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The Allegation that Iran is Developing Nuclear Weapons is a Mirage: Arshin Adib-Moghaddam

Tehran_skyline_may_2007 (Wiki Commons)
Tehran_skyline_may_2007 (Wiki Commons)

Tehran_skyline_may_2007 (Wiki Commons)

Interview by Kourosh Ziabari

Dr. Arshin Adib-Moghaddam

Dr. Arshin Adib-Moghaddam

Dr. Arshin Adib-Moghaddam is a political commentator and lecturer in the comparative and international politics of western Asia at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He was born in the Taksim area of Istanbul to Iranian parents and raised in Hamburg/Germany. He studied at the University of Hamburg, American University and Cambridge. He is the author of The International Politics of the Persian Gulf: A Cultural Genealogy, Iran in World Politics: The question of the Islamic Republic and A metahistory of the Clash of Civilisations.

He is an Honorary Fellow of the University of Cambridge’s European Trust Society and he was the first Jarvis Doctorow Fellow at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford.

His articles and commentaries have appeared on Guardian, CNN, Monthly Review, Independent, Open Democracy, Antiwar and Daily Star. His scholarly papers also have been published in “Critical Studies on Terrorism”, “Cambridge Review of International Affairs”, “Third World Quarterly” and “International Studies Journal.”

Dr. Adib-Moghaddam’s latest book “A Metahistory of the Clash of Civilisations: Us and Them Beyond Orientalism” was published in 2011 by the Hurst & Co. and Columbia University Press.

As described by Amazon.com, “Adib-Moghaddam’s investigation explains the conceptual genesis of the clash of civilizations and the influence of western and Islamic representations of the other. He highlights the discontinuities between Islamism and the canon of Islamic philosophy, which distinguishes between Avicennian and Qutbian discourses of Islam, and he reveals how violence became inscribed in western ideas, especially during the Enlightenment. Expanding critical theory to include Islamic philosophy and poetry, this metahistory refuses to treat Muslims and Europeans, Americans and Arabs, and the Orient and the Occident as separate entities.”

He joined me in an in-depth interview and answered my questions regarding the continued controversy over Iran’s nuclear program, the Western media’s black propaganda against Iran, the future of Iran-West relations and the prospect of Iran’s Green Movement.

What follows is the complete text of my interview with Dr. Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, political scientist and author.

Kourosh Ziabari: Over the past years, the United States and its European allies imposed several rounds of UN-authorized and non-authorized sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program. The general policy of West towards Iran brings to mind several questions. First of all, I would like to ask you, as a political scientist, that why is Iran singled out over its nuclear program? Who has put forward reliable evidence that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, or has the intention to do so? Does the West’s hostility toward Iran simply emanate from Iran’s nuclear program? If so, then why did the former U.S. President George W. Bush label Iran as part of an Axis of Evil under President Khatami who was a reformist and open-minded politician?

Arshin Adib-Moghaddam: You are right, and one has to stress that on every occasion, lest the lies that led to the invasion of Iraq will be repeated: There is no evidence that Iran is building a nuclear weapon. No IAEA report, not even national intelligence agencies hostile to the Iranian state such as the CIA and the Mossad in Israel have provided any evidence to that end. So the nuclear weapons allegation is a political mirage, a tactical manoeuvre to outflank Iran on other matters.

I think Chomsky is right when he says that it is Iran’s insistence on an independent foreign policy that is being punished. The allegation that Iran is developing nuclear weapons is a Trojan horse to legitimise the comprehensive sanctions regime and to contain Iran’s regional power. Having said that, I don’t believe that Iran is facing a coherent ‘western’ block. Even in the United States, where the image of Iran is professionally manufactured by anti-Iranian lobbying groups, there are differences of opinion on how to engage the country. There is a difference between Barak Obama and George W. Bush. In Europe too, we have been engaged in fostering a different kind of approach to Iran, one that is not reliant on myths, but the reality on the ground.

The fact remains that Iran is a regional superpower with influence in all the hotspots of the region. The sanctions policy, the policy of containment has largely failed. It has not changed Iranian behaviour on strategic matters. If anything, the politics of aggression has emboldened the rather more hawkish elements in the Iranian state, because it is them who thrive on the rhetoric of confrontation. You mention the axis-of-evil speech of George W. Bush. It came after the reformist President Mohammad Khatami made major concessions, offering support for the war against the Taliban in the aftermath of the terror attacks on 9/11. President Khatami went out of his way to offer medical support to US pilots who would be downed on Iranian territory, a major confidence building step. It was reciprocated with the axis of evil speech, one of the most disastrous and murderous foreign policy speeches in the history of the United States.

It should also be noted that Khatami suspended the enrichment of uranium in response to a deal with the European Union. But the EU, under the sway of Tony Blair and others, did not adhere to their side of the bargain. This was a major diplomatic blunder. Khatami was left with nothing. The right-wing in Iran was quick to capitalise on the situation. It was then when the Ahmadinejad faction accused the reformers of selling out the national interest of the country. With nothing to present, Khatami was robbed of a counter-case. Here he was talking about a dialogue amongst civilisation, condemning calls for the death of America in Iran, suspending the enrichment of uranium, supporting the campaign against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, reaching out to the American people on CNN, only to be demonised and placed along Saddam Hussein and Kim-Jong Il in the axis of evil.

But there is no time to reminisce or to be apathetic. The apostles of war are preaching again and they are taking their orders from Netanyahu. It is an ongoing battle. They are inventing myth in order to advocate military aggression. We are working on the truth. They wield sword and sceptre above our heads. We stick to the pen and the lectern. Theirs is a case of hate and destruction. Ours is geared to peace and reconciliation. Their conscious is pragmatic, ours is principled. We resist, they exercise power.

KZ: Israel is the sole possessor of nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Several international organizations including the Federation of American Scientists have confirmed this fact. Why doesn’t the international community, especially the United States and its European friends, take action to legalize Israel’s nuclear program and investigate its atomic arsenal? Why doesn’t Israel comply with the UNSC resolution 487 which called on Tel Aviv to put its nuclear facilities under the IAEA safeguards?

AA: From a legal perspective, there is a nuance of course. Israel, like Pakistan and India never signed the Non Proliferation Treaty. But let’s leave that aside for a moment, for it doesn’t really answer why the Israeli state is treated different than the Iranian government. It is ironic that Israel has done everything Iran is accused of: Iran is accused of terrorism; Israel openly admits that it pursues a policy of assassination all over the world. Iran is accused of meddling in the affairs of Arab countries; Israel has launched two invasions against them in the past five years killing thousands of civilians in Gaza and Lebanon. Iran has been accused and sanctioned for developing nuclear weapons without any evidence; Israel has nuclear weapons and boasts of close trade ties with the United States and the European Union. Moreover, Israel is the only country in the world that colonises territory in clear violation of international law and under the auspices of the ‘international community.’ This is called the ‘settlement policy’ in the official jargon of the Netanyahu administration. Not even the condemnation of President Obama, important in its own right, changed the situation. So Israel is what Iran is punished for. It should be said that there are many dissidents in Israel itself that disagree with the policies of Netanyahu and the strategy of colonisation of Palestinian territory.

So far Israel has been shielded from international law by successive US administrations. It is the veto of the US that prevents any serious UNSC resolution against Israel. When it comes to Israel, and consequently western Asia and North Africa, the United States continues to be hostage to the pro-Israeli lobby in the country. However, the tide is turning. There are signs of a progressive counter-discourse gaining ground. Obama and Netanyahu are at odds, let there be no doubt about this. And there is resistance to the influence of the Israeli right-wing on US domestic politics and foreign affairs. But for the moment the political elites in the US are not sufficiently independent to think in terms of their national interest in western Asia and North Africa.

