In southwestern Iran there is a region known as “Khuzestan,” “Arabistan,” or “al-Ahwaz,” populated by ethnic Arab Shi’ites – like the Kurds in Iraq, they are separated from the larger nation by ethnic, not religious, identity. (Control of Khuzestan was Saddam Hussein’s primary objective during the Iran-Iraq War – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khuzestan.) For some time some of them have been restive, in an occasional, fitful way, with Iranian rule. There’s a nationalist organization – how large or important it is, I don’t know, but it has a website (in Arabic): http://www.al-ahwaz.com/
How much ethnic unrest or secessionist sentiment is there, really, among the Iranian Arabs?
How (if at all) will the “Arab street” in neighboring countries react to these events?
Will the neocons be able to use this as a hook to hang a call for invading Iran? “Free the oppressed people of Arabistan!” (And there are various other ethnic minorities in Iran’s border provinces who might plausibly be “liberated” – Lurs in the west, Kurds in the northwest, Azerbaijanis in the north, Balochis in the east.)
If Arabistan is ever separated from Iran, would it necessarily be independent? Or might it be annexed to Iraq? Or merged with a new Arab Shi’ite state formed out of southern Iraq? (Which state might then start casting a hungry eye on the predominantly Shi’ite Northeastern Province of Saudi Arabia . . .)
It sounds like it would make a decent movie–Tony Shaloub can play an innocent Aribistani man caught up by the crowds of ravaging looters. Harrison Ford can play the POTUS, who agonizes over whether he should risk the lives of American soldiers (as typified by Billy Boyd playing Corporal Smith and the wise-cracking Private Martinez, played by Cheech Marin, who dies a tragic death almost immediately, causing Corporal Smith to break down and sob in combat. A powerful scene.) Antonio Banderas will play the gruff but sympathetic leader of an Iranian army unit fighting Corporal Smith’s. After hours of brutal fighting, they’ll come together and recognize the futility of war, and call a brief truce for their men to have a picnic together. Then, the balrogs come.
Oh, and I should have mentioned in the OP: According to the Wikipedia article on Khuzestan, it is “the major oil-producing region of Iran.” An interesting fact, if irrelevant to political concerns.
We’ll have the Tony Shaloub character be an alternative energy research then, trying to find a new energy source so that Iran won’t need his beloved homeland’s oil has badly. It will make his fiery death even more tragic.
Here’s a link to the controversial “Abtahi letter” – supposedly written by Iranian VP Sayed Mohammed-Ali Abtahi, setting out plans for the forced resettlement of the Arabs from Kjuzestan with the goal of reducing the province’s Arab population to one-third of the total: http://www.ahwaz.org.uk/images/ahwaz-khuzestan.pdf The Iranian government claims it’s a forgery. But why did they shut down al-Jazeera?
Here is one explanation why. And here is the official Iranian explanation, which should be taken with a grain of salt. It is not the first time Al-Jazeera bureaus get shut down in that part of the world. You can find a whole history of such shut downs in www.friendsofaljaseera.org
As you know, there is a collective effort by the Arab countries to change the name of the “Persian Gulf” to the “Arabian Gulf”. In fact if you buy the map of the area in the Arab countries neighboring Iran, you’ll find that the maps refer to the Gulf as the “Arabian Gulf”. This apparently does not bode well with the Persians. It is Ironic that the fundamentalist clerics currently ruling Iran all dress in Arab outfit, they recite the Quran in Arabic rather than Farsi, and have turned the Iranian culture of wine and roses into an Arabic savagery and barbarian stoning of adulterous women, imposing unnecessary Arab restrictions and denial of freedom to the fun loving people of Iran since 1979.
The dichotomy is that these A-holes are turning Iran into an Arab country by promoting Arab culture and language, and yet, they want to maintain the name of “Persian Gulf”.
IMHO, the A-holes such as Khamanei and Rafsanjani plan to replace a good chunk of the Iranian-Arab population of the Khusistan province with more Persian ones such as Azaris and other non-Arab sects, just in case the Iranian Arabs (that surround the oil reserves) may decide to unite with their brethrens in Kuwait, Bahrain and Southern Iraq, separating themselves from Iran – taking all of the oil with them.
That link won’t work unless you change the “s” to a “z.”
!!! No, first I’d heard of that!
And if the Iranian government does try to de-Arabize the province, what will be U.S. reaction to that? Conversely, if the Arabs try to declare independence, what will be U.S. reaction to that?
