The seizure of 15 British Sailors and Marines by Iran was not an isolated incident, but part of a long-running Iranian program to control the Shatt al-Arab.

The Narrows: A waterway beset by ethnic cleansing.

* Native Arab population of up to 500,000 “relocated.”
* Resistance jailed, forced to confess, and executed.
* Most politically sensitive area in the Middle East.
* Controls oil shipments and trade routes
* Iranian zone is the launch point for Iranian covert operations in Iraq.
* Iran now controlling up to 40,000 agents in Iraq.

By Daniel Brett
Chairman, British Ahwazi Friendship Society



Iran’s capture of 15 British navy personnel at gunpoint on the Shatt al-Arab, purportedly in Iraqi waters, is inextricably linked to the regime’s long-term ambition to impose its territorial control over the strategic waterway and hold Baghdad hostage to Iran’s interests.

The Iranian left bank of the Shatt al-Arab is undergoing a large-scale militarisation program conducted under the auspices of the Arvand Free Zone Organisation (AFZO), a state-run group that aims to extend the Iranian regime’s economic, political and military influence over the Shatt al-Arab and ultimately Iraq. The AFZO’s plans for the military-industrial zone were outlined in a letter issued to indigenous Ahwazi Arab residents living within the zone. This letter informed them that their land would be confiscated by the state. The confiscation program is nothing short of ethnic cleansing for the sake of Iran’s neo-imperialism.

Arab Shia tribes have populated regions on both sides of the Shatt al-Arab for centuries if not millennia. The leaders of the Bani Kaab tribe owned land on both banks of the waterway – most of it in Persia – giving them considerable influence and political autonomy. Any foreign power wishing to gain influence over trade along the Shatt al-Arab had to deal with the Bani Kaab leadership, which controlled the Sheikhdom of Mohammara under British protection.

The Ottomans confiscated assets belonging to the Bani Kaab and Reza Pahlavi deposed Sheikh Kazal, the de facto ruler of the oil-rich Arabistan region, following his military coup in 1925. Arabistan was renamed Khuzestan and Mohammara was renamed Khorramshahr. The area came to prominence in 1980, when Iraq invaded Khuzestan ostensibly to “liberate” the Ahwazi Arabs, although Saddam was no doubt taking advantage of Iran’s post-revolutionary turmoil to seize the region’s massive oilfields. The narrowness of the Shatt Al-Arab waterway also enabled Iran and Iraq to stage large-scale amphibious assaults during the war. In February 1986, 30,000 Iranian troops crossed the Shatt Al-Arab in a surprise attack to invade and occupy Iraq’s Al-Faw peninsula and create a bridgehead for further advances into Iraq.

The Marsh Arabs of Iraq’s Basra province suffered ethnic cleansing and repression under Saddam’s regime while in Iran the Ahwazi Arabs have endured violent persecution under the Pahlavi dynasty and the Islamic Republic. On both sides of the waterway, the governments of Iran and Iraq have viewed the indigenous population as disloyal and a threat to their territorial claims. They were perceived as a threat by Saddam because they are predominantly Shia, while the Iranian regime sees them as having innate pan-Arab sympathies. Ethnic cleansing has been used by both countries as a method of securing control and territorial claims over the Shatt al-Arab.
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The AFZ is the latest development in the Iranian regime’s campaign to rid the left bank of Ahwazi Arabs and impose its complete control over the Shatt al-Arab. The latest seizure of British personnel is a symptom of this quiet militarisation programme. Land acquisition and ethnic cleansing are intimately bound up with militarisation.

Over recent years, the Iranian regime has confiscated large tracts of land from local Arabs and transferred ownership to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and state-owned enterprises. Around 47,000 hectares of Ahwazi Arab farmland in the Jofir area near the Ahwazi city of Abadan has been transferred members of the security forces and government enterprises. More than 6,000 hectares of Ahwazi farmland north of Shush (Susa) has been taken to “resettle” the faithful non-indigenous Persians, following directives issued by the Ministry of Agricultures and the Revolutionary Guards Corp Command. These policies have forced Ahwazi Arabs into poor shanty towns.

