Mick Hartley

An activist from Al-Ahwaz, the oil-rich province in the south-west of Iran, describes the ethnic cleansing of the Arabs being carried out by the government:

“With regard to our Arab region of Al-Ahwaz, the [Iranian] government’s policy is to expropriate lands, to deport the indigenous Arab inhabitants to other regions, and to replace them with people from the Persian provinces of central Iran.” […]

“The first city of Persian settlers is called Shirinshah. You can find it on the map, or you can open Google Earth and see this Persian city in the heart of the Arab region. Lands in this region were expropriated under the pretext of the sugar cane project and were used to build the city of Shirinshah.

“The first settlement in the time of the Shah was called New Yazd, but after the revolution, the Iranians who were brought there fled from New Yazd. When the Iranian regime believes that the Arab or international situation allows it to get away with these things, it intensifies its actions. After the Arab defeat by Israel in 1967, they carried out the first settlement plan of New Yazd. They brought people from Yazd, and settled them in Al-Ahwaz. They did this when they saw that the condition of the Arabs deteriorated, even though the Arabs completely ignore our cause.

“Now that Iraq is no longer competing with Iran, and now that Iran has gained a monopoly over the strategic situation in the region, they have stepped up the expropriation of lands in Al-Ahwaz. The Iranian regime – despite all its claims to support the Arab causes and so on… Whenever it identifies some weakness in the [Arab] nation, it escalates its ethnic cleansing policies in Al-Ahwaz. […

“The Al-Ahwaz issue highlights the contradictions of the Iranian government. The Iranian government professes to call for unity, to avoid sectarianism, and to defend the Shiites. It tries to use the Shiite bargaining chip in some Arab countries in order to promote its plans and in order to extract some concessions from the U.S. or from some of the other Western powers. If Iran really defends the Shiites, why does it oppress the [Arab] Shiites of Al-Ahwaz? The majority [of the Arabs] there are Shiite. If it really defends the [Arab] peoples in Lebanon and Palestine, why does it oppress its own Arab people? This is the greatest contradiction in the policy of the Iranian government.

“This issue highlights the contradictions of the Iranian government on all levels – on the sectarian level, as well as the Islamic level. The Iranian government is, in fact, coming to a dead-end, not only in terms of its foreign policy, but domestically as well. […]

“Iran rules Al-Ahwaz by virtue of the status quo alone. It enjoys no historical, political, or even popular legitimacy in Al-Ahwaz.”