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New ‘I recognize Al-Ahwaz as an Arab State’ media campaign gains 1,000 prominent Arab supporters within the first two days

Posted: 08/19/2015 by editormary in Activists and Activism, Ahwaz, Culture and Heritage, Grassroots Activism, Ideas and Projects, Internet and Communication, Middle East, Petitions, Politics, Resistance, Somoud: Arab Voices of Resistance, Strategy for Liberation

Written by Rahim Hamid

A call by a senior UAE official on Monday for formal recognition of Al-Ahwaz as an occupied Arab country has sparked a rapidly growing pan-Arab media campaign, with over 1,000 prominent Arab figures across the region so far announcing their support of ‘I recognise Al-Ahwaz as an Arab State’. Despite only being launched a couple of days ago, the campaign is also spreading beyond the Arab world, with the slogan already shared across social media in 16 languages.

Launched in the wake of a statement issued by the influential former Dubai police chief Dahi Khalfan calling on Gulf states to open embassies for Al-Ahwaz and to formally recognise the state, which was renamed ‘Khuzestan province’ in 1936 by Iran following its 1925 annexation, the campaign has continued to gain popularity, winning backing from a wide range of influential Arab figures from all backgrounds across the region.

Among the leading regional figures who have announced their support of the new campaign are Jerry Maher, the founder and director of ‘Radio Swat Beirut International’ and the distinguished and widely respected Kuwaiti academic and analyst Dr. Abdullah Nafisi. In Egypt, TV show host Hussein Jouli, a moderate and opponent of the Sisi regime, said that he would head an Egyptian campaign for the recognition of Ahwaz as an Arab state. Another leading Kuwaiti figure voicing her support for the campaign was Ayesha Rashid, a liberal writer, journalist and political researcher.

Ahwazi activists hope that the new campaign, which has already been featured on media as diverse as Al Jazeera, CNBC Arabic, Sawa Middle East and even Japanese and Korean news channels, will help to raise awareness of the systemic injustices inflicted on the Ahwazi people by Iran for almost a century in near-complete international silence.

Since the initial Iranian occupation in 1925, successive administrations in Tehran, both under the current theocratic regime and the previous rulers, have refused to recognise the most basic rights of the ethnically Arab Ahwazi people numbering around 10 million in total, who are denied not only the right to the same healthcare and education as Persian Iranians, but even the right to wear traditional Arab garments, or to publicly speak or learn their native Arabic language, being subjected to what is effectively an apartheid system of rule.

Despite occupied Ahwaz, now a region of south and southeast Iran, being the home to around 95% of Iran’s oil and gas reserves, the vast majority of the Ahwazi population live in medieval poverty and squalor, often without running water, electricity or the most basic sanitation, while the massive wealth from their natural resources is spent on other, non-Arab regions by Tehran. This openly racist policy means that despite being the most resource-rich region of Iran, Ahwaz – or Khuzestan as Iran insists on calling it – is home to one of the poorest populations per capita on earth.

Anti-Arab racism is endemic in Iran, having been encouraged by successive regimes, with Ahwazis bearing the brunt of this bigotry, both in formal policies which treat them as second-class citizens, excluded from property ownership and all but the most menial jobs, and denied the most basic rights, as well as through a culture which glorifies racism and casual violence towards Arabs: many of the most celebrated contemporary Iranian poets’ most famous poems are filled with virulently racist anti-Arab imagery and language. This anti-Arab racism extends to all cultural forms, with one fairly typical recent hit by a popular Iranian singer entitled ‘Kill An Arab’ issued shortly after a phone app game, ‘Beat An Arab’ in which the object of the game is to force-feed a grotesque caricature of an Arab before beating him unconscious: both the song and he game were approved for general release by the Iranian Culture Ministry, which routinely approves such offensive items, and neither is viewed by Persian Iranians as being in any way objectionable.

Ironically while the theocracy in Tehran is keen to present itself as the champion of Palestinians and arch-foe of Zionist occupation, its own savagely imposed occupation of Ahwazi Arabs’ land is arguably more brutal and its profound anti-Arab bigotry virtually indistinguishable to that of Zionists.

The similarities can be quite uncanny, with Persian Iranians offered generous incentives to move to the Ahwaz region where they are housed in specially built settlements provided with all the latest amenities, and given well-paid state oil industry jobs not available to Ahwazis or offered further substantial financial inducements by the Tehran administration to set up businesses in these areas. As with the jobs and loans, these settlements are off-limits to Ahwazis who are routinely ethnically cleansed from their homes and lands whenever these are confiscated by the regime, with no compensation or recourse to legal complaint, and are housed in overcrowded shanty towns often located near the region’s oil refineries, where open sewers and atrocious pollution lead to widespread health problems.

There is still no word on the theocratic regime’s reaction to the new ‘I recognise Ahwaz as an Arab State’ media campaign, although the mullahs, who have long refused to recognise Ahwazis’ basic humanity, let alone their right to their own lands and sovereignty are, like Queen Victoria, unlikely to be amused.

Arresti, Detenzioni, Torture, Fame, Stupro… Essere una ragazza palestinese in Siria

Posted: 08/07/2015 by editormary in Counter-terrorism, Human Rights, Middle East, Nakba and Right of Return, Palestine, People's Movements / Struggles, Refugees, Resistance, Somoud: Arab Voices of Resistance, Syria, War
Tags: Yarmouk

(Traduzione di Claudia Avolio)

Una ragazza palestinese diciottenne di nome Huda ha spiegato nel dettaglio le orribili esperienze vissute nelle carceri del regime siriano, che vanno dalle percosse alla tortura con scariche elettriche agli stupri multipli.

Huda, originaria del campo di rifugiati palestinesi di Yarmouk, a Damasco, che non ha voluto diffondere il suo vero nome per ovvie ragioni (la paura di ulteriori ripercussioni da parte del regime) è stata arrestata da membri del Fronte Popolare per la Liberazione della Palestina – Comando Generale (FPLP-CG), gruppo pro-regime, all’entrata del campo verso l’inizio del 2013 quando aveva 16 anni con accuse di “terrorismo”.

Huda ha detto che lei ed altre tre donne palestinesi del campo di Yarmouk sono state torturate dal personale del FPLP-CG prima di essere consegnate al tristemente noto braccio “Palestina 235” del regime di Assad a Damasco, in cui è stata incarcerata per i quattro mesi successivi.

Ha ricordato di aver subìto tutte le forme di tortura da parte degli agenti di sicurezza del regime ogni volta in cui la portavano fuori dalla cella che misurava appena 3 metri per 4 ed in cui è stata tenuta insieme ad altre diciotto donne, la maggior parte palestinesi come lei. I torturatori del regime hanno iniziato con le scosse elettriche, ha detto Huda, seguite da percosse con fruste e corde. In seguito è stata trasferita al “Braccio 215” sempre a Damasco, in cui nelle sue parole la tortura è “esponenzialmente” peggiore di quella che aveva sofferto al braccio “Palestina”.

Al “Braccio 215”, ha ricordato ancora la ragazza, “gli investigatori interrogavano giovani donne e uomini del campo di rifugiati di Yarmouk, chiedendo nomi [di chiunque si opponesse al regime]. Quando negavamo di conoscerli, ci picchiavano, torturavano, lasciavano morire di fame e ci davano scosse elettriche. Sono stata stuprata nel corso della mia permanenza lì per oltre 15 giorni. A volte sono stata stuprata ripetutamente più di dodici volte al giorno da diversi funzionari e guardie della prigione”.

Huda ha scoperto di essere rimasta incinta nel corso di uno degli stupri quando ha abortito per via delle percosse quotidiane che le venivano inferte come sempre, di cui ha detto che il risultato è stato “il mio essere ferita e sanguinante al punto di perdere conoscenza. Mi hanno gettata in una cella piena dei corpi di detenuti uccisi sotto tortura, in cui sono stata obbligata a restare, circondata da quei corpi e da quel sangue per circa tre settimane. È stato allora che ho scoperto di essere incinta, quando ho abortito per via delle percosse”.

Lo stupro di detenute donne è pratica comune, ha spiegato Huda, aggiungendo: “Una di loro ha tentato di suicidarsi sbattendo la testa sui muri della cella. Ogni volta perdeva conoscenza per alcune ore”.

La ragazza ha ricordato un caso di cui è stata testimone quando una ragazza palestinese di 20 anni nella stessa cella ha dato alla luce un bambino concepito quando è stata stuprata ripetutamente dalle guardie del regime. “Dopo che è nato, non riusciva a guardare il bambino o a tenerlo vicino a sé nella cella, e non sopportava il suono del suo pianto. Voleva solo sbarazzarsene, ucciderlo mentre non guardavamo, perché la sua esistenza era un promemoria del fatto che fosse stata stuprata dai funzionari”. Ha continuato dicendo: “Alcuni giorni dopo una guardia è entrata e ha portato via il bambino – sapevano che la sua presenza nella cella era una prova della tortura che l’aveva creato”.

Huda ha parlato di come sia quasi morta in uno dei centri di detenzione del regime per via degli effetti della tortura, della fame e dello stupro, che l’hanno ridotta sanguinante in modo grave; le guardie del regime l’hanno lasciata nella sua cella senza alcun riguardo sanitario né medicine.

Tra le forme di tortura psicologica che ha ricordato, Huda ha detto che mentre era tenuta nella cella coi corpi senza vita di altri prigionieri è stata obbligata a mangiare del cibo gettato sul pavimento davanti a lei come a un animale, cibo che si era mescolato al sangue rappreso lasciato dalle ferite dei prigionieri morti. I detenuti ricevevano un pasto al giorno composto di bulgur (grano spezzato), a volte accompagnato da una fetta di pane. Ha detto ancora: “Potevo sentire dei lamenti dalle celle vicine mentre camminavano sui corpi delle persone per portare dei cadaveri fuori nel passaggio che collega le celle”.

Ha descritto guardie ubriache far subire ai detenuti percosse in modo indiscriminato senza alcuna ragione o giustificazione, insieme a costanti abusi verbali in cui insultavano i prigionieri e la loro religione, aggiungendo che un’altra giovane donna è morta per le ferite riportate alla testa nel corso di queste percosse date a casaccio.

Funzionari e guardie si vendicavano spesso sui prigionieri delle perdite subìte dall’esercito del regime in scontri con le forze ribelli all’esterno, nonostante i prigionieri non avessero nulla a che farci, ha detto ancora Huda, ricordando poi una donna che è stata punita e messa in una cella di isolamento per oltre tre mesi dopo che ha insultato Assad nel corso delle torture.

Yarmouk, agosto 2015, manifestazioni contro il perdurante assedio del campo profughi palestinese vicino a Damasco.

Dopo essere stata finalmente rilasciata dalla prigione, Huda ha scoperto che suo padre era morte in un bombardamento da parte del regime del campo di Yarmouk molti mesi prima, mentre lei era in carcere, e che quattro dei suoi fratelli erano stati imprigionati. Quando ha cercato di scoprire dettagli su dove fossero finiti, recandosi all’ufficio dell’OLP a Damasco e all’ambasciata palestinese, è stata informata da un membro dello staff che “se non fossero stati terroristi non li avrebbero arrestati per così tanto tempo” e che “meritavano di venire arrestati visto che erano terroristi”. Huda ha detto di essere riuscita a identificare tre dei suoi fratelli dalle foto trapelate di detenuti che sono morti nelle prigioni del regime sotto tortura, mentre il destino del suo fratello più giovane resta sconosciuto.

Il Gruppo Palestinese di Lavoro in Siria ha chiesto che il regime siriano rilasci tutti i prigionieri palestinesi e ne riveli la sorte, sottolineando che quanto sta avvenendo nelle prigioni del regime è un crimine contro l’umanità sotto ogni standard. Il gruppo ha ufficialmente catalogato 933 prigionieri palestinesi detenuti dal regime, confermando l’uccisione sotto tortura di 408 di loro, di cui 77 appurate dalla pubblicazione di immagini trapelate di alcuni dei prigionieri uccisi sotto tortura nelle prigioni del regime.

Articolo tratto dal Gruppo Palestinese di Lavoro in Siria

Via: Shahba Press

English version https://wewritewhatwelike.com/2015/08/07/arrest-detention-torture-starvation-rape-when-you-are-a-palestinian-girl-in-syria/

Arrest, Detention, Torture, Starvation, Rape… when you are a Palestinian Girl in Syria

Posted: 08/07/2015 by editormary in Counter-terrorism, Human Rights, Middle East, Nakba and Right of Return, Palestine, Refugees, Resistance, Somoud: Arab Voices of Resistance, Syria, War
Tags: Yarmouk

(translated by Ruth Riegler) An eighteen-year-old Palestinian girl named ‘Huda’ has detailed her horrific experiences in Syrian regime prisons, ranging from beatings and torture with electric shocks to multiple rapes.

Huda, from Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Damascus, who wished to withhold her real name for understandable reasons (fearing further persecution by the regime) was arrested by members of the pro-regime ‘Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command’ (PFLP-GC) at the camp entrance in early 2013 when she was 16 years old on charges of “terrorism”.

She said that she and three other Palestinian women from Yarmouk camp were tortured by the PFLP-GC personnel prior to being delivered to the Assad regime’s infamous ‘Palestine – 235’ branch in Damascus, where she was imprisoned for the next four months.

She recalled being subjected to all forms of torture by the regime’s security agents whenever they took her out of the cell there measuring roughly 3 x 4 meters, where she was kept with eighteen other women, mostly also Palestinians. The regime’s torturers began with torture by electrocution, she said, followed by beatings with whips and rods. After this she was transferred to ‘Branch 215’ also in Damascus, where she said the torture is “exponentially” worse than that she’d suffered at the Palestine Branch.

At Branch 2015, she recalled, “the investigators were interrogating young girls and young men from Yarmouk refugee camp, demanding names [of anyone opposing the regime]. When we denied knowing them, we’d be beaten, tortured, starved, electrocuted. I was raped during my stay there for more than 15 days. Sometimes I was raped repeatedly more than a dozen times a day by different officers and prison warders.”

Huda found out that she had been impregnated during one of the rapes when she miscarried a baby as a result of one of the daily beatings administered as standard, which she said resulted in “my being injured and bleeding heavily, losing consciousness. They threw me into a cell filled with the bodies of detainees killed under torture, where I was forced to stay, surrounded by those bodies and blood for approximately three weeks. Then I found out I was pregnant when I miscarried as a result of the beatings.”

Rape of the female detainees is commonplace, she explained, adding, “One of them tried to commit suicide by battering her head off the walls of the cell. Each time she’d lose consciousness for a few hours.”

Huda recalled one case she witnessed when a 20-year-old Palestinian girl in the same cell gave birth to a baby boy conceived when she was repeatedly raped by the regime guards. “After the birth, she couldn’t bear to look at the baby or keep it next to her in the cell and wasn’t able to endure the sound of his crying. She just wanted to get rid of him, to kill him when we weren’t looking because his existence was a reminder to her of being raped by the officers.” Huda added, “A few days later a guard entered and took the baby away – they knew that his presence in the cell was proof of the torture that created him.”

Huda recalled how she nearly died in one of the regime’s detention centres due to the effects of torture, starvation and rape, which left her bleeding severely; the regime guards left her in the cell without any medical attention and no drugs, she added.

