Using the language of diplomacy and humanitarian intervention, the UN Security Council on August 6, 1990 in resolution 66I, imposed multilateral economic sanctions on Iraq. All exports and imports from Iraq, with few exceptions, were banned.
Nine years later, a UNICEF demographic survey concluded that the rate of mortality of children under five doubled. Independent researchers concluded though, that UNICEF’s statistics underestimated the problem, and demonstrated that the average rate of deaths per month in 1989 amounted to 593, in contrast, to 1997 when 4,578 children died over a one month period. Diarrhea, genetic malformations and malnutrition were among the most common causes of death.
In this vein, the Arab adage ‘Cairo writes, Beirut edits and Baghdad reads’ was not true anymore. Iraq’s ranking in the UNDP Human Development Index fell from 55 out of 130 in 1990, to 126 out of 150 in 2000. Columbia University anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani argues that ‘even minimum estimates of deaths was three times the number of Japanese killed during the U.S atomic bomb attacks… An officially conducted and officially sanctioned genocide, primarily of children’.
However, Iraq was not the first or the last victim of liberal diplomacy. On July 1 2012 the toughest sanctions ever imposed by the European Union entered into force against Iran. Namely the toughest sanctions ever imposed against women, children, men, foreign workers, elderly people, and Central Asian refugees entered into force two months ago. Western policymakers argue though, that the sanctions will keep up the pressure on Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. Previous experience would suggest though that the sanctions will ultimately pauperise the living conditions of the millions or Iranians, and residents in Iran, who live under the poverty threshold.
The military war has not started yet, and Insh’allah (God willing!) it will not. NOVACT-Barcelona wants to tackle this war by other means that the West and its allies have started against this Central Asian country. The US-led invasion of Iraq started in March 2003; the psychological, moral, economic and political suffocation though, started almost 20 years ago.
Suffocating Iran’s economy: liberal diplomatic boycott against Iranians
The latest round of sanctions imposed by the US and the EU, known as the 5+1 Group, include a ban of Iranian crude oil and a ban on the provision of financial services related to the sale, purchase and transport of Iranian oil. Oil and petrochemical exports account for between 60 to 70% of government revenue. Once the sanctions are fully in place, oil and petrochemical exports will be reduced by approximately 60%. Currently, Iran relies on its exports to major oil-dependent countries like China, Singapore and India. Nevertheless, under the current economic sanctions and the lost of major oil importers like Spain and the United States, China and India have more space for manoeuvre to negotiate the price of oil.
Furthermore, the Obama administration has found new mechanisms to target foreign banks that handle Iranian money. The National Iranian Oil Company and Naftiran Intertrade Company (NICO), for instance, are financially blacklisted. Financial institutions dealing with Iran are penalised. In the long-term this strategy seeks the complete isolation of the Iranian economy in a globalised and economically interdependent world.
The diplomatic liberal boycott has also targeted the Iranian currency. The Iranian rial has lost half of its value since December 2011. Depreciation has decreased people’s purchasing power, and in combination with increased unemployment, has led to stagflation. Several scholars and activists affiliated to the Iranian grassroots organisation Haavar, the Iranian Initiative Against War, Sanctions and State Repression, have extensively documented the humanitarian consequences of economic sanctions as a weapon of mass destruction.
Joy Gordon, a sharp analyst of US foreign policy, in his book ‘Invisible Wars,’ documents the catastrophic consequences of the invisible mechanisms America uses to suffocate nations. He sketches a framework through which to understand modern warfare, neoliberal diplomacy, and the political economy of sanctions. Effectively, sanctions affect some countries but benefit others. Other oil suppliers, namely Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries, benefit economically when Central Asian natural fuels cannot be sold in the West.
Finally, more economic sanctions have been imposed to Iran, under the pretext of support for democratisation in Syria. Under the UN embargo Iran, rightly, is forbidden from selling weapons. Nevertheless, Iranian airlines, particularly Yas Air and Iran Air, have been dramatically affected by the sanctions due to allegations of shipping weapons to Syria via Iraq. Containing Iran’s efforts to support the authoritarian regime in Syria will lead to increased airfares. Those who have been to Iran can testify that flying is the most common mean of transport for thousands of poorly-paid Iranians to fly from the industrialised areas to remote cities to visit families.
The Balkanisation of the Islamic Republic: divide et impera
Anglo-American covert operations in the Iran are not new. Instances range from the CIA-engineered coup-d’état against Mohammad Mosaddeg’s nationalist government in 1953, for which Obama apologised in 2009 during his speech at Cairo University, to the White Revolution, the recent infection of computers with a worm called Stuxnet, or the murder of Iran’s brightest scientists.
Significant scientific social research has been conducted about the intelligence-led efforts to galvanise ethnical and racial differences among Iranians. The Iranian ‘imagined community,’ a concept coined by Benedict Anderson, is racially and ethnically diverse. Persians, Turkmen, Kurds, Baluchis, Arabs, Azerbaijanis, the Lak people, the Mandean, plus a number of nomadic tribes, have coexisted relatively peacefully in Iran.
