Iranian protesters demonstrate in the centre of Manchester. Backed by Israel, Reza Pahlavi, the son of the king overthrown in Iran in 1979, has become the most visible face of the fragmented Iranian opposition. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Karlos Zurutuza
MANCHESTER, United Kingdom, Mar 17 2026 (IPS)

Iranian and Israeli flags fill the centre of Manchester, in northern England. There are also portraits of a king overthrown almost half a century ago and of his son, now a claimant to the throne from exile. It is yet another march of Iranians calling for Reza Pahlavi as an alternative to the regime of the ayatollahs.

“The regime will not last much longer and Reza Pahlavi is the only one who can steer a transition and keep the country united,” Nazanin, a young woman who prefers not to give her full name or be photographed for fear of reprisals against her family in Iran, tells IPS.

The regime will die killing; then we will face a Libyan-style scenario in which everyone tries to extend as much control as possible over the territory. Civil war will be inevitable - Mehrab Sarjov
In fact, she does not know them either. Born in England, she has never visited the country her parents fled in 1982. It was three years after a revolution hijacked by clerics brought an end to almost four decades of an autocracy backed by the West.

Since then, Iran has been ruled by a Shiite Islamic theocracy that harshly punishes dissent. At the beginning of January, a wave of repression left a death toll that varies widely: about 3,000 according to government sources, but tens of thousands according to internal reports cited by doctors and journalists.

From the centre of Manchester, Nazanin says she has placed all her hopes in the bombing campaign launched by Israel and the United States against Iran on February 28.

So far, the bombs have claimed the lives of more than a thousand Iranians, including the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei. The fact that his son is taking over the role reflects the regime’s determination to resist. Military targets and key infrastructure on which a population of more than 90 million people depends have also been struck.

“The clerics have always responded to peaceful protests and legitimate demands with violence. It is sad, but there is probably no other way to end the regime,” the young woman says.

Remains of a bombed residence in Tehran, allegedly belonging to a nuclear scientist. The joint bombing campaign by Washington and Tel Aviv has resulted in over a thousand deaths, the vast majority of them civilians. Credit: Mirza Reza/IPS

Fragmentation

In a report published on February 24 titled “Tsunami of arbitrary arrests and enforced disappearances,” Human Rights Watch denounced tens of thousands of arrests following what it described as massacres across the country on January 8 and 9.

Opposition to the clerical regime has in fact been growing for almost a decade. In 2017 and 2019, massive protests erupted over the country’s precarious economic situation, eventually turning into calls for the government’s downfall.

Between 2022 and 2023, the Woman, Life, Freedom movement shook the country for months after the killing of a young Kurdish woman by security forces for not wearing the Islamic veil.

Although portraits of Reza Pahlavi have become a recurring feature of protests both inside and outside Iran, fragmentation remains the word that best describes the Iranian opposition.

Monarchists, republicans, federalists and reformists all share a common enemy, yet they have been unable to coordinate among themselves.

“Yemen is a hero,” reads this mural in central Tehran. Despite the ongoing conflict in the Strait of Hormuz, Iran has yet to activate its Houthi allies. Credit: Mirza Reza/IPS

“There are several self-proclaimed leaders in exile, but they have no real roots in the country. Pahlavi is Israel’s preferred option, and it is true that he has attracted some well-known reformists who have abandoned the regime, but it is not enough,” Mehrab Sarjov, an analyst originally from Iran’s Baluch southeast, tells IPS from his residence in London.

Sarjov also points to the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (MEK), an organization founded in 1965 that helped bring down Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979.

“They are highly organized inside the country, run intelligence networks and have the capacity to carry out sabotage operations, but Washington and Tel Aviv appear to have ruled them out,” the analyst says.

The situation is far more complex. Although the Persian majority makes up roughly half the population, Iran is a mosaic of peoples that includes Azerbaijani Turks, Kurds, Baloch and Arabs, among other ethnic groups.

Sarjov points to what he calls the “diversity of the periphery versus the Persian centre,” noting that many advocate decentralization toward a kind of federal model. Neither the ayatollahs, nor Pahlavi, nor the MEK, nor most of the Persian political core are willing to consider such an option.

How would the borders of those new federal entities be drawn? Along ethnic lines, historical ones or geographic ones? The lack of consensus leads the analyst to outline a scenario in which violence drags on over time.