Among the forms of psychological torture she recollected, Huda said that while she was kept in the cell with the dead bodies of other prisoners she was forced to eat food thrown on the floor in front of her like an animal, which had mixed with the congealed blood that was left there from the wounds of the dead prisoners. Detainees received one meal a day of bulgur wheat, she said, which was sometimes augmented by a round of bread. She added, “I could hear groaning from neighbouring cells as they stepped on people’s bodies to bring dead bodies out into the connecting passage between the cells.”
She described drunken guards subjecting detainees to random indiscriminate beatings for no reason and without justification, in addition to constant verbal abuse cursing the prisoners and their religion, adding that another young woman had died from the head wounds inflicted during one of these random beatings.

Officers and guards would often take revenge on the prisoners for regime military losses in clashes with rebel forces outside the prison, despite the prisoners having nothing to do with it, she added, further recalling that one woman was punished by being subjected to solitary confinement for over three months after she cursed Assad during torture.

Yarmouk, August 2015, protests against the ongoing seige in the Palestinian refugee camp Yarmouk, outside Damascus.

After finally being released from prison, Huda learnt that her father had died in regime bombing of Yarmouk several months previously while she was incarcerated, and that four of her brothers had been imprisoned. When she tried to find out details of their whereabouts from the PLO office in Damascus and the Palestinian embassy there, she was informed by a staff member that “If they weren’t terrorists they wouldn’t have been arrested for so long” and that they “deserved to be arrested since they were terrorists.” Huda said that she had been able to identify three of her brothers from leaked photographs of detainees who died in regime prisons under torture, while the fate of her youngest brother remains unknown.

The Palestinian Working Group in Syria has demanded that the Syrian regime release all Palestinian prisoners and reveal their fate, stressing that what is taking place in the regime’s prisons is a crime against humanity by every standard. The group has officially catalogued 933 Palestinian prisoners detained by the regime, with 408 of this number confirmed to have been killed under torture; 77 of these deaths were confirmed by the publication of leaked images of some of the prisoners killed under torture in the regime’s prisons.

From Palestinian Working Group in Syria
Via: Shahba Press

http://www.shahbapress.com/news/2002/%D8%B4%D8%A7%D8%A8%D8%A9-%D9%81%D9%84%D8%B3%D8%B7%D9%8A%D9%86%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D8%AA%D8%B1%D9%88%D9%8A-%D8%AA%D9%81%D8%A7%D8%B5%D9%8A%D9%84-%D9%85%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%B9%D8%A9-%D8%AA%D8%B9%D8%B1%D8%B6%D8%AA-%D9%84%D9%87%D8%A7-%D8%AF%D8%A7%D8%AE%D9%84-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B3%D8%AC%D9%88%D9%86-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B3%D9%88%D8%B1%D9%8A%D8%A9.html

How the Iranian regime tries to obliterate Arab identity in Al-Ahwaz

Posted: 06/08/2015 by editormary in Ahwaz, Culture and Heritage, Education, Grassroots Activism, Iran, Middle East Issues, People's Movements / Struggles, Religion, Somoud: Arab Voices of Resistance

Written by Rahim Hamid

The objective of this article is to highlight the pervasive systematic violations of the Ahwazi Arab people’s rights. Over the last 36 years, essentially coinciding with the formation of the Islamic Republic of Iran, these violations have increased many-fold, even as the Ahwazis continue demanding their legitimate rights.

This article seeks to provide a comprehensive picture of the prolonged oppression of the Ahwazi Arab people. They are suffering from ultra-national racism, institutionalized discrimination and deliberate neglect at the hands of Iran’s regime. They are facing various barriers in accessing education, employment, housing, healthcare and other essential services.

Since 1925, the Ahwazi Arab people have been subjected to summary executions, forcible displacement, migration, and the confiscation and destruction of homes and personal property. Under Iran’s current fundamentalist sectarian regime, the Ahwazi people live in constant fear of oppression. The current Iranian clerical regime is systematically completing the ethnic cleansing agenda that was begun by the deposed Pahlavi regime.

Around 10 million Ahwazi Arabs inhabit the south and southwest of Iran. They are one of the Middle East’s oppressed peoples.

They are united through race, culture and language. Their Arab dialect resembles the Iraqi Arabic dialect. The Majorities are Shia and Sunni Muslim, although there are a number of other religions and creeds, such as Christians and Mandaeans.

The Iranian regime has shown a deep-seated hatred against the Ahwazi Arab people, who constitute 10% of the population. In 1925, the emirate of Al- Ahwaz, ruled by Amir Khazaal Al-Kaabi, was toppled by an invasion by the Iranian regime. The invasion put an end to the independent sovereignty of Al-Ahwaz, which was annexed to the newly formed country of Iran in 1934.

Since then, through countless rebellions, armed insurrections and unarmed movements, the Ahwazi Arabs have reiterated their determination to continue their struggle and their resistance against the occupation of Ahwaz and to reassert the sovereignty of Ahwaz that was lost to the Iranian invasion.

For generations, the Ahwazis have received harsh treatment at the hands of the Iranian authorities. In response to the popular uprisings that followed the Iranian occupation, successive Iranian regimes have forcibly resettled much of the Ahwazi Arab population in Persian regions, as part of a program of ethnic cleansing. Historical Arabic names of cities have been changed into Persian ones. Arabic dress has been completely banned. The use of the Arabic language in Ahwaz has been greatly restricted and even criminalized. Even the ethnic identity of the Ahwazi Arab has been denied.

Ahwazi Arabs have long been suppressed and denied basic rights. In recent years, Ahwazi lands have been confiscated forcibly with threats and intimidation and redistributed to Persian settlers in an attempt to “Persianize” Ahwazi regions. In the late 1940s, the government began systematically settling the nomadic “Lur tribes”, who are offshoots of Persian ethnics, into areas with Arab majorities, particularly in the oil-rich cities from which the Arab people were forcibly relocated.

These ethnic cleansing policies have been accelerated in recent years in an effort to destroy the demographic fabric of Ahwaz. Any popular movement or protest led by the Ahwazi political class, such as the popular uprising of April 2005 against institutionalized ethnic oppression, has been brutally crushed by cracking down on the protestors and making mass arrests, even executing the majority of the prominent political figures.

In fact, the Ahwazi Arab people have sought and tried all peaceful political channels to obtain their most basic and legitimate rights, which are enshrined and stated in Iran’s current constitution. In particular, the Ahwazi Arabs have sought the application of Articles 15 and 19 of the Constitution, which stress the right of education in the mother tongue for all ethnic groups, including Arabs, Turks, Kurds and Baluchs. The regime, however, refuses to implement these articles, thus depriving more than 50% of the non-Persian population of their mother tongue. Instead, the regime has imposed the Persian language as the official language of the education curriculum. This policy has resulted in a high rate of students dropping out from schools at early ages in the marginalized non-Persian regions: due to the challenges of learning the Persian language, students are held back linguistically, becoming only partially proficient in both their native tongue and the imposed Persian language. This also results in students suffering from a dual identity crisis.

The Iranian occupation regime is utilizing a variety of strategies in its efforts to obliterate Arab identity in Al-Ahwaz. One of these strategies is to introduce Persian-speaking settlers and give them homes among communities of Arab citizens with the aim of having a negative impact on the Ahwazi Arab citizens in Al-Ahwaz. In addition, a massive number of schools, institutions, and centers are being built for the express goal of imposing and spreading the Persian language and culture, while obscuring and excluding the Arabic language and everything that is associated with the identity, culture and history of the Ahwazi Arab people.

The Iranian settlements are Persian-only, racially exclusive, and their residents live in comfort, with all the facilities provided, while the surrounding Ahwazi Arabs are denied the same facilities and live in desperate squalor in their own homeland.

Of course, the Ahwazi Arab people’s protests against the Iranian occupation are not limited to such issues. Since the military occupation of Al-Ahwaz until now, Iran has been practicing all types of repressive measures, and through the prosecution of multiple pernicious policies, the regime is attempting to eliminate totally the Arabic identity of the Ahwazis.

The terrible legacy of Iran’s repressive nationalist occupation cannot be overstated. It has inflicted horrendous suffering on around 10 million Ahwazi Arab people, who have long suffered systematic marginalization by consecutive regimes of Iranian occupation, going back to the Shah, before the current theocratic regime, in terms of land, territories, resources, language, culture, customary laws, and political and economic opportunities.

From the outset, the occupation of Al-Ahwaz by a racist colonial-settler state has been aimed at eradicating all that is Arabic in Al-Ahwaz. No effort has been spared to liquidate the culture, the language, the history and the whole Ahwazi Arab national entity within the crucible of the Persian culture through the denial of all legitimate rights, such as education and the teaching of the Arabic language, which is one of the most important pillars of raising new enlightened generations. A second language (Farsi) is being imposed.

Since the emergence of the Islamic Republic’s regime, everything related to Arab culture has been declared to be ‘against God’ and thus banned. As a matter of fact, the clerical regime does not concern itself with religious beliefs as much as they are concerned about fighting the Ahwazi Arab identity and snuffing out their culture. This colonialist policy has led the Ahwazi Arab people to fall far behind in terms of development and education, with the policy being practiced in parallel with terrorism, intimidation and oppression, all of which have weakened and made the Arabic language fragile among the Ahwazis.

The Iranian occupation apparatuses have been attempting to falsify and distort the national identity and culture of Ahwazis by describing them as Iranian Arab and as an Arab-speaking minority, which is intended to suggest that they are not originally Arab, but that they are Persians who over time have come under the linguistic influence of their neighbors and become Arab-speakers because of the proximity of Arab countries. The threat of the national Ahwazi Arab ideal to a Persian national security policy has occupied a key position not only among the Iranian security forces; it has become central to the Iranian nationalist political ideology, which is based on the dual doctrines of Persian nationalism and Iranian Islam (Shia Islam).

From the books and studies published by the Iranian strategic centers at the service of the occupation, we can understand how critical this issue is to the regime. Such studies and publications are full of strategies and vile concepts aimed at countering the Ahwazi Arab struggle; they are filled with weird concepts created to tarnish the image of the national Ahwazi movement. For example, these books and publications label Ahwazis as loyalists of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party. After the fall of the Iraqi regime, the Iranian occupation produced the concept of Wahhabism. Then it invented the lies that the Ahwazi political activists are Western spies and stooges, enemies of God, traitors, or infidel atheists. These charges carry the death penalty, and the biased judicial systems of the Iranian occupation use them to murder Ahwazi Arab political prisoners.

Owing to this, the threat of imprisonment and execution has been a constant reality for every Ahwazi. This threat is aimed at weakening the willpower of the Ahwazi Arab nation so that it will surrender its prolonged struggle for liberation, its struggle to regain the independence stolen by Iran in 1925. Despite all these repressive strategies, not only has the Ahwazi Arab culture not lost its fortitude, on the contrary, it has become even stronger.

Racial denial and elimination, mass extrajudicial murder, ethnocide and forced displacement have constituted the main policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran in dealing with the Ahwazi people and other national groups. However, the indigenous culture and the ethical and historical values of the Ahwazi Arab nation, as manifested in the context of social resistance, have never surrendered to the assimilationist policies of the Iranian effort to build a nation state on the basis of a mono-ethnic Persian identity.

Al-Ahwaz: 90 Years of Occupation and Injustice

Posted: 04/08/2015 by editormary in Ahwaz, Counter-terrorism, No thanks!, Culture and Heritage, Education, Grassroots Activism, Human Rights, Iran, Middle East Issues, People's Movements / Struggles, Politics, Refugees, Somoud: Arab Voices of Resistance, Strategy for Liberation

WRITTEN BY Rahim Hamid

Al-Ahwaz region of Iran is currently witnessing a wave of mass protests and demonstrations demanding freedom and an end to the Iranian regime’s multifaceted oppression of the Ahwazi people, which has been continuous since Iran first occupied the region by the use of military force.

Ahwazi Arabs are among the most brutally oppressed peoples in the Middle East. The population of the region in the south and southwest of Iran totals around 10 million, with the people united by race, culture and language. The Ahwazi Arab dialect strongly resembles the dialect in neighboring Iraq. The majority of Ahwazis are Shia and Sunni Muslim, although there are other sects and creeds, including Christian and Mandaean.

Ahwaz is a Persian-occupied Arab country located in the north and the east of the Arabian Gulf to the east of Shat Al-Arab waterway which has been occupied by Iran for more than eight decades and renamed ‘Khuzestan.’

The entire territory of Ahwaz, covering 324,000 square kilometers, is bounded to the west by Iraq, to the south-west by the Arabian Gulf and Arabian Peninsula and to the north, east and south-east by the Zagros Mountains, the natural boundary between Ahwaz and Iran. With an Arab population of ten million, Ahwaz is among the most resource-rich territories occupied by Iran, holding more than 80 percent of the country’s oil and gas resources.

The region has three major rivers, the Karoon, Jarrahi and Karkheh, which play a vital role in the lives of its people, with most Ahwazis long economically dependent on the three waterways for their income from both fishing and agriculture, with the waters used to irrigate the rich arable land.

Historically the Semitic Elami tribes, the first known peoples of the Arabian Peninsula and Iraq, settled on Ahwaz’s riverbanks and valleys, establishing a great civilization, particularly the ancient city of Susa, now known as Shush.

Since the initial annexation of Ahwaz by Iran, then known as Persia, 90 years ago, the humanitarian situation of the Ahwazi Arab people has steadily worsened, with the level of murderous repression by the current regime rising daily, extending to the level of systemic ethnic cleansing as policy, forcible eviction of the Ahwazi indigenous people, and the construction of exclusive apartheid-style settlements for non- Ahwazi, non-Arab settlers; these settlers are offered multiple economic and social incentives to move there and given guarantees of a promising future, while the Ahwazi Arab indigenous peoples are further marginalised, alienated and denied the most basic rights in every field.

Historically the catastrophic suffering of the Ahwazi people first began after Reza Khan, the then-ruler of Persia, now called Iran, and invaded the Emirate of Al-Ahwaz in 1925, overthrowing the last independent Arab ruler of the region, Sheikh Khazaal Alkaabi, who was subsequently imprisoned in Tehran for 10 years before being murdered in 1936 by strangulation on the orders of Reza Khan.

The current theocratic Iranian regime has imposed authoritarian rule on Al-Ahwaz region by the harshest measures, in a bid to isolate the Ahwazi Arab people from their origins and their historical association with the Arab nations, simultaneously imposing an absolute media blackout on any reporting of the suffering of Ahwazis.

As is widely known, the Iranian regime provides no official statistics on the number of Ahwazi Arabs in Iran, but studies conducted by Ahwazi activists confirm that the current total Ahwazi population stands at between 8 and 10 million. American historian William Theodore Strunk in his work about Ahwaz: The Reign of Sheikh Khazal ibn Jabir and the Suppression of the Principality of Arabistan: A Study in British Imperialism in Southwestern Iran, 1897-1925, Unpublished PhD thesis, Indiana University August 1977, wrote that during the discovery of oil 1908 in Al-Ahwaz region, Ahwazi Arabs made up roughly 98 percent of the regional population.

AHW 2 This majority has now shrunk to 70 percent, due to the regime’s policy of systemic and deliberate Persian immigration and colonisation of the region in order to alter its demographic composition.

The primary reason for Iran’s occupation of Al-Ahwaz is the region’s major oil and gas resources. The region also has extensive and fertile agricultural plains irrigated by the Karoon River.

