Haleh Anvari

Thursday, Feb 7, 2002 8:44 PM UTC

Iranians to Bush: Take this axis of evil and shove it

Most believe that the president's speech was ignorant bullying that will only slow reform.

By Haleh Anvari

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A few days before the 23rd anniversary of the Islamic revolution, the streets of Tehran are decorated with candy-colored lights. Despite the decorations, there had been no aura of revolutionary zeal in the city. But that was before President Bush’s State of the Union speech, in which he shocked political observers, diplomats and ordinary Iranians by singling out Iran, along with Iraq and North Korea, as part of an “axis of evil.” Now, anti-American sloganeering has returned.

Bush charged that Iran aids terrorism by providing aid to the militant Islamic groups Islamic Jihad, Hamas and Hezbollah, which have been locked in a violent conflict with Israel for years. He also warned that Iran was actively seeking nuclear weapons. In addition, U.S. officials have warned that Iran, which fronts Afghanistan’s western border, has been trying to destabilize the new government and possibly sheltering al-Qaida fugitives.

Bush’s speech dismayed Iranians of all political stripes. Reformers and conservatives have been locked in a bitter power struggle, but they suspended their infighting to make common cause against a speech widely regarded here as bullying, ignorant and counterproductive.

Iran’s foreign minister, Kamal Kharrazi, denied the charges and asked the U.S. to produce factual proof of Iran’s involvement in production of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. As a sign of protest, the minister cancelled a visit to the World Economic Forum in New York.

Iran’s leaders fired back fiercely. The country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, called the tone of the U.S. president’s speech “bloodthirsty.” President Khatami, leader of the reformers, was equally blunt. During his five years in office, Khatami has made a concerted effort to tone down hostile rhetoric toward the U.S. as part of a more pragmatic foreign policy, but he condemned Bush’s demonizing of Iran as “meddling, warmongering, insulting and a repetition of old propaganda.” It was perhaps the strongest language Khatami has yet used against the U.S., and belied his dismay at the abrupt change in the U.S. position towards Iran, which most observers believe has been softening in the past four years.

The clerical establishment has launched a forceful campaign of rebuttal over the past few days, filling the front pages of Iranian newspapers with angry pieces whose tenor summons up the darkest days of the troubled U.S.-Iran relationship.

At a special Friday prayer held at the shrine of Ayatollah Khomeini and broadcast on national radio and television, a prominent conservative cleric, Ayatollah Ahmad Janati, expressed doubts about Bush’s sanity, but scoffed that such outbursts should not be surprising when “cowboys and gambling-house managers from Nevada become presidents in the U.S.” (It was unclear who Janati was referring to; such employment does not appear on President Bush’s resumé.)

The spokesman of the powerful Guardian Council, which oversees all legislation to make sure it adheres to the values of the Islamic Revolution, called for unity among Iran’s internal camps — an appeal that would have little chance of being heard before Bush’s speech.

At least for now, Washington’s aggressive new stance toward Iran appears to have played into the hands of the conservative clergy, which is facing the greatest challenge to its rule in recent years from the reformist parliament. Even those reformist groups that are the most amenable to eventual reestablishment of ties with the U.S. were forced to condemn Bush’s speech. The leading reformist party, the Islamic Iran Participation Front (IIPF), which won a majority in the parliament two years ago, simultaneously condemned the U.S. president’s statement and criticized the hard-liners, charging that their policies have played into the hands of anti-Iran elements in the U.S. and Israel, whose aggressive lobbying against Iran is widely believed here to have been the decisive factor in Bush’s hawkish speech.

“Bush’s statement will only help obstruct the course of democracy in Iran,” says Saiid Leylaz, a reformist journalist close to the IIPF. He denounced the U.S. stance on Iran as simplistic compared to that of its European allies. “The Europeans understand that the rulership in Iran is not homogeneous,” Leylaz said. “They understand that Iran is ruled by [different] factions. The solution is to strengthen democracy in Iran, and that cannot be achieved by weakening the reformists.”

The reformists had suffered significant setbacks in recent months. More newspapers were closed and a member of parliament who had challenged the legitimacy of the hard-line judiciary was jailed. Last week, they were showing signs of regaining some of their lost ground, when Bush’s saber-rattling speech distracted them from the business at hand by forcing them to wave the flag with their rivals.