“The regime will die killing; then we will face a Libyan-style scenario in which everyone tries to extend as much control as possible over the territory. Civil war will be inevitable.”

A daily scene in Iranshar, in southeastern Baluchistan, Iran. Sistan and Baluchestan is the most underdeveloped province, as well as the most affected by violence in the entire country. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

Uncertainty

At the moment, Washington and Tel Aviv seem focused on the short term, with their strategy revolving around toppling the regime through a bombing campaign. Analysts worldwide have noted that this approach has never succeeded in achieving such a goal.

The US-Israeli offensive is now concentrating on clearing the Strait of Hormuz to restore the flow of oil from the Arabian Peninsula. Washington is keen to mitigate the impact on energy prices caused by the conflict in this crucial oil transit route.

American outlets such as CNN and The New York Times have reported that the CIA may be working to arm Kurdish guerrillas with a view to taking part in a possible ground offensive.

Recently formed amid growing instability in the country, the Coalition of Political Forces of Iranian Kurdistan brings together five clandestine political parties with military capabilities.

So far, they have not explicitly endorsed Washington’s alleged plan. However, they have reiterated their goal of overthrowing the regime and fighting for democratic rights that include the right to self-determination.

They have also expressed willingness to cooperate with other actors inside the country, including Azerbaijani Turks, with whom they maintain historical territorial disputes in places such as Urmia and Tabriz, in the northwest of Iran.

Dünya Başol is a researcher who holds a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies from Bar-Ilan University in Israel with a dissertation on Iran’s Kurds. He admits he finds it difficult to feel optimistic.

“Turkish nationalism in Iran feeds not only on the aggression of Persian nationalism but also on ethnic ties with neighbouring Azerbaijan and Turkey, as well as on the complex Kurdish-Turkish dynamics in Iraq’s Kurdistan Region,” the Turkish analyst tells IPS by phone from Ankara.

“Both Azerbaijani Turks and Kurds are beginning to draw their internal borders in maximalist terms, so all those calls for dialogue and coexistence will not prevent conflict from erupting between them,” he adds.

Başol warns that ethnic conflict could spread across the rest of the country and recalls that it already flared up after the revolution that brought the clerics to power in 1979. That episode, he says, was only contained by the war with Iraq between 1980 and 1988.

“There will be ethnic borders within the country, but what will happen in the large cities where the population is mixed?” the expert asks.

He points to an “unpredictable scenario.”

“If the regime collapses, only a strong government in Tehran will be able to avoid chaos. For now, nothing suggests that either Pahlavi or any of the other options will be capable of achieving that.”

Ahmed Salem Lebsir, battalion chief and director of the Polisario Front Military School, stands beside an installation marking Morocco’s invasion of the territory 50 years ago. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza / IPS

By Karlos Zurutuza
ROME, Nov 5 2025 (IPS)

Ehmudi Lebsir was 17 when he trudged more than 50 kilometres across the desert to stay alive. Half a century on, the Sahrawi refugee still has not gone home to what was then Spanish province of Western Sahara.

On 6 November 1975, six days after Moroccan troops pushed into the territory, hundreds of thousands of Moroccan civilians streamed south under military escort. Branded the “Green March”, it was, in effect, an invasion and the start of a military occupation of Sahrawi land.

The UN has now set aside a principle it has long held sacrosanct: the right of peoples to self-determination. That was the framework that had guided its approach to the Sahrawis for more than three decades

Dubbed “Africa’s last colony,” Western Sahara is roughly the size of the United Kingdom and remains the continent’s only territory still awaiting decolonisation. Yet on 31 October this year, that goal slipped further from reach.

Marking the 50th anniversary of Morocco’s incursion, the UN Security Council adopted a resolution that, by endorsing Rabat’s autonomy plan, lent weight to Morocco’s sovereignty claim over the territory.

The UN has now set aside a principle it has long held sacrosanct: the right of peoples to self-determination. That was the framework that had guided its approach to the Sahrawis for more than three decades.

Lebsir speaks to IPS by videoconference from the Tindouf camps in western Algeria. Nearly 2,000 kilometres southwest of Algiers, this harsh desert where summer temperatures can touch 60C has been the closest thing to home the Sahrawi people have known for 50 years.