I have argued in “A metahistory of the clash of civilisations” that justice in world politics is the surface effect of a series of constellations that can be manipulated towards particular ends. So justice is a product of politics and diplomacy rather than an objective value that is universally applicable. At the same time I reject the notion that world politics has to be anarchic, that the Hobbesian idea of a war of all against all is inevitable. It was Europe and then the United States that constructed and supervised this unjust order. It is not due to some kind of natural law. So it can be changed. The Israeli nuclear programme must be seen within this larger context of an unjust world order that continues to produce hypocrisies on major issues facing human kind. I mean, it is not as if we could detach from all of this. Politics affects everything we do, from birth to death, cereal to nightgown. The reform of the international institutions must do away with the hierarchy inscribed in them. One way of dealing with this would be to turn the UNSC into a rather more representative body that would reflect the emerging non-western world order.

KZ: The sanctions of the United States and European Union against Iran have targeted Iran’s medical sector, oil and gas industry, energy sector and even automobile and food industries. Ordinary Iranians are deprived of having access to the most rudimentary necessities of their daily life as a result of these crippling sanctions. Tens of patients suffering from chronic disorders die each year because the foreign firms don’t allow their products to be exported to Iran Even the reformist leaders Mehdi Karroubi and Mirhossein Mousavi have condemned the crippling sanctions of the West against Iran. What’s your idea? Aren’t these sanctions some kind of violation of human rights?

AA: There are two assumptions in the question that I would like to challenge. First, I think the Iranian economy is doing well if we take into consideration that the country has been under international sanctions for three decades now and that it is absorbing the ‘baby boom’ generation after the revolution. There are many problems of course, unemployment, inflation, economic mismanagement, etc, but the macroeconomic indicators of Iran – economic growth, foreign direct investment – are sound. Recent reports by the World Bank, UNCTAD and the IMF indicate these positive economic trends quite clearly.

After all, Iran continues to be an affluent country. From my own experience in Iran there is no shortage of medical provision and the country continues to have an intricate and wide ranging social welfare system with several foundations and institutions that are dedicated to the plight of the poor. They continue to function against all odds. To my mind the sanctions policy has largely failed. A country like Iran with the second largest gas reserves in the world and the second highest production of crude oil cannot be effectively isolated. But I take your point that economic sanctions hurt civilians rather than the state. Especially in the aviation industry the sanctions policy is killing Iranians. In that sense, it is true that they violate human dignity.

Yet I don’t think that the sanctions have in any way ‘crippled’ Iran as Hillary Clinton and others put it. The term crippling is very discriminatory and distasteful by the way, given that many US soldiers come back disabled from the many wars that the US is engaged in. It is even more disrespectful than the so called ‘carrot and stick’ policy applied to Iran, a phrase that is used for donkeys. Terms and phrases like that indicate the discursive violence enveloping Iranian-American relations. It is equally prevalent in Iran, of course, for instance the calls of death to America. To my mind, progressive independence, independence that is not only material, but psychological too, begets that Iran does away with slogans demonising or praising any country.

As for the second part of the question: In fact the Iranian opposition is by far more hawkish on the issue of nuclear negotiations, for they do not hold the responsibly of power. As you know I have never accepted the discourse of human rights as a part of the foreign policy of the state. Human rights are the prerogative of civil society. The state is merely there to execute our demands in that regard. I don’t think any of us need Nicolas Sarkozy to enlighten us about human rights. But it should be said in the same breath that the human rights situation in Iran is problematic. Again, why would we look at the representations by the ‘west’ in order to assess how we treat each other? Isn’t this a form of dependency? And does it not invite the other side into Iranian affairs? What we need is a transparent, legally grounded policy of human rights that defines the dignity of Iranians and their rights within the context of the social, religious, cultural and ethnic realities of contemporary Iran. An autonomous human rights shura, if you want, not in order to present Iran as a particularly tolerant country to the outside, that would be an automatic side effect, but in order to assess why there are so many complaints about the human rights situation in Iran by Iranians living in the country itself. The weakness of the system in this regard has serious national and international repercussions. The national security of a country starts with the nation— the citizenry which is the most precious commodity for the security of a country. The revolution was quite clear on this aspect, the centrality of the “tudeh”, “mardom”, the “ummah”. Surely, we are not saying that other countries are responsible for the dignity of the Iranian people? There is a splendid excursus by Ali Shariati on this matter, on the differences between “bashariyat” and “insaniyat” between being human in biological terms and humaneness. “Insaniyat” or humaneness requires caring for the plight of the ‘other’, the hamsay-e or neighbour with whom we literally share our shadow, “ham – saye”. I have used this differentiation of Shariati to criticise the inhumane treatment of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq by the US army. I don’t mean to sound too dramatic but I believe that we need the discourse of insaniyat in Iran today, probably more than ever.

KZ: Your articles and commentaries have appeared on several mainstream media outlets and you have been in close contact with a number of them. Don’t you believe that all of these media outlets have an anti-Iranian approach which prevents them from maintaining impartiality and objectivity? Don’t you trace the footsteps of a concerted anti-Iranian propaganda in these media? Why don’t they ever write anything of Iran’s rich and sophisticated culture? Why don’t they ever write anything about Iran’s scientific progresses? Why don’t they ever write about Iranian artists, scholars and scientists and the richness of Persian culture and literature? What we read of Iran in these media is simply confined to Iran’s alleged sponsorship of terrorism, nuclear program and violation of human rights. Why is it so?

AA: No I don’t think so. I certainly don’t see a concert of anti-Iranian propaganda. It is more of a cacophony. By that I mean that there is no government or agency that could control every aspect of the international media, otherwise the demand for some of my writings would not penetrate the mainstream as you put it. So I don’t think there is some kind of a conductor when it comes to the media concert on Iran. There is no monolithic coherence or a consensus that is all-encompassing. There is a real difference between Fox News and CNN, and there is a difference between The Sun and The Guardian of London. But it is true to say that there are many people shouting, and that the megaphones are readily available. It is surely easier to get published with a story that is anti-Iranian, rather than one that aspires to objectivity.

But the reason for that is not an all-encompassing conspiracy, but the composition of the mainstream media in the ‘west’ itself. At the margins there is room for dissent, but the bulk of the news stories have become a part of what Theodor Adorno aptly called a ‘culture industry’ decades ago. This culture industry reacts to market forces by far more than it reacts to the truth. As a current example: Here, in the UK the government of Prime Minister Cameron is currently grappling with a major corruption case involving several newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch’s company News Corporation. There have been arrests; Murdoch and his son had to appear in front of a parliamentary commission and so on. The allegations range from bribery of police officers who leaked information to journalists to the illegal hacking of phones and computers. It is a right mess. Murdoch co-owns Fox News together with the Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal. Murdoch also owns The Sunday Times, The Times, and several tabloid papers. So there is a concentration of power here that creates its own political economy of truth. This is unhealthy for a democracy and it is unhelpful to understand complex countries such as Iran.

But again, from a critical perspective, and in this case it means self-criticism, one has to ask why it is so easy to write nonsense about Iran and why it is that Iran’s image is so far removed from the reality? I don’t think that the power of the mainstream media is analytically possible without the absence of a functioning counter-discourse. Why is the international media not flooded with experts from Iran itself? How many of Iran’s cultural attaches in the embassies do their job properly? How many conferences do they organise on the media representation of Iran? How much outreach is there? And what about the media landscape in Iran in terms of its international appeal? An image can only be manipulated if the resistance to that manipulation is not sophisticated enough. To put it in simple terms: Iranians in Iran are the best authors of their narrative, highly educated, internet-savvy, most of them truly brilliant, it is just a matter of disseminating their message, so that there is a second opinion on the country.