One of the reasons for the shock felt by many Iranians at Bush’s speech was the widespread perception here that relations between the U.S. and Iran were improving. Iran had a sympathetic reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks: President Khatami sent a message of condolence to the people of America, which was a first by an Iranian president. It took a neutral stance in the U.S.-led war against al-Qaida. And as Afghanistan’s western neighbor and a close ally of the anti-Taliban forces, it played an important role in forming the interim administration of Hamid Karzai at the Bonn conference. All these were seen as hopeful signs auguring a rapprochement between the old foes.

The fact that none of these gestures prevented Bush from naming Iran as an “evil” enemy may have disappointed reformers, but hard-liners may actually be heartened, said Hermidas Bavand, a lecturer in international relations. “There are certain political wings in Iran who are glad about a return to crisis and slogans,” he said. Bavard deplored losing the opportunity for reconciliation offered by Sept. 11, but believed that there is room for a solution — if Iran reacts calmly. “Emotional reactions must be avoided. A short period of silence by Iran is required. We should ignore the fuss. We should also invite the International Atomic Energy Agency to come and inspect our sites to show our goodwill,” he said.

The Palestinian issue, which has topped Iran’s foreign-policy agenda since the revolution, remains the main point of contention with the U.S. The Israeli seizure of the Karine A, a ship containing a cargo of arms that Israel and the United States claim Iran was shipping to Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, and intense Israeli lobbying are seen as the decisive factors that led Bush to place Iran in the “evil” category.

Iran has denied involvement in the Karine A, but has made no secret of its support for the Palestinians, for whom many ordinary Iranians feel sympathy. Iran’s position is that Israel is an illegal occupying power in the West Bank and Gaza, and therefore that militants who battle Israel are not terrorists but resistance fighters. President Khatami, who is dubbed by Iranians “a talk-therapist” because of his insistence on solving all problems through dialogue, has proposed a U.N. summit to discuss the definition of terrorism, with the purpose of bringing such issues to the table.

As for the allegations that Iran has been meddling in the affairs of Afghanistan or harboring al-Qaida fugitives, officials here categorically deny them. Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi told reporters in a news conference Wednesday: “It is known to all that we played an effective part in helping establish this government in Afghanistan. It is not logical for us to weaken a government we have worked so hard to bring about.” He also asked the U.S. to give Iran any information it has about al-Qaida fugitives so that the Iranian authorities could try to track them down, a statement interpreted as a gesture of goodwill.

At the special Friday prayers, Ayatollah Ahmad Janati reinforced that comment, pointing out that it would make no sense for Iran to be sheltering al-Qaida fighters when Iran has been battling them for so many years. The Taliban regime and the Islamic Republic were enemies long before Sept. 11, with matters reaching bottom when eight Iranian diplomats and a journalist were murdered in Mazar-e-Sharif in 1998.

Despite the furor over Bush’s speech and the sloganeering, the prevailing mood among Iranians is pragmatic. Most believe that the administration is actually divided over Iran policy and that despite Bush’s tough talk, the status quo will prevail. There is also a widespread belief that Bush’s “axis of evil” speech was intended for internal U.S. consumption and has as much to do with justifying his request for a massive increase in the defense budget and distracting the public’s attention from the Enron mess as it does with Iran’s alleged role in supporting terrorism.

The immediate palliative for the present situation, according to the Iranian media, seems to be Iran’s relation with the Europeans and their lack of support for Washington’s “axis of evil” ploy. Bijan Khajehpour, a consultant who works with foreign businesses in Iran, thinks the new snub from the U.S. could have positive effects. “Iran will now have to make a concerted effort in improving relations with Europe,” he said. “We can no longer keep Europe at arms length while we wonder about relations with the USA.”

Hermidas Bavand is less optimistic: “Europe may distance itself initially from the U.S. on this, but ultimately they will follow. A solution must be found.”

In the meantime, most Iranians’ main concern remains not Bush’s threats but the wrangling between the reformists and the hard-liners. On Wednesday, most papers had reverted to carrying mainly domestic news. How the new American hard line will play out in the end is impossible to say, but for the time being, some find irony in the fact that what is good for a right-wing American president is also good for the right-wing Iranian administration. In the words of journalist Saiid Layaz, “For some bizarre reason, whenever the USA decides to talk about Iran, it accidentally ends up benefiting the hard-liners.”

Thursday, Nov 29, 2001 7:26 PM UTC

Inside Afghanistan’s refugee camps

Near the Iranian border, thousands of Afghans seek refuge from the U.S. bombing.