“We faced a choice: remain in Algeria as refugees, or build the machinery of a state, with its ministries and a parliament,” recalls Lebsir, now a senior representative of the Polisario Front. Founded in 1973, it is recognised by the United Nations as the “legitimate representative of the Sahrawi people”.

A man walks past a mural in the Tindouf camps in Algeria, where the Polisario Front has managed life in exile while building state institutions. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza / IPS

On arriving in Tindouf in 1975, Lebsir was tasked with setting up schools in the camps. He later oversaw cohorts of Sahrawi students in Cuba, spent a decade in the Sahrawi Parliament and served in the SADR’s Ministries of Justice and Culture.

It was in that parliament that the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic was proclaimed in February 1976.

“After a century of Spanish presence, we never imagined Madrid would leave and abandon us to our fate,” he says. “There’s no going back: either we have an independent state, or our people will be buried.”

After the Polisario declared independence in 1976, the UN reaffirmed the Sahrawis’ right to self-determination. But the UN Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara (MINURSO), created in 1991, has never delivered the vote it was set up to hold.

Tomás Bárbulo was also 17 when Moroccan forces moved in. The son of a Spanish soldier based in Laayoune —Western Sahara’s capital, 1,100 kilometres south of Rabat—, he had returned to Madrid three months before that 6 November.

“The Sahrawis have survived napalm and white phosphorus, persecution, exile, the systematic plunder of their natural resources, and attempts to erase their identity through the influx of hundreds of thousands of settlers,” the journalist and author tells IPS by phone from Madrid.

Bárbulo, whose La Historia Prohibida del Sahara Español (Destino, 2002) is a standard work on the conflict, lays the stalemate chiefly at the door of “Morocco’s unyielding position, often blessed by the Security Council’s major powers.” The UN, he says, “has capitulated to Rabat”.

Ironically, even the UN does not recognise Moroccan sovereignty over Western Sahara. The occupied territory has been on the United Nations list of Non-Self-Governing Territories since 1963. In legal terms, the decolonisation of Western Sahara remains “unfinished.”

Mohamed Dadach in Laayoune, the capital of occupied Western Sahara. Released in 1999 after 24 years in prison, he is known as the “Sahrawi Nelson Mandela.” Credit: Karlos Zurutuza / IPS

‘Open-air prison’

The UNHCR estimates that between 170,000 and 200,000 Sahrawis live in Algeria’s desert camps. However, life inside the Moroccan-held territory itself is harder to gauge, since Rabat does not even acknowledge the Sahrawi people exist.

Understanding living conditions there is equally difficult. Senior observers such as Noam Chomsky have labelled the territory as a “vast open-air prison”.

In a report released last July, UN Secretary-General António Guterres noted that Morocco has blocked visits by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) since 2015.

“OHCHR continues to receive allegations of human rights violations, including intimidation, surveillance and discrimination against Sahrawi individuals, particularly those advocating for self-determination,” he wrote.

Despite restrictions, international rights groups continue to document abuses. Amnesty International’s 2024 report says Rabat curtails “dissent and the rights to freedom of association and peaceful assembly in Western Sahara” and “violently represses peaceful protests”.

Human Rights Watch denounced that courts hand down long sentences based “almost entirely” on activists’ confessions, without probing claims they were extracted under police torture.

At 36, Ahmed Ettanji is one of the most prominent Sahrawi activists in the occupied zone, something he has paid for with 18 arrests and repeated torture.

Speaking by phone from Laayoune, he says the visibility afforded by international NGOs is the only thing keeping him out of prison, or worse.

“We are marking fifty years of a harsh military blockade, extrajudicial killings and every kind of abuse,” he says. “There are thousands of disappeared and tens of thousands of arrests. The economic interests of world powers always trump human rights.”

After five decades, entire generations have been born in the Algerian desert, many families knowing each other only through video calls. Yet Ettanji insists not all is bleak.

“Born under occupation, people my age were expected to be the most assimilated, the most pro-Moroccan. That has not happened. The desire for self-determination is very much alive among the young.”

Sunset on a beach in occupied Western Sahara. In addition to a coastline rich in fishing resources, Sahrawis watch helplessly as Rabat exploits the rest of their natural wealth with the complicity of powers like the US, France, and Spain. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza / IPS

‘Autonomous Region of the Sahara’

The autonomy plan that the UN has now effectively endorsed is Rabat’s sole political offer in five decades. First floated in 2007, it was backed by the Trump administration in 2020.