KZ: The critics of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad believe that he isolated Iran in the international community with his harsh policies and uncompromising stance, especially with regards to nuclear issue. They say that Iran has other important priorities than nuclear program and should not sacrifice its position and prestige in the international level by insisting on enriching uranium which is a sensitive issue for the Westerners. What’s your take on that?

AA: Success in international diplomacy is not merely dependent on the demand, in this case enriching uranium on Iranian soil, but on the way that demand is packaged. It is not what is in the package that is determining the reaction, but the way it is enveloped.

President Ahmadinejad stands accused of using the wrong wrapping paper. His rhetoric, his demeanour his overall discourse has been largely anti-diplomatic and confrontational. The Supreme Leader was quite aware of this at an early stage of the Presidency which is why he nominated a foreign policy council to oversee his performance. In that sense President Ahmadinejad is quite comparable to George W. Bush who was equally inept to articulate the national interest of the United States, which is why he plunged the country into a political and economic mess. Having said that, Iran is not isolated per se. Iran continues to be supported by those countries who are preparing for a new world order that will be distinctively multi-polar and non-western. The initiative of Turkey and Brazil is indicative of the future, the emergence of China as a global player is probably the most important factor, and the Arab revolts are very consequential too.

The puppets are falling and the puppet-master is running out of characters. The shah, Ben-Ali, Mubarak, their primary sin was that they were considered to be subservient to external demands. It was their colonial mindset, the notion that they simply can’t do it on their own that sealed their fate. The Iranian revolution has to be seen as a step in the direction of a multi-polar world order because it offered an alternative to superpower politics. In fact, the Cold War in Iran ended with the revolution.

KZ: The United States and Israel have long advocated a regime change in Iran and used every opportunity to sabotage Iran’s security by supporting terrorist groups such as PJAK and MKO or assassinating Iranian scientists and high-profile politicians. Don’t you believe that those Iranians living in Diaspora who support these American-Israeli efforts are betraying the cause of their compatriots living in Iran?

AA: To my mind, those fanatical opposition activists who cheer everything that is going wrong in Iran are delusional. They deserve compassion, not vitriol. Exile has a strange effect on the mind. It creates a dangerous duality. In terms of their mental habitat, many exiles continue to live in Iran. Yet because they are not there, everything that happens there appears in slow motion to them. They can’t keep up. You can take the individual from Iran, but you can’t take Iran out of the individual. Iran is like a magnetic nodal point that draws you in. It is really difficult to escape the lure of the country. Now if the duality of the exiled mind is not tempered with a good dose of reason, it creates a split personality, cultural schizophrenia in Dariush Shayegan’s words.

The idea that “they” have taken away “my” country from “me” turns into the idea that I have the right to take it back now. Iran is traded as a commodity that can be owned, rather than a bond that we all have to invest in, in order to yield results that are non-discriminatory. I don’t think, however, that any Iranian condones the murder of innocent scientists in their homeland.

There aren’t many of those delusional opposition activists left really, apart from the handful who have set up their satellite TV stations in their basement and who don’t really have serious influence on anything that is being said and written about Iran. But ideally, even they would be included in an extended parenthesis behind the meaning of contemporary Iran which would safeguard the right to contribute to the future of the country. Such a vast parenthesis would encompass all of those who identify themselves as Iranian, irrespective of political orientation, ethnic background, religious loyalties etc.

You are an Iranian if you say so, who am I to deny you the right to be one? Such an understanding of Iran as an open ended idea has a central function: It turns the politics of the country, including the dialectic between the Diaspora and Iranians living in Iran, from an antagonistic mode to an agonistic process of mutual acceptance, from the zero-sum politics of today, to the positive-sum policies of tomorrow, from the vilification of the political enemy to the acceptance of him/her as a legitimate competitor. The Iranian self, the “khodi” has always been cosmopolitan and politically promiscuous. Unless this reality is accepted, the politics of the country will be decided on a limited ground that does not encompass the transnational vastness of the meaning of Iran. After all, Iran transcends, that much we can all agree upon. Hence, a politics of transcendence, the maximal autonomisation of the meaning of Iran is merited.

KZ: The European Union has recently taken the name of MKO off its list of terrorist organizations. Moreover, MKO was legalized in the United Kingdom on 24 June 2008, six months after winning a court battle over its legality. The U.S. congressmen are also making efforts to persuade the government to remove MKO from its terror list. What’s your estimation of this action? Isn’t it contrary to the claims of the American and European politicians who usually boast of their loyalty to the Iranian people and their support for the freedom and democracy movement in the country?

AA: Of course it is. The MKO is a terrorist sect with rigid organisational structures that would make any fascist rise in applause. But why is the case against Iran easier to build than the case against other countries, for instance Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia or Nicaragua, states that are allied to Iran? This is the real question that the political elites in Iran need to address. And then there is a second responsibility for what is happening: The primary reason why the MKO can act is the vacuum left behind by Iranian diplomacy in the last years. We can’t start the analysis with the effect. We have to look at the causes. Where are the cultural attaches protesting against the activities of the MKO? Where are their outlines for concerted PR campaigns that would reveal the atrocities that the MKO committed? How many international conferences have been organised on the links between the MKO and Saddam Hussein? Why is this little organisation an issue in the first place?

What is needed in order to safeguard Iran’s national interest is a politics of friendship and reconciliation that stretches as far as possible to the realms of international diplomacy: state to state, state to society, and most importantly civil society to civil society. The dialogue between societies encapsulates the true essence of the term dawat that was so central to the libertarian aspects of the Islamic revolution. Inviting the ‘Other’ to listen is a virtue. Obviously an invitation requires a language that is empathetic rather than confrontational. As a Persian proverb has it: betamarg, beshin and befarma all mean sit down, but the polite befarma will probably yield the best reaction.
Stranger than fiction Order Now

KZ: And my final question is about the prospect of Green Movement in Iran. I strongly believe that the United States and European countries betrayed the Green Movement by explicitly supporting it and giving the hardliners an excuse to associate this reformist movement with the U.S. and Israel. The Western mainstream media also played their own role in this betrayal by portraying Mirhossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi as opposition leaders, while they were simply reformist candidates who wanted to implement soft reforms within Iran’s current political establishment, not opposition leaders who wanted to subvert the regime. What’s your idea?

AA: I don’t see the causal link between western policies and/or media representations and events in Iran. The politics of the country has its own dynamics. There is too much focus on what the media in the ‘west’ says, as if a journalist in New York has more power to decide the future of Iran than a university student in Tehran. Here, I disagree with post-colonial theorists and the Radical Left who keep telling us that imperial power is all-encompassing. To believe that, is not only analytically flawed but it creates a dangerous self-fulfilling prophecy. As for the Green Movement: it is the reincarnation of previous reform outfits such as the Second Khordad movement named after the date Mohammad Khatami was elected President.

It is the surface effect of the demands of Iranian civil society which will continue to be articulated beyond personalities such as Mousavi and Karroubi who themselves are merely the effects of those demands for reform. And you are right to say that these are calls for reforms to the Islamic Republic and not for a fundamentally new order. At the height of the demonstrations I wrote that they did not amount to a revolution. Most people disagreed. When it comes to the Iran story the degree of hypocrisy and opportunism is staggering, sometimes it is depressing. But one shouldn’t feel helpless in the face of the colossal lies that are being printed about Iran. There is room to resist and to fight for the truth. To my mind, this is primarily an intellectual jihad which requires research, patience and a good dose of cross-cultural empathy. It is not enough to speak truth to power from the outside any anymore. It is necessary to perfect resistance strategies that penetrate power from within. And isn’t this what the brave activists from Tahrir Square in Cairo to Syntagma Square in Athens are demanding as we speak?
 

