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A THREAT IN THE
NAME OF ISLAMIC REPUBLIC
The Islamic Republic is coveting the Turkish territories this time
01-06-2007
The Islamic Republic’s regime is dangerous for
the security of the world due to its stealthy plans. Territorial demands,
attempts to seize the neighboring countries, intervention in the internal
affairs of its neighbors, efforts to export Islamic revolution and to
convert Sunni Muslims into Shiites with a view to undermine the security and
stability of the region make up the plans of this disgusting regime.
It is so strange that although one can see the involvement of this regime in
the events taking place in many countries, there is no reaction.
This regime applies torture to its own people and executes them, violates
the individual and social rights of its people, sends social and political
activists to prisons, tries to eliminate non-Persian nations, considers
those Shiites who think differently as enemies and sheds their blood, and
keeps the Sunnis under great pressure due to their sect.
Can one deny the intervention of the Islamic Republic in Iraq, Pakistan,
Yemen, Lebanon and other countries? And can one deny the sites established
for propaganda purposes with a view to make hundreds of Sunnis in Arabia,
Africa, Asia and Far East feel doubtful about their religion?
Certain Pan-Iranians and chauvinists that appear to be against the Islamic
Republic have been in cooperation with this theocratic and reactionary
regime for years.
In the recent period the chauvinist and reactionary Islamic Republic regime
has been in agreement, and the territorial claims put forward by this regime
represent a dangerous case. These claims are so dangerous that they may drag
the whole region into war and unrest.
Muhammad Mahdi Abd Khodai, Head of the Fadaian-e Islam Society, made a
statement on May 18, 2007 on an internet site under Ali Akbar Hashemi
Rafsanjani, former President of the Islamic Republic and current Head of the
Expediency Discernment Council; this statement revealed a small part of the
malicious attitude of the Islamic Republic. In his statement, Khodai
disclosed the extremely dangerous territorial enlargement program which is
also supported by the leadership of the Islamic Republic.
In the above-mentioned statement, he said that the Caspian Sea belonged to
Iran and other states had no right over this sea. In an interview he had
with the political writer of Aftab, he said, “Today the presence and
independence of the countries around Lake Mazandaran is a subject of debate.
They had been forcefully separated from our country under the Turkmenchay
Agreement and solutions must be found to ensure their return to Iran.
According to the provisions of the Turkmenchay Agreement, the regions
separated from the Iranian territories would remain in the hands of the
Russian state for 99 years. In accordance with the Turkmenchay Agreement,
Nakhchivan, Baku and other regions must be returned to Iran”.
Abd Khodai wanted a group of experts from different regions to conduct a
work on this issue and to file suits at international institutions so as to
get their rights.
The above-mentioned individual, who was involved in the assassination
attempt against Dr. Fatemi, who was the Foreign Minister during the rule of
Dr. Mosaddegh, also stated the following: “The Islamic Republic is now the
biggest power in the region and the neighboring countries do not have the
strength to counter us. The State must take action in order to get the
rights over Lake Mazandaran (Caspian Sea).”
It is clear that this paid-up soldier of the Islamic Republic’s regime is
talking by relying on the support he receives, and behind his words, one can
see the footprints of the leaders of the Islamic Republic’s regime. This
regime threatens its neighbors and considers itself the strongest power of
the region. It is unclear what will happen to the region after this regime,
which is dreaming to be strong, gets the nuclear weapons it has been
violently after. This regime considers Bahrain, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan,
Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Armenia and a part of Turkey as
belonging to itself. These territorial claims of the Islamic Republic and
its efforts to export this outrageous ideology of Religious Leadership are
currently one of the greatest threats to the world and will lead to an
increase in the terrorist activities in the neighboring countries and cause
bitter wars with the neighboring countries.
Today we are witnessing explicit interventions of the Islamic Republic’s
regime in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Pakistan. This regime will become
a great threat also for the Middle Eastern countries in the future, and the
whole world will turn into a place insecure to live in if this regime gets
nuclear weapons.
The terrorist group called Fadaian-e Islam was founded in 1945 by Sayyed
Mojtaba Navvab Safavi, who was an extreme Shiite cleric, and 4 prime
ministers of Iran as well as a number of people not of the same opinion had
suffered from the terrorism of this group. This group is one of the
supporters of the ideology of the Islamic Republic, and the statement of the
leader of this terrorist group must be a sign of danger for all the
neighboring countries and particularly the Turkish-speaking countries.
Today, we must strongly stand against these secret and open plans of the
chauvinist and racist Islamic Republic and thwart them.
سازمان آزادیبخش ترکمن صحرا – تورکمن صحرا آزادلیق قوراماسی
TURKMENSAHRA AZADLYK GURAMASY
TURKMENSAHRA LIBERATION ORGANIZATION
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At the Edge of
Revolution: Does Pakistan Have a Khomeini?