The AFZ is located along the narrowest and most strategically sensitive part of the Shatt al-Arab and includes a large number of Revolutionary Guards naval posts, which are used to patrol the waterway and protect Iranian arms smugglers entering Iraq. It stretches 30km from Abadan along the Shatt Al-Arab to the land border between Basra and Khuzestan. The zone is in three segments: an island and adjacent land measuring 30 square km, a strip of land north of Khorramshahr measuring 25 square km and an in-land eastern segment measuring around 100 square km in area. The total land area of the Arvand Free Zone is around 155 square km and includes Arab towns and villages. At certain points, the zone is literally within a stone’s throw of Basra.

The Shatt al-Arab is the most politically sensitive area of the Middle East. Whoever controls the waterway controls movements from Iraq to the Gulf, including oil shipments, as well as serving as an important trade route for the entire west of Iran. Control over the disputed waterway led to wars between the Persian and Ottoman empires in the 17th and 19th centuries and more recently Iraq and Iran.

The AFZ has seen the mass expulsion of Arabs, the destruction of their villages and the creation of an exclusive military-industrial zone. The expulsion campaign began with the Arab farmers located on Minoo Island, near Abadan. The islanders were bullied by AFZO officials into giving up their land before the official deadline, indicating an increasing sense of urgency associated with establishing the zone. In all, up to 500,000 indigenous Ahwazi Arabs are being displaced by the creation of a 5,000 square km security zone, of which the AFZ is just a part, along the Shatt al-Arab.

The zone’s security element has strengthened covert operations inside Iraq, with the objective of securing an early exit of Coalition troops, influencing Iraq’s political system and using patronage to control local authorities in Basra. The zone is also being used to train, fund and organise militias loyal to Tehran. Mahdi Army leader Moqtada al-Sadr and several Iranian-backed politicians belonging to the ruling United Iraqi Alliance have recently visited the area.

Documents from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps’ (IRGC) Fajr Garrison in Khuzestan, which serves as the organisation’s main headquarters for southern Iran, show that Tehran is employing up to 40,000 agents in Iraq. The information was first revealed in March 2005 by former Iranian agents who defected due to pay cuts and subsequently confirmed by Coalition troops in Iraq. Fajr Garrison hosts the IRGC’s Qods Force, which runs the vast underground network in Iraq. Agents are paid by middle-men, who carry out regular visits to Ahwaz City to obtain payments and be debriefed by Qods commanders.

The regime’s activities in Khuzestan and the left bank of the Shatt al-Arab are related to the rise of militias in Basra and the British government’s discovery that weapons used by insurgents were likely to have originated from the IRGC via the Iranian-backed Lebanese Hezbollah. It is no coincidence that attacks on British troops, a sudden upsurge in militia activity in Basra province and the seizing of British naval personnel on the Shatt al-Arab have occurred at the same time as Ahwazi Arabs are being removed from the area to make way for the AFZ. Greater international attention to the plight of the Ahwazi Arabs would hinder the pace of militarisation along the Shatt al-Arab and stymie Iranian efforts to control Iraq.

Update: Iran Warns Britain Not To Politicize Captive Sailor Issue

April 1, 2007 7:34 a.m. EST

Komfie Manalo - All Headline News Correspondent

Tehran, Iran (AHN) - The Islamic Republic of Iran on Saturday warned the British government against politicizing the issue of 15 British sailors detained in Tehran for allegedly illegally entering the country's territorial waters. Iran's Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki made the appeal as he calls for a quick solution on the crisis.