Kourosh ZiabariKourosh Ziabari

 

Kourosh Ziabari is an Iranian freelance journalist, and regular contributor to RamallahOnline.com. More articles by Kourosh Ziabari can be found here.

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U.S. Human Rights Policy is Self-serving and Duplicitous

Kourosh Ziabari

Interview by Kourosh Ziabari, 6 March 2011

George Katsiaficas is a renowned university professor, sociologist, author and activist. He is a visiting American Professor of Humanities and Sociology at Chonnam National University, Gwangju, South Korea where he teaches and does research on the 1980s and 1990s East Asian uprisings.

George Katsiaficas

George Katsiaficas

Katsiaficas has a Ph.D. of sociology from the University of California, San Diego. Since 1990, he has taught sociology at the Wentworth Institute of Technology’s Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. During the period between 2006 and 2008, he was an Associate in Research at the Harvard University and Korea Institute.

He specializes in social movements, Asian politics, the U.S. foreign policy, comparative and historical studies and has written numerous books in these fields.

In 2003, he won the American Political Science Association’s Special Award for Outstanding Service and in 2008, received the Fulbright Senior Scholar Research Fellowship.

Among his major books are “The Battle of Seattle” by the New York’s Soft Skull Press, “Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party” by New York’s Routledge Press and “South Korean Democracy: Legacy of the Gwangju Uprising” by London’s Routledge Press.

What follows is the complete text of interview with Dr. George Katsiaficas on the recent uprising in the Arab world, its impacts on the international developments and its implications for the United States and its European allies.

Kourosh Ziabari: After Tunisia and Egypt in which the revolutionary forces and people on the ground succeeded in ousting the U.S.-backed puppets, several other Arab nations joined them and staged massive street demonstrations to call for civil liberties, improved living conditions, freedom and democratic governments. Now the whole Arab world is in a state of turmoil and unrest and the U.S.-backed dictators are facing the bitter reality that their autocracies are about to fail and collapse. What factors led to the extension of anti-government protests to the whole Arab world? Can we interpret this collective uprising a result of the explosion of strong pan-Arabist sentiments?

George Katsiaficas: No one could have predicted that the suicide of a vegetable vendor in rural Tunisia would unleash long pent-up frustrations on such a scale. If we take a long historical view, the Arab world went into a steep decline after Europeans discovered how to round Africa and established direct trade with the East. While oil has provided a huge stimulus for recovery in the 20th century, its effects have been drastically mitigated by elite corruption. The Arab people are finally awakening from a long slumber. The masses of ordinary Arabs today know in their hearts that they are more intelligent than their rulers. They know that they could all live better lives if they could get rid of the corrupt and often stupid elites trampling on their freedoms and hogging the money that rightfully belongs to everybody.

The phenomenon of uprisings spreading from place to another and drawing in ever more sectors of the population is one that I first uncovered when I studied the global movement of 1968. Unlike armed insurrections of the early part of the 20th century, the New Left involved a rapid proliferation of popular unarmed revolts—historically a new phenomenon. As I pulled together my empirical studies, I was stunned by the spontaneous spread of revolutionary aspirations in a chain reaction of uprisings and the massive occupation of public space—the sudden entry into history of millions of ordinary people who acted in a unified fashion, intuitively believing that they could change the direction of their society. Although they were not united by any centralized organization or even loosely tied together by any coordinating body, everyone was inspired by the heroic struggle of Vietnam. All over the world—from Paris to Prague, Chicago to Mexico City, and Dhaka to Beijing—people’s revolutionary aspirations and actions were not only synchronized, but they were also remarkably similar to each other in their international solidarity and desire for self-government.

After analyzing the proliferation of the global movement, especially the strikes of May 1968 in France and May 1970 in the US, I coined the term the “eros effect” to explain the rapid emergence of global solidarity and love. From my case studies, I came to understand how in moments of the eros effect, universal interests become generalized at the same time as the dominant values of society are negated (such as national chauvinism, hierarchy, and individualism). At that time, for example, opinion polls consistently showed that Ho Chi-minh was more popular than Richard Nixon on American college campuses. See The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968 (Boston: South End Press, 1987.)

At first glance, the current revolt appears to be confined to the Arab world, but in fact, it has already had a much wider effect: Gabon, Iran, and China have all felt the tremors from the rising in Egypt. Even workers in Wisconsin, who are fighting cutbacks in their standard of living, expressed admiration for, and inspiration from, the Egyptian uprising. Certainly pan-Arab sentiments are a driving force, yet they are not essential. People feel in their bones that change is possible—and not only in the Arab world.

KZ: Many Iranians believe that the uprisings of Tunisia and Egypt have been inspired by Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979. They compare the overthrowing of U.S.-backed Mubarak and Ben Ali to the dissolution of Mohammad Reza Shah’s government which was unconditionally supported by the United States and its European allies. Do you find such a relationship between these revolutions which took place during an interval of 32 years?

GK: Revolutions and popular uprisings have unexpected results—and not necessarily immediate ones. Even generations later, people’s memories and psyches assimilate lessons from previous eaves of struggles. The courage of Iranians in 1979, their withstanding of ferocious repression by the Shah and his forces, was evident for people all over the world, and inspired Haitians and Filipinos to overthrow their dictators. In 1987, I wrote that, “In the epoch after 1968, popular movements have internalized the New Left tactic of the occupation of public space as means of social transformation, and this tactic’s international diffusion led to the downfall of the Shah, Duvalier, and Marcos…the significance of the eros effect and the importance of synchronized world-historical movements will only increase.”

KZ: In your recent article, you’ve compared the new Middle East revolutions to the Korea’s 1987 June Uprising when after 19 consecutive days of massive street demonstrations, people could finally bring down the 26-year autonomy of military forces and hold direct presidential elections. In what ways are these movements similar to each other?

GK: In both cases, people basically fought with bare hands against mighty police forces and defeated them. Thousands of ordinary citizens claimed the right to remain together in public and refused to go home when ordered to do so. Small informal leadership circles emerged in the course of popular struggles, drawn initially from extant activist circles but also porous enough to admit many newcomers from a variety of constituencies. Most significantly, both revolts were quickly ended by the peaceful retirement of the incumbent president and vague promises made by the military—which in both cases remained in power as the uprising subsided. It took South Koreans another five years of struggle before the first civilian was elected president, and it took until 1996 to put the previous dictators in prison. While one agreed to the order to return some US$300 million that he had stolen from the public, Chun Doo-hwan famously testified he had less than $100 to his name—thereby losing his honor but keeping a fortune of perhaps $700 million. Both sums pale in comparison to the estimated fortune amassed by Mubarek. It remains to be seen how much of the Mubarek family holdings will be recovered—or, more importantly, whether or not Egypt will move toward substantive democracy. The longer people adopt a “wait and see” attitude, the less chance there is of change. Millennia of pharonic rule and dictatorships are not easily undone.

KZ: The Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi is said to have deposited $90 billion in Italian and other European banks. Since 1990s, the European states moved towards normalizing their ties with the dictator and supported him both politically and financially. Now, these Western states with which the Libyan dictator was once a close friend are calling for a unified international action against him. The old friend has now become a bitter enemy. Isn’t this an exercise of double standards by the Western governments?