Ahwaz is a tropical region located in the south and south-west of what is currently known as Iran, with the region being a major producer of crops, including dates, cucumbers, carrots, potatoes, tomatoes, watermelons and other fruits and vegetables, as well as wheat, sugar and corn and many other cereal crops.

Despite all this natural abundance and its status as the center of Iran’s oil and gas industry housing massive industrial complexes, Al-Ahwaz is also the home of Iran’s poorest people, with 99% of Ahwazi Arabs living in extreme poverty and endemic deprivation. This destitution among the region’s indigenous people has its origins in the profoundly racist mentality of the Iranian occupiers, in whose eyes the Ahwazi people’s Arab identity poses a dangerous threat to the country’s national security.

A destitute Ahwazi Arab couple, their home demolished by Iranian occupying forces, collect plastic from rubbish to sell simply in order to survive

Iranian colonial projects in Al-Ahwaz

The Iranian regime occupiers to this day seek to increase the proportion of non-Arab settlers in Ahwaz, even changing the original Arabic names of cities, towns, rivers and other geographical features to Farsi names in an attempt to deny the region’s Arab identity.

This systemic eradication of the Arab character and identity of the Ahwaz region and its peoples extend into every area of life, showing a thoroughly planned strategy to bury and erase the Arab culture and identity of Ahwazis once and for all via the illegitimate and forcible imposition of the Persian occupiers’ culture on the Arab peoples.

There is all too plentiful evidence of this policy which has led to the current bitter daily reality of the Ahwazi peoples. One of the earliest demonstrations of this policy was during the era of Reza Khan’s rule of then-Persia when the speaking of Arabic and wearing of Arab clothing in public were outlawed, with transgressors facing horrendous punishments.

Thereafter and to this day, Iran enforced an all-Farsi education curriculum in Al Ahwaz, with the teaching of the Arabic language forbidden and all studies in Arabic made illegal. This led to rampant illiteracy among the Ahwazi people, adding to the problems of widespread unemployment, with Ahwazis denied access to job opportunities on the pretext of their lack of educational qualifications. Through these openly grotesquely racist policies, the Ahwazi people were very deliberately weakened, losing any possibility of economic and social stability. These apartheid policies of successive Iranian regimes mean that Ahwazi people are still forbidden from giving their children Arab names or from wearing Arab dress, with the ultimate goal of eradicating all Arab identity and subsuming the Ahwazi people into simply another part of the Persian nationalist whole.

Karoon Rivers which dried up due to transferring of its water to central regions of Iran

Karoon River which dried up due to transferring of its water to central regions of Iran

Ahwazi peoples suffer from systemic exclusion in every area of life and at all levels, with the regime continuing a policy of ethnic cleansing, arbitrarily seizing homes, land and property and ‘giving’ these to settlers from neighbouring Persian territories in order to change the demographic balance of the region; under the Iranian legal system, the Ahwazi peoples are denied any legal recourse to object to such grotesque injustices.

The key leadership positions in the region are dominated by Persians, with all such positions being off-limit to Arabs. There is no real representation of Ahwazi peoples at any political level in the region due to the ‘security’ concerns of the occupying Persian authorities in all affairs concerning the Ahwazi people.

Despite the region providing approximately 80 percent of Iran’s oil and gas resources, Ahwazis, the rightful owners of this wealth, are denied any share in the massive profits generated by their mineral or other resources.

The only part of the oil and gas production which is passed on to the Ahwazi people is the related air and water pollution and a related increase in dangerous diseases as a result of the toxic waste and toxic gases emitted by the oil and petrochemical facilities whose emissions are largely unmonitored, discharging massive amounts of harmful industrial substances into the surrounding environment.

Recent acid rainfall and dust storms in the region resulting from this large-scale industrial pollution have seen more than 50,000 Ahwazi people admitted to hospitals and medical clinics for treatment for related conditions, providing terrible and plentiful evidence of the environmental pollution in the region.

Ahwazi citizens who were admitted to hospitals due to difficulty in breathing after dust storms

Successive Iranian governments have allocated far less than one percent of the monies from the region’s oil and gas revenues and related petrochemical projects to the development of Al Ahwaz; indeed the Iranian parliament recently rejected – for a fourth time – a proposal presented by the regional vice-consul to allocate 1.5 percent of the region’s oil revenues for the reconstruction of towns and cities in the region devastated in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, which ended 27 years ago.

Following Reza Khan’s 1925 military invasion of Al Ahwaz in 1925 and the ousting of Sheikh Khazaal, Ahwazi independence and sovereignty were formally denied when Al Ahwaz was annexed to become part of the newly established nation of Iran in 1934.

Since then, several Ahwazi Arab uprisings have taken place and been brutally quashed, with both military and civil movements reiterating their determination to continue their resistance and struggle for justice and freedom from Iranian occupation and to restore Ahwaz to its previous sovereign status.

Each uprising has met with murderous brutality at the hands of the Iranian authorities, with massive numbers of Ahwazis being banished and forcibly transferred to Persian regions.

Ahwazis have now received harsh treatment at the hands of Iranian authorities for generations. In the wake of the first popular uprising following the initial annexation of Ahwaz, Persia’s then-rulers banished large numbers of the people, forcibly resettling them in Persian regions as part of an ethnic cleansing policy, as well as changing the name of the region to Khuzestan and conferring Farsi names on cities, towns, villages and even geographic features like rivers, as well as banning the wearing of Arab clothing and criminalizing the speaking of Arabic, all in an effort to deny and effectively eradicate the region’s Arab identity and history.

These policies continue to the present day, with Ahwazi people’s land and property forcibly confiscated to be redistributed to Persian settlers in an attempt to ‘Persianise’ the Ahwaz region. In the late 1940s, the Persian rulers introduced a policy of settling people of Persia’s nomadic ‘Lur’ tribes in areas with Arab majorities, particularly around the oil-rich cities in the Ahwaz region, while Arab residents were forcibly transferred elsewhere.

This systemic ethnic cleansing policy has accelerated in recent years, with the apparent objective of eradicating the Arab identity and culture of Ahwaz. Any popular political movement or uprising led by Ahwazi dissidents, such as the last major one in 2005, protesting against this institutionalized injustice and oppression is brutally quashed by regime authorities, with massive violence against demonstrators and mass arrests and executions of hundreds of the most prominent dissidents.

Ahwazi demonstration

After every uprising, hundreds of bodies of Ahwazi dissidents arrested tortured and killed by Iranian security forces are recovered from the Karoon River where they are dumped. The detained prisoners are routinely held incommunicado for months, during which they are subjected to horrific torture and interrogation, with ‘confessions’ extracted under duress.

Ahwazi people have repeatedly sought to utilize every peaceful political means to attain even the most basic human rights, which are supposedly guaranteed under the current Iranian regime’s constitution, particularly in Articles 15 and 19, which stress the right to education in the native language of all ethnic groups within Iran, including Arabs, Turks, Kurds and Baluchis. This legislation is effectively superficial window dressing, however, since the regime refuses to implement these articles, with the result that more than half of Iran’s population who are ethnically non-Persian are denied the right to be educated in their mother tongue; this in turn means that, with an educational curriculum taught solely in Farsi, schools in the already marginalised non-Persian areas see high rates of non-attendance, with pupils dropping out at an early stage, leaving these populations further disadvantaged by widespread illiteracy and low education levels. Added to this, the criminalization of Arab culture, including proscriptions on Arabic language in both speech and education, along with the widely resented imposition of Farsi as the official language leaves students largely unskilled in both languages and suffering from a dual identity crisis.

Historical context

To understand the contemporary crisis in Ahwaz, it’s necessary to know some historical background. Oil was first discovered in Ahwaz, as elsewhere in the Middle East, in 1908, piquing the colonial greed of both the Persian state and the Western powers, with the then-British Empire seeking to expand its regional power and control in tandem with other European powers.

With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Ahwaz also assumed a strategic importance for the nations involved due to its strategic location.

In 1925, the Pahlavi dynasty came to power in Persia, ousting the previous ruler of Persia, Ahmad Shah Qajar. Reza Pahlavi identified the geopolitical significance and resource wealth of Ahwaz as potential major assets, with the new rulers wasting no time in invading and annexing Ahwaz, deposing Sheikh Khazaal, in 1925. In 1936, the year of Khazaal’s execution, Ahwaz was given a new, Farsi name, ‘Khuzestan’, while Persia was renamed ‘Iran’ – ‘Land of the Aryans.’

As Persia’s new name suggested, the Pahlavi dynasty was founded on a strongly nationalistic ideology, with all of Tehran’s territories depicted as homogenous parts of a mono-ethnic, monocultural Persian whole. This resulted inevitably in deeply racist antagonistic policies towards the Arab peoples of Ahwaz as to other non-Persian peoples in territories under Iran’s control from the 1920s which continue to the present day, with all non-Persians essentially robbed of their culture and identity. This denial and eradication of non-Persian identity extended into every area of life, from language, dress, education to all aspects of culture. Following the 1979 Islamic revolution, these brutal proscriptions extended to religion, with non-Shiites (and Shiite dissidents) being persecuted and non-Shiite religious ceremonies and worship heavily punished by imprisonment, torture and often execution.

A History of Dissent: Ahwazi resistance continues in the second Pahlavi era under Mohammad Reza Shah (1941–1979) and since the ‘Islamic Revolution’.

The grievances of the minorities under Iranian rule (who combined comprise the majority) grew throughout the second Pahlavi monarchy (1941-1979) since Mohammad Reza Pahlavi adopted his father’s deeply chauvinist policy to ethnically restructure the country completely based on Persian ethnicity and identity. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi introduced even more extensive policies intended to subjugate, marginalize and eliminate the five largest minorities under Iranian rule: Ahwazi Arabs, Turkish Azaris, Kurds, Baluchis and Turkmen peoples.

In response to these brutal policies, Ahwazi Arabs and other oppressed groups launched both peaceful and armed uprisings to defy this policy of systemic subjugation and ethnic cleansing. In 1958, the ‘Arabistan Liberation Front’ was established with the objective of liberating the homeland from Iranian occupation, operating primarily in the cities of Abadan, Mohammareh and Ahwaz.

Two decades after this, in the initial period following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Ahwazi Arabs felt inspired and hopeful of positive change as a result of the overthrow of the brutal monarchy. In light of this new spirit of optimism, a delegation of 33 leading Ahwazi figures representing all classes and points on the political spectrum was dispatched to Tehran in late April that year, under the aegis of the then-Ahwazi spiritual leader Grand Ayatollah Sheikh Mohammad Taher Al Shobair Khaghani, for talks with the new provisional government, then chaired by Mehdi Bazargan. The delegates took with them a memorandum containing 12 demands for very basic reforms, as agreed by the vast majority of prominent Ahwazi political and social leaders, with the people pinning their hopes on the new rulers in Tehran to help Ahwazis attain their legitimate rights and achieve long-denied freedom.

Among the demands laid out in the memorandum were:

Legal recognition of Ahwazi Arab nationality, to be acknowledged and protected under the new Iranian constitution.
The formation of a local committee to administer the affairs of the Ahwazi region as an autonomous, broadly independent territory.
Recognition of Arabic as the official language in Ahwaz, to be taught at school and further education level and the foundation of schools and universities for this purpose, with Arab students to be granted the opportunity of overseas scholarships.
A guarantee of freedom of expression, freedom of assembly and the freedom to establish Arabic newspapers and broadcast media, and an end to the draconian censorship policies of the Shah’s regime.
Abolition of discriminatory policies towards Ahwazis in civil service recruitment.
The allocation of sufficient funds from the oil and gas revenues from Ahwazi lands to help in development of the Ahwazi region.
The restoration and recognition of the Ahwazi people’s right to their Arab identity, i.e. through reintroducing the Arabic names of towns, cities, villages and geographic features rather than the Farsi names conferred under the Shahs’ rule.
Revisions and reforms to the previous regime’s agricultural legislation in order to allow land to be redistributed in a fair and equitable way among Ahwazi farmers, with their ownership rights to be taken into consideration.

During their week of talks in the capital, the delegates met with the then-Prime Minister and other ministers of the new government, as well as with the clerical regime’s religious leaders, including Ayatollah Khomeini. In these talks, they were assured of the new leadership’s full commitment to overturning the policies of the previous regime, renouncing violence and preserving the unity and integrity of the country. The delegates, on their part, reassured the officials that the Ahwazi people fully accepted that all state affairs concerning foreign policy, military issues, the monetary system, international treaties and economic plans should be exclusively the concern of the central state.

The Ahwazi delegates had hoped that even if all the demands laid out in the 12-point memorandum were not met, the new leadership would at least grant the Ahwazi people their basic rights and put an end to the Shahs’ decades-long policies of systemic brutal injustice and oppressive rule. During their meetings, however, the delegates came to realise that the new rulers were little different to the previous despotic regime in their racist attitudes and discriminatory policies towards Iran’s non-Persian population.

Following their return from Tehran, the delegates issued an official statement declaring that the new Iranian leadership had trivialized and undermined the concerns of the Ahwazi people. This led to widespread public anger among Ahwazis, who had been hopeful of real change following the revolution, with many taking to the streets for demonstrations against the continuing racism of the Iranian state to voice their disappointment and disillusionment. The protesters pointed out that the leaders of the Islamic Revolution had come to power with slogans promising a new openness and tolerance and making promises to fulfill the Ahwazi people’s long-denied demands for basic rights, all of which had turned out to be false. Instead, said the protesters, the new regime had shown the same contempt as the previous one, baring its teeth in response to their demands for freedom and rights.

In response to these protests and to the Ahwazi Arabs’ demands, officials of the new clerical regime immediately launched a propaganda and disinformation campaign, now widely known as a standard regime tactic, falsely alleging that the Ahwazi peoples’ protests were part of a regional and global conspiracy to separate Ahwaz from Iran, and asserting that any concessions to the Ahwazi people’s demands would undoubtedly threaten Iran’s territorial integrity, warning ominously that any such protests should be ‘neutralised’ at any cost.

The meaning of this ‘neutralisation’ became horribly clear on May 29^th 1979, only a few months after the revolution brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power, with the new clerical regime’s military, supported by affiliated voluntary extremist sectarian militias launching a murderous offensive on Ahwazi Arab dissidents, killing many hundreds, with thousands more imprisoned and forcibly ‘disappeared’ or forcibly displaced. The day subsequently became known amongst Ahwazis as ‘Black Wednesday.’

Images of the brutal crackdown on Ahwazis who were massacred savagely in Mohammareh

The ‘Black Wednesday massacre was carried out in direct response to a Fatwa (religious decree) issued by Ayatollah Khomeini, who directly ordered Ahmad Madani, the then-military governor of Ahwaz to organize the massacre of all the members of political and cultural organizations of the Ahwazi Arab people in Mohammareh city. To carry out this crime against humanity, Madani deployed the regime’s air and naval forces, who were supported by masked volunteer militias, who coordinated a massive military operation besieging and attacking all the headquarters of Ahwazi political and cultural organisations in the cities of Ahwaz, Abadan, and Mohammareh cities.

Ahmad Madani subsequently became a hero to the Persian people for his leadership of this slaughter, being appointed Commander of the Iranian Navy as a reward for his leading role. He was subsequently quoted as stating, “The Ahwazi are inciting riots so I will drink their blood if they continue insisting on their illegal demands.”