How this “Autonomous Region of the Sahara” would actually work is left largely undefined, beyond talk of local administrative, judicial and economic powers.

Polisario rejects the scheme, but rejection has not brought the Sahrawis any closer to deciding their own future.

For many Sahrawis, the timing of the Security Council’s move, on the very anniversary of Morocco’s 1975 incursion, felt less like coincidence than calculated cruelty.

People like Garazi Hach Embarek, daughter of a Basque nurse who treated the first displaced families half a century ago and a founding member of the Polisario Front. The 47-year-old has spent years taking the cause into classrooms, universities, town halls and any forum that will listen.

In an interview with IPS in Urretxu, 400 kilometres north of Madrid, Hach Embarek does not hide her dismay. “Active resistance is extremely difficult, and the Moroccan lobby remains highly influential,” laments the Sahrawi activist.

“We live in turbulent times, where anything seems to go, but this is neither just nor legal. Under the guise of peace, the real aim is simply to legitimise injustice,” she adds, before stressing the need “to forge new alliances.”

“Colonialism is far from over, and we’re merely the casualties of continued misgovernance in Africa’s last colony.”

Aitor Zabalgogeazkoa during an interview with IPS in Bilbao (Spain). Recently returned from Gaza, this Basque aid worker has spent three decades in the field of humanitarian work. Credit: Andoni Lubaki/IPS

By Karlos Zurutuza
BILBAO, Spain, Aug 19 2025 (IPS)

It’s 8am when Nasser Hospital in Gaza opens its doors. Aitor Zabalgogeazkoa, Doctors Without Borders’ emergency coordinator in the besieged territory, has already been at work for more than three hours.

“The first thing is to check online where the explosions or gunfire I heard overnight actually took place. That’s when we start organising the day,” says the 61-year-old MSF staffer, during an interview with IPS in Bilbao —400 kilometres north of Madrid. He has just returned home after two months in Gaza.

“By half past eight, the hospital has already reached its daily capacity. Children, women, the wounded… many are left outside because the system is overwhelmed. It’s incredibly hard to manage,” Zabalgogeazkoa explains.

That has been the reality since October 2023, when Israel launched its military offensive on the Gaza Strip, a Palestinian enclave bordering Egypt but cut off from the West Bank, where most Palestinians live.

Gazans living in tents set up on the beach fetch water in jerrycans. Access to even the most basic supplies has become a daily ordeal during the war. Credit: MSF

According to Gaza’s health ministry, the campaign has so far left more than 60,000 dead and 145,000 injured. The vast majority are civilians, including thousands of women and children.

Israel argues its operation is aimed at destroying Hamas’s military capacity — the Palestinian militia and governing authority in Gaza — following the 7 October 2023 attack in which around 1,200 people were killed in Israel and more than 240 taken hostage. Fifty remain in captivity, though only about 20 are thought to be alive.

The UN has warned of an “unprecedented humanitarian crisis,” with more than 90% of the population displaced and swathes of the enclave reduced to rubble. Numerous governments, international organisations and UN human rights experts have called it “genocide.”

“It’s two million people trapped between bombs and hunger, in 365 square kilometres where conditions deteriorate by the day,” says Zabalgogeazkoa.

“Other than the war injuries, the most ordinary things can kill”: if you’re diabetic you’ll lose your foot because there’s no insulin; if you’re malnourished you can’t care for your children… Even being coeliac can kill you.”

A healthcare worker tends to a newborn in an incubator. The lack of fuel also affects hospitals, which rely on generators for electricity. Credit: MSF

“An orchestrated massacre”

The MSF coordinator notes that only two of the four food distribution points run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) — an organisation backed by the US and Israel but heavily criticised — are still operating.

“Other than the war injuries, the most ordinary things can kill”: if you’re diabetic you’ll lose your foot because there’s no insulin; if you’re malnourished you can’t care for your children… Even being coeliac can kill you.”
“People have to cross war zones to get there, and then chaos breaks out. Many are injured in the stampedes of desperation. In the end, it’s thousands fighting for a few sacks of flour,” he recalls.

A Doctors Without Borders investigation published on 7 August, titled This is not aid, this is an orchestrated massacre, described the centres as “death traps”, called for the programme to be scrapped, demanded the reinstatement of the UN-coordinated mechanism, and urged governments and donors to cut support for GHF.