GK: This double standard is nothing new. The US has a long history of riding on the backs of dictators in Third World countries and then tossing them away like a used car once they have outlived their usefulness. Longtime Philippines president Ferdinand Marcos was ousted with US approval in 1986; the CIA maintained real time connection to the rebels and provided them with invaluable intelligence information. Much earlier, in 1961, Rafael Trujillo, who had ruled the Dominican Republic with an iron fist for decades, was assassinated. Many people suspect the CIA provided the assassins with the weapons they used. In 1963, Ngo Dinh Diem, who had faithfully served US interests in South Vietnam from 1956 to 1963, was overthrown in a military coup about which the US had advance knowledge, and US refusal to assist him led to his assassination. Many people believe long-time US ally Park Chung-hee, ruler of South Korea from 1961 to 1979, was killed with advance US approval.

KZ: The media have reported that the mercenaries of Colonel Gaddafi have so far killed more than 6,000 protesters in Tripoli and other cities of Libya. What’s your prediction for the political future of Libya? Gaddafi has vowed to remain in power and “die as a martyr”; however, the protesters, despite the large-scale crackdown by the government haven’t retracted from their stance and are still calling for the ouster of the old dictator. What will be the outcome of these tumultuous clashes in Libya? Will the revolution finally end in the overthrowing of Muammar Gaddafi?

GZ: That is a life and death question for thousands of Libyans. It is too early for us to tell whether or not the armed revolt will prevail. With the US and NATO already overextended in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Joints Chiefs are resisting the call by conservatives here to implement a no-fly zone and come to the assistance of the rebels. We should not forget that Gaddafi has played ball with the US in recent years, and he is certainly calling in every favor he is owed. In 1980, the US encouraged Korean General Chun Doo-hwan to suppress the democratic popular uprising in Gwangju. There can be no doubt that it may well stand by and watch as Gaddafi crushes those opposed to his rule.

KZ: Prof. Rashid Khalidi believes that the recent uprisings in the Arab countries have transformed and changed the mainstream media’s portrayal of the Muslim world. The people that were once introduced as fanatic terrorists and extremists are now being called freemen who sacrifice their lives for the sake of achieving freedom and liberty. Do you agree with this viewpoint? Has the communal uprising of the Arab world changed the public’s viewpoint regarding the Arabs and Muslims?

GK: In my view, US public opinion has not really shifted much. The self-organization of armed resistance to Gaddafi astounds American journalists. American young people note with amusement that soccer and dating web sites were used by young Libyans to organize their uprising, but my students complain that they feel burdened by the region’s peoples looking to the US for help.

I suspect the change in Arabs’ own self-understanding is far more significant. For too long, the role of public opinion and the importance of ordinary people has been disregarded in the region, especially by insurgencies, which instead of seeking to stimulate popular movements and raise consciousness, instead pinned their hopes on elites or organized armed commando actions. The first and most influential shift occurred with the first Palestinian intifada in the late 1980s. The people’s uprising was ruthlessly crushed—remember Yitzhak Rabin’s orders to break bones of unarmed children—but the spirit of popular resistance was kindled throughout the region.

KZ: We already know that the authoritarian regimes of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, Yemen, Bahrain and Libya are among the major human rights violators in the world; however, the United States and its European cronies who frequently boast of their concerns about the preservation of human rights and freedom have been long indifferent to the persecution of political activists, incarceration of journalists and bloggers and other abuses of human rights in these countries. On the other hand, the superpowers have always employed the excuse of human rights for pressuring the independent and non-aligned nations such as Iran. What do you think about this dualistic approach?

GZ: From the very beginning, US human rights policy has been self-serving and duplicitous. In the name of democracy and enlightenment, the US exterminated millions of Native Americans. The US government broke nearly every treaty it ever signed with native peoples, a sad history known as the “Trail of Broken Treaties.” It would be laughable if it were not so tragic that a country based upon enslavement and murder of millions of Africans and genocide against Native Americans, a country that killed at least three million Koreans and more than two million Indochinese, a country that today is massacring thousands more in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, could seek to instruct anyone on “human rights.” Yet it is precisely a self-righteous belief in American freedom and superiority that motivates continuing genocide.

President Jimmy Carter, with whom the modern version of human rights policy is thought to originate, collaborated with Indonesian generals in the bloody invasion of East Timor. Carter approved the suppression of the Gwangju Uprising at the cost of hundreds of lives. Years later, when evidence of his actions could be assembled, a Peoples Tribunal found Carter and 7 other high US officials guilty of “crimes against humanity for violation of the civil rights of the people of Gwangju.” Five months afterwards, Carter was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. The hypocrisy continues unabated. Obama enlarges the war in Afghanistan and attacks Pakistan, and he, too, is awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. Should we be surprised that an award named after the inventor of dynamite provides international legitimation of Western imperialism and aggression?

KZ: As my final question, what’s your prediction for the future of Arab countries which have been engulfed by the waves of popular upsurge in the recent weeks? Will the autocratic regimes of the Persian Gulf region finally yield to the demands of the protesting revolutionaries?

Unfortunately, my prognosis is that the region will continue to be burdened by corrupt elites, but also that existing rulers will have to permit larger circles of economic innovators to emerge and grant people a wider range of civil liberties. With a population of 90 million, Egypt barely managed to manufacture what Costa Rica (population 900,000) could produce. Historically speaking, uprisings have opened the doors to subsequent economic development, as we readily see today in East Asia.

I suspect that substantive democracy in the Arab world (nor practically anywhere else for that matter) is not in the cards—at least for now. Elections may well be permitted but, as in the US, candidates will reflect the dominant parties, not any meaningful alternative. Military spending will continue to be lavish and result in enormous waste of resources. Militarized nation-states armed with weapons of mass destruction, although widely understood as historical anachronisms, will continue to reign supreme. Ordinary people’s dreams of a world at peace reveals a wisdom that far surpasses their rulers’ capacity to think, yet the resultant contradiction requires a globally synchronized effort to result in real change.

In my view, the synchronicity of revolts and occupation of public space that began in 1968 is continually widening its circles. Besides the overthrow of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, we saw a wave of uprisings after Gwangju that spread in six years from 1986 to 1992 through the Philippines, Burma, Tibet, China, Taiwan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Thailand. This most recent emergence of the eros effect in the Arab world indicates that popular movements are building to an even more intense climax, to a global uprising that might finally bring an end to the scandalous control of humanity’s collective wealth by a handful of billionaires.

Kourosh Ziabari

Kourosh Ziabari

 

Kourosh Ziabari is an Iranian freelance journalist, and regular contributor to RamallahOnline.com. More articles by Kourosh Ziabari can be found here.

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Persian Gulf’s name is an eternal reality: Prof. Pirouz Mojtahedzadeh

Prof. Pirouz Mojtahedzadeh, prominent Iranologist and geopolitics expert
Prof. Pirouz Mojtahedzadeh, prominent Iranologist and geopolitics expert

Prof. Pirouz Mojtahedzadeh, prominent Iranologist and geopolitics expert

Interview by Kourosh Ziabari, 18 Feb 2011

Prof. Pirouz Mojtahedzadeh is a prominent Iranologist, geopolitics researcher, historian and political scientist. He teaches geopolitics at the Tarbiat Modares University of Tehran. He has been the advisor of the United Nations University and the founder and manager of the London-based Urosevic foundation. Mojtahedzadeh has published more than 20 books in Persian, English and Arabic on the geopolitics of Persian Gulf region and modern discourses in international relations. Since 2004, he has been a member of the Academy of Persian Language and Literature. Moreover, he has been a member of the British Institute of Iranian Studies since 1993. Prof. Mojtahedzadeh earned a Ph.D. in Political Geography from the University of London in 1993 and also obtained a Ph.D. in Political Geography from the University of Oxford in 1979.

He has been a member of the board of the Society for contemporary Iranian Studies at the University of London and also a senior research associate at the Geopolitics & International Boundaries Research Centre.

