Change in Iran: Reasons and Barriers
“Nation-state”: or nation-state, a territorially limited sovereign political system – i.e. a state – governed in the name of a community of citizens who define themselves as a nation. The legitimacy of a nation-state's rule over a territory and over the people who inhabit it stems from the right of a basic national group within the state (which may include all of its citizens or only some of them) in self-determination . As the American sociologist Rogers Brubaker put it in his book “Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe” (1996), nation-states are “states of particular nations .”
Kingdom: The word kingdom is singular, kingdom, which appears in the Persian Dehkhoda Dictionary and means "the state, and the sultanate." Guarded Domains refers to the allied kingdoms of Persia. In addition, the Persian word "kingdom" is the same as the Arab Kingdom and the English Kingdom, and guarded or allied kingdoms in English are referred to as Protected Kingdom .
Women of Iran: Women account for over half of Iran's population of approximately 85 million. “According to official figures, the overall number of workers in Iran in the spring of 2023 is anticipated to be around 23 million and 577 thousand persons, with 84.4 percent of them being men and 15.6 percent being women. In other words, just around 15% of those employed this year were”. We also see that unemployment rates are rising among women, and that the level of education among this group is higher than in Iranian society . This fact, as well as the systematic discrimination imposed on women in Iran, such as the imposition of the hijab and the lack of a fair law for inheritance and a suitable law for family planning that guarantees their rights to custody and divorce, as well as their small percentage in parliament and various ministries, and other discriminatory matters, all lead to restlessness and discontent among them. This is especially true among females, as seen by the 2022 rebellion and the high number of women jailed and victims of demonstrations around Iran.
Non-Persian peoples: Why do we describe them as peoples because they are linked to other neighboring and non-neighboring peoples who could have formed a nation, and it is not wrong to give the name nation to any of them in Iran? So this definition applies to all of these peoples: "A large group of people, bound by a specific territory, who are sufficiently aware of their unity to seek or have their own government ."
Imperialism: According to the Cambridge Dictionary, "Imperialism is a state in which one country has power or too much influence over other countries, especially in political and economic affairs." On the other hand, according to Merriam-Webster Dictionary, "Imperialism is the policy, practice, and defense of the expansion of a nation's domination, which is accomplished - in particular - by direct territorial acquisition or indirect domination of the political and economic life of other territories."
What is Iran?
For more than four centuries (1501-1925), from the Safavid dynasty to the Qajar dynasty, Persia's administrative-political system was described as allied kingdoms (guarded kingdoms), with the Kingdom of Arabistan being one of the most important of these kingdoms, despite the latter enjoying independence for long periods of time.
The Qajar Kingdom (1796-1925) had six kingdoms: Arabistan, Lorestan, Kurdistan, Azerbaijan, Gilan, and Khorasan. These six kingdoms, which encompassed many ethnicities, benefited from autonomy, particularly Arabistan (Ahwaz), which was semi-independent until 1925. If a democratic process had taken place in Iran, as in the United Kingdom with four peoples and four nations, these six kingdoms could have been the basis for six nations. Currently, in addition to these six peoples - Arabs, Lurs, Kurds, Turks, Gilaks and Persians - two other peoples also live in Iran: Baluchis and Turkmens.
Reza Khan Pahlavi, a military commander working with external help, led a military coup that destroyed the Qajar dynasty in 1921. In 1925, he was appointed Minister of War and later crowned himself Shah of Iran. Since then, Persian nationalism has been Iran's solitary ruler. Reza Shah Pahlavi replaced the multi-national, multi-kingdom political-administrative structure with provinces and banned non-Persian languages and cultures under the slogan "Iran: One nation, one country, one language."
Non-Persian populations in Iran Shah Reza Pahlavi (1925–1941) established the authoritarian colonial Persian nation-state and imposed it on all non-Persian peoples in Iran. Following the February 1979 revolution, Islamic rulers maintained the same nation-state system, based on the official status of one language, one culture, and one nationality, through a combination of soft and harsh methods such as insult, humiliation, imprisonment, execution, and torture of non-Persians demanding their national and ethnic rights, in flagrant violation of human rights laws and United Nations humanitarian law.
Approximately two-thirds of Iran's population, namely the non-Persian peoples, are currently denied their most basic political, cultural, and linguistic rights. Some of them, such as the Arabs and Baluchis, are oppressed by external colonialism, while others, such as the Kurds and Azerbaijani Turks, are oppressed internally.
