Archive for the ‘Ahwaz’ Category

Protests break out in Ahwaz (Arab area of Iran) as deadly dust storms plague the area

Posted: 02/12/2015 by editormary in Ahwaz, Iran, Middle East Issues, Somoud: Arab Voices of Resistance
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WRITTEN BY Rahim Hamid From the AlAhwazi Organization of Human Rights
Thousands of Ahwazis on the 10th 11th and 12th of February took part in massive organized rallies outside the governor’s building in the Ahwaz capital.

The protests were an attempt to express the deep discontentment of the Ahwazi people with Iran’s occupying policies that intentionally target the environment and the water resources in Al-Ahwaz. The plans for stealing the water of the rivers and dehydrating the wetlands have resulted in severe damage and destruction of Ahwaz’s climate and the emergence of toxic dust storms.

The dust storms have been disturbing the lives of Ahwazi citizens and their persistence is triggering fatal respiratory disorders that more likely will develop into cancerous diseases.

Two weeks ago the dust storm caused thousands of Ahwazi citizens, especially the elderly and children, to enter hospitals and clinics after having suffered from suffocation and shortness of breath due to inhaling air containing a high quantity of dust particles.

dust 4Dust storms have hit Ahwaz for several days, but the local officials proved to be irresponsible. They have taken no action to avert this environmental disaster that threatens human life and the habitat, putting at risk all the persons, animals and plants that live on the land of Al-Ahwaz. The extent of the storms has also been so severe that public and private institutions, such as schools and banks, have been undertaken a policy of temporary closure during the emergency.

The reason for the emergence of these toxic dust storms is the unnatural and extensive drying of the rivers and the marshes, as well as the ongoing construction of dams on the rivers of Ahwaz.

Additionally, there is the policy of diverting of the water of the Karoon and Karkheh Rivers to Iranian territories in order to revive the agriculture sector of the Persian provinces, particularly Isfahan and Semnan, and to supply some other Persian cities with the water; a policy that has been undertaken by the successive Iranian central governments.

According to Ahwazi human rights activists, the joint Iranian-Chinese oil prospecting activities in Ahwazi cities such as Al-Howeyzeh, Albseytin have severely polluted the land, the water of the rivers and the ecology of these regions.

Pollution has been further exasperated by the fact that the prospecting oil plans have been conducted with the use of internationally prohibited and severely detrimental toxic materials.

dust2As a result of this flagrant abuse of the environment of Al-Ahwaz, medical examinations of Ahwazi citizens undertaken after the downpour of acid toxic rain in Ahwaz revealed high incidence of toxic poisonings due to the toxic materials used in oil prospecting.

While the Iranian occupying central government continues plundering the natural resources of Al-Ahwaz, it is still employing demagogic propaganda and publicizing misleading facts where they claim that the sand storms which are plaguing the Ahwazi regions have an external origin and for this they are blaming the neighboring countries.

The Ahwazi Arab inhabitants who are living next to marshes and wetlands such as Hor-Al-Azim (which has been dried up by the Iranian oil companies) have repeatedly released films and videos that clearly show the horrific rise of sand storms from the dried wetlands.

The film below was made at the dried wetland of Hor-Al-Azim. It is compelling evidence corroborating that the source of such destructive sand storms is internal and it is the product of the colonial projects of the Occupation state of Iran.

The dust storms have caused death in other ways. They are so thick and visibility is reduced to only 5 meters, bringing about prohibitive road conditions. A tragic car accident took place on the highway between Ahwaz and Toster City involving a truck and five cars. At least twelve persons were killed in this collision, with dozens of others injured on the highway due to visibility accidents.

In recent days, the Ahwazi Arab people who have had enough of Iranian oppression, have been participating in protests in all the Ahwazi cities. They are denouncing the policy of the Iranian authorities in drying up the Ahwazi wetlands and marshes and they claim that the area of this devastation exceeds more than one and a half million hectares.

dust 5The desertification and dryness of such a vast area has led to the emergence of the deadly sandstorms that have claimed the lives of hundreds of Ahwazi Arab people. The Iranian authorities have not so far released transparent statistics with the number of deaths and people with respiratory disease and renal cancer in Al-Ahwaz. Such dust storms have been adopted as a deadly weapon for massacring the entire Ahwazi Arab people.