“Distributions start at nine, but two hours earlier you already hear the gunfire. Israel says there’s no other way to control the crowds, but we come across people with bullets in the head or chest,” explains Zabalgogeazkoa.

Since the offensive began, at least eight health facilities in Gaza have been targeted by the Israeli army, most of them bombed from the air.

“At Nasser Hospital they killed patients by firing a missile through a window on two occasions. Soldiers also stormed the building and we had to evacuate. We couldn’t return for weeks. It was one of the hospitals where babies were left in incubators, and nothing more was ever heard of them,” he laments.

Fuel shortages to power hospital generators have forced doctors in Gaza to take extreme measures, such as placing several babies in a single incubator. MSF staff have reported cases of up to six infants in one unit.

Even water supply is a major struggle. Zabalgogeazkoa notes that 70% of the urban network is destroyed, so much of the water never reaches its destination.

Israel maintains that Gaza’s hospitals often conceal military targets, including “Hamas command centres” and “tunnel networks.”

The MSF staffer rejects this outright: “They always use the same narrative, also when they kill journalists living in tents set up inside hospitals. For Israel, everyone is Hamas. Were all the journalists they killed Hamas too?”

Gaza residents in a district bombed by the Israeli army. After nearly two years of offensive, the territory has been reduced to rubble. Credit: MSF

“Inconvenient witnesses”

The UN reports that at least 242 journalists have been killed in Gaza since the offensive began — the highest number ever recorded in a conflict. The vast majority were Palestinian, as Israel has barred international press access. The few foreign correspondents who entered did so embedded with Israeli troops and were unable to work independently.

Nothing seems to stem the chain of attacks on local journalists, who bear the responsibility of documenting the horror.

On 30 June this year, an Israeli airstrike destroyed the al-Baqa café, killing at least 41 people, among them Palestinian photographer and filmmaker Ismail Abu Hatab. The café had been a popular meeting place for young people, journalists and artists, and one of the few places where residents could access the internet and charge their phones during the war.

On 11 August, four Al Jazeera reporters and a local fixer were killed when a bomb struck al-Shifa Hospital. The head of UNRWA accused Israel of “silencing the voices exposing atrocities in Gaza.”

“They’re killing journalists one by one. Now almost everything is left to 16-year-olds posting videos on social media with their phones,” says Zabalgogeazkoa, describing it as a “systematic elimination of inconvenient witnesses.”

With Hamas’s leadership decimated and no local government to manage resources or administer justice, the Strip is descending into chaos. “Israel is doing everything it can to bring about the complete breakdown of Gazan society,” he warns.

“Besides, medicines, food, fuel… they are manipulated in a cruel game. Just when supplies are about to run out, Israel allows enough for another three or four days. People are so consumed with survival that they cannot think about anything else,” adds the MSF staffer.

He is due to return to Gaza in mid-September, though he fears conditions will have worsened by then.

On 10 August, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the approval of a plan for a full takeover of Gaza as “the fastest way to end the war, eliminate Hamas and free the hostages.”

The announcement drew widespread international condemnation. Few doubt the already dire humanitarian situation will deteriorate even further.

A portrait of Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned PKK leader, looms over the Qandil Mountains, the group's stronghold in Iraqi Kurdistan. In 1998, a year before his capture, the guerrillas relocated their bases here from Syria’s Bekaa Valley. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Karlos Zurutuza
ROME, Mar 5 2025 (IPS)

“The PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) should dissolve. I make this call and take historical responsibility,” read the letter from Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the Kurdish guerrilla, on Thursday, 27 February.

This could be the last chance for a democratic solution between the Kurdish people and the Turkish state, says PKK spokesman Zagros Hiwa
The statement was read at a press conference by members of the People’s Equality and Democracy Party (DEM)—Turkey’s pro-Kurdish and progressive political party—and broadcast on social media.

After four decades of armed conflict between the Kurdish guerrillas and the Turkish state, there seemed to be an opportunity to bring one of the longest-running disputes in the Middle East to an end.

Once again, Abdullah Öcalan emerges as a central figure. Born in Şanlıurfa (Ankara-controlled Kurdistan) in 1949, he was one of the founders of the PKK, which he led into armed struggle in 1984.

After years of directing the group from exile in Syria, Öcalan was captured in 1999 in Kenya by Turkish special forces while travelling from the Greek embassy to Nairobi airport.

