The Persecution of Baha’is in Iran

Black
census

Counting
minorities is an omen of bad prospects and evil designs ahead

May 2, 2006

Iqbal Latif

Asma Jilani Jahangir, born 1952, Lahore, is a Pakistani
lawyer and human rights activist UN Special Rapporteur
on Extrajudicial, Arbitrary and Summary Executions. The name of Asma Jehangir, human rights
activist, commands respect, admiration and affection in the Indian
sub-continent comprising India,
Pakistan and Bangladesh.
According to her, the new wave of Bahai persecution
in Iran
is a gross infringement of UN Declaration of Human rights. The Special Rapporteur made public a confidential and official letter
sent on 29 October 2005 by the chairman of the command headquarters of Iran's armed forces to several Iranian
government agencies stating that Iran's
Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, has instructed
the command headquarters to identify and monitor, in a highly confidential
manner, members of the Bahai faith in Iran.

She has expressed the fear that information gained through such monitoring
would be used as a basis for the "increased persecution of and
discrimination against members of the Bahai faith,
in violation of international standards." She is a very frail lady ready
to take on the power of the entire cabal of the Iranian theocracy. If she can
throw the gauntlet to Khamenei, I ask why Shirin Ebadi can't speak up for
the rights of the persecuted Bahai community. Why
the Iranian intellectuals turn their face the other way? Is Pakistan not
far more difficult a place to survive if one invites the wrath of the
mullahs? Why can't Iranica intellectuals speak up
against this planned downsizing of a very vibrant Iranian Bahai
community? They could join the civilised world by
condemning this actuarial scientific method of marginalisation.
Many intellectuals worldwide have done so exactly.

As Iranian intellectuals enjoy the 'Rip van winkle' slumber today, Professor
Kevin Boyle, Professor of Law, University of Essex, Professor Guy S Goodwin,
Gill Senior Research Fellow All Souls College, University Of Oxford,
Professor Francoise Hampson OBE, Professor of Law,
University of Essex, Professor Matthew Kramer, Professor of Legal and
Political Philosophy, University of Cambridge, Professor Javaid
Rehman, Professor of International Law Brunel
University, Professor Malcolm Shaw QC, Sir Robert Jennings, Professor of
International Law, University of Leicester, Professor Patrick Thornberry CMG,
Professor of International Law Keele University,
have all joined hands and issued a direct appeal to the conscience of the
world; they have said that

"concern with Iran's nuclear status is
overshadowing its human rights situation. As persons committed to the dignity
of all human beings and the protection and guaranteeing of human rights, we
are greatly concerned at the news announced on 20 March by the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, Ms Asma Jehangir.

"We share the deep concern of the Special Rapporteur
about this development which represents an ominous new stage in the ongoing
persecution of members of the Bahai faith in Iran. The UN
has issued more than 56 pronouncements condemning Iran's
execution and imprisonment of Bahais, solely
because of their membership of the Bahai community,
and criticising the overtly discriminatory
treatment by Iran's
government of this religious community since 1980.

Such comments have never before included a warning to the international
community that the government of Iran is now seeking to identify
and monitor every single member of the Bahai faith.
History tells us that this type of measure is often the precursor to
increasing persecution of such a group. Given the existing level of
discrimination and persecution experienced by the Bahais
in Iran,
we can only have considerable fear about what the new measure will mean in
practice."

Asma Jehangir is a friend. I met
her first time nearly eight years ago at the house of the ex-President of Pakistan, Ayub's,
son in London.
Little did I realise that this lady has a will of
iron. She has fought numerous cases against the Pakistan government to uphold the
rights of minorities like Christians and Hindus. She once saved a Christian
boy of 12, sentenced to death for blasphemy from being hanged; she has saved
women charged with adultery from being stoned to death; she leads agitations
against public flogging, executions and chopping off of limbs ordained by
hooded ordinances promulgated during the regime of President Zia-ul Haq. Mullah elements hate
her guts. Murderous attempts to kill her and her family were made. She has
had to send her children abroad for safety. She has been beaten up and
jailed. Nevertheless for the vast majority of Pakistanis, Asma
Jehangir has become the voice of sanity in an atmosphere
fouled by religious bigotry.

The world cannot keep quiet as this new pre-genocidal cleansing attempt to
clear the remnants of a vibrant philosophical thought is methodically carried
out. The belief and doctrine of the Bahai faith has
undoubtedly been the harbinger of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
adopted and proclaimed on December 10, 1948 by the General Assembly of the
United Nations. Declaration is a living document that enshrines freedom,
respect, dignity, peace, equality, justice, pluralism and tolerance; these
are the very values that underpin ethics of the Bahai
philosophy.

The declaration recognises the inherent dignity and
equality and inalienable rights of all members of the human family as the
foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world, censure and denounce
the disregard and contempt for human rights that have resulted in barbarous
acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind. The declaration demands
an advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and
belief. Freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest
aspiration of the common people. And calls for the human rights should be
protected by the rule of law.