Original in Arabic

ahwaz map 1

The Desperate situation of the Ahwazi people (Arabs in Iran) from 1979 to this day

Posted: 02/03/2015 by editormary in Ahwaz, Children's Corner, Culture and Heritage, Human Rights, Iran, Middle East, People's Movements / Struggles, Refugees, Somoud: Arab Voices of Resistance, War
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10961890_1407719049528535_223506516_n (1)

WRITTEN BY RAHIM HAMID

The revolution of 1979 in Iran was visualized like a remedy in the minds and hearts of Ahwazi Arab people who were yearning for freedom and justice after having been oppressed by tyrannous and fascist policies of the Pahlavi regime.

The Ahwazi people, like other ethnic groups, pinned their hopes on the revolution because it was the only recourse for the freedom from racial oppression.

More than every other people in Iran, Ahwazi people were victims of anti-Arab policies of the Pan Persian Pahlavi regime. For this reason, they inspired to join the revolution so as to achieve their national rights and abolish the racial injustice and racism that had been practiced against them for years. However, in the early months of the revolution, all the hopes of ethnic groups including Ahwazi Arab people despaired after the revolution’s objectives turned out to be merely delusive slogans.

The Islamic Republic regime, to reach their illegitimate goals and continue to dominate over non-Persian ethnic people resorted to the worst type of racist tools.

The Mullah regime with much more aggressive policies in comparison with the previous Pahlavi system, has continued to carry out the ethnic cleansing policies through changing the demographic composition of Al-Ahwaz.   In this period, the policy of changing the population structure of Al-Ahwaz in various forms has been widely implemented.

Some of the methods that are used in line with ethnic cleansing of the Ahwazi Arab people are outlined as follows:

Exile:

Exile is one of the tools that the Islamic Republic regime, like its predecessor the Pahlavi regime, has used it against Ahwazis. This punitive measure is employed especially for those effective Arab intellectuals and influential political figures who have been campaigning to gain some of the social, political, cultural, and economic rights for the Ahwazi people.

10966681_1407719212861852_796136942_nThe regime, by applying exile, is seeking different goals such as disconnection of Ahwazi intellectuals with their society as a step for depriving the society of benefits of the intellectual’s insights. Besides the displacement of intellectuals, the regime is attempting to submerge the intellectuals and their families in the host community (Persian community) in order to prevent the continuation of their influence on the next generations.

As a matter of fact, in the early days of the revolution, the institutionalized policies, of banishing Ahwazi people to Persian regions, was carried out with greater frequency and intensity.

However, later with the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war the exile and displacement of Ahwazis practically took on new and broader forms as this time there was no longer need for Iranian courts’ decisions to carry out the banishment of Ahwazis.

This is because of constant fears of rockets and mortar shells of the war that forced many of Arab people out of Al-Ahwaz. As it is estimated that around 1.5 million Ahwazi civilians have been relocated in provinces of Fars, Isfahan, Khorasan, Tehran and many other places.

War:     

Khomeini said war was a blessing for us. These ominous words today apparently reveal the destructive and the murderous theories that had been set against the Ahwazi people during the war.

The Iranian occupying theorists viewed the war as the best opportunity to implement their horrid goals and make them facts on the ground.

The Ahwazi liberationist movement was a serious obstacle for the Iranian totalitarian regime. Therefore, the large-scale turmoil of the war was an unrepeatable time for the government to liquidate most of the Ahwaz’s political class once and for all so that they could never become a challenge to the regime that see the demands of Ahwazis  incompatible with its centralized  ideology.

Finally, the Iranian death squads operated massive extrajudicial killings of any Ahwazi who was suspected of having cultural or political activism by accusing them of being a fifth column, or engaged in espionage or sabotage activism for Iraqi forces.

By the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, many Ahwazi political forces  called for the establishment of political and cultural institutions, but the governments of the time  did not respond to any of the demands. At that phase, the Ahwazi Arab movement suffered the greatest human losses due to repression by the Islamic Republic regime, as hundreds of Ahwazi cultural, civil and political activists were executed, based on unfounded accusations like treason charges.

Additionally, the cataclysm of the prolonged war operated as a potent weapon in favor of the Iranian regime to displace Ahwazi Arab inhabitants and as the conflict reached its fiercest peak the war-stricken cities such as Abadan, Mohammareh, Albseytin and rural areas in borderline which exposed to extensive havoc and damage were almost deserted and its Arab population moved to the central regions of the Iranian plateau thereafter they were scattered among different cities. As a consequence, the large active part and one of the most efficient pillars of Ahwaz society, particularly in Mohammareh city, has been practically excluded from influencing the movement of the Ahwazi Arab nation.