Mottaki reportedly told Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, "The British leaders should avoid media campaign and politicization, or it would further complicate the affairs."



http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7006916235

April 1, 2007, 10:01AM
Protest in Iran targets British Embassy

By NASSER KARIMI Associated Press Writer
© 2007 The Associated Press

TEHRAN, Iran — About 200 students threw rocks and firecrackers at the British Embassy on Sunday, calling for the expulsion of the country's ambassador because of the standoff over Iran's capture of 15 British sailors and marines.

Several dozen policemen prevented the protesters from entering the embassy compound, although a few briefly scaled a fence outside the compound's walls before being pushed back, according to an Associated Press reporter at the scene.

The protesters chanted "Death to Britain" and "Death to America" as they hurled stones into the courtyard of the embassy. They also demanded that the Iranian government expel the British ambassador and close down the embassy, calling it a "den of spies."

March 31, 2007
What must Iran make of this free woman?

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/c...icle1593734.ece

They insisted that she conceal her fatigues with a white abaya, cover her hair with a hijab. It was with her soft voice and in her round, girlish handwriting that the apology for her country’s actions had to be made.

This war has a workaday military guise, but as the treatment of Leading Seaman Faye Turney shows, it is a collision between two irreconcilable civilisations. Its spoils are more than oil reserves, disputed waters or regional influence, but, at its very core, the right of dominion over women.

What a perplexing and alien creature Seaman Turney must appear to this Iranian regime. A young woman working close-knit with men, proud to perform her dangerous task of piloting speedboats as well as any one of them. A wife and mother, moreover, away from her small daughter, who has put military career before marital and maternal duties.

The Iranians were satisfied to have her 14 male comrades surrender as sailors or Marines: Seaman Turney had to surrender also as a woman. While the men were free to eat their pitta bread and lamb stew with weary resignation, she had to work out how best to appear adequately humble, grateful and submissive. She must submit not just to Iran’s military authority but its patriarchal might.

After all, here she stood, the end-product of 100 years of bitterly fought — and now mostly unacknowledged — Western female emancipation. In Britain our own reactionaries may finger-wag at the unnatural spectacle of a mother in a warzone, distracting our male warrior caste. One strain of feminism can question why womankind — Nature’s peacemakers, oh Mother Gaia! — would want to fight men’s wars, particularly this one.

While another might point out the sham of Seaman Turney’s equality: the sexual harassment endured by almost all women military personnel and their ban from the front line.

And the tiresome buzz of these debates can distract us from the wholly magnificent truth: the freedom of Seaman Turney and of all of us, our right to make choices — and mistakes — to fight, to study, to work, to stay home, to have children, to remain childless, to wear what the hell we like — whether basque or burka — to live unenslaved by our fertility, our fathers, our husbands, to have equal rights before the law. So languid are we in this warm bath of freedom, that International Women’s Day — March 9 — doesn’t even figure on our calendar. It is some vestigial Seventies feminist joke. We’d be marching for what, exactly? Is there really anything left? Er, more women on the boards of FTSE 100 companies?

In Iran, however, International Women’s Day is as perilous as patrolling any Iraqi foxhole. A week before, to forestall protest on the day itself, police rounded up and arrested 33 women involved in the Campaign for Equality, which aims to get a million signatures on a petition calling for the end of discrimination in Iranian penal and family codes.

In Iran a woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man, her murder requires only half the punishment, girls as young as 9 may be stoned for adultery and mothers after divorce only have custody rights over their children until they reach 7 years old.

On March 9, the few women who dared to gather peacefully outside the parliament building were dispersed or arrested. Any prominent woman lawyer, journalist or politician speaks out at grave personal risk. Five feminist leaders are currently on trial for “propaganda against the system” and “acting against national security.” Compared with their subjugated Saudi sisters, Iranian women have comparative liberty, being permitted to drive, vote and stand for office. Indeed more than half of university graduates in Iran are women. And it is this weight of numbers, a growing confidence and sense of entitlement among these educated women, that threatens the male leadership and has precipitated a recent crackdown.

