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Iran's minorities
June 01, 2006
The Economist
Middle East & Africa
link to original article
The Islamic Republic's culture minister is under the cosh for reacting
tardily to last month's publication of a cartoon, showing a cockroach
speaking Azeri Turkish, which sparked rioting across Iran's Azeri-dominated
north-west.
Members of the Majlis, Iran's parliament, have threatened to impeach Mustafa
Pourmohammadi, the interior minister, for failing to stem lawlessness in the
part-Baluch south-east. Cast an eye over western Iran's troubled Kurdish and
Arab regions and you may concur with Rahim Shahbazi, an Azeri nationalist
based in America, who calls ethnic strife a “nuclear bomb that will blow
away the Iranian regime”.
Several days of protests by Iranian Azeris peaked on May 25th, when four
demonstrators were killed in the part-Azeri town of Naghadeh. Many Azeris,
the biggest minority in a country dominated by ethnic Persians, had not been
placated by the banning of the government-owned newspaper in which the
offending cartoon appeared, nor by the arrest of the cartoonist and an
editor. The killings were only fleetingly acknowledged by the authorities.
An official account was hastily withdrawn from the newswire where it was
posted.
Iran's Azeris, (perhaps 16m-strong in a population of 70m-plus) are mostly
Shia Muslim and have not, compared to Sunni minorities, done badly out of
the (Shia) Islamic Republic. Though schooling in Azeri is not permitted and
the constitution bans private broadcasting in any language, intermarriage
with Persians is widespread and Azeris are well represented in Iran's
trading and bureaucratic elite. From the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei (himself of Azeri origin) downwards, Iranian officials have blamed
the recent unrest on foreign “enemies”.
At a time when the American government is looking for Iranian opposition
groups to support, many Iranians believe such claims. Some Azeri
nationalists in neighbouring Azerbaijan and others in America used the
internet, radio and television broadcasts to incite protesters during the
unrest. By contrast, neighbouring Turkey, which also casts a protective eye
over its cousins in Iran, kept mum.
Turkey's restraint is partly due to shared interests. Kurdish minorities
straddle the border. Emboldened by the autonomy now enjoyed by Iraq's Kurds,
and dispirited by their own nationalist parties, some Iranian Kurds were
thrilled last year when Abdullah Ocalan, the jailed leader of Turkey's
Kurdish rebel movement, called for a region-wide confederation. Since then,
according to Kurds from Sanandaj, the capital of the Iranian province of
Kurdistan, scores of recruits have crossed into Iraq to join the Party for
Free Life in Kurdistan (PJAK), an Iranian' subsidiary of Mr Ocalan's
Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). Both groups are based in northern Iraq.
Iranian Kurds, especially the Sunni majority, complain that discrimination
hurts their promotion chances in the local bureaucracy. In the words of a
prominent Iranian Kurdish academic, they “loathe” the state's pro-government
Kurdish-language television station. Many Kurds tune in to Roj TV, which
carries PJAK propaganda.
The PJAK's popularity has gone up since a Kurdish criminal suspect died at
the hands of Iran's security forces last summer, causing much rioting. A
Kurdish group says the security forces killed ten demonstrators in a single
incident in February.
The Turks were unbothered by Iran's bombardment of suspected PJAK positions
in Iraq last month. The Iranians have handed over captured PKK fighters to
the Turks, and both countries recently massed troops near the border where
Turkey, Iran and Iraq all meet. No government thinks it can seal these
mountain border areas, a paradise for smugglers. But the Turks and Iranians
aim to intimidate the PKK's Kurdish hosts in Iraq and their American
overlords into reining in Mr Ocalan's cohorts.
From one side to the other
At the opposite end of the country, along Iran's border with Afghanistan and
Pakistan, the security forces are also being stretched—by dozens of bandit
groups and particularly by the savagery of Abdolmalek Rigi, a young Baluch
who kills in cold blood in the name of his vaunted ideals, Sunni Islam and
Baluchi nationalism. Iran has 4m-plus Baluchis.
Last winter, Mr Rigi's Jundullah, or Soldiers of God, kidnapped nine Iranian
soldiers, one of whom they later killed. In March, they held up a convoy and
slaughtered 22 people, including officials in the provincial administration
of Sistan and Baluchistan. Last month, a similar raid, for which Mr Rigi did
not claim responsibility, killed 12 people.
Mr Rigi, who is given publicity by some Arabic TV stations, denies that he
trafficks in any of the Afghan opiates that traverse the region in vast
quantities; his motives, he insists, are political. According to Mr
Pourmohammadi, he flees into Pakistani Baluchistan, where President Pervez
Musharraf is struggling to put down an insurgency of his own, with impunity.
In the case of Mr Rigi's attacks, and a series of bomb blasts over the past
year in the part-Arab province of Khuzestan, which borders southern Iraq,
the Iranians at first blamed the British and Americans—without offering
proof. Moreover, the Iranians' lightning response to such atrocities does
not suggest painstaking detective work. Not all Iranians were convinced, for
instance, by the broadcast confessions of two Arabs later executed for
alleged involvement in the blasts in Khuzestan, home to some 2m Arab
Iranians. Mr Rigi has appeared on foreign channels to rebut Iranian claims
that he has been killed.
Amid daily boasts of captures, deaths and brilliant punitive operations,
Iranian officials never admit the role of chronic unemployment and poverty,
not to mention Iran's institutionalised distrust of minorities, in stoking
the unrest. In Sanandaj, for instance, university graduates may find
themselves choosing between manual labour and a life in the hills with PJAK.
“Is it surprising”, the academic asks, “that some choose the latter?” It
certainly deters would-be investors. Rio Tinto, an Anglo-Australian mining
company, recently said it was withdrawing from a gold-mining project in
Kurdistan.
“In these cases of minority unrest,” observes a seasoned diplomat from a
country bordering Iran, “you see the effects of America's invasion of
Afghanistan and Iraq.” Sandwiched between countries in a state of flux,
whose own minorities sense an opportunity, Iran's border areas are
vulnerable. Crucially, though, the instability has yet to affect Iran's
populous central areas, where Persians are a big majority.
In a fractious discussion among Iranian exiles last winter at the American
Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think-tank in Washington, it was plain
that Iran's mainstream opposition groups are as hostile to minority
irredentism as the Islamic Republic is. For all the unrest around its edges,
Iran's heartland remains strong, centralised, and unsympathetic to uppity
minorities. Iran's nuclear bomb, if it comes, is unlikely to be aimed
inwards.
Source: http://www.economist.com
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