For those Persian chauvinists who see history as a competition, Al-Ahwaz’s backwardness and poverty are merely the result of the cultural and racial inferiority of its Arab inhabitants. Arabs lost and Persians won in the supposed “clash of civilisations”.
But Al-Ahwaz’s under-development is an integral part of the history of modern Iran’s development. Arab defeat has always been implicit in the victory of the despots in Tehran.
Al-Ahwaz is a region of open veins. Its wealth has always generated its poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others: the Persian empire and its military-industrial elite.
Everything, from the time of dictator Reza Pahlavi’s occupation in 1925, has always been transmuted into Persian capital and as such has been accumulated in a distant centre of power: Tehran.
Everything: the soil and its oil-rich depths and all the products of its enslaved workforce.
Industrialisation, production and the racialised class structure have been determined from the outside, meshing with the gearbox of Iranian capitalism and the war machine that guards it.
Those living in the shadows of the oil rigs, refineries and petrochemical plants have become painfully aware of the mortality of wealth that nature bestows and Persian imperialism appropriates.
Iran’s strength necessarily lies in the marginalisation and persecution of Ahwazi Arabs. This vampire state drains the life from Al-Ahwaz and can only replace it with death. It is a regime of destruction and suicide.
Al-Ahwaz lies in a choking toxic cloud created by the destruction of resources for a terror machine that oppresses and exploits the indigenous people. Ruin was the fate of the Karoun and Karkeh rivers when they were dammed to provide waters to favoured ethnic Persian regions, turning Al-Ahwaz’s verdant food-yielding fields into wastelands.
The gap between Tehran at the centre and Al-Ahwaz at the periphery widens ever still. Living standards are in freefall. Infant mortality is soaring. Ever more people are left beside the road, without work, without land, without the ability to determine their destiny, without the right to learn in their own tongue.
But such contradictions cannot be sustained. The Ahwazi movement is a stone that will shatter the clay feet of the Persian empire. The poets, the writers and the strugglers are rising in defiance. These are people of courage, not satisfied just with words, but ever searching for the means to transform them into action. These are men of integrity for whom the act is one with the idea, for whom prison, exile, and death are preferable to a life contrary to their principles. These are the lonely sentinels who enter the battle long before the masses are sufficiently roused to raise openly the banner of insurrection and to march, arms in hand, to the conquest of their rights.
