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Iranians prepare for nervous new year
By Gareth Smyth in Tehran
Published: March 20 2006 18:22 | Last updated: March 20 2006 18:22
Iranians on Tuesday celebrate the first day of their New Year with rituals
of regeneration and renewal marking Noruz, the onset of spring.
Families have bought new clothes and
cleaned their houses. And last Tuesday many people jumped seven times over
open outdoor fires to ward off decay and malice.
The seasonal optimism of Noruz coincides this year with fresh hopes for
overcoming Iran’s international problems centred on the country’s referral
to the United Nations Security Council over its nuclear programme.
Many Iranians warmly welcome the announcement from Ali Larijani, the top
security official, that Iran is ready for talks with America over common
interests in neighbouring Iraq. “This is good news, and we wish for a
positive US response,” said a 44-year-old man in north Tehran.
Iran News, the English-language newspaper, hoped negotiations could break
“the taboo of no dialogue” and so help “the two countries...iron out
differences”. Nasser Hadian, assistant politics professor at Tehran
university, said the logic of an agreement “goes beyond Iraq, and can
bring huge benefits for both sides across the region, in Lebanon, the
Persian gulf and central Asia.”
On Sunday, Mosharekat, the reformist party led by Mohammad-Reza Khatami,
brother of the former president, called for Iran to resume “voluntary
suspension of all nuclear fuel cycle work to resolve this crisis and
re-establish confidence”.
But for most Iranians, any sense of historical breakthrough is less urgent
than the preparation of the Noruz table of haft seen, seven items
beginning with the Farsi letter seen – wild rue, apples, garlic, vinegar,
malt grain, greens and sumac.
Noruz has prehistoric roots that go back long before organised religion.
But like many things in Iran, the festival has often been politicised.
Murals at Persepolis, the now ruined ceremonial capital of the Achaemenid
dynasty (550-330 BC), show subject peoples from across the multi-ethnic
Persian empire bringing Noruz gifts for the king.
In the years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, some clerics tried to play
down or abolish a festival seen as pagan. But Noruz has now become widely
accepted as part of the country’s heritage. Many haft seen tables have a
Koran next to painted eggs and a goldfish in a bowl.
Iran’s intellectuals, dismayed by the populism of President Mahmoud
Ahmadi-Nejad, received good news for Noruz with Friday’s release of Akbar
Ganji, a dissident journalist, after six years in jail.
Mr Ganji – who helped expose the role of senior clerics in the killings of
intellectuals in the 1990s and has also directly criticised Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader – promised on release to continue speaking
out.
But growing ethnic unrest may be of greater concern to the authorities in
the new year. The past month has seen further riots in Iran’s Kurdish
areas, where the example of autonomy in neighbouring Iraq has emboldened
illegal Kurdish parties demanding self-rule in Iran.
Last Friday, 22 Iranians, mainly officials, were killed in the restive
eastern province of Sistan-Baluchistan after militants in police uniforms
flagged down their vehicles. A claim of responsibility was made to
al-Arabiyya television by Jundallah, a group that last year released a
video of the al-Qaeda-style beheading of an Iranian soldier.
Both Kurds and Baluchis are Sunni Muslims, a minority in mainly Shia Iran.
But Khuzestan, the Arab and mainly Shia province in south-west Iran, has
seen at least 20 people killed since last June in bombings blamed by the
authorities on Arab separatists. Sectarian strife in Iraq has alarmed
many, as Iran’s ethnic make-up is far more complex than that of its
western neighbour.
In a Noruz statement issued on Monday, former President Mohammad Kha-tami
appealed for unity among Sunni and Shia, Jews and Zoroastrians, and among
the various ethnic groups. He called on all Iranians “in the name of God
and for the sake of freedom, progress and justice...to deal with darkness,
violence and fanaticism.”
Source: Financial Times
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