranian Arabs and
Kurds cheered—and, in the case of the Kurds, joined—Saddam Hussein's bid to invade Iran.
Since Muhammad Khatami became president in 1997, Iran has managed its minority relations
with more sensitivity. Thanks to him, Arabs and Kurds are better represented in local
bureaucracies (they always had seats in parliament); each lot has a high-profile cabinet
member.
Learning Arabic, albeit for reasons of religion rather than communal harmony, is
compulsory in schools across Iran. (of the country's 70 million, nearly 5 million are
Kurds and over 2 million are Arabs).
So why does Ahwaz erupt periodically? Its last serious riot was less than three years ago.
The answer is that the Arabs there feel deprived of their rightful share of profits from
Khuzestan's hugely profitable oil and gas.
Although the country's economy relies on Khuzestan's hydrocarbons, the revenues go
elsewhere, and the province has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country.
Arabs now form an underclass in the suburbs of Ahwaz. They find it hard to get jobs in the
oil industry.
Ethnic Persians tend to avoid hiring them. One Persian professional in Ahwaz declared that
the riots were caused by “unemployed drug addicts”.
Sadly, that may not be far from the truth. Thanks in part to unemployment, some 4 million
Iranians are said to be drug users, and the problem is especially acute in Khuzestan.
http://www.economist.com/World/africa/displayStory.cfm?story_id=3924598