He has since been serving a life sentence for charges of “treason” and “terrorism” on İmralı, a small island in the Sea of Marmara between European and Asian Turkey, which houses a high-security prison.

The Women’s Centre in Qamishlo, the capital of north-eastern Syria. It is there that the Kurds have been self-governing since 2012, following the lines of a political and social programme drawn up by Abdullah Öcalan from his captivity. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

There are 40 million Kurds spread across Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey. Half of them live under Ankara’s rule, where their demands for basic rights —such as recognition of Kurdish identity, freedom of expression, and other democratic guarantees— have historically been met with repression.

Previous attempts at reconciliation between Ankara and the PKK —including the most recent in 2013 and 2009— failed. As early as 2004, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, now Turkey’s president but then prime minister, vowed to solve the Kurdish issue.

Back in 1993, Turkey’s then-president, Turgut Özal, publicly acknowledged his Kurdish heritage and advocated for peace and dialogue. However, he was found dead in his office, with causes ranging from “cardiac arrest” and allegations of poisoning. Özal´s death also put an end to what had been a promising peace initiative.

“Öcalan’s latest letter is a continuation of that 1993 peace initiative. This could be the last chance for a democratic solution between the Kurdish people and the Turkish state,” PKK spokesman Zagros Hiwa told IPS over the phone from the Kurdish mountains.

The guerrilla fighter recalled that the PKK had declared more than ten unilateral ceasefires since the armed struggle began in 1984, the latest being announced last Saturday.

A PKK guerrilla fighter in a guerrilla cemetery in the Qandil Mountains. The Kurdish-Turkish armed conflict is one of the longest-running in the Middle East and has claimed tens of thousands of lives. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

A Recurring Pattern

For the Kurds, this is a well-worn cycle of failed peace efforts. Every attempt by the PKK to initiate dialogue has placed the ball in Turkey’s court, yet Ankara has never played it back. Perhaps this explains why so many Kurds remain sceptical.

“This is the déjà vu we experience every five or ten years,” said Mehmet K., a Kurdish journalist who writes under a pseudonym for security reasons, speaking to IPS by phone from Amed (the capital of Turkish Kurdistan).

In his latest letter, Öcalan stressed that the process requires “the recognition of a democratic policy and a legal framework.” However, unlike in previous appeals, he provided no details on specific demands or a proposed roadmap.

Sources within DEM confirmed to IPS that the PKK leadership in Qandil had been consulted before the document’s publication. They also emphasised that discretion was key and that details would be discussed “at a negotiation table with the Turkish state and political parties.”

“At first glance, it seems like a blank cheque. We have no idea what they are asking for in exchange for their dissolution, so all we can do is speculate,” said Dünya Başol, a political analyst and professor of International Relations at Batman University in eastern Turkey, speaking to IPS from Ankara.

According to Başol, possible concessions could include recognition of Kurdish language rights, such as cultural programmes in local councils, as well as easing restrictions on civil movements and the potential release of political prisoners.

“In some ways, it would be a return to Turkey’s 1960s, when Kurds had greater freedom of expression and tensions were lower,” the analyst pointed out. However, a military coup in 1971 put an end to that period of relative openness.

A tribute to Abdullah Öcalan in the Kurdish mountains. The PKK leader was arrested in 1999 in Kenya by Turkish special agents while traveling from the Greek embassy to Nairobi airport. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

A “New Paradigm”

From the Kurdish Peace Institute—an independent research organisation based in Washington with offices in Kurdistan—researcher Kamal Chomani expressed “mixed feelings” about Öcalan’s recent statement.

“History pushes me towards pessimism, but we cannot give up when there is even the slightest chance of peace,” Chomani told IPS by phone from Leipzig, Germany. He noted that the announcement comes at “a historic moment when the Middle East is being reshaped.”

According to Chomani, possible Kurdish demands could include constitutional recognition of the Kurdish language, amnesty for guerrilla fighters, some autonomy, and greater political representation within the Turkish state.

“This would be a roadmap that Turkey must accept if it wants lasting peace,” he argued. He also stressed that the Kurdish issue “is no longer just a security problem or an internal affair, but an international matter that Turkey can no longer ignore.”

The Kurds in Syria, just across Turkey’s southern border, have been self-governing since 2012 under the principles of democratic confederalism—a progressive and decentralised political model outlined by Öcalan while in captivity.