Prof. Mojtahedzadeh has published scores of articles regarding the historicity and veracity of Persian Gulf name and the legality of Iran’s ownership over the three Persian Gulf islands of Lesser Tunb, Greater Tunb and Abu Musa. He has delivered several international speeches in which he has scientifically repudiated the territorial claims of the United Arab Emirates government over the three Iranian islands and also confronted the psychological operation of the U.S.-backed Arab monarchies in the Middle East in distorting the historical name of the Persian Gulf.

What follows is the complete text of my exclusive interview with Prof. Mojtahedzadeh in which we discussed the scientific, historical authenticity of Persian Gulf’s name, the legality of Iran’s ownership of the three Persian Gulf islands of Lesser Tunb, Greater Tunb and Abu Musa and the futility of UAE and Bahrain’s claims over these islands.

Kourosh Ziabari: United Arab Emirates is at the forefront of cultural battle with Iran. It’s among the few nations in the world which use the forged term of “Arabian Gulf” to refer to Persian Gulf. It also cites territorial claims over the three Iranian Islands of Abu Musa, Greater Tunb and Lesser Tunb frequently. Some scholars believe that the people and youth in the UAE suffer from an identity crisis and that’s why the rulers of this tiny country have decided to bring back honor and dignity to their people by staging a cultural propaganda against Iran and stealing the cultural heritage of Iran. Some others believe that UAE is being backed by the United States in its battle with Iran. What’s your viewpoint in this regard?

Pirouz Mojtahed-Zadeh: The United Arab Emirates has in deed been at the forefront of a cultural battle with Iran, which basically stems from their problem of lack of a genuine national identity and has been brought to the open in connection with their claims of sovereignty on three islands of Greater Tunb, Lesser Tunb, and Abu Musa, regardless of the fact that these islands formed parts of Iranian dominion in the Persian Gulf undisputedly up until the beginning of 19th century, when British colonial presence began to grow in the southern shores of the Persian Gulf, whereupon the first germs of the creation of the emirates of those shores were sawn in what was Iranian dependant tribal entities. Soon these emirates, as a result of the 19th century British strategy of de-Persianization of the Persian Gulf, emerge as Arab entities of British protection. British support for their territorial expansion encouraged their territorial claims in a political space that was Iranian to a large extent at the time, and further encouraged them in post-1971 independence to try and assume an identity which was not in any way associated with Iran or being Persian. Hence, they make more efforts than all others, to change the name of the Persian Gulf as well as laying claim to the said three islands. There are scores of documents proving that the entire region of the Persian Gulf belonged to Iran since time immemorial. Nevertheless, the British occupied these three islands in 1903 in the name of British protectorate Qawasim tribes of Sharjah, then covering the entire dominion of what is now known as UAE.

Before withdrawing its protection of Arab emirates in 1971, the British called for the formation of a federation of its protectorate emirates of the region, namely Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ras al-Khaimah, Ajman, Fujairah and Umm-al-qowin, as well as Bahrain and Qatar, the latter two refusing to join the proposed federation for their own reasons. It was as a result of these said British plans that the United Arab Emirates was formed out of the seven emirates of Musandam Peninsula on December 2, 1971, and the new entity began to call on behalf of two of its member emirates, Sharjah and Ras-al-Khaimah for the three islands in question to be added to its territories. Since territorial claims against other states is an old, and highly effective tactic for a newly formed state to enhance its particular design of nationhood and to assume a definitive national identity, it seems the UAE has opted for territorial disputes with Iran, the only non-Arab state of the Persian Gulf in the hope of attaining its desired national unity and Arab identity. Territorial claims for nation-building purposes has precedence in the region, as Iran claimed Bahrain in 1930s in order to use the old Arab-Iranian conflicts to assist the process of nation-building that Reza Shah had started then. Similarly the Baath regime of Iraq claimed in 1950s and 1960s sovereignty over Khuzestan of Iran, calling it “Arabistan” precisely because it re-awakened historical Arab-Iranian controversy in the hope that it would enhance a pure Arabic identity for Iraq of the semi-Iranian region of Mesopotamia.

KZ: Which documents and evidences attest to the fact that Persian Gulf is a legitimate, historical and acceptable name for the body of water which separates Iran from the Arabian Peninsula? Why are those who claim that the name of Persian Gulf should be changed wrong?

PM: All documents of history and geography of mankind bear evidence that the sea separating Iranian Plateau from Arabian Peninsula as the Persian Gulf. Of the maritime geography of the world the works of ancient Greeks and ancient Iranians seem to have been the earliest studies. In their varying approaches they saw the surface of the world in the form of a rectangular land mass surrounded by a world ocean from which the Greeks thought four seas: the Mediterranean, Mare Caspian, Sinus Persicus, Sinus Arabicus, brunched inward whereas the Iranians who have been the most ancient people to inhabit areas in and around the Persian Gulf spoke of two seas coming forth from the peripheral ocean; one named Parsa Draya, or the Persian Sea to the eastern half of the world, but the other unnamed in ancient literatures available to us, comprised all waters of western hemisphere connected to the Mediterranean.

It seems that the Romans, learning much from ancient Iranians through their Macedonian conquerors, adopted the Persian Parsa Darya in the form of Roman Mare Persicum or Persicum Aquarium. Yet, the original Greek version Sinus Persicus seems to have survived in Western civilizations to this day in the form of the term Persian Gulf.

During the more recent centuries, Arab and Muslim geographers adopted ancient Iranian geographical view of the world and Persian terminologies in their geographical study of the world. They simultaneously used both Greek Sinus Persicus = Persian Gulf and Persian Parsa Draya = Persian Sea in their references to the body of water now known in modern global geography as ‘Persian Gulf’. There are hundreds of ancient and historical Islamic and Arabic maps and other documents that prove this theory, which, at the same time, clarify the authenticity of the geographical use, by Arabs and other Muslims, of either of these two terms for the eastern waters of the world.

The first person to use a different name (in 1935) was Sir Charles Belgrav, British Political Resident in the Persian Gulf, who wanted to emphasize the partial success of British colonial strategy of de-Persianization of the Persian Gulf. Though only a geopolitical move his suggestion the much desired precedence for Pan-Arabist policies of Iraqi Baath party in the 1950s and 1960s to follow is lead but for racist reasons.

This was because what constitutes Iraq now had been a part of the Iranian federal system known in the West as Persian Empire for centuries both before and after Islam. To the Baath party thinkers, Cyrus the Great’s conquer of Babylonia in the mid six century BC was not to be forgiven because, no matter how emphatically the holy books in Islam, Christianity and Judaism condemned Babylonian tyranny and its inhumanity, to them Babylonia was an Arab state that represented Iraq’s glorious past upon which Iraq’s new Pan-Arab identity had to be constructed.

It was on the basis of this peculiar way of reading history that a mind-boggling anti-Iranian (anti-Persian) campaign began which lasted for 35 years, a major aspect of which was changing historical names of geographical places. They endeavored to change the name of the Persian Gulf into Arabian Gulf as well as trying to change the name of Khuzestan province of southwest Iran into Arabistan in order to shed the Persian aspect of their desired Pan-Arab identity. This is precisely the reason for the United Arab Emirates to copy the Baathist style anti-Iranian (non-Arab identity in the Persian Gulf) strategy in the hope of forging a pan-Arab identity.

But the answer to your question “Why are those who claim that the name of Persian Gulf should be changed wrong” not only is in the fact that the world has, through the United Nations and its relevant commissions have affirmed validity of historical names of geographical places including the name Persian Gulf in no uncertain terms, but because of the scientific fact that geographical names have not been invented because of political, racial, or religious motives to be changed for these reasons. What kind civilized world would be, I ask all civilized people, if we were to bow specially to the racially inclined policies of Saddam Hussein and his followers in Qatar and Abu Dhabi in trying to change historical name of an important geographical place like the Persian Gulf.