Ahmad Madani and his speech on the necessity of quelling Ahwazi demonstrations

The staff and anyone else in the buildings, including those who attempted to flee the regime’s forces, were either arrested or shot dead if they attempted to flee. When news spread of the regime’s massively brutal offensives, hundreds of enraged residents of the three cities rushed to the scenes of the atrocities in a desperate effort to save the activists. Despite being unarmed, these people in turn were machine-gunned in massive numbers by the masked militias and otherwise executed in cold blood, with survivors who didn’t manage to escape being arrested, imprisoned and/or forcibly exiled.

Mohammed Sadeq Givi Khalkhali, one of the main regime officials under Madani responsible for organizing this slaughter, was subsequently appointed as Chief Justice of the regime’s revolutionary courts in the region, where he ordered the execution of countless other innocent Ahwazi Arabs, often following ‘military trials’ which lasted no longer than a few minutes.

Unfortunately, like so many of the clerical regime’s brutal crimes against Ahwazis and others, ‘Black Wednesday’ has remained uninvestigated and unmentioned by international human rights organisations to date, despite being deeply etched on the memories of the survivors and of all Ahwazi peoples, for whom it is impossible to forget or to forgive until the perpetrators are brought to justice. Despite the regime being accorded absolute impunity by the international community to act with barbaric savagery and to sweep such crimes against humanity under the carpet, the day will live in infamy among all Ahwazis, even those who weren’t born at the time.

One desperate reaction in the aftermath of ‘Black Wednesday’ was the 1980 Iranian Embassy siege in London by an Ahwazi Arab pro-autonomy group who demanded the release of 91 of their comrades held in Iranian jails. Given the relentless decades-long murderous repression of Ahwazis by successive regimes and their refusal to grant even the most basic human rights to the Ahwazi peoples, some Ahwazis see no hope of regaining their rights under such monstrously unjust leadership, with the Pahlavis’ monarchy and the Islamic Republic’s theocracy being effectively two largely indistinguishable faces of the same genocidal and deeply racist coin for Ahwazis and other minorities in Iran.

Whilst it has gone down in Ahwazi history as one of the most infamous of the Khomeinist regime’s crimes, ‘Black Wednesday’ was not isolated incident, with similar murderous brutality meted out routinely, indeed systemically as regime policy, to Ahwazi peoples and other minorities by regime forces and militias in that period and ever since.

Like their predecessors, Ahwazi dissidents and intellectuals continue to face the threat of imprisonment, torture and execution simply for campaigning or writing in support of freedom, self-determination and human rights.

The three founders of the ALF, Mohiuddin Al-Nasser, Dohrab Al-Nasseri and Isa Nasseri, were executed in 1964 at the hands of the Organization of Intelligence and National Security, better known by its Farsi acronym, SAVAK, which led the regime’s rule of terror between 1957 and 1979. This, along with the tragic bloody massacre in Mohammareh city in 1979, and the brutal crackdown on another popular uprising in 2005, are just a few of the stark indications of the dangers faced by Ahwazi dissidents and intellectuals, who live under the constant threat of prison, torture, exile and/or execution.

In the face of this relentless persecution, the Ahwazi people have continued their long struggle for freedom, self-determination and their long-denied legitimate rights; despite the lack of regional and international support for their cause, the people have maintained their determination to continue until they attain their objectives.

Indeed, it could be argued that the many obstacles and the lack of external support or recognition of Ahwazis’ struggle have resulted in strengthened resolve among the Ahwazi people, recognizing that only they can achieve their liberation and succeed in the struggle for freedom, social emancipation and self-determination.

These efforts have led to the establishment of a number of political organisations and groups which have introduced political and social programs that enjoy widespread popular support. Ahwazi groups have also built strong links with liberation movements representing other non-Persian minorities in Iran oppressed by successive Iranian regimes during the same period, including Kurds, Turks, Baluchis and Turkmen.

After its initial revolutionary fervor, the clerical regime’s profoundly reactionary nature, along with its double standards and hypocrisy, became clearer as time went on. For one example, despite having lived and studied in France, the home of liberté, égalité, fraternité, during his exile, Bani Sadr, a prominent figure among the leaders of the Islamic Revolution, returned to Iran only to become one of the most vehemently racist Persian nationalists in the new regime. Sadr enthusiastically supported the brutal persecution of the Ahwazi people under the new leadership, with his greed for power quickly overcoming any revolutionary ideals he had previously espoused. In an interview with a Paris-based Iranian news agency concerning the popular uprising by Ahwazis in support of freedom and self-determination, Sadr said, “ will not grant autonomy to any territory because it simply means the disintegration of the country”.

Another official, who had met with the Ahwazi delegates during the 1979 talks and promised that their demands would be submitted to the consultative committee then drafting the new constitution, reneged on his promises, telling the official news agency, “Granting autonomy is without doubt considered separation which threatens national unity.”

Meanwhile, Ayatollah Khalkhali, prioritized his loyalty to the new regime, vehemently opposing any autonomy and stating, “We will cover the Shaat al-Arab with the blood of those pro-autonomy Ahwazi Arabs.”

In extracts from his posthumously published memoirs, reported in the Iranian Hamshahri newspaper in December 2001, the ayatollah appeared to have been proud of his criminal practices against Iran’s Arab Ahwazi and Kurdish peoples, writing, “I have killed a lot of Ahwazi Arabs, Kurdish and remnants of the monarchy, but I don’t regret it, and my conscience is not tormenting me.”

Regime oppression continues

The clerical regime’s racist attitudes to Ahwazi Arabs and other minorities remain as deeply entrenched today as they were in 1979, having become institutionalized and systemic as under the Shahs’ rule. Ahwazis continue to be subjected to ethnic cleansing and the withholding of all rights, with imprisonment, torture and execution standard policy for even the most minor offence or for no reason other than to maintain fear, and ensure continued subjugation and break the will of the people. As a result of this policy, the percentage of Ahwazi Arab prisoners in the regime’s prisons is, unsurprisingly higher than that of any other group. Regular calls by the EU and international human rights organisations for the introduction of fair and transparent trials for Ahwazi prisoners, who are routinely denied access to a lawyer as standard practice, have been disregarded.

Despite the clerical regime’s oft-repeated claims to stand for Palestinian freedom, anti-Arab racism is endemic and encouraged by the regime, with Arabs being commonly referred to by derogatory terms such as ‘lizard-eaters’ and ‘camel’s milk-drinkers’ and depicted as uncivilized barbarians and barefoot nomadic peoples.

Denied rights and employment, destitution amongst Ahwazis is widespread, with disproportionate numbers living in the most abject poverty amid unimaginable conditions. With the Tehran regime deliberately withholding funding, infrastructure development is non-existent, with thousands in the regional capital, Ahwaz, living in areas with open sewers, no sanitation, rampant diseases due to pollution, no access to running water, electricity or gas, despite the fact that the region is, as mentioned above, the centre and backbone of Iran’s massive oil wealth, containing over 80 percent of its oil and gas resources. Ahwazi peoples are essentially treated as fifth-class subjects in their own lands, while Persian settlers introduced by Tehran to change the demographic balance live in great affluence in pleasant Persian-only settlements as part of the regime’s policy of tempting more Persians to move to these areas. Those Ahwazis who are able to find employment have access only to the most menial, low-paid jobs, with all desirable jobs reserved for Persians.

Although most Ahwazis are Shiite, those who are Sunni face even greater discrimination due to the clerical regime’s persecution of non-Shiites.

Almost a century of systemic racist subjugation as policy has led to the Ahwazi people being one of the most marginalized and oppressed peoples in the Middle East and the world, with one of the highest rates of incarceration and execution globally.

The disfranchisement and ethnic discrimination policies of the Persian state towards Ahwazi Arabs have crippled the majority of the Ahwazi population, with an estimated 80 percent of Ahwazi households living below the poverty line, even while their lands sit on virtually limitless oil, gas and mineral resources that have been exploited to benefit Iranian occupiers since before the state of Iran even came into existence.

The absolute censorship of the press and media has been a serious obstacle for Ahwazi activists attempting to raise awareness of the systemic racism and abuses perpetrated against the Ahwazi people, allowing the regime to continue these inhuman and supposedly internationally outlawed policies.

Iranian hard-liners consider Ahwazis a threat to the integrity of their theocratic state and to the oil and gas wealth which is one of its primary income sources, and have done their utmost to disseminate negative perceptions of Ahwazi peoples, labelling activists as apostates and terrorists and thus enabling the judicial system to issue grotesquely unjust prison sentences against them. The EU parliament and a number of international human rights organisations have issued a large number of extensive, well-documented reports listing some of the abuses and violations commonly inflicted on Ahwazi peoples and other non-Persian minorities in Iran. These decades-long abuses comprise part of a longstanding policy, which predates the clerical regime but have been enthusiastically adopted by it, with the ultimate objective of eradicating, subjugating and subsuming the non-Persian population in every way.

For far too long, successive Iranian regimes have denied the true diversity of the ethnic mosaic which makes up Iran, which is in reality the most ethnically diverse country in the Middle East. The flagrant and systemic violations and abuses against non-Persian minorities show that the current regime, like the monarchy that precedes it, is in reality founded on a savagely fascistic, repressive and racist mono-ethnic, monocultural ideology, regardless of its veneer of theocratic piety.

In summary

At present, we see strong and continues popular movement in Al-Ahwaz, once comes out in a football stadium to express the power held by the people against the Iranian military, again it shows up at the funeral of “Younes Asakereh” the martyr which his funeral turned into a huge anti-regime protest in “Mohammareh” city.

As people in one united voice chanted revolutionary slogans calling for popular uprising in Ahwaz against the racial discrimination, the national oppression, the marginalization, the rampant poverty, unemployment, and attempts to obliterate the Arab identity of the region at the hands of the occupying Tehran government’s policies in Al-Ahwaz.

As matter of fact, organizing such Ahwazi populace movement at wide scale which engulfed the most parts of Al-Ahwaz aims to the following:

– Applying pressure on the Iranian regime, through the general popular rejection of the brutal Iranian policy in Ahwaz and in all countries that Iran presents.

– Working with non-Persian peoples against mullahs’ authority to expose its violations against the peoples exists in geopolitics Iran.

In fact, this Ahwazi movement has become an example to the rest of peoples in geopolitical Iran, the people of (Turk, Kurds, and Baluchs) was directly affected by this movement on many occasions and in conjunction with Ahwazi people have staged protest rejecting the repressive measures of Iranian regime conducting against non-Persian national groups and even Persian community. Many senior intelligence officials has visited Ahwaz to calm the situation which came up in a very critical time for Iran while it’s looking for internal cohesion to continue its sabotage in the Arab world, This senior-level of security officials visits reflects the strong movement of Ahwaz and it’s reflection to what is going on in the Arab Nation which is fed up with Iranian hegemony.

Without doubt, all these events in the region are in the national security interests of the Arab countries, the inner uprising of the non-Persian peoples are fruitful to those peoples firstly, and secondly they are in the same row against Iranian expansion in the Arab world.

For Ahwazi Arab people, the matter is not being forgotten like before, we now see the Arab media generally interested in Ahwaz’s cause specially the Saudi media, as well as the liberation groups started to have armed wings, the “Arab struggle for the liberation of Ahwaz” movement on the top of it which succeeded in directing painful blows to Iran in both revolutionary field inside occupied Ahwaz homeland or its political activities in all over the world.

This is the truth in spite of Iranian media ignoring Ahwaz’s movement which is living real uprising despite more than eighty years of Ahwaz’s occupation, where Iran exercised all forms of racism to root out the Arabic identity and it didn’t even succeed to contain all Ahwaz’s Shiites, which most of them are resisting the Persian occupation, on the other side the Sunni elimination didn’t succeed and the number of Shiites who converted to be Sunni exceeded all the expectations.

It is noteworthy that ever since the April 15^th uprising in Ahwaz in 2005 commemorating the anniversary of the original 1925 Iranian occupation of Ahwaz (which was subsequently renamed Khuzestan in 1936), Iranian security and intelligence services have launched brutal crackdowns and mass arrests of activists and civilians in the weeks preceding the anniversary in an attempt to intimidate the people and prevent further demonstrations.

It is imperative that Arab and Western human rights organisations take up the too-long ignored cause of Al Ahwaz on the basis of basic humanitarian principles, recognizing that the occupied and horrendously brutalized peoples are being deprived of their most basic rights as fellow human beings.

Flagrant violations of Ahwazi prisoners and fabrication of charges as justifications for their execution

Posted: 03/17/2015 by editormary in Ahwaz, Counter-terrorism, No thanks!, Iran, Middle East Issues, Somoud: Arab Voices of Resistance

Example of the forced confessions televised (also with English subtitles, by Iranian state tv) of the prisoners so as to convince the general public that they are guilty and deserve execution. In this case, the prisoner is praising the Secret Service agents who arrested him.

Main Arabic Source: http://www.alriyadh.com/1025667

Translated by Rahim Hamid, Ahwazi human rights activist

Two distinguished Ahwazi former prisoners named “Ramadan Nasseri” and “Mohammed Hattab Zaheri Sari”, in an interview with Al Riyadh online newspaper revealed flagrant human rights violations that the Iranian occupying government has exercised against Ahwazi Arab prisoners in Al-Ahwaz.

They revealed how the Ahwazi prisoners are subjected to arbitrary brutal arrest after being abducted and taken to secret detention centers which are heavily guarded. At this station, the interrogators in the secret detention facilities use threats and violence during interrogations in order to extract confessions or gain practical modifiable information that can be applied against the prisoners to convict them to the death penalty or to issue long prison sentences against them.

The two prisoners in their interview recounted that causing severe mental exhaustion during questioning is most pervasive technique employed by the Intelligence service interrogators to force the Ahwazi prisoner to produce confessions of crimes which he/she did not commit.

Also, the Ahwazi prisoners often are coerced into confessions after the threat that their family members will be arrested or imprisoned, as this menace often has a profound effect on the spirit of the prisoner, leading him or her to succumb to the fabricated charges that the person is being charge with in order to protect their families from any risks of the sort.

In the case of rejecting the accusations, the Ahwazi prisoners will have to endure brutal physical torture and if it is ineffective, psychological torture begins, which frequently leaves a deep impact on the Ahwazi prisoners and always drives them to harsh sentences or the gallows. During mental torture, the prisoner is deprived of sleep, for a period that often lasts a week or ten days.

The prisoner is detained in a narrow cell, the length of which is estimated at two and half meters by one and a half meters, the cell’s walls are painted with a mysterious and sharp red color. At this station, the prisoners hear voices such as crying women and screams of children and horrific sounds of different animals.

Until this moment, the Ahwazi prisoners who were released still do not know if these voices and sounds are real or if they have been set by the intelligence services in order to influence them, or if they have been infected with illusions because of psychological pressure and their extended terms of incommunicado detention which may last for years.

During the interrogation, Ahwazi prisoners are forced to write all of their daily lives from childhood to the details of their period of captivity. They are compelled to write everything they know, even if it has no link to political and security issues.

This method is used in order to wear down the captive physically and physiologically and destroy his spirits and place excessive pressure on him.

