by Amir Taheri
The regime is also facing ethnic unrest at the other end of the country, among the Baluch in the southeastern province of Sistan and Baluchistan. There, too, large chunks of Iranian territory have become no-go areas, with armed clashes between rebels and the IRGC an almost weekly occurrence. In 2008, Tehran accused Pakistan of encouraging and partly financing the most radical of the armed groups, named Jund-Allah (Army of Allah) and led by Abdul-Malik Riggi, a thirty-year-old former student, apparently in retaliation for the Islamic Republic’s support for Pakistani Baluchi rebels since 1993. In parts of what is called the “Wild East” of the country, government officials and mullahs are forced to travel by helicopter or under heavy armed escort to avoid ambush by rebels. In some areas such as Pishin, Magas, and Jakeguvar, the Khomeinist regime has all but disappeared, leaving behind a no-man’s land close to the borders with Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Like their Iranian siblings in Kurdistan and Khuzestan, the Baluch, though almost unanimous against the Khomeinist regime, are divided into several trends. The most militant consists of radical Sunni fundamentalists close to Salafist groups in the Arab world. Inspired by the Taliban in Afghanistan, these groups are even more reactionary than the Khomeinists. For example, they are so obsessed with the issue of hijab that they have forced everyone, male and female, to wear full-length burqahs in public from the age of six. In the enclave of Pishin, for example, a visitor gets the impression of a land of ghosts covered from head to toe with two holes left for the eyes. Although more than 80 percent of the Baluch are Sunni Muslims, these extremists have not been able to secure a large following. Financed by wealthy Salafi groups in Arab countries in the Persian Gulf, these groups are nevertheless able to buy some support among the poorest Baluch.
The second trend is represented by Jund-Allah and a number of tribal armed groups, fighting to overthrow the Khomeinist regime and replace it with a federal Iranian state in which ethnic minorities enjoy autonomous rights envisaged for them in the 1906 Constitution. They protest against the regime’s efforts to convert the Baluch to Shiism through propaganda, force, and bribery. By 2008, however, none of these groups had succeeded in developing a political platform that could appeal to the broader strata of society, especially in urban areas.
Finally, there is a third trend consisting of outright secessionists such as the Baluch Liberation Front, led by elements from the Lashari (Shahbakhshi) tribe. At least some of these groups are partly financed by drug barons in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Their scheme is to create a Greater Baluchistan composed of all Baluch-majority parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran. Such a state could then become a safe haven for drug barons who now control almost half of all heroin supplies in the world. Linked to the drug barons are organized smuggling gangs that sell billions of dollars of contraband goods in Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia each year. Worse still, large chunks of the vast semi-desert area shared by Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan risk becoming safe havens for terrorists. The Khomeinist regime’s repressive policies and its systematic violation of the basic human rights of the Baluch favor the darkest elements among them.
The fourth ethnic minority moving rapidly towards open rebellion against the regime is the Turkmen, who inhabit a vast arc of land from the Caspian Sea in the west to the northernmost corner of Iran’s border with Afghanistan in the east. Like the Kurds and the Baluch, the Turkmen are mostly Sunni Muslims and distinguished from other Iranians by ethnic background and language. In the 1920s, Turkmen rose in revolt and declared a Soviet Republic with support from Moscow. Reza Khan, the general who became shah in 1925, destroyed their short-lived republic. Over two hundred Turkmen chiefs were hanged and hundreds of families transported far from Turkmen territories. However, from the 1930s until the seizure of power by the mullahs in 1979, the Turkmen did relatively well as their region was transformed into a major agricultural center producing cash crops, including almost 90 percent of Iran’s cotton, much of it destined for export. In 1945, encouraged by Stalin, some Turkmen again rose in rebellion, this time under the red flag, but failed to make much of an impression as the overwhelming majority of Turkmen had no wish to live under Communism. The third revolt came in 1979 with the declaration of an autonomous Turkmen Republic, created by the People’s Fedayeen Guerrilla Organization (PFGO), a Marxist-Maoist outfit dedicated to a Communist revolution. The adventure ended when the IRGC arrived to crush the rebels, most of whom were not Turkmen.