Ankara has responded to this ideological affinity with military interventions in Kurdish-Syrian areas, using allied Islamist militias to seize territory and displace hundreds of thousands. Meanwhile, Turkish airstrikes on key infrastructure in northeast Syria continue unabated.

But with Turkey’s growing influence following the fall of Assad’s regime in Syria—replaced by an Islamist government sympathetic to Ankara— what incentive does Erdoğan have to offer anything to the Kurds?

Chomani questions the nature of Turkey’s supposed victory and believes there are still many unanswered questions.

“Turkey is militarily stronger than in 2015, but economically and socially, it is far weaker. Moreover, we still don’t know what direction Syria will take under Ahmed Al Sharaa (the country’s current president). I believe he will align more closely with the Saudis, Turkey’s regional rivals,” Chomani explained.

While the PKK has openly expressed its willingness to disarm, the Kurdish-Syrian forces of the Syrian Democratic Forces —whom Ankara considers an extension of the PKK— have distanced themselves from any potential disarmament as part of a Turkish peace process.

According to Chomani, Öcalan´s recent announcement marks a “new paradigm” in which armed struggle would be replaced by political and social activism.

“The guerrillas would have taken this step back in 1993 had Özal’s initiative succeeded,” lamented the Kurdish expert. Three decades and tens of thousands of deaths later, the ball is once again in Turkey’s court.

The skyline in Baku. Tycoons like the Rothschilds or the Nobels made their fortune here over a hundred years ago thanks to oil. (Image: S.K.LO.)

By Karlos Zurutuza
ROME, Oct 10 2024 (IPS)

On November 20, 2023, Ulvi Hasanli, director of AbzasMedia —an independent media outlet in Azerbaijan—was arrested when he was about to board a taxi to Baku airport. Meanwhile, uniformed officers raided AbzasMedia’s headquarters in the Azerbaijani capital, claiming to have found 40,000 euros in cash, which was used as evidence to accuse Hasanli of currency smuggling.

“I guess we were focusing on topics too sensitive for the government,” explains Leyla Mustafayeva via videoconference from Berlin to IPS. She has been the new editor-in-chief of AbzasMedia since February.

This 41-year-old Azerbaijani journalist recalls that one of those “too sensitive” topics had to do with Nagorno-Karabakh, the enclave in Azerbaijani territory from which the Armenian minority was expelled in September 2023.

The United Nations Climate Change Conference 2024 (COP29) will take place from November 11 to 22 in Baku. "Baku seeks to silence any dissenting voice in what was supposed to be a great year for Azerbaijan," concludes Mustafayeva

“We investigated the contracts awarded for reconstruction in the area and discovered that many companies belonged to high-ranking government officials,” explains the journalist. The second issue dealt with an artificial lake where toxic waste from a gold mine was being dumped.

In addition to covering protests that were brutally suppressed, the journalists wanted to go further.

“The locals are suffering from serious health problems. We wanted to take samples to check cyanide levels in the soil and water but the village was under police control,” recalls Mustafayeva, who has been exiled since 2017.

It was that year when her husband, Afqan Mukhtarli, an Azerbaijani journalist and human rights defender, was arrested in Georgia and transferred to Azerbaijan in a joint operation between Tbilisi and Baku.

Today, six journalists from AbzasMedia are listed among 23 journalists currently in prison in Azerbaijan. The country ranks 164th out of 180 in the World Press Freedom Index published annually by Reporters Without Borders.

Observers agree that repression has escalated since 2023. The United Nations Climate Change Conference 2024 (COP29) will take place from November 11 to 22 in Baku.

“Baku seeks to silence any dissenting voice in what was supposed to be a great year for Azerbaijan,” concludes Mustafayeva.

Ilham Aliyev, the president of Azerbaijan, waves from one of the thousands of billboards scattered throughout the country. He came to power in 2003, succeeding his father in office. Credit: David Fielke/IPS

“Repressive State”

The current president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, took office in 2003, succeeding his father in power in a country rich in gas and oil. The latter is a factor that strengthens the regime’s stability and also opens many doors in the international arena.

But its reputation seems inversely proportional to its wealth.

The American NGO Freedom House labels Azerbaijan as “one of the least free places in the world.” It also ranks 154th out of 180 countries in the 2023 Corruption Perception Index compiled by Transparency International, a platform working in 100 countries.