After the war, the successive governments had undertaken similar policies against the Ahwazi people. They refrained from allocating part of the economic budget to the reconstruction of the devastated infrastructure of the war-ravaged regions, especially in the cities of Abadan and Mohammareh. In this way they were able to foreclose any possibility regarding the return of the Ahwazi people in exile to their homeland. Thus, the Iranian occupying state had pioneered in contemporary history of the Middle East in one of the largest changes of demographic composition, that of uprooting the Ahwazi Arab people.

10966804_1407719286195178_544516746_nAs always, the regime, with overt relocation programs, sought to use the condition of the war-torn areas from where its Arab people had largely evacuated during the conflict as an excuse to prevent and discourage the return of thousands of its original inhabitants.

The regime did not reconstruct these areas, particularly those bordering villages and instead have declared them as prohibited military zones and have cordoned the areas off with barbed wire and patrols leaving it empty to this day.

In fact, the Arab people belonging to these rural areas after fleeing their villages were relocated in shanty town and marginalized areas around Ahwaz city and other urban areas outside Al-Ahwaz.

They waited long years to return to their villages, but their hopes have steadily weakened and became a mirage contrary to what they had previously assumed; that they could come back to their homes soon after the end of the war.

The Arab people have lost not only their villages, but also their agricultural lands. They retain countless mines and unexploded rockets. The Iranian governments did not attempt to restore and de-mine the agricultural lands from the remains of the legacy of the war and in exchange used it as a preventive measure with which to deprive the Arab villagers from cultivating their lands.

Such measures have caused the Arab villagers prefer to live under the harshest conditions in the margins of the metropolis of Ahwaz and to not return to their ruins.

Iranian occupying security forces intensify home demolition operations in Ahwaz, violent clashes erupt

Posted: 01/20/2015 by editormary in Ahwaz, Iran, Middle East Issues, People's Movements / Struggles, Somoud: Arab Voices of Resistance
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ahwaz 1 19Prepared and presented by: Committee for research and studies in The Arab Movement for the Liberation of Al-Ahwaz   

The security and municipal agents in Ahwaz raided a home belonging to an Ahwazi extended family, throwing their furniture out onto the street and trashing their personal belongings. This barbaric act happened on Sunday morning, 18 January.

Eyewitnesses were quoted as saying the residents of the home were screaming in the attempt to protect their property that they had lived in for 26 years, but the regime’s agents did not care and continued to destroy their property.  Two women and an old man who were standing there were brutally beaten and sustained injuries.

The occupying security forces, escorted by bulldozers belonged to the municipality of District 6 in Ahwaz city raided Zafaraniyah neighborhood and wiped out the home of the Ahwazi Arab family.

The Persian Occupation forces, by demolishing the home of the Ahwazi citizen in the Zafaraniyah neighborhood provoked fierce indignation among local people.

Violent clashes broke out in between the Occupation forces and the citizens in response to the wanton aggressive action, which outraged the local people.  The resistance of the local people to foil the security forces from destroying the home was in vain, and the house was razed to the ground. In reprisal, the bulldozer driver, who demolished the home, was shot dead by the local people, eyewitnesses quoted.

ahwaz 2 19The Zafaraniyah neighborhood is one of the most densely populated areas in the Ahwaz capital, and its Arab residents are suffering from marginalization and deliberate negligence policies by Occupation authorities.

It is worth mentioning that the bulldozer driver, who was killed, is an Ahwazi Arab citizen who was used as a human shield to carry out the brutal action.

The institutions and departments of the occupation usually deploy Ahwazi citizens to commit such criminal acts taking advantage of their extreme economic weakness as the majority of Ahwazis suffer poverty because of marginalization and discrimination policies.

The family of the victim bulldozer driver, after hearing the news of their son’s death had attacked the mayor of the District 6.They blamed the municipal department, placing the entire responsibility on the head of the municipality for their son’s death.

In recent months, the Iranian regime has brutally demolished and confiscated many of the Ahwazi Arab homes almost under the pretext of building without a permit, as roughly 70 percent of Ahwazi applications for the building permit are rejected.