Counting minorities is an omen of bad prospects and evil designs ahead.
According to the wicked plan, each and every Bahai
member in Iran
was being identified and monitored. Such an action is an impermissible and
deplorable interference with the rights of members of religious minorities in
Iran.
Bahai faith for far too long has been an expunged
page from the Iranian official contemporary records; to erase them further
and tap their fringe subsistence is a clear-cut program of state-sponsored
extinction of an entire community. This new actuarial request and secret
state censuses of minorities have a very dangerous precedent. It advances the
idea of collusion of silence with the involvement of science.

This
testimony of a "black census" of Bahais
can be compared to 'The Nazi Census: Identification and Control in the Third
Reich,' a book written by Gtz Aly
and Karl Heinz Roth and published in 1984 is amongst the first to commence
the discussion about link between Nazi and post-Second World War state
practices. "It was neither through the ideology of blood and soil nor
through the principle of guns and butter, upheld until the end of 1944, that
the National Socialists secured their might or carried out their destructive
activities. It was the use of raw numbers, punch cards, statistical expertise
and identification cards that made all that possible (p.1)."

Aly and Heim talk about the dominance of an
actuarial sensibility in the Reich's scientific and state communities that
measured the "value of a human being" in the purely economic terms
of cost versus productivity (pp. 94-98). According to their arguments,
populations were selected for marginalization and eventual murder based
primarily on this criterion. The authors point out that policies of
registration and identification, which did not exist before the Nazis,
continue to "profoundly affect" the daily relationship between
individual and state in post-war Germany (p. 146). The Bahais in Iran
are facing similar prospects today; they have been targeted for marginalisation for nearly 140 years. Now this courageous
community is being threatened with a renewed scientific form of annihilation,
something that Nazis perfected. Will the world's conscience remain hushed?

A nation is known by the state of its minorities. The way the weakest are
maintained exemplifies the moral standing of nation; a great nation takes
care of its weak and its nonconformist. On that count, the efforts to
eliminate the Bahai faith in Iran is the
regime's clear-cut effort to pay no heed to the Article 1, 2 and 3 of the UN
Declaration of Human rights. UN Human rights charter Article 1 categorically
states that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.
They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one
another in a spirit of brotherhood. Article 2 of the charter cements the
right of faith; it states vigorously that everyone is entitled to all the
rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any
kind, such as race, colour, sex, language,
religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property,
birth or other status. Article 3 guarantees that everyone has the right to
life, liberty and security of person.

The fortitude and the substance of the preamble of the three sacred articles
is flagrantly desecrated by Supreme leader Khamenei's
secret edict, reported by Asma Jehangir,
UN special Rapporteur, that Bahais
in Iran be subject to specific 'census' of 'familiar discrimination,' which
is the preamble of a new program of ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing is
designated a crime against humanity in international treaties, such as that
which created the International Criminal Court (ICC). The International
Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was set up in a similar
spirit, and prosecutes these crimes under more generic names. The United
Nations' General Assembly condemns "ethnic cleansing" and racial
hatred in a 1992 resolution.

A similar term with the same intent
was used by the Nazi administration in Germany under Adolf Hitler. When
an area under Nazi control had its entire Jewish population removed, whether
by driving the population out, by deportation to Concentration Camps, and/or
murder, the area was declared judenrein, (lit.
"Jew Clean"): "cleansed of Jews". (cf. racial hygiene).
The clergy-dominated Iran
today wants to achieve similar goals through ideological persecutions and
economic marginalisation. The term, "ethnic
cleansing," refers to various policies of forcibly removing people of
one ethnic group. At one end of the spectrum, it is virtually
indistinguishable from forced emigration and population exchange, while at
the other, it merges with deportation and genocide. How can Muslims at large
accept such draconian measures when, throughout the history, Muslims like any
other race have suffered from cleansing? Spain's large Muslim minority,
called Moriscos, inherited from that country's
former Islamic kingdoms, was expelled in 1502 and 1609-1614.

Recently
the comparisons of these cleansing efforts in Iran
can be made to attacks by the Janjaweed
Arabic-speaking African Muslim militias of Sudan
on the non-Arab African Muslim population of Darfur, a region of western Sudan. The
1994 massacres of Tutsis by Hutus, known as the Rwandan Genocide; the forced
displacement of some 800,000 Azeri's and 300,000 Armenians during the
conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan and the Armenian invasion of
Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding areas from 1988 to 1994. Irrespective of
their beliefs, it is the minorities that are annihilated by the forceful
majorities; it is this diversity of ideology and culture that we all human
beings are bound by; a human covenant to stand up for and protest. In Iran
Muslims are persecuting; in Sudan,
they are being persecuted. We condemn both at the top of our voices. That is
what is demanded from us by the social contract we follow.