The intelligence service also uses open and long discussions with the Ahwazi prisoner as a technique in order to gain more information and to identify prisoner’s orientations and directions. The content of these talks are then manipulated and used for the purposes of the occupation. The detainee is labelled as dangerous, on the basis of fabricated and ill-defined charges such as posing potential threat to the national security, waging war against God, spreading propaganda against the regime, causing corruption on earth and so forth, in an alleged attempt to criminalize Ahwazi prisoners.

The efforts behind flinging out these charges against Ahwazi prisoners after filming and documenting prisoners’ coerced confessions is to orchestrate a scenario of self-incrimination of prisoners as testimonial evidence that more possibly implicates and incriminates the prisoner, providing a justification for his execution.

In this case, Ramadan Nasseri, the former Ahwazi prisoner who was sentenced to thirty years in prison and who recently escaped from prison, says he was kidnapped outside his home by eight intelligence agents without their showing any arrest warrant.

He recounts how he was blindfolded and handcuffed and was taken to an unknown place and then went to a narrow and suffocating cell where was interrogated abruptly in an arbitrary way for many hours without being given the opportunity to take a break. He was also prevented from drinking water and eating.

He says that during all of his time in solitary confinement his hands were bound by handcuffs and his feet were shackled by chains. He could not walk or sit as he had undergone long periods of interrogation.

The intelligence services torturers exercised extreme physical torture against him, as he said on many occasions, he was beaten by electrical cables and shocked, making him become unconscious when this situation occurred many times.

He added that he was tortured psychologically when he was kept in a narrow cell painted with shocking colors and unclear graffiti, which bothered his nerves extremely as well as being subjected to the sound of constant disturbing voices, sounds and radio signals that came to him from unknown directions.

Besides severe mental and physiological torture endured in the cell, he was convicted for thirty years in prison based on the coerced confessions in biased trial proceedings that fell far short of international standards.

Regarding his unfair conviction, as he was even banned from having access to lawyer, he said that he was tried by an intolerant and an infamous judge named Mohammadi who chaired the primary branch of the revolution Court in Ahwaz.

He said the judge within ten minutes firstly read aloud the charges against him quickly and after that asked if he wished to defend himself.

Ramadan believes that as the judicial system of the Iranian occupation is thoroughly corrupt and deeply intolerant toward Ahwazi prisoners, his prison conviction was already issued before his trial and before hearing his words.

The outcome of his trial was a heavy imprisonment sentence plus the exile to “Eghlid”, the notorious prison in the Fars Province.

Ramadan claimed the aim of his banishment to far-distant Persian regions outside Al-Ahwaz was to deprive him and his family from visiting each other.

He says that his wife, alongside their children, had to travel long distances to visit him in the prison as his wife was not able to afford the travel expenses regularly because she was struggling just to sustain her children’s lives and fulfill their basic needs, this situation resulted in more suffering as it inflicted damaging psychological effects. Ramadan said that the legacy of torture is still on his body and he is suffering from harsh pain owed to rupturing in his two knee joints as a result of torture.

Ahwazi reveals another prisoner named “Mohammed Hattab Zaheri Sari”, who recently escaped from prison, saying he was a political, cultural and religious activist while he used to live in Ahwaz.

He asserts he also had an active part in the popular uprising in Ahwaz in April 2005, which covered the majority areas in Al-Ahwaz. He continued his activism even after the uprising in Ahwaz, which caused him to suffer persecution when the Iranian authorities arrested him on 29 July 2007.

He reports that he had spent two months under severe torture in the intelligence service secret detention. The Iranian intelligence agencies decided to transfer him to “Sepidar” prison after the investigation of his political activity.

In addition, the Iranian revolutionary court in Ahwaz (Branch four, by the judge Mr. Torki) sent him to five years imprisonment on 02/19/2008 on the charge of conspiring against Iran’s national security.

He says that after two and half years in the prison, was released by the “conditional release” law. He says despite all the barriers and risks, he pursued his activity after getting released from prison, so the Iranian intelligence services who put him under surveillance once again arrested him on 4 May 2011 on the Iran-Turkey border (Sarv border) when he tried to get out legally from Iran.

Then he was transferred to the city of Ahwaz, where spent 45 days in secret detention which belongs to the Iranian intelligence services, under severe torture and other ill-treatment.

He said he was tortured by various methods as on one occasion, he reports being severely beaten with belt on his back when he was laid on an iron bed and his hands and his feet were tied from two sides with manacles; on another, he described brutally being lashed, kicked, slapped on his ears that resulted in partial loss of hearing in his left ear, hung upside-down and beaten on the soles of his feet with cables, given electric shocks, hearing voices like crying and weeping and screaming men and women. After that, the services transferred him to the Fajr prison in the city of Quneitra (Dezful), about 160 kilometers north of Ahwaz city.

He was released from the prison after spending several months on bail of one Iranian billion rials (about 30,000 US dollars) on 30-11-2011 by the judge Mr. Morteza Kiasati, who is one of the nine Iranian judges whose name is on the list of European sanctions against the Iranian state as a human rights violator.

Mohammad continued saying: “since I have been released and I’m continually suffering from harassment and threats of the Iranian intelligence services, as they call my phone every month to threaten me to face a new trial and prison if they think that I am still active.

And also every April, which coincides with the anniversary of the popular uprising in Al-Ahwaz, the Iranian intelligence services in the city of Ahwaz forced me to come to their office for questioning and investigation, and to sign a document that kept me under house arrest, not allowing me to leave my home without getting permission from the intelligence services.

The intelligence services were also forced me to come to their office if any of my friends were arrested by them, just to answer their questions as to if I have regular contact with him or not.

Finally, this situation forced me to leave my homeland to protect my life from another arrest, torture, and imprisonment.”

To the question about the prison condition, Mohammad said that the section of prison where he was held was not able to accommodate more than one hundred and twenty prisoners, but the prisoners in this section were more than four hundred and eighty people. The section’s cells are cramped and overcrowded and one cannot find a place to sleep.

He added that the judges in the Persian courts do not abide by and respect the principle of neutrality and the principle of innocent until proven guilty, but they are acting as the prosecutors who are directing the charges and demanding the most severe penalties against Ahwazi prisoners and after the issuance of unfair sentences against Arab prisoners, the occupying Persian authorities begin to transfer the convicted prisoners to various notorious prisons such as Sepidar and Karoon Prison and also other prisons outside Al-Ahwaz.

In these prisons, Ahwazi prisoners are often banned from visiting their parents and their other relatives, although the right of prisoners to visit their family members is enshrined in Iranian law, also the prisoners are prevented from the acquisition of book and newspapers, even though they are in the Persian language. This situation causes the spread of frustration, stress and depression among Ahwazi prisoners.

In reference to health and the sanitary condition of prisons, he said health care in overcrowded prisons is almost non-existent. The contagious skin diseases run rampant among Ahwazi prisoners due to their infection with parasitic insects like lice as well as pulmonary and TB diseases because of dirty water and lack of air-conditioning systems. This is because of the deliberate neglect of the prison authorities who refuse to provide the required facilities such as clean water for drinking and washing, air-conditioning systems, and the necessary medical treatment of prisoners. Such systematic inhuman denial of basic human rights is adopted in order to punish the Ahwazi prisoners indirectly.

The Iranian occupation state tries to distribute the arrested Ahwazi political activists among the prisons and in sections that have nothing to do with political issues, especially throwing them into sections of prisoners accused of possession of narcotic drugs, larceny and murder offences for the reason of ruining the morale of the political prisoners and at the same time to tell the world that there are no political prisoners in Ahwaz. Add to that, they exile the Ahwazi Arab political prisoners to remote areas far away from Ahwaz in the Persian regions as a common physiological punishment so that their families can’t visit and meet them, which something that the regime always does to Ahwazi families.

SEE ALSO: http://www.ahwaziarabs.info/2013/11/global-outrage-over-press-tv-torture.html

Forced sterilization, exclusion, persecution, cultural genocide: The situation of Ahwazi women: an interview with Mona Oudeh

Posted: 03/09/2015 by editormary in Ahwaz, Culture and Heritage, Europe, Grassroots Activism, Human Rights, Interviews, Iran, Middle East, People's Movements / Struggles, Somoud: Arab Voices of Resistance, Strategy for Liberation, Syria

Mona Oudeh, an Ahwazi activist based in London, said in an interview with Al-Sharq Newspaper that she has always carried the burden of the Ahwazi cause like every other Ahwazi Arab woman who rejects and repudiates the Persian occupation of Al-Ahwaz that has forced her to leave her homeland.

Mona, who devotes all of her time to the Ahwazi cause, has spoken about some of the atrocities perpetrated by the Persian occupation against her Arab compatriots, and in particular, against women, affirming the fact that due to decades of Iranian occupation, Ahwazi Arab women have been subjected to human rights violations such as being deprived of their inalienable right to education in Arabic, their native language.

Al-Sharq: How do Ahwazi women consider the Persian occupation of their homeland Ahwaz?

MO: First I would like to express my gratitude to the venerable Al-Sharq newspaper for allowing me this opportunity to talk about Al-Ahwaz case.

Also, let me take this opportunity to extend my appreciation to the Saudi people, brothers, and all observers, and to all those interested in news and developments in the matter of Al-Ahwaz. To answer your question, Ahwazi women, as an integral part of their society, believe that the occupation has to be overthrown, even militarily, if necessary, and the area returned to Ahwazi Arab rule.

The occupation is entirely illegal, and there is no doubt that sooner or later it is bound to disappear. The occupation is the root cause of my people’s suffering, and Ahwazi women endure additional repression and exclusion, such as losing their right to live in dignity in their homeland.

In fact, since the start of Iranian occupation and domination of Al-Ahwaz, the ultra-national Persian institutions have systematically implemented policies of racial discrimination against the entire Ahwazi population, and in particular, of Ahwazi women, who have been excluded from all rights and privileges including educational opportunities, employment, intellectual, literary and artistic participation, as well as the denial of exercising their indigenous cultural activities.

Mona continued, saying that crimes of the occupation are incalculable, but the worst crime committed against the majority of Ahwazi women is through the policy of ethnic cleansing practiced in the cruelest manner, by preventing women of childbearing age to bring about demographic change in the areas of Al-Ahwaz.

The occupation authorities are forcing Ahwazi women to give birth through “Caesarean” procedure rather than natural birthing, and in many cases the authorities urge the doctors to carry out sterilization on birthing women without their knowledge or prior approval, through the process of tying the fallopian tubes. This results in Ahwazi women no longer being able to have more than one child, and thus, it reduces population growth among the Arabs.

She pointed out the suffering of the Ahwazi women as a consequence of the apartheid policies of Iranian occupation. Women are subjected to arbitrary arrest, imprisonment, physical harassment, psychological and physical torture as well as the death penalty like all Ahwazi activists. The Arab and international stance regarding our plight is still weak, and our cause must be activated and placed on the table of international forums.

Al-Sharq: What else do the Ahwazi women suffer because of the occupation?

MO: If we want to describe and analyze the nature of oppression and suffering of Ahwazi women under the grip of Iranian Occupation, then it would require us to write books about it.

This is because of a racist, anti-Arab mentality and ideology of the Iranian occupation against Arab people generally, and particularly against Ahwazis. As a matter of fact, the intensity of the regime’s racial oppression and segregation falls primarily on the Ahwazis in comparison to other ethnic and indigenous peoples in Iran, which is reflected in all aspects of their social, economic, and political lives and many other areas.

In this case, because the Iranian occupation harbors hatred towards Arabs, the Ahwazi women suffer and endure the most vicious types of harassment, arrest, imprisonment, physical and psychological torture because of three major factors, the first one is their female gender and, the second is their Arab ethnicity and the third is because they are Ahwazi women freedom fighters.

Ahwazi women, as Ahwazi men, face the death penalty because of their struggle against the Iranian occupation, and while sometimes the Ahwazi woman activist has undergone such heavy and cruel punishment, the most prominent Ahwazi woman imprisoned in an Iranian jail is Ms. Faheme Esmaili Badawi. She is an elementary school teacher and political activist who was arrested in 2005 and is currently serving 15 year’s imprisonment in exile from her homeland.

In December 2006, the Iranian occupation regime executed her husband Ali Matouri Zadeh, the Ahwazi activist and founding member of the moderate Hizbal-Wifaq (Reconciliation Party).

The suffering of Faheme Esmaili Badawi cannot be easily summarized through her arrest and the injustice of her husband’s execution, during imprisonment she was forced to give birth to her daughter Salma without receiving adequate medical assistance and in the most unsanitary conditions. Her daughter Salma is now seven years old, and she lives without her mother and her father, who was unjustly hanged by the regime.

Al-Sharq: What is your view of the stance of Arabs and Muslims toward your issue?

MO: Honestly, the position of the Arab and Islamic countries toward the issue of Ahwaz is very weak and timid. It cannot in anyway be considered a significant stance, neither can it be called advocacy or support for it. So far, however, hopeful and positive indicators have recently occurred in one or two of the Arab Gulf countries. However, we can say that there is no Arab state with a clear and explicit stand in support for the Ahwazi issue. In reality, the promises made regarding supporting Ahwazi people were only words spoken, no actions have been taken. There are Arab countries allied with Iran, and these countries, especially the Syrian regime, have handed over political Ahwazi activists to Iran to be sentenced to death and executed.

As for the European position, through the work of human rights and civic organizations, it has resulted in the right of assembly and demonstration for Ahwazi communities in European countries. European governments have met with Ahwazi organizations in order to learn about and understand their cause.

Al-Sharq: What is the stance of the United Nations and international organizations toward the plight of the Ahwazi people?

MO: All that the United Nations and human rights organizations have done is to condemn and denounce the crimes committed by the Iranian occupation authorities in Al-Ahwaz, despite the fact that the Iranian crimes against Ahwazis have reached the level of ethnic cleansing and genocide. The international community has to do its duty to prosecute those responsible for these heinous crimes.

The secret letter leaked from the office of “Abtahi” during the tenure of the President Mohammad Khatami clearly indicated a policy of ethnic cleansing, a policy that is still ongoing and expanding. The letter stipulates orders and certain conditions for conducting systematic ethnic cleansing of Ahwazis within 10 years, such as the banishment of influential and educated Ahwazis such as teachers, university professors and governmental employers to remote Persian areas. This is facilitated through different enticements, particularly by making them promises of providing better living conditions, promotions and increased salaries and then replacing them with Persian settlers who implement the orders of the occupation government in Al-Ahwaz.

Al-Sharq: How do you see the future of the Al-Ahwaz cause and Middle East?

MO: I think that all Ahwazi activists believe that the demise of the occupation and the establishment of the state of Ahwaz is a fact that will come into being and what separates us from our goal is just a matter of time and the need to improve Ahwazi capabilities and facilities that will ensure the development of tools for the Ahwazi struggle to defeat the Persian occupation. Ahwazis fully believe in the future of their cause and work on this basis.

We know the rule says that the revolutionary struggle for liberation from the clutches of colonialism and oppression requires manpower, in fact, we have the manpower that is willing to sacrifice in order to regain the legitimate rights of Al-Ahwaz.

But, we also need foreign support and backing at all levels for our struggle against the Iranian occupation. We need the international human rights and law agencies to decry the human rights abuses practiced against Ahwazi Arab people.

Additionally as Al-Ahwaz has been occupied military and the enemy only understands force, there has to be a regional strategy to supply us with arms and training, as well as the implementation and full force of international law, to recognize us as an occupied and oppressed people. It is the responsibility of the global media and regional media to expose our suffering to the world.