The goal of establishing the Persian nation-state in Iran was to change the bounds of the Persian language to match the political frontiers of the country, i.e. to compel everyone to become Persians. For this reason, Iran's rulers conducted atrocities against non-Persian peoples a century ago, as well as throughout the Pahlavi and Islamic Republic eras.
People and their active forces for change in Iran
Women, non-Persian peoples, and Iran's underprivileged classes are among the social actors interested in altering the system. The opposition movement has proved that the second reason is more crucial since it possesses the fighting capability to compel the administration to withdraw and even seek to replace it. The Ahwazis were the first to join in most rallies and protests throughout the previous two decades, and now that they have decided to remove the Shah's administration through strikes in the oil industry and other areas of the economy, they can reprise this role.
In an interview with state television, Iranian Interior Minister Rahmani Fazli labeled the Arabistan area (Persian Khuzestan), along with Tehran, Fars, Kermanshah, and Kurdistan, as the most hazardous region during the 2019 revolt. He also added; "The situation in Khuzestan (Arabistan) differs from other provinces and is characterized by a special situation, as protests spread to about 18 cities."
On the other hand, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard's spokesperson, Ramadan Sharif, stated that "the monarchists, the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, and the separatists" had a significant part in the rebellion. Sharif defines separatists as all Arab activists and those fighting for their national rights, regardless of whether they are separatists. What is more crucial, however, is to recognize the rising importance of non-Persian nations and their effect on Iranian events, as well as other forces such as the People's Mujahideen Organization and the royalists who work at the national level. This occurs when ethnicities were marginalized and had little political power in Iran.
Let us not forget that it was the Azerbaijani Turks who broke the spine of the Shah's rule in the Tabriz protests on February 18, 1978. The Islamic Republic regime's ongoing attacks on Iranian Kurdish opposition groups in Iraq demonstrate its concern of the influence of non-Persian peoples in any future change in Iran. In addition to the prominent movement and great sacrifices made by these peoples during the Jena-Mahsa Uprising in 2022. The Balochistan region is also experiencing a semi-civil war, something we have not seen in other areas of Iran.
International and Iranian human rights organizations allege that defendants and inmates in Sistan, Baluchestan, Kurdistan, and Khuzestan [Ahwaz] experience harsher treatment and sentences, although there is less information and media coverage on them. These organizations confirm in various reports that the largest number of those sentenced to death in Iran are Kurds, Baloch, and Arabs, and the largest number of prisoners in Iran are Arabs, Kurds, Baloch, and Azerbaijani Turks.
The position of non-Persian peoples in the struggle, as well as their geopolitical and geoeconomic importance, gives them importance and priority in the struggle against Iran's totalitarian regime, and their growing awareness of their national rights increases their strength and participation in the struggle process when compared to before the revolution. Workers, teachers, and retirees all play a role in the process of change, even if their demonstrations are mostly about pressing concerns; nonetheless, they did not engage fully in the 2022 revolt. Residents on the city's outskirts, or slums, played an essential part in the 1978-1979 revolution and must be recruited into the opposition to the current government.
The popularity of the mainstream Islamic discourse is limited to around 20% of the country's population and is progressively falling in Iranian society. Royalist, Persian nationalist, and leftist opposition rhetoric is also prevalent among some sectors of Iranian society, the majority of whom are Persian, although it is not widely popular among non-Persian peoples, who frequently embrace non-Persian nationalist discourse.
Contrary to what we observed during the 1979 revolution, this discourse began to spread among those peoples, creating way for new discourses that progressively impacted solely the Persian populace.
In addition to the political forces active in the 2022 demonstrations and protests, in which more than 500 people were killed, most of whom were women, Baloch, Kurds, Azeris, and Arabs, we can talk about the reformists who did not participate in those protests, but they began to move away from the regime little by little, including former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Moussavi and his Green Movement followers, as well as reformists who boycotted the last parliamentary elections, bypassed the present system in a declaration issued in 2022.
The Ahwazi Arab people, their suffering and their role in the process of change
Non-Persian peoples have had a similar denominator in their interaction with successive Iranian administrations since 1925: nationalist persecution, but for the Ahwazi Arab people, we must add racial oppression. Since the fall of Arab rule in the Kingdom of Arabistan and the overthrow of Prince Khazal by Persian occupation forces in 1925, the Pahlavi regime has changed the name of Arabistan to Khuzestan, banned the use of Arabic as the region's official language and replaced it with Persian, and carried out massacres against the Ahwazi Arab people, including:
1- In 1925, Shah Reza al-Pahlavi's invading soldiers slaughtered 700 Ahwazi Arabs in the city of Muhammara, according to Ain al-Sultanah, the Shah's nephew Nasser al-Din al-Qajari, whose memoirs were referenced by the Iranian government at the time .