According to Ahwazna sources, on Tuesday, 23 September 2014, the Iranian regime security forces who were escorting a bulldozer raided a home in one of the Ahwazi villages the day before and ordered the home residents to collect their things, and get out immediately because their home must be demolished. But the occupying forces met with stiff resistance from a group of Ahwazi Arab women who bravely formed a human chain around the home and refused to evacuate as well as some of them laying down in front of the bulldozer to prevent it from demolishing their home as of one women was crying and screaming saying to the security forces that “you are going to demolish my home over my dead body”, “I have five children, where else have I to go?”.

Watch the video: 

On Monday, October27, 2014, Iranian occupying forces once again brutally invaded Ahwazi Arab houses in the poorest slums in various parts of Ahwaz capital.

According to eyewitnesses, the military operation which was launched in the early morning without any prior warning to the Ahwazi Arab residents left more than 45 Ahwazi houses completely ravaged and destroyed and over 78 others were severely damaged.

The operation which has been reinforced with intensive military vehicles, including 5 bulldozers, has savagely terrified the innocent and defenseless Ahwazi Arab residents including children, women, the elderly and handicapped people by constant  arbitrary shooting in the air as a message for  the Ahwazi civilians to get out of their houses and giving them only 20 minutes to evacuate their property  as their house must be  destroyed as usual under the pretext of so-called illegal construction and lack of legal building permit.

The occupying bulldozers have also demolished the electricity piles, telephone towers, branch roads and streets of the densely residential areas of the Ahwazi civilians.

This military operation by the Iranian occupying regime left 45 homes demolished with 350 homeless and the homes and property of over 78 families (500) were seriously damaged.

The silence of the international community toward violations of humanitarian rights in Al-Ahwaz serves to encourage the Iranian occupying forces to intensify such oppression and violation against the Ahwazi Arab people.

An unbearable condition of life has been imposed on the entire Ahwazi Arab population by the Iranian regime. It is incredible that in an age of human rights, such atrocities can continue to rage for more than 9 decades and that there are people in nations who undermine and underestimate such inhumanity.

Poverty, expulsion, killing, substance addiction, land, home and property confiscation and many countless crimes are perpetrated by the Iran regime. Where are those human rights activists who proclaim advocating human rights and why haven’t they opened their eyes toward the Ahwazi Arabs’ suffering?

In the early hours of Sunday morning 17/11/2014,  the Iranian occupation forces demolished the homes of Ahwazi Arabs in Om-Al Ghezlan district (Koye Farhangian), the angry residents,  in a natural reaction, clashed with the invading forces.

In response to the brutal actions of the occupation forces who invaded the district to destroy the Ahwazi Arab homes, men and women desperately resorted to throwing stones during the clashes with the invading forces.

According to eye witnesses, in the early hours of the day, the Ahwazi Arab stone throwers defended their homes by burning tires in front of the occupying bulldozers and managed to deter the invading operation for short time.

The invading forces, after having faced down the resistance from the Ahwazi homeowners, have decided to deploy more forces which resulted in the arrest of many people  with bulldozing of around 20 homes along with ruining the property of Arab people, giving them no chance to save their possessions.

The Ahwazi Arab residents filmed and photographed the criminal operation of the destruction of their own homes, calling on the world conscience to condemn and to speak out against the atrocious policies of the Iranian occupying forces in the Ahwazi territories.

In recent months, the occupation forces have significantly intensified the home demolition operations and seizure of property in most of the Ahwazi Arab residential districts. The demolition of homes is always been carried out under the pretext of the owner not having a legal permit for construction.

The local people reported that their children are suffering from stress-related night-time bed-wetting and sudden epilepsy due to the trauma and terror they have had received during the home destruction operations.  The security forces were intimidating the Ahwazi Arab women and children by pointing guns at them during the demolition of homes.

Such brutal and unjustified policies are consistently conducted with forced displacement and migration of the Ahwazi Arab people who are extremely punished due to subjection to the outrageous ethnic cleansing policies of the Iranian occupying regime.

In parallel with the demolition of the Ahwazi homes and confiscating of properties, the occupation government is encouraging Persian settlers to reside in Ahwaz, providing them with full facilities, housing units and job opportunities as incentives to settle them there.

Ahwazi mass demonstration in front of the Iranian occupying regime embassy in Denmark’s capital

Posted: 01/10/2015 by editormary in Ahwaz, Counter-terrorism, No thanks!, Culture and Heritage, Europe, Grassroots Activism, Human Rights, Iran, Middle East, People's Movements / Struggles, Resistance, Somoud: Arab Voices of Resistance, Video
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Written by Ahwazna

The Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz organized a mass demonstration entitled “we never forget our Ahwazi oppressed people” in front of the embassy of the Iranian occupying regime in the Danish capital on Saturday 10/01/2015.