Lack of attention to our just cause is only in the interest of the Iranian occupation to perpetuate its illegal existence and crimes and expansionist aspirations which know no boundaries not only in Al-Ahwaz but all the neighboring Arab countries, as today it is more evident than any other time, when we see Iran’s occupation of Syria, Iraq, Yemen destroying our people’s revolutions through their mercenaries. The only tool that can foil the regime’s devastating colonial advancement in the region is by supporting Ahwazis and other non-Persian ethnic groups such as Turks, Kurds and Baluchs in Iran.

In my point of view, this is the only way we can trample the regime, because as long as the regime exists and there is the absence of a comprehensive national Arabic project to deal with Iran, nowhere in the Middle East will there be peace and stability. Thus, the absence of the Ahwazi cause in the international and regional arena only serves the regime, as the Iranian regime’s major strength has originated from its domination of Al-Ahwaz’s sea oil and gas, albeit, the Ahwazi indigenous people have gained nothing from their vast resources, which have become a curse against them solely.

We ask the international community to support our cause in accordance with the norms and the international conventions because we are a suffering and oppressed people undergoing countless policies of racial discrimination.

The Iranian regime is attempting to melt us down in the crucible of Persian culture, eliminating our Arabic origins. As earlier mentioned, the regime has exercised such brutal racial discrimination policies that have amounted to ethnic cleansing through forcible displacement, reverse migration, and settlement construction for installing Persian settlers in Al-Ahwaz in order to impose a new demographic reality on us and the future of Al-Ahwaz.

The brutal oppression of the indigenous Ahwazi Arab people encompasses political, economic, social and cultural measures has been going on for years, and the sheer injustice imposed on my Arab people has gone unreported for decades, never getting the attention that it deserves. Our cause has been sanctioned due to regional plots related to bilateral economic and political interests.

The most unfair tool that is still used against our plight is the Media Blackout made of the spilled blood of my people who have dared to speak out against the Iranian occupation. Is their blood so cheap, without global condemnation?

The truth is that Ahwazis are sieged and restricted and unable to convey their voices out because the internal media is controlled by the regime and even the outside Persian opponent the media are bribed and supportive of the regime’s crimes against us and deliberately hide our news and events taking place on the ground, as such biased media stigmatizes Ahwazi Arab fighters by describing them as foreign stooges scheming with Britain and Saudi Arabia who want to break up the country and bring corruption, terrorism and Wahhabism.

Likewise, the occupying judicial system presses the same charges against the Ahwazi prisoners and simply executes them. This is because the racism and the anti-Arab sentiment has taken deep root into the minds of the entire Farsi-speaking community. Furthermore, Arab and Western media also have not really put a spotlight on our issue because of the aforesaid reasons, turning our issue into a regional and global orphan.

The outcry of Ahwazi prisoners remains unheard behind bars, so our most basic and smallest demand is to receive help and solidarity from Media outlets to break the Iranian occupation blackout, to make known the reality of the Ahwazis and other ethnic groups, where our most basic conditions are so low in the framework of Iran’s petrified ideology.

We need the world to hear our voice and stand by our side against the Persianization policies and genocide campaign that look like a fatal cancer metastasizing to the whole Ahwazi Arab society as an attempt to erase the Arabic identity of Ahwazis. For instance, as I mentioned earlier, this vicious occupation policy, through denying our native Arabic language, has caused the Ahwazi people to be stammering and uneducated in our own tongue, not able to speak Arabic or write in it.

My people have had enough of torture, prison, execution, poverty and illiteracy. We have had enough of the grief of mothers whose loved ones are executed or imprisoned for years. Let’s stop here because I am speechless. I have run out of words. I cannot depict the gravity of the nameless crimes exercised by the Iranian occupying authorities in Al-Ahwaz. I just look forward to seeing a better future for my Ahwazi oppressed people as they are free of any chains of oppression and living in safety and dignity.

Main Source: Al-Sharq newspaper

Translated by Rahim Hamid

Ahwazi mass demonstration in front of the European Parliament in Brussels

Posted: 03/07/2015 by editormary in Ahwaz, Europe, Human Rights, Middle East Issues, People's Movements / Struggles, Resistance, Somoud: Arab Voices of Resistance, Syria

Ahwazi and Syrian freedom flags march together to demand the EU address their human rights.

written by Ahwazna website

The Arab Struggle Movement for the Ahwazi mass demonstration in front of the European Parliament in BrusselsLiberation of Al-Ahwaz has organized a mass demonstration, under the title “We will never forget our Ahwazi people” in front of the European Parliament in Brussels, the Belgian Capital.

The Demonstration took place on Friday 6th of March to condemn the policies of Iranian occupation and the ongoing anti-human atrocities against the Arab people of Ahwaz.

The Ahwazi community organized this massive demonstration as a message of solidarity with the enormous sacrifices of the Ahwazi Arab people in the path of preserving the Arab identity and liberation of the Al-Ahwaz land from Iranian domination which has brought nothing but destruction and murder to its indigenous Arab people. Also, it acts upon the belief in the feasibility of using all legal means in combating the unlawful Iranian occupation and its non-humanitarian practices in Al-Ahwaz.

This demonstration was a part of series of demonstrations and activities undertaken by the Arab Struggle for the Liberation of Ahwaz as a bid to expose the obnoxious occupation policies of the Iranian regime. In addition, to make heard the oppressed voice of Ahwazi Arabs who are under extreme oppression from the occupation by Iran, the likes of which is not known to the world at large, despite the objective brutality of this occupation.

Hundreds of Ahwazis and Syrian took part in the mass demonstration, as there was a significant presence of Arab communities including Iraqis, Lebanon, Yemenis and Palestinians who came from various European countries as well as distinguished media figures and human rights advocates who came from Arab Gulf states and other countries for the purpose of supporting the Ahwazi cause.

Non-Persian communities such as Turks from South Azerbaijan and Kurds from East Kurdistan and Baluchis attended this demonstration to denounce the Iranian regime over its atrocious policies that are murdering their people in cold blood and in particular, against the ongoing machine of execution that is being used at an alarming rate against their activists.

Ahwazi women along with other non-Persian women including Kurds and Turks who came from different countries took part in this demonstration to protest against the violated women’s rights, for their fundamental rights to education in their mother language and for the right to freedom of expression, against sex discrimination and inequality that the totalitarian Iranian regime has been committing against them for decades.

During the demonstration, participants raised the national flag of Ahwaz and the flags of the struggle movement and images of Ahwazi martyrs and prisoners and numerous banners in Arabic and English denouncing the continued policies of forced displacement and changing the demographic structure of Ahwazi Arab areas through construction of exclusive vast settlements for bringing Persian settlers. There were also banners whose theme was the dryness of Ahwazi rivers and marshlands via construction of excessive dams.

Many outspoken political figures emphasized the necessity of supporting the Ahwazi Arab cause in their long struggle against Iranian occupation and ongoing Iran oppression and to denounce the abuse of human rights of Arab people in occupied Ahwaz territory. Moreover, they stress the necessity of implementing an effective political and media strategy to highlight the Ahwazi Arab issue not only amid the Arab world but also on the international level.

As the Arabic region is on the verge of mass domestic unrest and instability, important speeches were addressed to the audience regarding Arab national security and the increasing threat of Iranian influence and its terrorism-driven campaign in Arab countries – Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Bahrain and the necessity of Arab countries to build strong alliances to tackle the aggressive Iranian foreign policy which is extending serious repercussions outwards, as its expansionist ambitions to achieve more influence politically and economically in the Arab world countries, mainly Arab Gulf states, become more evident each day.

The partial list of names of veteran political and journalism figures who were present at the demonstration are Dr. Walid Tabtabai, the Former Kuwaiti MP, Mohammad Al-Emadi and Nasser Al-Fezalle the MPs in Bahrain’s parliament, Rashid al-Fayed, the veteran politician and representative of the Lebanese Future Movement, Anwar Malek, an Algerian human rights advocate, Behjet Al-kurdi, the Iraqi political activist, Ayed Al-Shemeri, the prominent Saudi journalist, Delegation from PJAK party, Delegation from Baluchistan and Democratic Party of South Azerbaijan.

The participants spoke about ways to support the struggle of the Arab people of Ahwaz in order to lift the injustice, oppression and racial discrimination which has been practiced against them and also viable solutions to reclaim their freedom and exercise the right to self-determination of Ahwazi Arab people who have sought to end Iranian occupation of their homeland for years.

The demonstration has witnessed notable coverage by Arabic and foreign newspapers as well as TV news channels such as Al-Arabiya, Orient, Alrafidain, Wesal and Lebanon Future Channel.

The Arab Struggle Movement, in a letter submitted to the European Union, called for urgent intervention to immediately stop the Iranian regime’s arbitrary arrests and executions of Ahwazis.

The Movement also appealed to the European Union and its institutions to visit Al-Ahwaz to uncover and document the Iran regime’s occupation practices that have polluted and destroyed the environment, leading to the large-scale spread of dangerous diseases in all parts of Al-Ahwaz.

The delegation of the Arab Struggle Movement met with a number of European Union officials in Brussels after the demonstration.

The delegation stressed the need for the European Union intervention and implementation of safeguards as provided for in international treaties and conventions to protect oppressed peoples under military occupation, in particular, the Arab people of Ahwaz.

The Arab Struggle Movement also expressed its hopes that the EU’s relations with the occupying Iranian regime would not be at the expense of the right of peoples under Iranian occupation, and to be supportive of the demands of the peoples struggling for their freedom and the formation of their Independent States.

The final statement which came out with five recommendations was stated by Musa Mehdi Fakher, the Ahwazi political activist. The some of the notable recommendations are as follow:

– Stop ongoing violent persecution ranging from execution, torture and detainment of Ahwazi Arab people.

– Unconditional release of all Ahwazi political and cultural prisoners.

– Granting the prisoners their legal rights of having access to lawyers and having an open, transparent and non-biased trial respecting human rights standards.

– Stop changing the main courses of Karoon, Jarahi, Karkheh Rivers, and stop damaging the environment in Ahwaz.

– Stop the forced displacement and construction settlement policies that are conducted in line with ethnic cleansing policies against Ahwazi Arab people.

– Support the protesters who are protesting against the Iranian occupying authorities in destroying the environment in Ahwaz.

– Demand for sending specialist envoys to Al-Ahwaz by the United Nations to stand up against the repeated cases of abuse suffered by the people of Ahwaz, where some of them reached the level of extermination and ethnic cleansing crimes, and demand the punishment of those individuals who must be held accountable for these offences.

– Refusal to make the Ahwazi, Kurdish, Baluchi and Turkish Azeri people issues and the violations of human rights of the occupying clerical regime as issues of compromise during the ongoing negotiations between the West and the occupying Mullah regime over its nuclear program. As it is not permissible to compromise on the fundamental rights of these peoples supported by international law under any circumstances.

To conclude, we demand the free world, specifically the EU, to assume its full humanitarian responsibilities and to stand by the side of Ahwazi people and other non-Persian peoples in their legitimate struggle for their freedom and to maintain their dignity.

It is worth mentioning that this demonstration is the third of its kind this year, as the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz has already organized a mass demonstration, entitled “We will never forget our Ahwazi oppressed people” in front of the Embassy of the State of Iranian occupation in the Danish capital, Copenhagen on 10 January 2015. Followed by another massive demonstration in front of the UN headquarters in the Austrian capital Vienna on 20 February 2015, to support the Ahwazi people rising up at home against the Iranian occupation policies.

The Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz called for UN intervention in Al-Ahwaz

Posted: 03/03/2015 by editormary in Ahwaz, Culture and Heritage, Europe, Iran, Middle East Issues, People's Movements / Struggles, Resistance, Somoud: Arab Voices of Resistance, Strategy for Liberation

Written by Ahwazna website

Ahmad Mola, the Chairman of Political Bureau of the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz, has called on the United Nations to take swift actions against the continued Iranian regime’s crimes in Al-Ahwaz.

At a time when the Ahwazi Arab people continue their decade’s long struggle to regain their homeland’s independence from Persian occupation, the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz organized a demonstration in front of the UN headquarters in the Austrian capital Vienna on 20 February, 2015.

The demonstration, expressed the support and solidarity of the Ahwazi Arab community, Arab and non-Persian groups in Europe with the Ahwazi people rebelling against the lingering inhuman policies of Iran’s occupation in Al-Ahwaz.

The Arab Struggle Movement in a letter submitted to the United Nations called on for the urgent intervention to immediately to stop the Iranian regime’s arbitrary arrests and executions of Ahwazis. The Movement also appealed to United Nations Environment and Health organizations to visit Al-Ahwaz to uncover and document the Iran regime’s occupation practices that have polluted and destroyed the environment leading to the large-scale spread of dangerous diseases in all parts of Al-Ahwaz.

The delegation of the Arab Struggle Movement met with a number of United Nations officials in Vienna after the demonstration. The delegation stressed the need for United Nations intervention and implementation of safeguards as provided for in international treaties and conventions to protect oppressed peoples under military occupation, in particular, the Arab people of Ahwaz.

While the demonstration showed solidarity with the decades-long suffering of the people of Ahwaz, Ahmad Mola, the Chairman of Political Bureau of the Arab Struggle Movement stated that the suffering becoming worse by the day due to Iranian occupation and violations of human rights in Ahwaz.

Such policies are inconsistent with and in violation of international law and covenants, hence the urgent appeal to the United Nations to intervene to prevent the State of Iran’s colonization and human rights violations against Ahwazi people living under occupation.

Ahmad Mola added, “the crimes of the Iranian occupation are approaching a very dangerous turning point in Al-Ahwaz and we hope that the United Nations perform its humanitarian and its legal duty to upholding the right of the Ahwazi Arab people in their freedom and independence from the Iran’s occupation and the backing and support of the struggle of our people in all its forms”.

“When you read about the Ahwazi people sufferings you will understand the occupying Iran regime’s policies are aimed at completely erasing the people of Ahwaz, their history, culture and future by constructing settlements which target Ahwaz and its population”.

“This is meant to undermine Arab identity in the crucible of Persian culture. The spread of drug addiction and crime in Ahwaz is also largely attributable to the policies of the Iran regime. This enemy of democracy spreads ignorance and backwardness and tries to repress the entire Al-Ahwaz region by supporting drug dealers and yet another attempt to ruin Ahwazi society”, said.

Ahmad Mola, the Chairman of Political Bureau of the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz, has called on the United Nations to take swift actions against the continued Iranian regime’s crimes in Al-Ahwaz.

“The plight of Ahwazi people is very long term, and their right to independence and safety has worsened during successive Iranian regimes that denied the fundamental right of having access to education in mother language and punishing everyone for acquiring Arabic books attempting to make Ahwazis to be lost generation without identity and history melting in Persian culture . However, despite all this, the Persian state’ racist policies failed due to the strong national will of our people in rejecting occupation adhering to their Arab identity and culture.

Iran’s Sharia law and legal system make it one of the worst, repressive, totalitarian regimes in the world. It is hard to find a system which is more politically manipulative, and its theocratic rule misleads its people and the world.

It is opportunistic, self-serving and sectarian, discriminating particularly by region and socially excluding many. Its aim is for the country to be entirely dominated by glorifying Safavid history and culture, whilst destroying other neighboring history and culture.

