Iran is waging a secret, racist war against its Arab population. The
latest victim is Dr Awdeh Afrawi, a respected Arab Iranian
psychologist and human rights advocate. Despite a lack of evidence, he
has been jailed for 20 years – supposedly for bombing oil
installations.

Dr Afrawi is lucky. Sixteen other Arab rights activists have been
sentenced to death. Found guilty of insurgency in secret trials before
Revolutionary Courts, none had proper legal representation. Human
Rights Watch confirms that lawyers for many of the condemned men “did
not have an opportunity to meet with their clients.” Most of the
defendants were convicted solely on the basis of confessions extracted
under torture. Amnesty International says two of those sentenced to
die, Abdolreza Nawaseri and Nazem Bureihi, were in prison at the time
when they were alleged to have been involved in bomb attacks.

Some of the 16 condemned Arabs recently had their sentences referred
back to the courts for reevalution, after their families staged vigils
and hunger-strikes that embarrassed the regime. But the rest are
likely to be hanged in the coming weeks.

The death sentences seem designed to silence protests by Iran’s
persecuted ethnic Arabs. They comprise 70% of the population of the
south-west province of Khuzestan, which Iranian Arabs call Ahwaz. Many
Ahwazis believe the activists were framed. Their real ‘crime’ is
campaigning against Tehran’s political repression and economic
exploitation of their oil-rich homeland.

More show trials are scheduled - 50 Ahwazi Arab activists have been
charged with insurgency since 2005. They are accused of being
“Mohareb” or enemies of god, which is a capital crime. Other
allegations include sabotage and possession of home-made bombs. No
material evidence has been offered to support the charges. All face
possible execution.

In a recent letter to the chief of the judiciary, Ayatollah Hashemi
Shahroudi, one of Iran’s leading human rights activists, Emadeddin
Baghi, said that the trials of Ahwazi Arabs were flawed, the charges
baseless, and that the sentencing was based on a spurious
interpretation of the law.

Human rights groups confirm a new wave of repression against Ahwazi
Arabs. Ali Afrawi (17) and Mehdi Nawaseri (20) were publicly hanged in
March, for allegedly participating in insurgency. They were hanged
using the strangulation method, designed to cause a slow and painful
death. Amnesty International condemned their trial as “unfair.” They
were denied access to lawyers. The Ahwazi Human Rights Organisation
(AHRO) says that seven other Arab political prisoners were secretly
executed in jail at around the same time.

Tehran’s has recently stooped to taking Ahwazi children hostage.
According to Amnesty International, kids as young as two have been
jailed with their mothers, in a bid to force their political activist
fathers, who are on the run and in hiding, to surrender to the
police.

Protests against these abuses are brutally suppressed. Since April
2005, 25,000 Ahwazis have been arrested, 131 killed and 150 have
disappeared, reports AHRO. The bodies of many of those executed have
been dumped in a place the Iranian government calls “Lanat Abad”, the
place of the damned. They are buried in shallow graves. Dogs dig up
and eat the bodies.

Ahwazi political parties, trade unions and student groups are illegal.
Arab candidates have been barred from standing for election. Among
those excluded is Jasem Shadidzadeh Al-Tamimi, the secretary-general
of the reformist Wefagh Party and an MP for Ahwaz from 2000-04. He was
barred from seeking re-election in 2004 and his party was banned for
attempting to express Ahwazi concerns using lawful and constitutional
means.

Ahwazis allege anti-Arab persecution by the Persian-dominated Tehran
regime, which they accuse of “racism” and “ethnic cleansing.” Other
minority nationalities face similar oppression by “Persian
chauvinists”: Kurds, Azeris, Turkmen and Baluchis. While the Arab
League professes pan-Arab solidarity, it does nothing to challenge
Iran’s abuse of Ahwazi Arabs.

Tehran has a secret plan to resolve ‘the Arab problem’ by making Arabs
a minority in their own land through ‘ethnic restructuring.’ The plan
is to cut the Arab population in Ahwaz from over two-thirds of the
total to under one-third. It encourages ethnic Persians to settle in
the region by offering financial incentives, such as zero-interest
loans, and by building new townships to house 500,000 non-Arab
incomers. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of displaced Arabs have been
forcibly relocated to poverty-stricken far-flung northern regions of
Iran.

Already, 250,000 Arabs have been uprooted from their villages
following the Iranian government’s confiscation of 200,000 hectares of
farmland for a massive sugar cane project. Compensation was in some
cases less than 3% of the market value of the land, notes Miloon
Kothari of the UNCHR.

A further 400,000 Ahwazis Arabs face displacement by the creation of
the new military-industrial Arvand Free Zone (AFZ) covering over 3,000
square kilometres, along the Shatt Al-Arab waterway, which borders
Iraq. Dozens of Ahwazi towns and villages will be erased and their
inhabitants dispersed. According to the Iranian media, the British
government has been involved in discussions on investing in the AFZ.

Ironically, Lebanon’s Hezbollah – the supposed embodiment of Arab
resistance in the Middle East – is complicit in the displacement of
Ahwazi Arabs. On confiscated Arab land, Tehran has set up military
training camps for Hezbollah and for the Iraqi fundamentalist militia,
the Badr Brigades. Badr death squads in Iraq are assassinating Sunni
Muslims, unveiled women, gay people, men wearing shorts, barbers,
sellers of alcohol and people listening to western music. They are
also killing British soldiers. Many of the killers received their
training in Ahwaz.

Ahwaz produces 90% of Iran’s oil and 10% of OPEC’s global output.
Tehran expropriates 100% of oil revenues. A bid by Ahwaz MPs to secure
the repatriation of 1.5% of these earnings back to the region for
expenditure on social welfare projects was rejected in January 2006.
The result? Ahwaz is the region of Iran with the third greatest level
of poverty. Half the population are impoverished and 80% of children
suffer from malnutrition, according to an AHRO report to the UNCHR in
2004. The unemployment rate of Arabs is more than five times that of
Persians.

In a bid to crush Arab ethnic identity, Tehran has banned Arab
language newspapers and educational text books. Borrowing from the
tactics of the apartheid regime in South Africa, which compelled
school lessons in the oppressor language of Afrikaans, Tehran has made
instruction in Farsi (Persian) compulsory in Ahwazi schools. The
result is a 30% Arab drop-out rate at primary level and a 50% drop-out
rate at secondary level. Illiteracy rates among Arabs are at least
four times those of non-Arabs.

Contrary to Tehran’s propaganda, the vast majority of Ahwazi Arabs
reject separatism. They want regional self-government, not
independence. Nor do they support a US invasion. This would, they
argue, strengthen the position of the hardliners in Tehran, allowing
President Ahmadinejad to use the pretext of defence and security to
play the nationalist card and to further crack down on dissent. Many
Ahwazis believe the route to reform is an internal alliance of Iranian
democrats, leftists, trade unionists, minority nationalities and local
civic organisations.