KZ: Since its creation, United Arab Emirates started a psychological campaign against Iran and claimed sovereignty over the triple islands of the Persian Gulf. Are there reliable evidences available to demonstrate that these islands have been eternally Iranian and cannot be disputed by any other country?

PM: Of course there are masses of documented evidence proving the fact that the two islands of Tunb and Abu Musa Island have, since time immemorial, belonged to Iran. To introduce your readers to these documents I would recommend reference to many of my books and Articles in English, Persian, and Arabic, particularly to the following books: The Islands of Tunb and Abu Musa, published by SOAS of London University 1995 with Persian translation published by Sahab Cartography institute of Tehran and Arabic translation published in Beirut by Dar-al-Montazir; Security and Territoriality in the Persian Gulf, Curzon press, London 1999 and New York 2002, with Persian translation which is published by IPIS of the Foreign Ministry of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

In my years of studying the history of legal status of these islands I come across thousands of documents including original historical documents in Persian, English and Arabic, as well as original government documents from Iranian, British and local Arab governments, and diplomatic correspondence. In addition to that it is quite interesting that I have discovered nearly 30 official and semi-official maps of British authorities both in London and India that verify Iran’s undisputed ownership of these islands throughout the period 1903 t0 1971 when they were occupied by the British in the name of the Arab emirates of the time. I have introduced all these maps in my aforementioned books.

KZ: Please tell us a little bit about the historicity of Bahrain’s state as an Iranian province. Many of the countries in the Persian Gulf and Central Asian region had been once provinces of Iran. One of these countries which usually directs spates of psychological and political propaganda against Iran is Bahrain. Is it possible for Iran to claim sovereignty over Bahrain 30 years after its being separated from the country?

PM: To begin with I must stress that Bahrain is not an enemy of Iran and does not direct spates of psychological and political propaganda against Iran, unless when there are unfriendly gestures from individuals in Tehran from time to time. In normal circumstances Bahrain and Oman are two friendliest countries to Iran among the Arabs of the Persian Gulf.

The old Bahrain, which comprised Bahrain archipelago as well as Qatar Peninsula and Hassa and Qatif provinces of modern Saudi Arabia, was included in what was Persian Federative state that the Achaemenid Empire had created in about 550 BC at the same time when Mesopotamia too was included in that Persian federation. Yet, it is notable that it was said to have been the cradle of Dilmun civilization two millennia prior to the advent of the Achaemenids. Bahrain remained as a Persian Satrapy until the advent of Islam when it began to play the role of an important centre of anti-Caliphate movements. From the Safavid era in 16th century, Bahrain returned to new Iranian federative state and remained so until 1860s when British colonial officers in the Persian Gulf decided to include it in their colonial collection in southern shores of the Persian Gulf. In fact when 1861 Colonel Lewis Pelly captured the archipelago and forced Sheik Mohammad Al-Khalifah to sign his treaty of colonial protection, he wrote to Nasser al-Din Shah Qajar pleading that as he and his dominion in Bahrain were subjects of the Iranian state, he should be assisted in his resistance vis-à-vis British colonial proposals. But that Shah was too arrogant and too ignorant to understand the importance of the moment and ignored, perhaps for the fear of the British, what was happening to Bahrain. By imposing two treaties in 1861 to Sheikh Mohammad and 1868 to his brother Sheikh Ali, the British separated Bahrain from Iran.
It was in 1930s that during his endeavor for state building and nation building Reza Shah Pahlavi resorted to territorial claims on Bahrain (archipelago only), which in deed was instrumental in enhancing his desired sense of nationhood in the modern nation state )حکومت ملت پايه( of Iran that he had inaugurated. So, as you see Bahrain was not separated from Iran 30 years ago, it was separated from Iran by the British in 1861 – 1868 during the reign of Nasser ad-Din Shah Qajar in the same period that other parts of the old state in Central Asia, Caucasus, Mesopotamia, and south-east Asia were ceded and. It is important to remember that it was during the reign of Fathali Shah and Nasser al-Din Shah Qajar that all-together 14 countries, including modern Iran, came out of the belly of old Iranian federation. What happened in 1970 was that as Iranian claims to Bahrain had become a thorn on the side of the Iranian geopolitical designs in the Persian Gulf for the period after the departure of British colonial rule in the region, causing Iranian position in the changed political geography of the region more harm in the region and beyond then any good at all, the last Shah of Iran decided that to withdraw the old and exhausted claim in an orderly and face-saving manner through the good offices of the Secretary general of the United Nations. It is patently obvious that when measured against this historical and geopolitical background, any idea of return to the old claims will cause Iran even more harm in today’s world of politics than ever before.

KZ: How is it possible to preserve the heritage of Persian Gulf and derail the plots of enemies who want to bother us by trying to change the name of this strategic body of water?

PM: First of all let me make it absolutely clear that when we talk amongst ourselves we may see the issue related to the attempts in some Arab quarters in changing the name of the Persian Gulf as a plot to bother our heritage, but as these attempts are made on international level, the situation should not be seen as related to our internal problem that harms our heritage, the defense of which would attract no international sympathy. I have been advising this to the young Iranians abroad, specially in the United States, who go around this matter in a way that gives ammunition to our national enemies in the West and in Arab world using it as a tool to further their accusations that we, Iranians have a colonial view of the Persian Gulf because we see it as the sole heritage of Iran whereas it owned by all nations of the region. The issue should be seen by us in its international capacity as an affront that harms the world heritage of preserved historical names of geographical places; an affront that has been rejected by both international academic community and by the United Nations. This kind of international campaign that I myself have been involved (publishing several books and hundreds of articles in various languages as well as delivering speeches at international gatherings and writing letters of protest to political leaders and international media in the West who happens from time to time, to compromise for a handful of petro-dollars from certain Arab circles, their integrity), has proved during the past four decades to be the most productive and most successful; the best way that we can preserve the international heritage of the correct name of the Persian Gulf.

KZ: Is it possible for Iran to lodge a complaint against the United Arab Emirates in an international court and sue its statesmen for their frequent territorial claims against the Iranian islands of Abu Musa, Greater Tunb and Lesser Tunb? In what legal framework can Iran tackle this problem and subvert the plots of UAE which wants to take over the three Iranian islands and undermine the territorial integrity of Iran?

PM: No, it is not customary to sue leaders of a country for proposing legitimate or illegitimate claims on another country’s territory. But what is customary in such contexts is first and foremost to ignore those claims. If the claims become vociferous with plenty of intrigues, as has been the case with UAE leaders activities against our national interest and our national and territorial integrity, then we have to challenge them to prove their case legally at international level. In their reaction to this challenge they bluffed their way to take us to the International Court of Justice. We replied naturally that we had no business in bringing doubt to our perfectly legitimate and legal ownership of the three islands by going to the ICJ in response to a falsely put together petition of the UAE. Later in 2004, the leaders in Abu Dhabi, supported actively by the Sheikh of Qatar, opted on physical attempt to interrupt undisputed Iranian sovereignty over these islands bay undertaking sporadic military attack on Abu Musa territorial waters, arresting a number of Iranian subjects fishermen therein, kidnapping them to Abu Dhabi and Doha, beating them up in Dubai and killing one in Doha. The Iranian foreign minister of the time decided that these acts of violence and affront to our national dignity and our territorial integrity should go without the internationally prescribe in the form of reprisal or official complaint to UN Security Council. The Sheikh of Qatar arranged later, in 2008 for the Arab League to lodge a formal complaint against Iran with the United Nations Security Council on behalf of the UAE. Not only the Iranian foreign ministry did react to this outrageous behavior, but the Foreign Minister of the time, enticed by the Sheikh of Qatar, took part in the meeting of Arab League council of foreign minister that lodge that complaint with the UNSC actively ridiculing his own office, his government’s respectability, his country’s territorial integrity, and his nation’s honor. But a legally argued petition based on strong historiography of the situation that I sent to the UN Secretary General, regardless of lack of any reaction from the Iranian foreign ministry, produced the good result of Arab League’s complaint being turned down by the UN Security Council and its literatures being wiped off the UN sites.