The demonstration was held to denounce the policies of occupation of Iran and its ongoing crimes against the Arab people of Ahwaz.

The Ahwazi demonstrators carried their protest through the streets of Copenhagen, chanting anti-regime slogans as they headed toward their final destination, which was a rally that gathered in front of the Iranian embassy.

The Ahwazi crowds packed the streets outside the Iranian embassy in the largest anti-regime protest to date, shouting “Death to the Iranian occupation regime” as well as  chanting slogans such as “Ahwaz will be freed, and Iranian occupiers will be out of it”.

copen demo 2The protesters also carried Arabic and English signs reading “Stop the ethnic cleansing policies against the Ahwazi Arab people”, the world must condemn the land confiscation policies conducted in Ahwaz”.

Many of the Ahwazi Arab protesters who participated in the massive rally came from various European countries. There was significant presence of the Arab community residing in Denmark who took part in the demonstration, showing their solidarity with the Ahwazi Arab people as well as a number of Arab brothers who are supporters of the cause of Ahwaz hailing from European and Arab countries were participants in the rally.

The friends and comrades of the Kurdish, Baluch and Turkmen communities, whose people are under the enslavement and occupation of the Persian state made an unforgettable and effective participation in this demonstration, embodying the spirit of true friendship and collaboration and actual solidarity in the face of the most notorious occupation on earth.

During the demonstration, Ahwazi participants raised the national flag of Ahwaz and carried posters of martyrs and prisoners and banners in Arabic and English condemning the policies of forced displacement and changing demographics which are being carried out by the sinister Persian occupiers. They strongly denounced and condemned the diverting the course of the Karoon River, where the occupying regime is pumping its water away from the Ahwazis and diverting it to central Persian regions.

The organizers of the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz who had called for this demonstration, stated during the Press Conference that despite grave human rights violations perpetrated against Ahwazi people, the plight of this occupied nation remains invisible to the world at large. Therefore, the ultimate aim of the demonstration is to bring it to the attention of the public and to demand that the international organizations place further pressure on the Iranian regime to stop the ethnic cleansing practices, the executions and arbitrary arrests of the Ahwazi Arab people, the detainees being mainly political and human rights activists.

They asserted in recent years that around 35 Ahwazi Arab political prisoners have been executed but these atrocious and senseless crimes have elicited very little reaction from the international community.

For years, Iran has been cracking down on the Ahwazi Arab people by mass arrests, torture and intimidation as well as carrying out the execution of innocent Ahwazi civilians.

The wealth and natural resources, especially natural gas and oil, of Ahwazi lands are being extracted without discernible economic benefit for the Ahwazi Arab people.

This racial oppression has led the Ahwazi people to be one of the most destitute and marginalized people in Middle East, with a very high incarceration and execution rate.

The disfranchisement and ethnic discrimination policies of the Persian state have crippled the majority of the Ahwazi Arab population, as there is an estimated 80 percent of Ahwazi households living below the poverty line, while they are living on the ocean of oil and gas and mineral resources that are being exploited by the Persian occupation state since 1925 and still ongoing.

The censorship of the press and media has been a serious obstacle for Ahwazi activists to voice out the non-stop abuses committed against the Ahwazi people. This serious obstacle has allowed the regime to discriminate strongly and consistently against the Ahwazi Arab people.

copen demo 1The ethnic oppression includes the prohibition of Arabic, leading to the inability of Ahwazi people to study in their native language, the denial of job opportunities, the confiscation of lands and building Persian settlements for Persian settlers.

At the end of the Press Conference, the organizers of the demonstration appealed to human rights organizations and the Arabic and Western media to speak out against the despicable crimes of the Iranian regime in Al-Ahwaz. And finally, to recognize Ahwaz as an occupied Arabic country.