It is no longer enough, say the mullahs, for women to sit in separate rows from male students in lecture theatres or classrooms. Liberal academics have been purged, there are calls for separate teaching and for CCTV cameras on campuses to monitor “gender-mingling”.

Meanwhile the Islamic dress code is being imposed with renewed zeal. Girls have pushed the rules — as girls eternally will — wearing tight fitting abayas or the sheerest scarves far back on their dark hair, flashing painted toenails in open sandals.

But last year, the police chose the broiling heat of August to caution women deemed “badly veiled” and instructed them to wear the heavy, sweltering full-length chador. In Tehran, in a single month, 63,963 women were given a warning, with some making a written pledge to dress properly. Then, in a move which would be comical if it weren’t so despotic, the police organised a fashion show, displaying examples of outfits considered properly Islamic. Obviously no live models were used.

To think, we live in a parallel universe where “diktats of fashion” mean feeling obliged to succumb to the smock, where “fashion crime” means Christina Aguilera overdoing the sequins and the “fashion police” are a bunch of effete stylists, not zealots wielding night-sticks.

There are, of course, those who have taken up the veil voluntarily in Britain, who fight secularism so bitterly, who would have it that no British Muslim school girl strode to school bareheaded or even barefaced. What would they make of these women who risk a spell in Iran’s notorious Evin prison for supporting a form of political protest as meek as a petition? They might say that these women were infected with Western values — although the richest Iranian women are apparently unwilling to dirty their shoes on this campaign, having the money and connections to skip off abroad at will. And in any case the groundswell of revolt against clerical tyranny comes from the less affluent or educated, who stand to lose most: their children, homes, liberty, lives.

Let the women of Beeston in their chadors flick V-signs at us. Let them wear their slave garb and tell us their invisibility is the will of God rather than the rule of man. Let them do so while reaping all the benefits — education, equality — of Western feminism. As long as they acknowledge that thanks to the values they disdain and too often wish to destroy, and unlike the women of Iran and currently Leading Seaman Turney, they do so because they have a choice.

Well they learned something from the Israelis didn't they?




http://www.amazon.com/Ethnic-Cleansing-Pal...3053&sr=8-1

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Cole in Salon: Iran's New Hostage Crisis

My column, "Iran's new hostage crisis," is out at Salon.com.

Excerpt:


' The capture by Iranian Revolutionary Guards of 15 British sailors and marines on March 23 has set off a diplomatic crisis and mobilized the public in both Britain and Iran . . . Why would the Iranian leadership risk such a confrontation over a minor issue? . . .

With Iran facing huge challenges at home (an economy in tatters) and abroad (mounting pressure over its nuclear program), Ahmadinejad and his reluctant patron, the Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei, desperately needed a diversion. . .

Ahmadinejad's alienation of potential Iranian supporters such as Russia and China with his regular undignified rants against Israel and the West has cost Iran dearly at the United Nations Security Council, which has voted for a series of potentially serious economic sanctions in response to Tehran's attempts to enrich uranium for nuclear energy. Iranians, who saw how oil-rich Iraq was reduced to a fourth-world country by U.N. sanctions in the 1990s, are anxious about their own fate.

Ahmadinejad's domestic and foreign policy failures have emboldened his enemies, especially Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former president (1989-1997) who now heads the clerical "senate" called the Expediency Council. Rafsanjani has taken to openly denouncing Ahmadinejad's policies. Even the president's own right-wing supporters are threatening to vote down his budget, which contains another 20 percent increase in public spending.

A lot of Iranians could not care less about Khomeini's clerical ideology at this point, but most are still intensely nationalistic. Given all the student protests against hard-line policies in recent times, it must be sweet indeed for the ayatollahs and Ahmadinejad to see universities become the sites of anti-British denunciations. '

The Costs of Iran’s Political Pageantry
http://tinyurl.com/33ky8h
By Karim Sadjadpour

“You know the thing about Iran,” a European Ambassador in Tehran once lamented to me. “It has such a rich culture, a grand history, wonderful people. The cuisine is sophisticated and the scenery is breathtaking. It’s got incredible poets, musicians and filmmakers. Beautiful art and architecture…But it’s cursed with such lousy politicians.”