2- In 1928 , 100 Ahwazi Arabs were slaughtered as a result of peasant disobedience in all of Arabistan's villages.
3- Haider al-Talil, commander of the Battle of Al-Wanj in the Al-Minaw district , suppressed the revolution, killing 80 Arabs. The atrocities persisted during the tenure of the Islamic Republic.
4- On May 30, 1979, the Islamic Republic's armed forces and militias attacked political and cultural facilities as well as Arabs' peaceful rallies in Muhammara, killing 200 and injuring 500. The Tehran daily "Pegham Emroz" accuses Admiral Ahmed Madani, the military ruler of Ahwaz province (Khuzestan), of carrying out these atrocities .
5- In 2005, Iranian security forces killed more than 50 Arab civilians in the city of Ahvaz who participated in peaceful rallies to oppose government policies. According to a Human Rights Watch study cited in the US State Department archives, the goal is to shift the region's demographic mix in favor of non-Arab citizens.
6- The killing of 35 Ahwazi political prisoners—20 at Ahvaz Central Prison (Shayban) and 15 at Sepidar Prison - on March 30 and 31, 2020, following a strike by the convicts in protest of the officials' lack of care for their health as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Voice of Germany's Persian department reported this, citing Amnesty International . Meanwhile, the Human Rights Watch Organization in Iran stated that on March 31, a fire broke out in Shayban Prison during prisoner demonstrations, killing 80 Ahwazi detainees alone . According to the website of this group, the total number of casualties in these two jails is 100 dead, including the twenty detainees executed in Sepidar prison.
In addition to these atrocities, there have been hundreds more executions and assassinations as a result of torture, poisoning, and deaths in staged occurrences, as well as other events and demonstrations for which no figures are available. The Islamic regime is now imprisoning hundreds of Ahwazi artists, intellectuals, and activists in deplorable conditions, with Iranian human rights organizations ranking Ahwaz Central jail, also known as Shaiban Prison, as the worst jail in Iran. Iranian security forces executed Ahwazi leaders Mansour Silawi Al-Ahwazi in London in 2008 and Ahmed Mawla Al-Nisi in The Hague, Netherlands, in 2017.
Khuzestan Province [Ahwaz], which accounts for almost 80% of Iran's oil and non-oil income, ranks thirty-first among Iranian provinces in the education sector . This province ranks last among Iran's 31 provinces in this sector. This is because Arabs are not taught in their home tongue in schools, and their culture, language, and arts are being suppressed.
Furthermore, the environmental destruction caused by fossil fuel industries, as well as the plundering of this province's oil, water, and other wealth for the development of Tehran and the Persian provinces and cities in central Iran, all reflect colonial policies pursued by Tehran's ruling elites.
The purposeful drying of the Hawizeh marshes forced the evacuation of around 118 villages and the migration of their population to large cities to live in slums, resulting in sand storms most days of the year and the spread of many forms of cancer, respiratory ailments, and children's disorders. Not to mention the diversion of river courses into the Iranian heartland, which kills agricultural fields in Ahwaz and dries up the population's main means of income, with the goal of relocating them to locations within Iran to integrate with other nations.
The Islamic Republic dictatorship also stole hundreds of hectares of agricultural land along the Karun River, displacing villagers and farmers and building 16 agricultural-industrial firms in their place, employing workers primarily from neighboring provinces. More than 200 Arabic cities, villages, neighborhoods, geographical and natural locations have been renamed in Persian, and Persian names have been forced on infants. Whoever insists on an Arabic name that is offensive to Iranian public taste would be barred from using official papers.
The regime's declining popularity brings it closer to its final fate
What the former Islamic Republic's guide, Ruhollah Khomeini, and the current guide, Ali Khamenei, feared was a decline in the popularity of this religious republic, which has already occurred as a result of the Supreme Leader's poor and authoritarian performance and that of his regime, particularly following the popular uprisings that Iran witnessed in 2017, 2019, and 2022. The involvement of non-Persian peoples was apparent and distinct in the last two uprisings.