Kourosh Ziabari

Kourosh Ziabari

Kourosh Ziabari is an Iranian freelance journalist, and regular contributor to RamallahOnline.com. More articles by Kourosh Ziabari can be found here. Continue reading →

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What does the Israel-backed UAE say?

Kourosh Ziabari

Kourosh Ziabari, 8 Dec 2010

Speaking or writing as an Iranian citizen makes it difficult to weigh in on the latest remarks made by the UAE Foreign Minister, Abdallah Bin Zayid Al Nahyan, who likened Iran’s legal sovereignty of its Persian Gulf islands to the Zionist regime’s occupation of Syria’s Golan heights. Investigating the whole story from a broad view, some focal points should be considered regarding what the novice FM has grumbled in his latest statements before the Federal Council of Emirates.

To one’s utmost surprise, Mr. Nahyan is interestingly 38 years old, and it means that he is one year younger than the country he represents internationally since the official establishment of the state of United Arabic Emirates dates back to 1971, and Nahyan is born on April 30, 1972. So, from a basic comparison with his Iranian counterpart who is a veteran, 57-year-old diplomat, one can simply figure out that Nahyan is too inexperienced and green to make verbal attacks against a country which has existed on the face of earth for the past 7500 years, and mathematically, 7500 is more than a little bit bigger than 37! Mr. Manouchehr Mottaki, the Iranian counterpart of Mr. Nahyan, has been a senior diplomat and politician for the past 30 years, serving in various departments and sections of Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, so even if Mr. Nahyan has started his diplomatic career since he was 10, he would still lag 3 years behind Mr. Mottaki in terms of political experience.

The unconventional rhetoric of UAE Foreign Minister is being widely circulated by the British and American mainstream media outlets, and one may doubt for a moment whether the plots designed to threaten Iran’s territorial integrity are being directed from the White House, Tel Aviv or Abu Dhabi. (Fascinatingly, they’re only the American, British and Israeli media outlets – such as the Associated Press, the Daily Telegraph and Haaretz – which refer to the Persian Gulf as “Arabian Gulf”, a fabricated term which violates the UN’s Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names’ 2003 decision to initialize “Persian Gulf” as the only valid name for the body of water separating Iran from the Arabian Peninsula. Such hostile actions are nothing more than a set of concerted plans to undermine Iran’s territorial integrity and bring down its national cohesion after the plots of post-election’s artificial unrest failed deplorably).

I’ve seen some pictures of the building of UAE’s Federal Council, namely parliament, and I don’t put the blame on Mr. Nahyan’s shoulders for making such ludicrous remarks that even his Iranian counterpart refused to issue a response to. The building is a gloriously-ornamented magnificence edifice and a 36-year-old young man would be unquestionably affected by the supreme environment of such a building to express that “the occupied islands of Abu Mousa, Greater and Lesser Tunbs will sooner or later return to the UAE”.

Those who sit behind the seats of this building are supposedly the representatives of a nation, and Mr. Nahyan has categorically promised them to bring back what he considers to be his paternal inheritance, albeit this is not exceedingly unusual in the Israel-allied Arab nation to calculate the global equations on the basis of familial and paternal skirmishes; the ruling family of Al Nahyan has been struggling and clashing with a well-off neighboring tribe, namely Al Qassimis, who signed the 1971 British-brokered deal with Iran which designated to Tehran the full sovereignty of Abu Mousa, Greater and Lesser Tunbs (three small islands in the Southern Persian Gulf) in lieu of the sovereignty of Ras-Al Khaimeh Protectorate as a British-owned land.

Anyway, Mr. Nahyan courageously promised the representatives of his nation to bring back, sooner or later, “its islands” which Iran has “occupied” unlawfully.

There are some possibilities, and one may think of some caustic motives which has drawn the young man to make such “uncalculated” comments, as Iran’s FM Spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast told the media.

Firstly, the bitter, nightmarish outfall of Dubai which was once the sugary, lovable dream of Emirs in Abu Dhabi can be recalled as the basis for UAE’s projection towards Iran, the adjoining neighbor which can be attacked on a regular or irregular basis for some sort of entertainment. Dubai was slated to become the heaven of Middle East with multi-billion-dollar investments of the American and Zionist-owned companies who would search their Middle Eastern ideal in the seashores of Persian Gulf, but with the continued “miscalculation” of young people such as Mr. Nahyan who rule the young country of UAE, Dubai’s sweet dreams now do not exceed a frightening depression.

In order to distract the public opinions from the dissolving slump in Dubai, one should take action, and who can be a better subject than Iran that is busy confronting the spates of black propaganda by the American, British, French and German media outlets from one hand and the continued threats of military strike and a permanent “table” which is home to “all the options” on the other?

The other option might by a lack of geographical knowledge. As a friend, who is almost a few years younger than Mr. Nahyan, I would cordially invite him to spend a few hours reading some scientific and geographical materials regarding what he is drumming for.

If he does not have enough time, I’ll be more than glad to summarize for him the whole story along with a digest of historical evidences.

In 1888, Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, the British Plenipotentiary Minister to Tehran, presented a War Office map to the Iranian King Nasser al-Din Shah Qajar, in which the islands were presented as Iranian territory.

In his 1892 book Persia and the Persian Question, George Nathaniel Curzon, the Viceroy and Governor-General of India recognized the islands as belonging to Iran, but a decade later in 1902 the British occupied the islands as a buffer against the growing Soviet influence in Southern Iran.

Being afraid of the growing Soviet influence in the Southern regions of Iran, the British forces occupied three Iranian islands, named Abu Mousa, Lesser Tunb and Greater Tunb in the year 1902.

Iran and Britain fought over the islands for decades until 1968, when the Britons pulled their troops out from the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf as a reconciliatory stance.

Then, in 1971, as the colonial protectorate of Ras al-Khaimeh and Sharjah, Iran signed an agreement with Sharjah with the arbitration of British government to take responsibility for the islands’ security while recognizing the sovereignty of Bahrain and the UAE.

Now everything is clear. If Mr. Nahyan, who should be supposedly aware of the modality of international regulations and agreements, insists to return “his” islands “sooner or later” back to his paternal homeland, UAE and Bahrain should be reattached to Iran as they were the provinces of Iran until the 1971 Iran-Briton-Sharjah agreement was signed.

Mr. Nahyan and his family members can take sovereignty of three islands they claim to be the owner of, and the United Arabic Emirates will be returned to Iran. That’s a fair swap!

Anyway, Mr. Nahyan should be referred to the demographical data of his country which indicate that there’re 400,000 Iranian citizens living there. If these 400,000 people pull their enormous capitals and skyscraping investments out from the economy of UAE, I doubt whether Israel and the U.S. would suffice to lend a hand to UAE to keep up with the barest rudiments of its flimsy life.

Kourosh Ziabari

Kourosh Ziabari

Kourosh Ziabari is an Iranian freelance journalist, and regular contributor to RamallahOnline.com. More articles by Kourosh Ziabari can be found here.