Iason Athanasiadis | Bio | 30 May 2007
World Politics Review Exclusive
http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/
LAHORE, Pakistan -- "The only time I wore a burka was at a fancy-dress
ball," says Unver, a Pakistani painter hailing from an upper class Pakistani
family. Speaking to a group of friends, he recounts sending his driver to
the market to buy him the cheap, all-enveloping veil sealed with a face
grill that many of Pakistan's most conservative women wear on sorties
outside the house.
"After forty minutes of wearing that thing, I was drenched in sweat. Next
time I saw my driver, I asked him how his wife can wear that thing all the
time. He just looked at me with an expression that said, 'You don't
understand.'"
Unver's post-party exchange with his driver hints at the massive cultural
gap between the elites inhabiting the villas vacated by the British colonial
masters and the vast majority of Pakistan's 190 million poverty-stricken
masses. In Iran, a resource-rich country twice the size of Pakistan and with
a third its population, this social disparity helped galvanize the 1979
Revolution that led to the foundation of the first Islamic Republic in the
Middle East. Could this be the path that Pakistan will follow?
Unver is the only one of his siblings to have returned to Pakistan from the
West. One of Pakistan's foremost painters, he sells his striking figurative
and abstract works for several times what the average Pakistani makes in a
year. His world is peopled by a British-accented Pakistani elite inhabiting
exclusive districts of Lahore or Karachi and punctuated with shooting and
fishing getaways conducted against a background of private guards, cooks and
drivers. In Iran, almost thirty years ago, people such as Unver were shocked
when the classes to which their servants belonged rose up to overthrow them
and confiscate their properties. Could it be Pakistan's turn next?
"A civil war in slow motion has started already," said a Lahore-based
Pakistani journalist who refused to be named for fear of jeopardizing his
position. "Musharraf has a double standard: he's killing Baloch nationalists
in the name of security and patronizing mullahs inside the capital."
Pakistan's military President came to power in a 1999 coup and assumed the
position of Washington's main partner in its post-9/11 War on Terror. To
safeguard American aid, Musharraf conjured the specter of Islamic radicalism
as the only alternative to himself in a bid to convince the Americans that
he is an indispensable partner. At the same time, he gave religious radicals
more leeway to conduct their activities than at any other time since the
Islamist Pakistani President Zia Ul Haqq.
In a notorious, ongoing case, hundreds of
madrasseh students have taken over Islamabad's Red Mosque, a radical
seminary, and are running an independent religious court that bypasses
Pakistani law to implement Islamic law directly. The mosque's male and
female students have also launched anti-vice patrols that target music and
video shops. Meanwhile, in the northern Pakistani city Charsadda, two-dozen
music shops have been blown up in the past month. In Iran, all Western music
and films were banned after the Revolution and morality militias called
Bassijis manned checkpoints and raided homes in which unrelated men and
women were suspected of mingling.
In Balochistan, a restive and underdeveloped province adjoining Iran,
Pakistan has constructed the fourth deepest port in the world with Chinese
help. When ready, it will give Beijing a valuable strategic foot-hold close
to the energy-rich Persian Gulf, long an American zone of influence.
Washington is less than delighted about the budding Sino-Pakistani
friendship, which has led to Musharraf stepping up his repression of armed
Baloch factions who are demanding greater profit-sharing with the state and
increased autonomy. Across the border with Iran, a series of explosions and
kidnappings by a mysterious group called Jundullah (Soldier of God) has
targeted the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, giving rise to Iranian
accusations that the United States is involved in funneling arms, money and
terrorist know-how to the anti-Tehran group as part of its strategy to
pressure the Islamic Republic.
Elsewhere in Pakistan, social inequality is on the rise. Rather than
addressing the simmering resentment and widespread poverty of the people,
the incestuously intertwined political and business establishment is giving
its blessing to the construction of Dubai-style exclusive gated compounds
with names such as Canyon Views and Crescent Bay where the rich can isolate
themselves from the anger of the poor. The remains of such compounds still
exist in today's North Tehran, although they are now inhabited by the new
"revolutionary" aristocracy. During the Shah's time, they were the exclusive
domain of foreign, often American, advisers subcontracted out to the Shah's
modernization drive. Like Pakistan, Iran had also signed an intrusive Status
of Forces Agreement (SoFA) with Washington that exempted U.S. personnel from
prosecution under local courts in the event they committed a crime while in
the host country.
Pakistan's elites inhabit exclusive, British-designed ghettos with 24-hour
access to water and electricity and names such as Cantonment, Defence and
GOR (Government Officials Residences). Their villas are set back from wide,
tree-lined boulevards embedded with speed-bumps to minimize rowdy driving
and terrorist attacks. Lush, plentifully-watered gardens poke over high
walls, within which small detachments of servants bustle about preparing
Sahib's car or Madame's social excursion. Educated in British-style public
schools and American universities, Pakistan's upper classes speak mostly
English among themselves, switching to Urdu to address the servants.