According to Reuters, the participation rate in Iranian presidential elections did not fall below 50% until 2020, when Ibrahim Raisi was elected President of the Republic, and the participation rate in parliamentary elections did not fall below 50% until after the 2019 uprising, in which 1,500 people were killed.
The number of voters in the March 11, 2024 parliamentary elections was around 25 million, compared to the number of eligible voters, which was 61 million, indicating a 41 percent participation rate. This is what government authorities announced, which is obviously suspect given the opposition's claim of 27 percent participation. But even if we believe in this percentage, for the first time in the history of elections in the Islamic Republic of Iran, the percentage of participation in the elections has fallen to this low. The graph illustrates a fall in participation from 62 percent in the 2016 parliamentary elections to 42.5 percent in the 2020 elections and 41 percent in 2024.
Participation in non-Persian and ethnically mixed regions was lower than in other regions, including Ahwaz, Balochistan, East Azerbaijan, Kurdistan, Alborz, and Tehran, confirming their importance in Iran's future. As a result, we might see the three aforementioned revolutions as a watershed moment in the people's battle against the Iranian dictatorship, and the parliamentary elections as a referendum affirming the regime's illegitimacy.
The Iranian regime's diminishing popular base portends mass protests and uprisings in the future years, threatening the regime's very survival.
Iran and the Middle East
Studying the Middle East area necessitates a thorough understanding of the major active forces in it, with Iran being one of the most significant states acting in a conflict environment, each of which strives to gain greater interests and influence in it. Iranian strategy is founded on historical claims, aspirations, and sectarian exploitation, which has resulted in the dissolution and collapse of several Arab nations, as well as significant changes in the Middle East.
The criteria of imperialism I described before apply to the policies and actions of both the Shahnshahi Pahlavi dictatorship and the Islamic Republic of Iran, with the exception that Iran is a regional imperialist. The former Shah's rule was referred to as the Gulf's policeman, and its political, cultural, and military actions were widely recognized across the region.
Following the 1979 revolution and the Iran-Iraq conflict, the Islamic Republic of Iran was obsessed with military and internal affairs. Iraqi, Lebanese, Yemeni, Afghan, and Pakistani political-military groups were also founded in Iran and overseas during the early years of the revolution, with the Iranian regime providing material, moral, and military assistance.
When the embers of war were doused, the flames of the expansionist drive rekindled, and Iran proceeded to expand its military organization. Iran's rulers developed a worldview centered on restoring the glories of the Persian Empire. They recognized that the greatest way to protect themselves was through what they referred to as strategic depth, which is the euphemism for regional expansion. The Safavid Empire became their mental and historical paradigm to follow, and this is especially true for Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. It appears that this mental and psychological aspect serves as a stimulant and complement to other reasons, such as the Islamic Republic's rulers' economic, political, and ideological interests in expanding and advancing imperial policies in the area.
There is little question that some elements of the Islamic Republic's Constitution, as well as Khomeini's objectives, particularly his emphasis on the need of exporting the Islamic Revolution, opened the way for the implementation of such programs.
Although nationalist incentives drove and continue to drive the monarchy and republican regimes' expansionist policies, the previous Shah's regime, due to its secular nature, was unable to benefit from common sectarian and Shiite relations in the same way that the leaders of the Islamic Republic did, especially since it was mixed with revolutionary literature in the latter.
How can imperial Iran be tamed and then be changed?
The protests and demonstrations of 2022, known as the "Women, Life, and Freedom" uprising, shook the Iranian regime, and because Iran is on the verge of similar events, it is critical to understand the weaknesses and strengths of that broad movement and learn from them.
Weakness of the Movement
1- Excessive dependence on international opposition movements in the absence of organized domestic political opposition. As we saw during the uprising, such a vacuum resulted in the formation of the so-called "Mahsa" coalition, which collapsed after a short period of time, causing a general wave of despair among the movement's supporters and providing a favorable pretext for government propaganda about the movement's demise and failure.
2- A lack of plan, organization, and a broad coalition, as greater reliance was placed on spontaneous rallies and protests rather than continuous strikes, as occurred in Poland, Serbia, South Africa, and even Iran in the latter months of the Shah's tenure.
3- The gray segments of Iranian society did not participate in that uprising because they feared the unknown future, and this is somewhat due to the first reason.
4- The entrenchment of security elements among the ranks of the opposition, without exception, from the Persian royalist and nationalist parties to the organizations of non-Persian ethnicities and nationalities. In reality, this is the most significant vulnerability among international opposition groups and organizations, impeding their ability to mobilize and coordinate against the regime.
