The biggest threat to the ruling ayatollahs and
generals in multi-ethnic
Iran
does not come
from the embattled democratic opposition movement struggling to reform the
Islamic Republic. It comes from increasingly aggressive separatist groups in
Kurdish, Baluch, Azeri and Arab ethnic minority regions that collectively make
up some 44 percent of Persian-dominated
Iran
’s population.
Working together, the democratic reform movement and
the ethnic insurgents could seriously undermine the republic. But the reform
movement, like most of the clerical, military and business establishment, is
dominated by an entrenched Persian elite and has so far refused to support
minority demands.
What the minorities want is greatly increased economic
development spending in the non-Persian regions, a bigger share of the profits
from oil and other natural resources in their areas, the unfettered use of
non-Persian languages in education and politics and freedom from religious
persecution. Some minority leaders believe these goals can be achieved through
regional autonomy under the existing Constitution, but most of them want to
reconstitute
Iran
as a loose confederation or to declare independence.
Should the
United States
give money and
weapons aid to the ethnic insurgents?
During the Bush administration, a debate raged between
White House advocates of “regime change” in
Tehran
, who favored
large-scale covert action to break up the country, and State Department
moderates who argued that all-out support of the minorities would complicate
negotiations on a nuclear deal with the dominant Persians.
The result was a compromise: limited covert action
carried out by proxy, in the case of the Baluch, through
Pakistan
’s Inter-Services
Intelligence Directorate or, I.S.I., and in the case of the Kurds by the C.I.A.
in cooperation with
Israel
’s Mossad. My knowledge of the I.S.I.’s role is based on first-hand
Pakistani sources, including Baluch leaders. Evidence of the C.I.A. role in
providing weapons aid and training to Pejak, the principal Kurdish rebel group
in
Iran
, has been spelled out by three
U.S.
journalists, Jon
Lee Anderson and Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker and Borzou Daragahi of the Los
Angeles Times, who have interviewed a variety of Pejak leaders.
Iran
’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, speaking in the Kurdish city of
Bijar
, charged on May
12 that the Obama administration had not reversed the Bush policy. “Unfortunately,
money, arms and organization are being used by the Americans directly across
our western borders in order to fight the Islamic Republic’s system,” he
declared. “The Americans are busy making a conspiracy.”
Mossad has long-standing contacts with Kurdish groups
in
Iran
and
Iraq
established when the
United States
and
Israel
wanted to
destabilize the Kurdish areas of Saddam Hussein’s
Iraq
. But now the
United States
wants a united
Iraq
in which Kurds,
Shiites and Sunnis cooperate.
Iran
, too, wants a
united
Iraq
because it fears cooperation among its own Kurds and those in
Iraq
and
Turkey
to create an
independent
Kurdistan
. So aiding Pejak would hamper future Iran-U.S. cooperation in
Baghdad
in addition to
complicating the nuclear negotiations.
Both the Baluch and the Kurds are Sunni Muslims. They
are fighting vicious Shiite religious repression in addition to cultural and
economic discrimination. By contrast, the biggest of the minorities, the
Turkic-speaking Azeris, are Shiites, and Ayatollah Khamenei himself is an
Azeri. His selection as the supreme leader was in part a gesture to the Azeris
designed to cement their allegiance to
Iran
and to blunt a
covert campaign by ethnic kinsmen in adjacent
Azerbaijan
to annex them. The
Azeris in
Iran
are better off economically than the other minorities but feel that the
Persians look down on them. Prolonged rioting erupted for days after a
Tehran
newspaper
published a cartoon in May 2006, depicting an Azeri-speaking cockroach.
The Arabs in the southwestern
province
of
Khuzestan
, who are also
Shiites, pose the most dangerous potential separatist threat to
Tehran
because the
province produces 80 percent of
Iran
’s crude oil
revenue. So far the divided Arab separatist factions have not created a militia
but they periodically raid government security installations, bomb oil
production facilities and broadcast propaganda in Arabic on satellite TV
channels from shifting locations outside
Iran
.
The most serious military clashes between the
Revolutionary Guards and separatist groups have come on the Kurdish border,
where Iran repeatedly bombarded Pejak hideouts in September 2007, and in Baluchistan,
where the Guards frequently suffers heavy casualties in clashes with militias
of the Jundullah movement operating out of camps just across the border in the
Baluch areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Compared to the massive protests in the streets of
Tehran
and
Qum
, the uncoordinated harassment of the regime by
ethnic insurgents may seem like a sideshow. But if the ethnic insurgents could
unite and if the democratic opposition could forge a united front with the
minorities, the prospects for reforming or toppling the Islamic Republic, now
dismal, would brighten.
For the present, the Obama administration should tread
with the utmost care in dealing with this sensitive issue, guided by a
recognition that support for separatism and engagement with the present regime
are completely incompatible.
Selig S. Harrison is director of the
Asia
program at the Center for
International Policy and author of “In
Afghanistan
’s Shadow.”
(
from the New York Times,
27/12/2009
)