Avoiding the slum-infested popular parts of town, they feed themselves at
Western fast-food franchises and turn a blind eye to the assorted scrums of
beggars clamoring to clean their windscreens or sell them jasmine-bracelets
at traffic lights. In the summers, they migrate from Lahore or Karachi to
London, taking a break from a busy social calendar that peaks in December
with glittering weddings and parties catered by small armies and splashed
across the glossy pages of socialite magazines.
Having been based in Iran for the past three years and having studied the
social conditions that led to that revolution, I was assaulted by an ominous
sense of déjà vu as I witnessed Pakistan's moneyed professionals discuss the
emboldened religious conservatives in horrified tones at nightly salons. The
way in which they mystifiedly asked each other who the niqab-clad women
occupying the Lal Masjed (the takeover of the Red Mosque by radical Talibs
is the latest manifestation of Islamist fervor in the Pakistani capital)
reminded me of the befuddlement with which Iran's upper classes confronted
the great unwashed after they took over Tehran's streets, ousted the Shah,
voted overwhelmingly for an Islamic Republic and moved into the
lavishly-appointed ministries of a defunct Imperial Iran.
Today, those formerly scruffy revolutionaries have aged gracefully in power,
educated their children at foreign universities and chanelled their profits
into international companies with interests in Dubai, London and New York.
In the summer of 2005, it was their turn to look appalled as another wave of
the great unwashed, led by current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, stepped up
to the seat of power.
So when can we expect the Revolution? Well, possibly not anytime soon.
"Pakistan's very social fabric has been broken, ever since Zia ul Haqq,"
said Javed Muazzam, the chairman of the Pakistan People's Party - Shahid
Bhutto and Pakistan's longest-serving political prisoner during the reign of
former Islamist premier Zia ul Haqq. "We've become a country of crises but
even now people are not ready to come to the streets. They've been divided
in religion, language and faith basis and lost their faith in the political
parties that betrayed him."
Pakistan may be an overwhelmingly Muslim state, but it is split between a
Sunni majority and Shiite minority and lacks a Khomeini-style religious
leader behind which its fragmented religious groups can unite. None of the
country's clerics possess the charisma of the founder of the Islamic
Republic of Iran, while the corrupt antics of the leaders of Pakistan's
mainstream political parties have robbed them of their popular legitimacy.
Musharraf has taken advantage of this by building a strategic domestic
alliance with the MQM, a thuggish political party that was largely
responsible for violence two weeks ago that killed around 40 people in
Karachi.
"He has parceled up the country and sold it off to people whose support his
needs," said Benazir Bhutto, a two-time former prime minister with
corruption charges pending against her. "He has given Karachi to the MQM
like he has given the (North Western) Frontier to the religious extremists."
But not one of the religious parties is led by a personality of
inspirational and unblemished religious credentials. The head cleric of the
Red Mosque, Maulana Abdel Aziz, has been widely quoted in the headlines
recently for threatening an anti-government jihad.
"We will not retreat. We will sacrifice our lives," said Abdul Rashid Ghazi,
a spokesman at the Lal Masjid mosque.
However, neither he nor Abdel Aziz can match Khomeini in stature or the
magnetic hold exercised over ordinary people. Ironically, perhaps Pakistan's
most popular Muslim preacher is an Indian: Zahir Naik. Unknown to the West,
he employs his fluent, sarcastic English to fashion biting retorts to
perceived Western encroachments upon Islam that endear him to the millions
of the subcontinent's middle class Muslims who feel directionless in these
troubled times.
Ultimately, Pakistan is perhaps too young and insecure a nation to sustain a
genuinely popular anti-establishment movement rising from the streets.
"Iranian society is intact and deep-rooted but we're not," said Munib.
"Iranians have 3,000 years of nationhood and an accompanying arrogance. We
don't."
Perhaps the reason for the almost servile respect that is directed towards
foreigners lies in Pakistan's short nationhood -- just sixty years have
elapsed since the state was created in 1947. It is an attitude diametrically
opposed to the Iranian mistrust -- official and popular -- of Westerners and
the single largest factor contributing to the two countries' foreign policy:
Iran is an international pariah and member of the so-called Axis of Evil,
while Pakistan is the most trusted Muslim partner in the War on Terror.
Perhaps the Pakistani Khomeini is even now preaching in a mosque in the
conservative city of Multan or studying in a madrasseh in the North Western
Frontier Province. But his ability to reach out to the masses will be
hampered by Pakistan's Sunni-Shiite divide and the country's fragmented
Muslim identity.
"In our subconscious we're shaped by Hindu mythology," said Rumman Ihsan, a
journalist for Pakistan's Dawn television. "We worship idols, not democratic
principles, and live in a fool's paradise, feeling that we're still the
Muslim Moghul princes who ruled the Continent."
Iason Athanasiadis is an analyst and writer who recently left Iran after
three years living in Tehran.
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