5- Some people did not fully join in the 2022 rebellion for a variety of reasons, including historical, social, and cultural considerations. Turkish-Azeri nationalism, while being the largest nationality in terms of size and accounting for almost one-third of Iran's population, did not contribute fully to the rebellion. This also applies to Arabs, the majority of whom did not support the revolution's cry, "Women, Life, Freedom," and were fearful of the entry of monarchists and Persian nationalist forces to power, whose image the opposition Persian media blasted around the clock. The Baloch had the most and longest participation, continuing the conflict more than a year after the 2022 rebellion ended.
6- Existing issues between Iranian peoples, particularly between surrounding peoples, the most visible of which are disagreements and occasionally clashes between Azerbaijani Turks and their Kurdish neighbors. Although Azerbaijani activists went to Mahabad and other Kurdish cities in solidarity with the Kurds during the 2022 uprising, and despite its strong momentum and impact on people-to-people rapprochement, it did not completely bridge the mistrust and gap between Turks and Kurds that dates back to the early years of the Islamic Revolution.
The Arabs are particularly concerned about the influence of royalists and Persian nationalists among their Lurs and Bakhtiari neighbors, who harass them at work, in their homes, and elsewhere. The Sistani and Baloch people in the Sistan and Baluchestan area have a hostile relationship. In all of these examples, we can observe the security services' involvement in fuelling these disagreements, whether directly or indirectly.
The differences that exist between various political trends, the most important of which are the confrontations that took place abroad between supporters of the monarchy (led by the deposed Shah's son Reza Pahlavi) on the one hand and Republicans, leftists, and elements of non-Persian peoples on the other. It is worth noting that the aforementioned Mahsa coalition included Reza Pahlavi, one of the Kurdish party leaders, as well as some female activists, civic activists, and celebrities.
The Strengths of the Regime
1- The masses who still support and support the regime, whose percentage in all of Iran is about 20 percent, according to what the election results show in recent years.
2- The repressive force, which consists of the Revolutionary Guard forces, the Basij, and the security and intelligence services affiliated with the regime, headed by Ali Khamenei, and the number of these agencies reaches six.
3- The psychology of the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, differs from that of the Shah, as well as many of the leaders of countries overthrown by the waves of the Arab Spring, due to his extensive reading of books and his long experience following his participation in the struggle against the Shah's regime, as well as his arrest and exile to remote areas of Iran during that regime's reign. Surviving an assassination attempt after the revolution and the events of the Iran-Iraq war, and believing that all could be done to protect the regime, he inherited this from Khomeini who felt that in order to maintain the Islamic Republic's system, acts of devotion including as prayer, fasting, and Hajj may be prohibited. Furthermore, his severe treatment of protestors and detainees in Iran and other Iranian-allied nations, as well as his disproportionate murdering and cruelty.
4- The formation of armed political and ideological groups affiliated with it in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, and even expansion into some African countries. The regime uses this as evidence of its power and influence in these countries to satisfy the nationalist instinct of Iranians who are passionate about expansion and development in other countries.
5- Russian and Chinese support for the regime in the economic, diplomatic, and security fields.
Conclusion:
The issue of nationalities in Iran is the Achilles heel of the ruling regime in Iran. The experience of expansionist rule under the Shah and the Islamic Republic confirms that overthrowing the ruling tyrant alone is insufficient; instead, the central authoritarian-colonial regime in Iran must be deposed, as it is a barrier to improving relations with countries in the region and around the world, as well as the main impediment to the economic, social, linguistic, and cultural development of all components of Iranian society and the democratization of the state- the nation has been around for a century, and it may be attributed to the struggles of women, non-Persian peoples, and downtrodden groups.
The fundamental role in any change is that of the inside, and the outside (regional and worldwide) is regarded supportive of what the inside is doing, with types of assistance ranging from diplomatic and political backing to the like. However, this should not be confined to backing an opposition linked with a single dominating nationality, but should also include oppositions and groups associated with non-Persian peoples. We know that the Persian lobby in the United States and Europe is considerably stronger than that of other nations in this respect. Regional and international support has been allocated primarily to the Persian media that opposes the regime and to dominant nationalism, and it must include all other nationalities (Arabs, Baluchis, Kurds, Turks) who have played and continue to play an important role in the process of change, particularly in supporting the establishment of television channels, radio stations, and other media outlets.