The Iran regime’s expansionist policy, for example in the case of UAE islands and neighboring regions such as occupied Al-Ahwaz, is done aggressively and ruthlessly with no regard for international relations or upholding human rights”, said Ahmad Mola.

The demonstration came as mentioned in the earlier statement released by the movement of its media “Ahwazna” to support the people of Ahwazis’s struggling against the State of Iran’s occupation policies and to condemn the Iranian occupier criminal policies committed against the land and the people, including drying rivers, which cause environmental pollution in Ahwaz, where the region called “the capital of global pollution.”

The protesters carried Arabic and English signs demanding the Iran regime stop the ethnic cleansing policies against the Ahwazi Arab people, and that the world condemn the land confiscation policies taking place 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 showing solidarity with the Ahwazi Arab people, in addition to a number of Arab brothers who are supporters of the cause of Ahwaz hailing from European and Arab countries The friends and comrades of the Kurdish, Baluch and Turkmen communities, whose people also suffer under the enslavement and occupation of the Persian state, made an unforgettable presence at the demonstration, embodying the spirit of true friendship and 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 both Arabic and English, condemning the policies of forced displacement and changing demographics which are being carried out by the Persian occupation.

They strongly denounced and condemned Iran’s changing the course of the Karoon River, and diverting its water away from the Ahwazis to central Persian regions.

The Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz, who had called for this demonstration, stated that despite grave human rights violations perpetrated against Ahwazi people, the plight of this occupied nation remained invisible to the world at large.

The ultimate aim of the demonstration was to bring the suffering of the Ahwazi people to the attention of the public and to demand that the international organizations place pressure on the Iranian regime to stop the ethnic cleansing practices, the arbitrary arrests and executions of the Ahwazi Arab people, and to recognize and uphold the political prisoner status of the political and human rights activists.

For years, Iran has been oppressing the Ahwazi Arab people through intimidation, mass arrests, torture, and mass execution of Ahwazi civilians.

The exploitation of the wealth and natural resources of Ahwaz, In particular, the natural gas and oil are being extracted without discernible economic benefit for the Ahwazi Arab people.

The Persian state’s policies have crippled the majority of the Ahwazi Arab population, with an estimated 80 percent of Ahwazi households living below the poverty line, while they are living on the sea of oil and gas, and mineral resources that have been exploited and stolen since 1925.

Press and media censorship continues to be a serious obstacle for Ahwazi activists speaking out against the non-stop abuses being committed against the Ahwazi people. This censorship allows the Iranian regime to discriminate perpetually against the Ahwazi Arab people.

Ahmad Mola, addressing the Arab and regional countries reminded that the Iranian state is rapidly controlling and destabilizing the whole region. The Ahwazi Arab parties, with the right military training and arms, would be ready to inflict strong blows to the Iran regime, but support and shelter from Arab and regional countries were imperative.

The threat of ongoing Persian settlement policies in Al-Ahwaz

Posted: 02/27/2015 by editormary in Ahwaz, Human Rights, Iran, Middle East Issues, People's Movements / Struggles, Resistance, Somoud: Arab Voices of Resistance

WRITTEN BY Ahwazna website

Throughout human history, authoritarian regimes have exercised numerous policies to influence and pressure peoples whose homelands are under the grip of domination and occupation. Occupation policies include construction of settlements and relocation of settlers to change demographics to favor their colonial aspirations. This is one of many ways used gradually to control the indigenous population living under colonial occupation.

History is full of examples illustrating the process of colonialism and occupation, but none more clearly than the example of the brutal Israeli colonization and occupation of Palestine. Through the establishment of extensive illegal settlements and introduction of hundreds of thousands of Zionist settlers the occupation has usurped the historical homeland of the Palestinian people.

Since the outset of Iran’s military occupation of Emirate of Al-Ahwaz, the occupying central governments have one after another, exposed the Ahwazi people to heinous crimes of violence, brutality, and everyday indignities. Through the colonial acquisition of lands throughout Al-Ahwaz, the goal was to cleanse the area of the indigenous Ahwazis.

The looting and plundering of Ahwazi lands were carried out through forcible displacement of Ahwazi citizens and the appropriation of their land by force of arms as well as using money to entice the most impoverished Ahwazis to sell their land. The facade of legitimacy and legality masked the occupier’s dishonest practices, and the plundered Ahwazi lands were handed over to Persian settlers.

After years of confiscating and appropriating vast amounts of territory, the Iranian colonizers and segregationist governments have built hundreds settlements, bringing in tens of thousands of Persian settlers into areas where the number of settlers was scarce or where there were fears of changing demographics in Persian settlers ‘favor, which would harm the future of the Al- Ahwaz in the case of right to self-determination.

The Ahwaz Arab people continue to resist the settlers by whatever means available to them, but the resistance has not been exhaustive. For the most part, it only involved those who suffered at the hands of the settlers. There is substantial documented evidence recorded by the Ahwazi human rights activists, showing the involvement of many Persian settlers in committing the most barbaric and inhuman crimes against the Ahwazi Arab citizens.

It is important to remind that the majority of settlers are also equipped with weapons and unlimited support by the Persian occupation authorities. Unfortunately there is a level of complacency of in segments of the Ahwazi people, partly due to ignorance, or fear of government repressive responses and, in some cases, a lack of interest in what is happening. However, these problems and areas of what may be perceived as weakness have never deterred Ahwazi citizens to resist the occupiers.

The building of settlements for housing non-Arab settlers did not suffice the Persian occupation authorities this means that in addition to the importation of Persian settlers to Al-Ahwaz, Persian occupying forces have extended their underhanded criminal activities by building thousands of housing units in Arab areas and populating them with Persian settlers which serves the purposes of Persian occupation in several ways.

They have brazenly gone too far in conducting their crimes over which enhancing their occupation malicious projects through the construction of thousands of housing units in the hearts of Arab areas and bringing settlers recruiting them for a number of things.

Firstly: The Persian settlers act as the eyes and ears of the occupation forces and provide the Persian occupation with anti-activists agents placed among the Arab population, who are able to immediately inform Persian intelligence and security forces of any intended anti-occupation activities. This provides Persian forces with preemptive capabilities to subdue and eliminate any resistance in the fastest manner possible.

Secondly: The Persian settler’s physical proximity to Arab Ahwazis, aims to destroy Arab culture by excluding it from everyday activities and through corrupting and replacing Arab culture with the Persian state-supported culture.

In work, education, intermarriage, every aspect of socio-economic activities imposed on the Arab Ahwazi culture puts it in a weak, threatened position. It is generally excluded and frowned down upon while Persian is endorsed and supported by the state. Conflicts arising from forcing Persian culture upon Ahwazi Arabs continues to have adverse and detrimental affects upon all aspects of Ahwazi life.

Thirdly: Persian settlements aim to monopolize trade in Persian settler hands through buying up all shops and outlets. This has resulted in grave economic changes which will be very difficult to reverse in the future. Through Persian news agencies and Persian government official communiques inform of proposed new settlements and housing units being completed and delivered to Persian settlers. In addition, one hears of the large numbers of companies, government agencies, banks and cooperatives supportive of Persian settlement activities.

It is clear that Persian occupation and settlement of Ahwaz, coupled with the criminal destruction of Arab society and culture in Ahwaz, is high on the agenda of the Iranian state and is ongoing with strong impetus.

Many researchers and observers hold that resisting Persian settlement activities should be among the foremost of priorities for the indigenous Ahwazi population. Unless the Ahwazis resist Persian colonial settlement at this time, it will be impossible to reverse the dangerous and ongoing demographic changes in the area.

Therefore, taking all of the above into consideration, all Ahwazi citizens, without exception, are obliged to engage in resisting all forms of Persian settlement undertaken by Persian authorities without differentiation between any particular form of settlement, or Persian Military personnel, agriculturalists or pastoralists, or government employees settled in Arab Ahwaz. All are collaborators in the crime of occupation and theft of Ahwazi Arab land, indigenous resources and job opportunities.

The resistance against occupation and settlers needs no debate, neither is it subject to debate; rather it is a national duty dictated by religion law and conscience.

Among the most important manners to resist settlement and settlers are:

Boycotting settlers socially and severing all contact with them.
Economically boycotting settlers and their businesses.
Military confrontations with settlers.

At this decisive stage it has become imperative for all members of the National Ahwazi Resistance to join ranks in order to deliver the most powerful blow possible to Persian occupation, which includes Persian settlers, who have ever since their arrival, acted and conspired against the Arab Ahwazi people.

Any wavering at this stage in resisting Persian settlers will end all future hopes for the Arab citizens of Al-Ahwaz. History shows that attempts towards the establishment of peaceful co-existence and good neighborly conduct have proven fruitless in deterring Persian settlers from aiding and collaborating with the Persian occupation of Ahwaz, the theft of our land and national resources, and the destruction of the culture of Arab Ahwaz.

Protests sweep through Ahwazi cities, and Iranian Occupation forces repress Ahwazi demonstrators

Posted: 02/16/2015 by editormary in Ahwaz, Human Rights, Iran, Middle East, Middle East Issues, People's Movements / Struggles, Somoud: Arab Voices of Resistance

Written by Rahim Hamid

Thousands of Ahwazi people have gathered once again on 14^th, 15th and 16^th of February in front of Ahwaz Governorate office in Ahwaz’s capital demanding swift actions to cope with the dust storm that is currently crippling the lives of the Ahwazi people.

Ahwazi protesters, donning face masks, angrily shouted critical slogans against the lack of appropriate actions than those expected to be taken by local authorities to alleviate the suffering of the Ahwazi people as a result of the persistence of the dust storms.

The Iranian occupation security forces, by taking tight precautionary measures, scattered and arrested key protesters in yesterday’s demonstration.

The occupying security forces, in efforts to quell the public anger of Ahwazi Arab protesters, have tactically and brutally beaten up and handcuffed a group of Arab protesters who played important roles in organizing the peaceful protest.

The aggressive operations of police security forces in dealing with the protest resulted in the arrest of dozens of key activists and organizers who were kicked and punched savagely and taken to an unknown place by the occupying forces. The security forces the put up massive barricades to prevent protesters from advancing to other locations.

The mass arrests were carried out immediately, just thirty minutes from the start of the protest while protesters raised banners and began chanting slogans condemning the criminal policies of the occupation government. The occupying authorities, to clamp down on the protests, deployed significant anti-riot squad forces to battle the Ahwazi Arab activists who called people to take part in this protest through social Media.

Since early February, the Ahwazi people’s lives have been gravely disrupted due to the lingering intensive dust storms causing breathing disorders. Asthmatic attacks have become very problematic and prevalent among the people.

The protesters, by holding up numerous placards, placed the entire responsibility of the environmental disaster in Al-Ahwaz on the occupying Iranian central government’s policies in constructing excessive dams on Ahwazi Rivers diverting the course of the water of the rivers to the central plateau of Iran.

According to reports and studies led by Ahwazi medical research centers, Al-Ahwaz has become one of the most dangerous regions in terms of air and water pollution. As the annual review of the medical centers indicates, annually more than 22,000 Ahwazi citizens were admitted to hospitals and clinics due to diseases linked to inhaling polluted air or drinking contaminated water.

Through the protest which included adults and children, people expressed their outrage at the negligence and the aggressive policies of occupying Persian authorities as they raised banners that read “we have right to breathe clean air”, “you have stolen Oil, Gas, and water and left the dust for us”.

The World Health Organization since 2011 has repeatedly rated Al-Ahwaz as the world’s most polluted region. Not surprisingly, cancer and respiratory illnesses are on the rise among desperate poor Ahwazi Arab people. Annually, nearly 2000 people in the Al-Ahwaz area are diagnosed with cancer. A number is likely to increase by 90% by 2020, according to cancer research in Ahwazi medical centers. The WHO says Ahwaz has the highest measured level of airborne particles small enough to cause serious health problems for humans.

Despite the severe degradation of Ahwaz’s climate, the Iranian government has done nothing to effectively counter the spreading desertification that is encroaching on the most Ahwazi fertile agricultural lands, transforming them into arid and barren lands as a consequence of lack of water where the water of Ahwazi Rivers due to the diversion into Persian regions.

Several of participants in the rally expressed their resentment of what they described as shameful disregard and deliberate neglect by the Occupation state of Iran toward the lives of Ahwazi citizens as the occupying authorities only visit Ahwaz without providing any tangible solutions to combat the environmental and health disasters that are ravaging the lives of millions of Ahwazi citizens.

Ahwazi officials continuously stated that the level of dust particles in the Ahwazi atmosphere has seen no signs of improvement and exceeds the acceptable level by 66 times.

The Ahwazi protesters placed the responsibility for the devastating consequences of air pollution that pummel embattled Ahwazi citizens on the Iranian occupying government and blamed the Occupation’s pernicious policies at all levels in Al-Ahwaz.

The protesters, by chanting fiery slogans have slammed the government authorities for being irresponsible, indifferent as nothing can justify the inactions of the authorities. The protesters reiterated to continue their protest until the authorities take the necessary and essential procedures to tackle this adverse problem is crippling the lives of Ahwazis as the dense dust storm has reduced the visibility to less than 150 meters during the day.

The protests continued and escalated in recent days as residents gathered several times in front of the governorate in the Ahwaz capital as an expression of objection and discontentment regarding their neglected fundamental rights.

The residents have shown their anger and intolerance of the continued racial oppression and the systematic discrimination that has been practiced against them for decades at the hands of occupying officials and demanded comprehensive and rapid solutions to address the catastrophe of the dust storms have been sweeping through the entire Ahwazi cities for two weeks.

No report has been released on the number of Ahwazis who were admitted to hospitals or clinics after being affected by the dust storm. However, many reports with pictures by Ahwazi activists have been circulated via social Medias showing the massive numbers of Ahwazi Arab people who have been hospitalized in the medical centers in several Ahwazis cities due to the dust storm.

It is crucial to mention that the United Nations Environmental program (UNEP) said the dust storm in Al-Ahwaz is mainly originating from the dried wetland of Hur-Al-Azim in the west of Ahwaz. UNEP has already warned Iran about the catastrophic consequences of the dryness of the Hur-Al-Azim wetland.

During the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988) a large part of Al-Azim wetland was destroyed and the remaining part of it was devastated completely with prospecting and drilling of the Azadegan oilfield project, as well as the construction of the Karkheh Dam, which brought about the desertification of the wetland which was regarded as the only economic source of the local Ahwazi people, forcing the majority of them to migrate to surrounding cities.

The area of Al-Azim in Al-Ahwaz measures about 3,500 square kilometers but it has been totally dried out by the Iranian oil companies.

In recent years, dust storms have jeopardized the Ahwazi people’s health as the level of dust particles ultimately had reached 2,335 micrograms per cubic meter in the February of 2015. The dust storm phenomenon in Al-Ahwaz led to numerous respiratory problems, asthmatic attacks, and even surge in various cancerous and chronic diseases.

The plundering policies of Iranian occupiers led to the dryness Al-Azim and Howeyzeh wetlands, the most extensive wetlands in Middle East. The destruction of the wetlands has driven massive population of inhabitants to abandon their lands and migrate to cities. All of these factors combined have caused the majority of them to face homelessness and destitution as they are living in ghettos under the worst economic pressures.