By Haleh Anvari

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In between the rows of refugee tents here set up by the Iranian Red Crescent, just on the other side of the Iranian border, a little boy quietly creeps up and whispers an almost inaudible sentence.

“My father and mother became martyrs,” he says without any preamble.

The word martyr has become so commonplace in the lexicon of this region, it can apply to having a road accident while on government duty.

“When?” I ask.

“A month ago.”

“Where?”

“Kandahar.”

We speak the same language, Farsi, but to my Iranian ears, his Afghan dialect, known as Dari, sounds as if it was being uttered 1,000 years ago. So I have to keep questions short and to the point, using simple sentences and basic vocabulary.

“How old are you?”

“Twelve.”

“How were your parents martyred?”

“Bombaran,” he utters, the single word in Farsi that literally means rain of bombs. In this case, he is referring to the bombs that fell from American and British jets over Kandahar. He has no expression on his face, which remains like a mask. The boy’s name is Saleh Mohammad. He recounts his family’s death in the allied bombing with complete emotional detachment — no tears, no wailing, no complaining.

When describing even the bloodiest scenes, Afghan children speak as if they are 100 years old. They have witnessed images that Western children are not even allowed to see in movies, for fear of nightmares. Dismemberment, death, starvation, torture have been part of their daily lives throughout more than 20 years of war, drought and now renewed bombing.

Saleh was at his uncle’s house the night the bombs fell on his parents’ home. He saw his father and brother dead when he got back in the morning, and he ran away. “There was blood and broken walls everywhere,” he says.

Saleh left Kandahar with his uncle’s family and came to this camp on the Iranian border. He is in a region controlled by General Barahooii, a Baluchi Afghan who has held on to a 200-square-kilometer piece of Afghanistan throughout the Taliban reign.

“On the first night of the bombardment, the city square was destroyed,” he says.

He is wearing the traditional long cotton shirt over trousers worn by most Afghan men here. At night the desert temperature drops below freezing. He has no shoes.

Saleh, an ethnic Pashtun and Sunni Muslim, has been in the camp for 10 days. It took him 20 days by car to get here from Kandahar. His father was a day laborer. He says he wants to be a teacher, but he himself is illiterate.

“Will you go back?” I ask him.

“If it becomes safe I’ll go back.”

“Will you not be scared, to go back where your parents died?”

“Scared? Why? The Americans have killed my parents. If I can, I will kill the Americans.”

Almost 10,000 Afghan refugees have arrived at the Iranian border in the past month but have not been permitted to cross into Iran. Immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, Iran sealed its border with Afghanistan, but Iranian authorities have set up two refugee camps inside Afghanistan itself. Makaki camp is situated only 1.5 kilometers from Iran, in what was originally Taliban territory. A second camp has been organized at Mile 46, farther north in an area of Afghanistan controlled by a local warlord and erstwhile governor of Zaranj in Nimrooz province, General Abdolkarim Barahooii.

While the closing of the border was welcomed by the Bush administration, the Iranians’ refusal to open their borders to fleeing Afghans has put the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in a quandary.

The UNHCR has remained absent from both camps, stranded by both security concerns and a matter of semantics. Its mandate for helping refugees does not cover these Afghans, who are classified as internally displaced people (IDP): homeless within their own borders. The UNHCR also fears for the safety of both its staff and the Afghans in camps that are clearly vulnerable to the ever-changing situation in Afghanistan.

Reflecting the state of the country as a whole, the Taliban-controlled camp at Makaki fell under the control of Barahooii’s troops, who are sympathetic to the Northern Alliance. They arrived on the evening of November 12. The Taliban minders disappeared, and some reportedly changed sides.

Abdolkarim Bashardoost, a local Afghan with a long beard and his plain white turban tilted over his left ear — a sign of the Taliban, who almost never wear the decorative silk turbans worn by other Afghans — was the security chief of Makaki camp in charge of 50 armed Taliban. A soft-spoken man, he was still defiant about reports of the demise of the Taliban in other parts of Afghanistan when we spoke during the day on November 12. Neither of us were to know that he would lose control of his small territory in only a few hours. “Every government after the end of this war will be made by America. We will never accept them. We will fight to the end,” warned Bashardoost.

The next day Bashardoost left the camp unannounced after the arrival of Barahooii’s men.