Since 2005, growing repression combined with widespread poverty has once again driven the Turkmen to revolt. The immediate cause of the latest wave of revolts that started in January 2008 is the IRGC’s monopolization of fishing in the caviar-rich Caspian Sea, thus depriving thousands of Turkmen fishermen of their sole source of income. The trigger for the revolt came on January 4, when an IRGC gunboat shot and killed a twenty-year-old Turkmen fisherman in the coastal waters of the Caspian. The authorities claimed that the fisherman, one Hissmaud-din Khadivar, had been part of an illegal fishing expedition whose thirty or so members were later arrested, and that his death was an accident. As news of the incident spread, bands of angry Turkmen, some armed with daggers and sticks, attacked government offices and set vehicles on fire. One group attacked a police station; another tried to lay siege to the local IRGC barracks near the fishing port of Bandar-Turkmen. The riots continued for two days, ending after reinforcements flew in from other cities. Over the two days, more than three hundred people were arrested and taken away to unknown destinations. A spokesman for the Turkmen Human Rights Group said that dozens were injured. How many might have died was unclear, because the Guard took some of the injured with them, ostensibly for hospitalization in other towns. In March 2008 it was established that eleven people, including four children, had died in the clashes. As antigovernment demonstrations rocked a number of other cities, including Gonbad Kavous and Quchan, where Turkmen are a majority, a state of emergency was imposed by the IRGC. The Turkmen anger was so strong and widespread as to oblige the government in Ashgabat, capital of neighboring Turkmenistan, to stop its flow of natural gas to Iran, provoking a diplomatic tussle with Tehran.
Khadivar is not the first Turkmen fisherman to be killed in an incident involving the IRGC’s naval units in the Caspian. Since Tehran banned unauthorized fishing in the inland sea in 1996, dozens of men in search of caviar-rich sturgeon have died in clashes with security forces. Why did Khadivar’s death trigger such anger? Some observers point to President Ahmadinejad’s economic policies, which have produced a 17 percent inflation rate and thrown thousands out of work. Unemployment among the Turkmen is estimated at 40 percent, three times the official national rate. Another grievance is the government’s refusal to allow Turkmen even a toehold in local administration. All top jobs in Golestan and in Turkmen towns in other provinces are held by Shiites from other parts of Iran. The government prefers to employ migrant workers from Afghanistan and Baluchistan to work in the Turkmen area’s vast state-owned cotton fields. And besides making Caspian fishing a state monopoly, Tehran has also imposed central control on water distribution from the River Atrak, reserving the bulk of it for state-owned farms and estates, owned by rich mullahs and Guard commanders, where few Turkmen work. Turkmen farmers, mostly smallholders, are left with little or no water. Turkmen claim that they have the lowest life expectancy in Iran.
They also complain of a massive government campaign to convert them to Shiism. While no permit is issued for building Sunni mosques, the number of Shiite places of prayer and mourning has multiplied in Turkmen towns and villages. Shiite mullahs from Qom conduct periodic conversion “raids” into Turkmen towns and villages, using the promise of jobs and perks as inducements. Turkmen say that they are denied fair access to higher education. Those who manage to apply for university places are often turned away because they fail religious tests based on Shiism; and their inadequate mastery of Persian reduces their chances further.
Turkmen form a majority in Golestan province; they are also pres
ent in north Khorassan (along the border with the former Soviet Republic of Turkmenistan) and the Caspian province of Mazandaran. They say Tehran has gerrymandered them across four provinces to curtail their political influence by denying them the number of seats they might otherwise have won in the Islamic Majlis.
Tehran authorities blame the Turkmen revolt on “counterrevolutionaries,” allegedly supported by the United States. In fact, the revolt highlights the failure of a narrowly based ideological regime to understand the pluralist nature of Iranian society and the legitimate aspirations of its diverse component parts for dignity, equal opportunity, and a fair share in decision-making.
Another area of Iran in a state of civil unrest—though not full revolt as is the case in Kurdistan, Sistan and Baluchistan, and Golestan provinces—is Talesh county, on the southwestern tip of the Caspian Sea. The Taleshis are of pure Iranian stock and speak one of the oldest Iranic languages. What distinguishes them from a majority of their fellow Iranians is their Sunni Muslim faith. Many Taleshis regard the fascist regime’s aggressive Shiism as a permanent threat to their identity, as Tehran pours in massive resources of money and manpower to convert the Sunnis to the Khomeinist version of Shiism. The Taleshis also resent the regime’s persistent refusal to declare their region a full province, thus making it eligible for greater financial aid from the central government. Tehran has elevated the neighboring town of Ardebil into a full province but refuses the same favor to Talesh. The reason is that the mullahs do not wish to create yet another province with a Sunni majority.
Over the coming years, the ethnic time bomb may prove the most serious threat to Iran’s existence as a unified nation-state. Several neighboring countries believe that the only way to neutralize what they perceive as an Iranian threat is to push Iran towards Yugoslav-style disintegration. That is unlikely to happen, however. Unlike Yugoslavia, which was a recently created and totally artificial state, Iran is an ancient nation with deep cultural and historic roots binding its many peoples together. Even when backed by a superpower such as the USSR in the 1940s, secessionism failed to divide Iran into a number of mini states. This is why Iranian patriots should not use the fear of secessionism as an excuse for not even discussing the very real discrimination directed at ethnic, linguistic, and religious minorities. The fascist regime’s policy of systematic repression is likely to lead the country into endless low-intensity war against rebels using ethnic and religious grievances as a pretext. The failure of both pre-liberation Iraq and Turkey to “solve” the Kurdish problem by force must be a lesson for Tehran decision-makers as they face what looks like a series of ethnic revolts in the four corners of the country.