The policy of changing the demographic composition of Al-Ahwaz, a practical example of Persian racism

Posted: 01/05/2015 by editormary in Ahwaz, Culture and Heritage, Human Rights, Iran, Maps, Middle East, People's Movements / Struggles, Somoud: Arab Voices of Resistance
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Al-Ahwaz1WRITTEN BY AHWAZNA, Prepared and presented by: Committee for research and studies in The Arab Movement for the Liberation of Al-Ahwaz

Ahwaz is an occupied Arab country located in the southwestern region of the Republic of Iraq and also in the southwestern region of Persia. It is bounded on the north by the Kurdistan Mountains the eastern border of the Lorestan Mountains which are known as the mountains of Zagros. These mountains in the north and the east create a natural border that separates the Ahwaz Arab lands from Persia. To the south, Ahwaz lies along the northern coast of the Arabian Gulf.

In terms of climate, the areas of occupied Ahwaz are quite similar to the plains of Mesopotamia as well as being entirely different in all respects with the climate of Persia.

Arnold Wilson, the British civil commissioner in Baghdad in 1918-1920, also asserted when he visited Ahwaz or Arabistan, “Ahwaz (Arabistan) is quite different from Iran. Ahwaz is surrounded by mountain chains forming a wall completely surrounding Al-Ahwaz and constituting a geographic division. The interval between Ahwaz and Persia and the difference between Ahwaz and Persia resembles the differences between Germany and Spain. In addition, this difference is not only confined to the geographical landmarks of Ahwaz, but includes culture, language, customs and traditions, history and population, fertility of the land and agricultural crops”.

The actual total area of this occupied Arab land is 375 thousand square kilometers, but the subsequent Iranian occupying governments have proceeded to usurp vast areas of this Arab land and have annexed adjacent Ahwaz areas to the Persian regions, all for the reason of legitimizing the diminishment of the area of Ahwaz. This organized plundering, shrinking the area through a land-grab and pernicious policies had been sought since 1936 up to the present day where Persian governments, under the pretext of conducting modern administrative regulations have truncated the following parts of Ahwazi lands:

  • Cutting off 11 thousand square kilometers of southern lands of Ahwaz and annexing it to Fars Province.
  • Cutting off 10 thousand square kilometers of eastern lands of Ahwaz and annexing it to Esfahan Province.
  • Cutting off 4400 square kilometers of northern lands of Ahwaz and annexing it to Lorestan Province.
  • Other regions such as Elam, Bushehr, and Bandar Abbas also have been cut from Ahwaz and exposed to Persianization policies by displacing its indigenous Ahwazi Arab inhabitants and settling Persians there. In Bushehr and Bandar Abbas large numbers of Ahwazi Arab inhabitants have been forced into Arabian Gulf countries after experiencing oppression, poverty, the appropriation of their property and possessions, particularly through forcible confiscation of their lands.

Consequently, the map of Al-Ahwaz has dramatically been shrunk from its original size to 159,600 thousand square kilometers according to current Iranian statistics.

Despite the lack of accurate statistics on the precise amount of the Ahwaz population, the number of residents of this occupied Arabic country is estimated to be eight million people. According to the most recent census issued by the Persian government in 1962, the population of this country that remained after the annexation of large regions from it was approximately 3.5 million Arabs. In addition to the 100,000, settlers who came from the Persian cities to this country after Reza Shah Pahlavi invaded Ahwaz.

According to other statistics recognized by the Persian occupation which was carried out after administrative divisions led into truncation, large parts of this usurped Arabic country the Ahwaz or Khuzestan area, as Persian rule calls it, is 64,236 square kilometers and the census of Arab people is 374,6772 residents.  So, if we retrieve the population of the separated areas and add it to the aforesaid number, then the number of Arab inhabitants of Ahwaz will reach nearly eight million people.

Since 1925 and right after the fall of its last Arab ruler through the military occupation of Reza Shah, Ahwaz has been the target of racist policies of successive governments of Persian regimes.

The most vile, dangerous and destructive policy inflicted on Ahwaz is the plague of Persianization that is changing the demographic composition of Ahwaz with the goal of eliminating the Arabic identity and destroying all its major pillars of nation building.

ahwazThis policy in the long-term has drawn a vicious vision for the Persian occupation that is the requisite of dragging the Ahwazi Arab nation to a stage in which calling it a nation will no longer be possible. They have spared no effort to make this vision a reality on the ground. The practices and policies undertaken by Persian occupation can be divided into two eras.

The overt racist philosophy of Farsism began in the form of the pan-Iranist party during the Reza Shah Regime. But our intended concept is the inherent popularized idea of Farsism that has penetrated deeply into the mind and the characters of the Persian people, even those who are seemingly combating racism.  However, they are more Catholic than the Pope when it comes to anti-Arab sentiment or fighting against Arabs.