Additional information
Ahwaz is occupied Arab land that is located in the South- West and South of Iran. The name of Al-Ahwaz has changed to Khuzestan, Bushehr and Hormozgan in 1935 after invading the Emirate of Al-Ahwaz in 1925. The Iranian regimes of Pahlavi and Islamic republic deployed different ways to suppress Ahwazi voices.

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

WRITTEN BY Rahim Hamid From the AlAhwazi Organization of Human Rights
Thousands of Ahwazis on the 10^th 11^th and 12^th 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 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.

As 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.

The 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

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

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.

The 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.

As 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.

Vanessa e Greta, thank you: a message from a member of the SNC

Posted: 01/23/2015 by editormary in Europe, Grassroots Activism, Human Rights, Middle East, Opinions and Letters, Refugees, Somoud: Arab Voices of Resistance, Syria, War
Tags: Greta Ramelli, Vanessa Marzullo

Thank you, from Nour, an artist in Syria.

Dearest daughters, dear Vanessa and Greta,

Welcome home. We are very happy to know you are safe within the loving embrace of your families. In these five months we have never stopped praying for you.

I want to just write a few lines to thank you for your sacrifice and your commitment, thank you for having made the cause of the long-suffering Syrian people your own and for having taken so fully to heart the suffering of the children, women, youth and the elderly who are dying in Syria. You are a noble example of what volunteering is, the pride and joy of Italy, where every day thousands of persons are dedicated to helping those in need. The Syrian people thank both of you and all the Italians who have never stopped sending their aid and who have welcomed and comforted refugees in transit on Italian soil.

You have been mothers to the little orphans and sisters to the many Syrian women who are paying with their lives without any reason for it. You have waved the flag of Free Syria, honouring the sacrifice of the 270 thousand Syrian victims who have died in the name of dignity and freedom.

As a father, I am so proud of your altruism and your generosity: so young, and yet at the same time, so sensitive to the pain of the millions of helpless civilians who have been undergoing a genocide for almost four years. My dear daughters, five months spent so far away from your loved ones, five difficult months of pain and suffering: you have paid so dearly for your altruistic instinct for which the entire Syrian population, 21 million persons, are indebted to you.

Please don’t apologise, on the contrary: the world of free men and women is on your side and is with you, and is very sorry for all that has happened to you and what you have had to undergo.

Welcome back, and may you receive the blessings that the Lord will grant you for your generosity and sensitivity.

Dr. Dachan Mohamed Nour

Syrian National Council

Greta and Vanessa, courage against indifference

Posted: 01/23/2015 by editormary in Counter-terrorism, No thanks!, Europe, Grassroots Activism, Human Rights, Internet and Communication, Middle East, People's Movements / Struggles, Refugees, Resistance, Somoud: Arab Voices of Resistance, Syria, War
Tags: Greta Ramelli, Vanessa Marzullo

WRITTEN BY ASMAE SIRIA DACHAN, translated by Mary Rizzo

The emotion was immense when, Friday, 16 January, 2015, the Italian news agency Ansa finally released the title:”Palazzo Chigi (Office of the Prime Minister, translator’s note) confirmed, Greta and Vanessa are free.” It’s over, thank God; the nightmare that has lasted five months is over. An interminable time in which, respecting a news blackout and considering the need of discretion, I preferred not to write anything, entrusting my feelings and my thoughts to prayer.

The day the news was released of their kidnapping I was at home, having returned just a few days before from a poignant trip to Syria; Ramadan had just begun. Hearing the names of Vanessa Marzullo and Greta Ramelli on the TV and that word, “abducted” was terrible. The beginning of a nightmare for all who love and know them. But now they are back home, in the close and reassuring embrace of their families.

On the news many times was broadcast a video in which Vanessa and I are together: an interview in Bologna in November 2012, on the occasion of the Global March for the Children of Syria’, an initiative of solidarity and denouncement in which many had taken part, from every part of Italy. Syrians, Italians, volunteers, students, journalists, families, charities: a colourful procession bring to Italy the voice of Syrian civilians. Vanessa was one of the organisers of the march, whose local slogan was ‘Follow Your Heart’ and I made the interviews with the participants, while Paolo Crobu oversaw shooting and editing. Initiative ignored by the mainstream media, with interviews that were only broadcast on the YouTube channel; the aim was to raise awareness about what was and is still happening in Syria, where from 2011 to today there are at least 270 thousand deaths, including more than 20 thousand children.

Many had written and phoned to tell me that they had seen the video on TV. It had been there on the net almost unnoticed and, in the light of the abduction, was instead disseminated. I’ve seen it countless times.

Vanessa speaks quietly but with determination, she speaks of the Syrian drama, the dream of freedom for a people with whom she, a young student of Lombardy, has been in contact with and to whom she is attached. Only twenty years old, at his age many of her peers are busy only with their studies and organising their amusement, but she hasn’t thought only of this. Ever since I met her, I’ve noted that she was writing every night of Syria, denouncing kidnappings, rapes, abuses suffered by civilians. She translates the stories and dramatic testimony that is disclosed in the network by young Syrian activists. ‘Clandestine Communicators’, ‘opponents’, ‘rebels’, ie, people who have found the courage to challenge the censorship imposed by the Assad regime, giving voice to the genocide of which the world seems not to have taken notice. Because the dictatorship leads to this: to move like ghosts, to become ‘outlaws’ for disobeying the impositions of the tyrant. In Syria one shuts up and obeys the rules, or else you are finished, and this the world, at least the countries that in the past have suffered such violence, know, or at least should know.

In Syria able to move freely is the regime and their supporters; anyone who is opposed to it is illegal. Anyone who has picked up the flag with the three stars, the historic Syrian flag hoisted after the end of French colonialism in 1946 (and not the red, white and black with the two stars imposed by the regime) is branded for life. Anyone who has taken part in marches, demonstrations, initiatives, is branded. Not only in Syria. Even among Syrians abroad. Everyone knows that having declared themself to be against the regime, the regime that after fifty years of power and four years of bloodshed still holds Syria in its fist, means to have finally signed their forced exile from the homeland. The Syrians who have fled in boats of death, which in the absence of an international humanitarian corridor, are entrusted to human traffickers, they know they will not be able to return home. The same for those who are in the condition of refugees. This is something Vanessa and Greta knew and they did not look the other way. They participated, along with many other young people and volunteer associations in operations of hosting the Syrians in transit at the station in Milan to reach northern Europe.

They have taken Syria to heart. They have embraced the pain of a humanity forgotten. With selflessness and courage. Exposing themselves personally. Risking, without any fear. You can criticise their imprudence, but demonise them, no.

Now they are paying for their courage. On the web the media lynching is nothing short of disgraceful. I have never seen so much fury even against mob bosses or serial rapists. Certain political areas exploit their dramatic story for their campaign. We are witnessing a sexist drift, a blind hatred and theatre of hypocrisy that dance embraced tightly to ignorance. Because most of the people, even in good faith, ignore what is happening in Syria and how we have come to this state of total chaos.

Greta and Vanessa are becoming the scapegoat for many crisis situations. Paying for being young, for being women, for having taken the side of a people struggling against a tyrant, for putting the lives of others before their own. Turning them into what they are not is ignoble.

Has the sacrifice of these two young girls perhaps rekindled the spotlight on the Syrian drama? Is anyone wondering what is going on over there? Today it seems that the problem in Syria is only Isis, circulating many distorted concepts, the truth is systematically raped and the dramatic situation is ignored. The Syrian situation is the most serious humanitarian emergency in the new century. Please read the reports of the Syrian Network for Human Rights, UNICEF, the UN and humanitarian organisations that are monitoring the situation. It is reflected by the numbers of this massacre: 270 thousand deaths, including 20 thousand children, 9 million IDPs, over 3.7 million refugees, 1 million wounded and more than 250 thousand missing. Taking Syria to heart means not being indifferent to all this.

As a Syrian I feel strong embarrassment towards Greta and Vanessa for what they have suffered in Syria. I am equally embarrassed for all the hatred that is flowing against them. Both situations are ignoble.

A dutiful thanks goes to those who worked towards bringing them home safe and sound.

Greta and Vanessa are courage and recklessness, selflessness and sacrifice. We have waited anxiously. Today they are here. Welcome Back Home.

Original: https://diariodisiria.wordpress.com/2015/01/20/greta-e-vanessa-il-coraggio-contro-lindifferenza/

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

Prepared 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.

The 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

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”.

The 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.

The 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.

Charlie Hebdo: the first victim of fanaticism is Islam itself

Posted: 01/08/2015 by editormary in Counter-terrorism, No thanks!, Europe, Human Rights, Internet and Communication, Politics, Religion, Somoud: Arab Voices of Resistance, Syria

WRITTEN BY SHADY HAMADI, translated by Mary Rizzo

I am a Muslim and I condemn the massacre at the headquarters of Charlie Hebdo and I condemn Islamic fanaticism. But for some, and in a particular way I am thinking of certain politicians who carry out electoral campaigns inciting hatred towards immigrants and Islam, the condemnations by the religious leaders of the Islamic world are not going to be enough. Even if every single Muslim in the world speaks out to condemn what happened, this, unfortunately, will still not be enough because all that is being done is pointing the finger at a sole culprit, against the Islamic religion.

Even now, they will tell you that Islam, that is, more than two billion people, has declared war on you, on your values and on your Western belonging.

A certain kind of politics will seek consensus exploiting the massacre of Paris. Our politicians will tell you that “we are already at war against Islam and that we have to defend ourselves,” and the only real defence against the Islamic tide, is to vote for precisely those parties that have made xenophobia their raison d’etre. They will launch campaigns against the construction of places of worship for Muslims, declaring that “the mosques are the breeding ground for new terrorists” and, in so doing, they deny a right … just like those fanatics who they claim they want to fight.

You can choose. You can believe those who say that a war with Islam is inevitable. According to them, this religion embodies the violence and brutality that is then transmitted from one believer to another, through the study of the doctrine and prayer. For them, there aren’t good Muslims but there are only terrorists. They paint them all with the same brush, providing the right motivation that serves the terrorists to proselytize among the multitude of the desperate.

Another possibility, more sensible and correct, is to try to reason and understand that for the actions of two terrorists, two billion people and a religion cannot be responsible. We must understand that fanaticism in the Islamic world has many reasons, most of them related to social and historical causes, that affect societies today.

A century where colonialism and dictatorships, foraged from the West, have produced enormous damage to the Arabic social fabric. School systems built around an education formed on totalitarian regimes that have produced widespread ignorance; the lack of economic opportunities; the syndrome of Arabic nihilism, well described by the late Samir Kassir; the total lack of hope for the future and the tragedies that came about as of September 11 were some of the reasons that have produced contemporary religious radicalism. The first victim of this fanaticism is Islam itself. Sunni Muslims are the most persecuted by fundamentalists, as evidenced by the massacres in Syria: a whole population victim of the totalitarianism of Assad and the ISIS barbarians. And it is always Islam, the perception we have of this religion, to suffer the most damage because of the acts of those insane minds.

Today, in fact, Islam has become synonymous with terrorism in the West, so as to be deprived of any spiritual significance. It is marred by those who continue to associate it, without knowing anything about it in the least, as an enemy to fight. Clichés, simplifications and stereotypes about Islam are the collateral damage of a lack of knowledge that is far too widespread.

Now more than ever, we need constructive encounters, ones that are the sign of Mediterranean conviviality and an inter-religious discourse. Only with mutual recognition can we continue in our common history, managing to build a society for all of us. The fight for freedom is the struggle of each one of us, regardless of our faith.

If we abandon ourselves to the entrepreneurs of fear and ignorance, all will be lost.

Original: http://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2015/01/08/charlie-hebdo-prima-vittima-fanatismo-lislam/1322511/

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

WRITTEN 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.

This 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.

The 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.

Approximately 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.

Do wars end?!

Posted: 12/29/2014 by editormary in "Israel", Children's Corner, Human Rights, Middle East Issues, Palestine, Refugees, Somoud: Arab Voices of Resistance, War

WRITTEN BY FIDA SHURRAB, PHOTOGRAPHS BY MOHAMMED HASSAN SHURRAB

Wars are always classified within historical eras with a start and end dates. However, do wars really have an end? Do wars end when bombings and strikes stop? Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, have witnessed three wars within six years, each war ended leaving a mass of destruction at all levels, and none of them has really ended. When the people in the Gaza Strip speak of the memories they have of the wars, all of a sudden, memories turn to be very alive scenes, as if the wars have taken a place in their hearts and souls.

Do we, in Gaza, overcome the trauma? Psychologists have to expand their theories in the post traumatic disorder interventions when it comes to the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Living and surviving three wars is not an easy life story. Damages have occurred in our life system. In what way in the whole world can people get used to the sounds of bombs, because people in Gaza did? This needs to be brought to the attention of the whole world, the people in Gaza Strip lost their lives during the past three wars, they are alive but without souls, their humanity has been easily raped by the silence of the international world watching genocide taking place.

We gained nothing from wars! An old woman once said, as a survivor of three wars: “In the 2008 war, I lost my eyes, and in the 2014 war, I lost my home. Loss is all I’ve gained”. In wars, we harvest loss and pain. A child, 4 years old, keeps repeating: “Every time I go to sleep, I hear loud explosions, and I cover my face with a blanket to hide from the rockets. I am afraid of sleeping”. The war visits the people every night in their dreams. People, during the war, run under heavy shelling looking for a safe place, leaving their houses, people were displaced in the schools and the streets. Many of them lost their children when they were running. A young man, from Al Shejeaya, was holding his son in his hands while running looking for a shelter, when shrapnel hit his child, cutting him into pieces. This man has nothing to speak about except the moment of his biggest loss, he says: “Why live?! I lost my pregnant wife, and I could not protect my child, he died in my hands. All of my life was snatched away in a matter of seconds”.

We need to live without remembering the scenes of the massacres, we want to stop expecting wars at every second, is that a too much for a human being?

Having a tour of the massively destroyed neighborhoods in the Gaza Strip is not easy. The rubbles of thousands of houses are not only a pile of stones, those rubbles are huge amounts of stories, memories, dreams and hopes which all have been brutally scattered.

Meeting a mother who has lost a child in the war is like meeting a mountain dipped with anguish. All she can talk about is her child whom she lost, she does not speak of his/her death but rather of his/her life, hobbies, things they hated and things they loved, as if she denies the fact that she lost him/her forever; and telling her the truth is like committing a crime. Forgetting is impossible, but death has become a habit. Losing the souls of the beloved ones can take the lives of the survivors with them in the graves, this leads us to the fact that we are also buried in life.

The war has done a hellish job in the Gaza Strip, the war did not end, people are still suffering its severe consequences, the only different thing is that the explosions have stopped; otherwise, the stories of pain and loss continue to be our antagonists in the Gaza Strip.

We Shall Not Forgive nor Forget!!!!

According to the UN reports:

2,127 Palestinian citizens were killed during the 51 days of war. The number of deaths included 544 children and 302 women.
The number of wounded is 10,744, including 3,258 children and 2,089 women. About 3,000 wounded are expected to have lifelong disabilities.
About the Israeli attacks, the Israeli occupation carried out 60,664 attacks, including 8,210 airstrikes, 36,718 tank and artillery shells and 15,736 naval strikes.
The number of houses targeted by the occupation is 16,002, including 2,358 completely destroyed and 13,644 partially destroyed.

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