While the fascist regime faces increasing opposition from workers, teachers, women, students, and ethnic and religious minorities inside the country, it is also challenged by a diverse and robust opposition in exile that covers virtually the entire spectrum of political ideologies. The presence of millions of Iranians of several generations abroad gives this opposition a space in which to develop and grow. The traditional view of exiles, of course, is that of a bunch of romantic idealists fighting ideological battles in the cafes of Paris and the lobby of the British Museum in London. Everyone remembers the quip by the Swiss pension manager who observed that Mr. Bronstein (Trotsky) and his comrades would never be able to topple the tsar. In 1999, a senior official in Saddam Hussein’s government offered a reporter a substantial bet that the Hakim family would never return to Iraq. The reporter did not take the bet, but the Hakims returned to Iraq in 2003 to become part of a new governing elite, while the senior Saddamite was in prison.
The two largest exile movements among Iranians are the monarchists and the Mujahedin Khalq, the People’s Holy Warriors. While the monarchists acknowledge Reza Pahlavi, heir to the Iranian crown, as their overall leader, they are divided into more than a dozen rival groups; by contrast, the Mujahedin look like a hermetic sect.
The more radical supporters of Reza Pahlavi want a straight return to monarchy, with the heir as the future shah. Others, including Reza Pahlavi himself, offer a referendum on the future system of government, leaving the choice to the people. Although they enjoy a great capital of goodwill, partly inspired by nostalgia for what many Iranians see as their “golden age,” the monarchists have not succeeded in developing a coherent political program or promoting an easily identifiable leadership. nevertheless, the monarchists remain a force to reckon with in forming a broad patriotic coalition to oppose and eventually replace the fascist regime.
The Mujahedin Khalq, better known under their acronym of MKO, are an active element of the exile opposition but have failed to broaden their original support base. The reason is their sectarian attitude, their insistence that they have already written a new constitution for Iran and even elected its future president in the person of Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, the estranged wife of their supreme leader Massoud Rajavi. The latter has lived in Iraq for the past quarter century, first under Saddam Hussein’s protection, and since 2003 thanks to a policy of benevolent neglect by the U.S.-led coalition. The U.S. forces in Iraq have disarmed the 3,500 Mujahedin who had been armed by Saddam Hussein for broader raids against the Islamic Republic and put them under virtual arrest in their camp northeast of Baghdad. Originally a Marxist-Islamist movement, the MKO has developed into a sect dedicated to the destruction of the Khomeinist regime and the handover of the country to the Rajavi couple. In 2008, however, there were signs that at least a section of the MKO leadership was pondering a less sectarian program and possible alliances with other opposition movements. Were that to happen, the MKO, although declared a terrorist organization by the State Department in Washington, could emerge as a significant part of a broad anti-Khomeinist coalition.
Outside the monarchists and the Mujahedin, Iranian opposition in exile also includes a wide range of leftist parties, from the Tudeh (Masses) to social-democrats modeled on Western European parties. What is encouraging is that almost all the exile opposition groups have committed themselves to a pluralist and democratic system of government. Even the hard left no longer calls for the establishment of a one-party state in the name of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” This collective commitment to democracy, even if not sincere in every case, restores the situation that existed in Iran between the 1880s and the 1920s. In that period, Iranian intellectuals came into contact with modern Western political ideas and began to fight for an end to absolutism in Iran.
The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 divided the Iranian intellectual elite into left and right, just as it had divided the European socialist movements. This division proved fatal for Iran’s hopes of democracy. Fearing that democratization could lead to Communist revolution and the annexation of Iran by the Soviet Union, the intellectuals of the right decided that their priority was preserving the nation’s independence rather than extending individual and collective freedoms. That analysis led them into collaboration with the authoritarian regimes of the two Pahlavi monarchs, a collaboration they tried to justify by pointing to the achievements of both shahs in uniting and modernizing the country. The intellectuals of the left, on the other hand, imitated Lenin in rejecting even the possibility of slow but steady reform. Under Soviet influence they believed that Iran had to break with the “imperialist” camp before it could have any chance of meaningful change. Based on that analysis, the Iranian left supported Khomeini and his obscurantist associates in seizing power.
Although the right-left divide remains, it is no longer an unbridgeable gap. Left and right could, and do, compete for support, but are no longer prepared to form alliances with Islamist fascists or secular absolutists. The disappearance of the USSR has removed the prospect of Soviet domination through an Iranian “fifth column,” something that haunted the Iranian right as a nightmare for three generations. At the same time, a majority of Iranian leftists have realized that had they sided with the shah rather than Khomeini in 1979, Iran might have avoided this long Persian night.