The contemptuous attitude toward other non-Persian, people particularly toward the Ahwazi nation, constitutes the backbone of Farsism as an ideology. In fact, the policy of racial discrimination is being applied at the beginning of the founding of the state – the nation.

The Ahwazi Arab people have been the first victims of this policy. Because the radicalism of Farsism, which seeks to maintain and stabilize its illegal roots in the land that was occupied it by force, has committed mass murder and genocide of Ahwazi Arab people in different ways. Before the occupation, Ahwaz had a homogeneous Arab population with various clans and tribes.  After the conquest of Ahwaz and consequent overthrow of Arabic rule, Reza Shah by applying the recommendations of Farsism theorists such as Foroughi, Mirza Malcom, Akhound Zadeh and Taghi Zadeh, practiced the policy of forced migration and displacement of populations against the Arab people. In his first criminal acts, we can refer to the mass exile of Arab sheikhs outside Ahwaz.

Then, he ordered the banishment of a large number of Ahwazi Arab tribes to the Khorassan region, forcing them to walk barefoot long distances day and night without water and food, having to cross grueling mountain routes as so many women, children and elderly people were killed due to extreme fatigue, thirst and starvation.

For years, Reza Shah had widely practiced the policy of reverse migration of Ahwazi people to the central Persian regions and in contrast promoted the settlement of Persian people in Ahwazi regions.

AHWAZ MAPThe nomadic Lur and Bakhtiyari tribes, as their original homelands is beyond Zagros Mountains and because of their proximity to the northern regions of Ahwaz, had frequently travelled  with their herds to Ahwazi areas to find pasture lands to feed their flocks of sheep and goats. This situation helped Reza Shah to resettle them quickly in Ahwazi areas especially in Qenitra (Dezful) and Susa (Shush).  The Bakhtiyari tribes were only living in mountain regions and foothills of the Zagros in Izeh and Masjed Soleyman and in winter and summer they were commuting between their original homeland and the Ahwazi areas (Izeh and Masjed Soleyman. This meant that they left Ahwaz in the summer and returned to Ahwazi areas in the winter. These areas had the greatest potential for changing the demographic composition of Ahwaz. However, the industrialization of the cities of Abadan and Ahwaz had created the basis for the massive migration into the cities.

The Pahlavi regime repeatedly sent groups of Persian laborers into cities and through the granting of privileges, established a Persian middle class in the heart of Ahwazi cities, thereby enabling and reinforcing its occupation policies. Since 1925 the systematic migration of Persians has been carried out through the settlement of the “Lor and Bakhtiyari” tribes in Izeh, Masjed Solyman and Qenitra (Dezful), agricultural projects in Toster to Muhammarah, and industrial and oil projects in Ahwaz and Abadan.

Once Persian immigrants started to descend on Ahwazi cities, it did not take long for the total political domination of the Persian state over Ahwaz. Further development of the Abadan oil refinery in 1938 led it to become one of the largest refineries in the Middle East, providing thousands of job opportunities and paving the way for the arrival of many immigrants.

Iran_Oil_Arab_Population_MapApproximately 25 years after Reza Khan entered the region, the population of Abadan increased to 227,000, more than ten times that of 1956. The arrival of Persian settlers was to such an extent that there was not sufficient housing to lodge them. It followed that the English-Iranian Oil Company had to construct exclusive residential buildings for their workers and employees, and these buildings are known as “Bangleha”. According to government statistics, 62 percent of these immigrants are from the Isfahan and Yazd provinces, 24 percent are from the Fars province and 8 percent from the Kermanshah province.

These government settlement programs resulted in an influx of large numbers of Persian settlers to the cities of Abadan and Mahshor. The occupation authorities ever since have sought to build new industrial hubs in other major cities in an effort to further spread the scale and scope of Persian settlement of the cities of Al-Ahwaz.

Through the establishment of governmental centers, industrial factories in and around the Ahwaz capital, in addition to promoting and strengthening the military’s role in establishing large military bases, improving roads and routes leading to Ahwaz city, they created another new industrial hub in the region that brought tens of thousands of Persian immigrants to the city.

The consequence of this policy led to the population of Ahwaz city in 1977 to reach half a million people, surpassing Abadan and other cities.

