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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