I was reminded of these words when watching the pageantry of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad this morning, announcing that 15 British sailors held captive in Iran would be “pardoned” as an Easter “gift” to the British people in a gesture of magnanimity from “the great Iranian nation.”

Hardliners in Tehran are certain to perceive the entire incident as a diplomatic victory. After all, Iran publicly humiliated its long-time nemesis Britain, and won the release of an Iranian diplomat who had been detained in Iraq.

But at what cost?

From the diplomatic perspective, Tehran may feel like it has chastened the Europeans to think twice before working in concert with the U.S., but in fact they’ve likely achieved the opposite effect. Instead of splitting the international coalition assembled against them by weaning the Europeans away from the Americans—a strategy which Iran successfully employed during the era of reformist President Mohammed Khatami—Iran has further eroded European confidence that there exists a mature Iranian leadership amenable to diplomatic compromise.

And what effect will this have on the moribund Iranian economy, the regime’s Achilles heel? Is the multi-national corporation looking for investment opportunities in the Middle East going to go to Iran or Dubai? Is the international energy firm going to look to sign lucrative natural gas contracts with Iran or Qatar? Are the European tourists who were looking to visit the Middle East this year going to journey to Iran or Egypt?

Iranian hardliners similarly proclaimed victory after the 444 day hostage crisis in 1979 which humiliated the Carter administration. While three decades later the hostage crisis is a blip in the history of the United States, Iran continues to pay for it in terms of a soiled international reputation, political and economic isolation, and vastly unfulfilled potential.

And what about the Iranian people, whom president Ahmadinejad professes to speak for? Ahmadinejad’s entire campaign platform was about compassion for the common man and putting the oil money on people’s dinner tables. But they have been diminished to a mere footnote during his presidency, amidst the bustle about uranium enrichment, centrifuges, holocaust denial, and now British sailors.

Before announcing the release of the sailors, Ahmadinejad felt compelled to lecture the West on gender sensitivity, asking why the UK would send Faye Turney, a mother, on such a compromising mission. “Why don't they respect the values of families in the West?” he asked. “Why is there no respect for motherhood, affection?”

His remarks come one month after a few dozen Iranian women were arrested and/or beaten while peacefully assembling against laws which, among other things, permit stoning women to death if they are convicted of adultery and deny women equal rights in divorce, custody and inheritance. I’m sure the double standard was lost on him.

In characteristic fashion, Iran’s leadership is consumed by short-term tactics at the expense of long-term strategy. In the short term, Iran thumbed its nose at the West and put a smile on the face of millions around the world—especially in the Islamic world—who abhor Western policies in the Middle East.

But once the dust has settled in Tehran, more sober Iranian officials will come to realize that Iran has only increased the time and distance it will need to travel until it can reintegrate itself into the international community and assume its rightful position as a respected member of the league of nations.

Karim Sadjadpour recently joined the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace after serving four years as the chief Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group based in Tehran and Washington, D.C. A leading researcher on Iran, Sadjadpour has conducted dozens of interviews with senior Iranian officials, and hundreds across Iranian society. He is a regular contributor to BBC World TV and radio, CNN and National Public Radio, and has written in the Washington Post, New York Times, International Herald Tribune, and New Republic.

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Posted by Karim Sadjadpour on April 4, 2007 2:45 PM

It's a dead heat between this guy and Chavez' over big headed foolishness. He definetly has the littleman syndrome.

And speaking of Chavez, apparently he's gotten the attention of the populace by banning the sale of alcohol over the Easter holidays. That is a apt description of both - poco hombre syndrome. A few others that fit the description as well.

Seems he's flipped his position on biofuels also. He was for it but no he's against it.