The outbreak of the Iran revolution in 1979 and after the Iran-Iraq war, the migration of Iranians to Ahwazi regions had relented for a while. But after those ethnic statistics were excluded from the official statistics of Iran, it was the beginning of a lack of transparency in statistics related to immigrants coming to Ahwaz.

As every year, the hideous assimilation phenomenon (Persianizing land and human settlement) plagues Ahwaz, mainly the northern and the eastern bordering regions. This monstrous occupying Persian state aims at devouring the entirety of Arabic characteristics of Ahwaz.

Changing the demographic structure in favor of non-Arab immigrants, changing the Arabic names to Farsi ones, the ban on teaching the Arabic language and breaking up Ahwazi territories by annexing parts of Ahwaz and inserting them into Persian regions adjacent to Ahwaz are all part of the agenda, seeking the corroboration of the occupation authorities in targeting all the pillars of the national Arabic identity of the Ahwazi people.

In addition to forced migration and deporting Arab people to Persian regions and reverse migration of non-Arab people into Ahwaz, the Persian state has adopted other evil methods against the Ahwazi people.

The confiscation and plundering of agricultural lands by Persian feudal owners followed new approval of agrarian reforms.  Under the new and unfair law, the non-indigenous feudal entities had seized the chance to illegally become the owners of the lands that had previously been usurped from Arab farmers. In this regard, the death of Majid Khan, the great feudal owner, had been a perfect opportunity for the Persian central government to take control of 25,000 hectares of the lands that were virtually usurped.  Later, the occupation government has established the “Karoon Sugar Cane Development project” on these confiscated lands in the Toster (Shushtar) region.  As a matter of fact, the agrarian reforms made by the government were not so different  when compared to the feudal ones with respect to giving the possession of lands by its main Arab owners and once again it was a lose–lose situation for Ahwazi Arab farmers. Although some feudal lands were granted to Arab farmers, the majority of lands that were under the possession of feudal ownership, once again were confiscated by the central government and  Arab farmers were deprived of their lands forever. Additionally, those nomadic Lor tribes that forcibly settled on Ahwazi lands according to the agrarian reform Law become the owners of lands that formerly had belonged to the Arab people.

In Mahshor, Temimiyeh (Hendijan), Khalafeyeh, Ramez and Omideyeh the Pahlavi government claimed that the lands belonged to a Persian person named “Hosseinqoli Nezam Alsalteneh Ma’âfi” and after his death the government declared the confiscation of all these lands.

The Pahlavi government’s argument that apparently based is on speculation and lacks any credible evidence was announced as follows:

It seems that before the ownership of lands by Hosseinqoli Nezam Alsalteneh Ma’âfi, these lands were under the authority of Sheikh Khazaal (the ruler of Ahwaz) but when Sheikh Khazaal married Batul Ma’âfi, the daughter of Hosseinqoli, he endowed the lands to Hosseinqoli Ma’âfi.  After the fall of Sheikh Khazaal and occupation of Ahwaz, Hosseinqoli Ma’âfi gave half of these lands to the government endowment organization and kept the rest in his ownership until the end of the Pahlavi regime. Later the Islamic Republic seized the part of lands owned by him. Now the Ahwazi Arab people, the original inhabitants of these lands, remained tenants residing on the lands that mainly belong to them and every time the landlord (government) wishes it can expel them from these lands.

Most statistics and evidence show that the government has put more focus on changing the demographic structure of Al-Ahwaz. Because they know well that a divided and heterogeneous nation is no longer able to stand against colonialism for this reason, the government has ever since been targeting the Ahwazi Arab nation from the inside.

It is a silent killer policy aimed at exterminating the entire Ahwaz population, and it has been pursued in the form of changing the demographic structure of Ahwaz.  This inhuman act is conducted without adequate news reflection or attention. In silence, its annihilating consequences are disintegrating the Ahwazi nation from the inside.

In addition to the above methods, the government has deployed modern methods for changing the demographic structure, such as constructing Persian settlements to make a rapid and widespread change in the fabric of the population in favor of Persian settlers.  New Yazd and New Isfahan settlements built in Khafajah city are only examples of these grave crimes that not only have not stopped under the current Islamic Republic regime, but have continued with greater frequency and intensity.

Of course, these are just a few cases of the Pahlavi regime’s crimes in the demographic structure of the Arab nation of Al-Ahwaz. In the second part of this article, we will shed more light on the current policies of changing the population structure of Al-Ahwaz under the Islamic Republic regime.

 

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