Since its independence Iran has faced episodes of separatism and secessionism at different levels, in different regions and for different reasons. The nationalist feelings that foreign stakeholders can manipulate from outside to destabilise the country’s unity are various. In the south-east, the Balochi people seek an independent Baluchistan, a region that comprises of Pakistani, Afghan and Iranian lands. In the south-west, there is a separatist movement in the province of Khuzestan, or Arabistan, worldwide known for the siege of the American Embassy in 1980 by the Iraqi-backed Democratic Revolutionary Movement for the Liberation of Arabistan. And finally, the Kurdish and Azerbayani enclaves in the northwest of modern Iran also display separatist tendency.
Articles 15, 19 and 48 of the Iranian Constitution establish the basis for ethnic, linguistic and cultural minority rights in the fields of education, employment and the distribution of resources. In most regions, Shia Iranians coexist peacefully with other ethnic groups. However, the Iranian government, particularly during the Shah’s regime when Persian and Aryan patriotism was soaring, has put into practice top-down policies to ‘Persianise’ ethnic diverse regions. For instance, over the last years several Sunni extremist groups have acknowledged receiving funding from Iraq, the US and Saudi Arabia to fund the separatist militancy in Khuzestan or Arabistan, Iran’s major oil producer area. Similarly, confidential memos leaked by Wikileaks, revealed that the Iraqi Intelligence Service, the CIA and the Israeli Mossad contributed to the recruitment of militants of the extremist organisation Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan against Tehran.
To sum up, there is a large amount of evidence of Western intelligence-led covert operations, suggesting an imperial desire to destabilise Iran internally. British Arabism in Khuzestan was the clearest instance after Iran’s independence. The killings of nuclear scientists are the most evident of such operations. However, a quick look to Iran’s ethnic diversity brings new facts to light. The Western endeavour to engineer active internal opposition to the government is a fact – the leaders of the Mujaheddin e Khalq, the Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan, the Southern Azerbaijan National Awaking Movement or the Salafist Jundallah can vouch for this assertion.
The Arab Spring and geopolitical losses for Iran
Finally, but by no means least, we should consider the consequences of the Arab Spring for Iran’s geopolitical role in the region. Certainly, the purpose of this article is to recapitulate some invisible means of war that the West has used against the Iranian autocracy, but mainly against ordinary people. This last epigraph is relevant though taking into account the regional sway that Tehran struggled to maintain in the Middle East over the last decades.
Iran’s regional allies and proxies were few but powerful: Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Alawite regime in Damascus, the Mahdi Army in Iraq, and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Regarding Syria, after 18 months of popular non-violent and armed struggle, the Saudi and Qatari support for the Syrian opposition are evidence of Sunni efforts to contain Iran’s sway in the Levant. In this vein, Syrians in opposition have received substantial funding from anti-democratic regimes that want to diminish Tehran’s sphere of influence.
A change in the regime in Damascus would weaken the Lebanese party-militia Hezbollah, Ahmadinejad’s sharpest ally against Israel. The pronouncements of Hezbollah’s leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah in favour of al-Assad’s regime have unveiled the hypocrisy of the ‘resistance.’ The military supplies that entered Lebanon across the Syrian border, will not be able to keep on entering if a Sunni pro-Israeli and pro-Saudi government seizes power in Syria. How can an alleged anti-imperialistic organisation endorse a government that kills, rapes and tortures its people? Evidently, the reputation of the vanguard of anti-imperialism in the Middle East has been destroyed. Nasrallah preferred not to bother his patrons so he could stay in business.
Meanwhile, Iran’s relationship with another ally, Hamas is also changing Now, with the Muslim Brotherhood – a transnational organisation of which Hamas is part – in power in Egypt, Hamas is likely to distance itself from Iran.
War by other means, the war started a long time ago
In a recent public lecture at the London School of Economics, Iranian Sholar Hamid Dabashi was asked whether Iran would be the focus of the next war in the Middle East. He responded that the war started a long time ago. Effectively, suffocating a country’s economy through trade sanctions, conducting and endorsing intelligence-led operations, and engineering regional geopolitical transformations are acts of war.
NOVACT-Barcelona, does not endorse the tyrannical theocracy that kidnapped the 1979 Iranian Revolution, nor the liberal diplomatic and intelligence-led operations against the women and men who live in Iranian soil. These are neoliberal imperialistic ambitions masquerading as strategies for disarmament, and do not coincide with the interests of most Israelis, Iranians or American citizens.
The international community ought to condemn all policies that affect innocent Iranians, and struggle against any form of humanitarian catastrophes that may arise from these sanctions. In this vein, we believe that the nascent Iranian civil rights movement must be endorsed in the pursuit of their goals. A call for unity in the Middle East is more important than ever. The following is an extract of Young Mizrahi Israelis’ Open Letter to Arab Peers. An effort to retrieve the shared past of the peoples of the Middle East and an invitation to break down with the post-colonial neoliberal narrative. We now express the hope that our generation- throughout the Arab, Muslim, and Jewish world- will be a generation of renewed bridges that will leap over the walls and hostility created by previous generations and will renew the deep human dialog. We draw on our shared past in order to look forward hopefully towards a shared future.