Inside the camps, uncertainty reigns. The refugees who remain here are reluctant to return home, even as news of the Taliban’s continuous retreats reaches them on little transistor radios tuned to foreign radio stations. Water, electricity and basic foodstuffs are brought in from Iran and the Iranian Red Crescent provides medical care, assisted by Doctors Without Borders and a handful of other small international aid agencies. But the situation remains dire for the Afghans who are not prepared for the winter, which has arrived early this year.

Women and children, poorly dressed and often weak from long journeys, constitute the bulk of the population. Many left their homes because of the bombing and have no means by which to return. Moreover, they do not trust promises of a new, broad-based Afghan government to be any different from the many changes of power they have witnessed in their country in the past.

“In the last 20 years, I have sold all of my belongings at least three times,” says Mohammad Naiim, a 46-year-old refugee from Kandahar who spent two weeks traveling with his pregnant wife and six children to reach Makaki. “My family and I no longer have the strength to be chased away again if it doesn’t work out this time.” Soon after his family arrived in the camp, Naiim’s wife gave birth to a baby girl with the help of Doctors Without Borders physicians.

UNHCR also believes that the worst may not be over yet. It maintains that Iranians should allow the Afghan population at its borders inside and allow them to set up camp at least 50 kilometers inside the Iranian border. “In spite of the change of forces inside Afghanistan, the situation is still fluid,” said Millicent Mutuli, UNHCR’s public information officer based in Tehran. “These are people fleeing from the Nimrooz province; they should be allowed asylum in Iran. They will be safer in Iran.”

Danial Mollaii, the security chief of Sistan-Baluchistan, the Iranian province that borders the camps, disagrees. He relies on statistics to make his point. There are 400,000 Afghan refugees already living in his province. Thirty percent of the population of the province’s capital, Zahedan, are made up of long-term Afghan refugees exerting pressure socially and economically on a region officially declared deprived by the Iranian government.

But the Iranian government, which has long supported the Northern Alliance, is clearly concerned about the political allegiances of these refugees. “There are hidden sympathies in the province for the Taliban because of the common religious roots some people here have with them,” Mollaii says.

Seventy percent of people in the province are Sunnis, unlike the rest of Iran, which is a predominantly Shia country. The Baluchi tribe after which half the province is named are scattered across Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan, traveling freely across borders.

Only a month ago, an anti-U.S.-bombing demonstration led to an attack on the Pakistani consulate in Zahedan that left one person dead.

Anti-U.S. and Pakistani sentiment runs high among the population. “Hatred against the U.S. and Britain has increased since the bombings,” says Molana Abdolhamid, the spiritual leader of Sunnis, in his mosque in Zahedan. “If the international community topples the Taliban and excludes them from future government, the Taliban will not allow a new government to exist. Maybe the Taliban’s extremism is a weakness. But it is better to reform them than to kill them.”

Prospects for a quick solution for the 2.3 million Afghan refugees scattered in the region remain bleak as factions gathered under the umbrella of the Northern Alliance begin to voice their individual vision of a future Afghanistan.

“If the world forgets Afghanistan, tomorrow’s Afghanistan will be no different to yesterday’s Afghanistan,” says Barahooii.

But even the general, whose latest advances would not have been possible without the help of U.S. bombers, warns against any direct role for the United States in Afghanistan’s future: “If the U.S. aims for a base in Afghanistan, they will face the same fate as the Soviet Union.” While many of the refugees oppose the Taliban, they are angry at the U.S-led bombing campaign that has cost them their homes and their loved ones.

“People in big tall buildings with bathrooms are humans, but my children aren’t,” says Mohammad, a 45-year-old father of six. He and his wife, Bibigol, 38, and their children ranging in age from 2 to 10, left their native Ghowr, east of Heart, to come to Makaki. For ten days they lived without a tent, bearing the freezing cold of the desert nights, because there were not enough tents for the new arrivals. They made their own shelter on the outskirts of the camp with a sheet of cloth and some sticks.

Life was good for them before the bombing, according to Bibigol, who makes traditional hand-woven rugs known as kilim. Mohammad made a living as a cook preparing chelo-kabab, a local dish of rice and barbecued meat. They sold all they had to pay for their way to the Iranian border.

Surrounded by three of their children, they sit outside their makeshift tent, their faces caked in the dust that blows up into the air with every little movement. Behind them a crowd gathers around tankers distributing drinking water.

“I’ve never seen bin Laden,” says Mohammad. “Nobody here has ever seen bin Laden. [The United States] talks of human rights. Don’t children here have human rights?”

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