Bahai systematic plunder is ethnic cleansing that
can be understood as the expulsion of an "undesirable" population
from a given territory as a result of religious or ethnic discrimination,
political, strategic or ideological considerations, or a combination of
these. The term "cleansing" ("cleansing of borders") was
used in Soviet documents of early 1930s in reference to the resettlement of
Poles from the 22-km border zone in Byelorussian SSR and Ukrainian SSR. The
process was repeated on a larger and wider scale in 1939-1941. Humankind has
seen this plunder all through the ages; we need to be very clear in
condemning it irrespective of our color creed and thought. Once, when we are
perpetrators, we need to stand up against our own communities, or once, when
we are oppressed, we should not let the efforts of annihilation go by; we
should stand up and censure shackles that try to limit our freedoms.

Our globe is rich with diversity of culture and ideas. Let's not rob our
future generations of this rich diversity; let's not impose a tyranny of
forceful conversions. The genre of discrimination sees no bounds and has no
distinctive color attached to it. Today, they are Bahais
in Iran
that are facing an edict of ideological and physical extermination from Khamenei.

In
yesteryears, it was the destructions and cleansing of Turkish, Muslim, and
Jewish populations from Balkans following the independence of Balkan
countries (e.g., Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria) from the Ottoman Empire; from
early 1800s to early 1900, the cleansing of Muslim populations in Northern
Caucasus by imperial Russia throughout the 19th century, particularly,
expulsion of Circassians to Anatolia in 1864; the
widespread ethnic cleansing accompanying the Yugoslav wars from 1991 to 1999,
of which the most significant examples occurred in eastern Croatia and Krajina (1991-1995), in most of Bosnia (1992-1995); the
expulsion of 800,000 Poles from Warsaw, partially to concentration camps,
after the defeat of Warsaw Uprising 1944.

The city of
Warsaw,
population of one million, was ordered to be completely demolished on the
personal order of Hitler. Approximately 80% of the city was demolished; the
expulsions of Jews from Austria
after the Anschluss, and deportations of Poles and
Jews from Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany.  Nazi Germany wiped out
entire populations of Jews and Roma people and Sinti
("Gypsies") during World War II. Generalplan
Ost, in which the Nazis planned to kill or expel
most or all ethnic Slavs from large regions of Eastern Europe and replace
them with German settlers.

It is not who the perpetrator is that matters, it can be our own leaderships,
but it is our collective conscience to identify the perpetrator and go beyond
our own strain of human grain and condemn it vehemently. Let's be counted.
The genocides and denial of freedoms need the help of every human being's
conscience; it needs no unanimity of colour, creed
or thought; human beings should stand for each other and protect each other's
right of expression. It is the complicity of silence that is criminal. A
breathing Diaspora should not accept it.

Is Iran not a signatory of this UN
declaration that sanctifies the right of every human being for a free belief?
Iran
as a signatory of the Non proliferation treaty wants to send that treaty to
the dustbin by not adhering to its limitation imposed on it as a signatory.
On the other hand, it similarly wants to send the UN declaration of human
rights to the dustbin of history by failing to maintain minimum safeguards as
far as recognition and freedom of its minorities are concerned. A clergy-led
cabal is putting the entire nation at a collision course with the conscience
of the world.

Nations
that are led on such a path of self-destruction in this day and age of
drone-guided weapons bring havoc and heap misery upon the weakest.
Iranians in no way deserve it. The intentional violation of
international contracts - from NPT to Human rights - is a blinkered version
of clergy that feels they can find their way out by highhandedness and
long-windedness. Today the question is: until when will the conscience of
Iranian diaspora remain in slumber with a huge dose
of self-induced detachment from the grim prospects of Iranian minorities? Iran should take pride instead of persecuting
the authors of declarations like these that emanated from Iran in 1869:
"The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens."

The belief that "the national state has reached the limits of its
development as an independent, self-directed social body, a world science, a
world economy and a world consciousness, riding the wave of a new and
universal movement of spiritual evolution, lays the foundations of a world
order. Conceived of as an end in itself, the national state has come to be a
denial of the oneness of mankind, the source of general disruption opposed to
the true interests of its people. From the depths of man's divine endowment
stirs a response to the affirmation of oneness which gives this age its
central impetus and direction. Society is undergoing transformation, to
influence a new order based on the wholeness of human relationships needs
admiration if nothing. It beggars belief why Iran should exclude and bar the
rich heritage of modern 'Iranian universalistic philosophy' penned by the
great Bahai authors of the 19th century?

I thank Asma Jehangir, a
fragile lady who had the courage to put this on the map of the world human
right activists. It is a clarion call for every Iranian to stand up and be
counted, condemn this ethic downsizing and cleansing in the cradle of civilisation. Let us put Iran back on the map as the
great civilization of mankind we call it; we can take one small step that
will be a huge step for mankind to denounce the bigotry and make ourselves
count; to show that when it comes to inequity, we will go beyond beliefs and
condemn human rights violations. The greater necklace that ties us all
together is the necklace of humanity; let's rise above pettiness, division of
ideology, and join hands with the academic icons of the world.

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