On September 24, Human Rights Watch reminded that this is “the third consecutive year the COP is held in a repressive state that severely limits freedom of expression and peaceful assembly” (the previous ones were Dubai and Egypt).

Baku´s Olympic stadium will host one of the annual climate summits, COP29, from November 11 to 22, in Azerbaijan’s capital. The country’s president, Ilham Aliyev, is using this conference in an attempt to improve his regime’s image. (PEN/Flickr)

“You could say that the West has failed Azerbaijani civil society. It’s clear that the priority is energy, not human rights,” Arzu Geybulla, an independent Azerbaijani journalist, told IPS via videoconference from Istanbul.

She hasn’t set foot in her country since she was accused of “treason” in 2014 for having worked for Agos, an Istanbul-based Armenian newspaper. She says that the Armenian issue and anything related to the Azerbaijani family in power for the past three decades are two red lines for journalists and activists.

“Repression has worsened in recent years. Journalists on the ground are completely defenceless against all kinds of threats, mainly because they lack legal protection,” Geybulla denounces.

She refers to measures like the so-called “Media Law”, passed in 2022. The Committee to Protect Journalists denounced that the decree increased government control over the press, making it easier to ban and shut down media outlets.

UK Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, Ed Miliband (left), welcomes Mukhtar Babayev, the president-designate of COP29, in London last July. Once again, energy takes precedence over human rights. (Image: UK Government)

However, journalists aren’t the only ones being targeted.

One of the most well-known recent cases is that of Gubad Ibadoghlu, a professor at the London School of Economics and a renowned human rights defender in Azerbaijan. He also worked on the United Nations Convention against Corruption.

On July 23, 2023, Ibadoghlu was travelling with his wife when their car was pushed into a ditch by three other vehicles. The couple was brutally beaten by agents in plainclothes and later taken to police custody in Baku.

After spending the first six months in a small cell shared with five other inmates and being deprived of his medications (he is diabetic), Ibadoghlu remains under house arrest awaiting trial on charges of “smuggling foreign currency” and “propagation of extremist ideas.” He is not allowed to use a phone, and his visits are restricted.

“It was a message to everyone: if they can arrest someone like him, they can arrest anyone,” explains his daughter Zhala Bayramova, a human rights lawyer, speaking to IPS by phone from the Swedish city of Lund.

The police also claimed to have found 40,000 euros in a wardrobe in his office, despite the presence of a safe. Other than the recurring sum, the 26-year-old lawyer points to a pattern in repression campaigns.

“In 2003, they targeted the political opposition; in 2013, NGOs; and now it’s journalists, researchers, and academics,” the Azerbaijani woman emphasizes.

“There have always been political prisoners in Azerbaijan,” she adds.

An oil platform in the Caspian Sea. Azerbaijan’s fossil resources have opened many doors for it on the international stage. (Image: S.K.LO.)

Silence

Journalists in Azerbaijan contacted by IPS pointed to increasingly difficult working conditions.

“Taking just one photo on the street can land you in jail. There are police officers everywhere; it’s like a massive open-air prison,” a journalist told IPS by phone before asking not to reveal his identity for fear of reprisals.

The Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Justice, the Press Department and the Baku Police refused to answer the questions forwarded by IPS via email.

Meanwhile, arrests continue. On August 21, Bahruz Samadov, an Azerbaijani political analyst pursuing doctoral studies at the University of Prague, was arrested.

After the police searched his apartment on suspicion of drug trafficking and allegedly found 40,000 euros in cash, Samadov was eventually charged with “treason.”

A few days later, another Azerbaijani researcher, Cavid Aga, was detained at the airport and interrogated by intelligence services about Samadov. He was about to fly to Lithuania to continue his studies but is now banned from leaving the country. Dozens of journalists and activists today face this same ban.

Aga, 31, built a reputation as an observer, translating news and official statements, and providing context during the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war. Baku then took control of two-thirds of the territory held by Armenians after a 44-day confrontation.

“Although there’s a new generation in power, Azerbaijan is still doing what it has always done,” Aga tells IPS via videoconference from Baku.

Aga doesn’t know when the ban on leaving the country will be lifted and is in the midst of a legal process to clarify his situation. He admits to being much more cautious in his statements “for obvious reasons.” The government, he stresses, “has made people afraid to speak out.”

Mahrang Baloch during a public appearance. The 30-year-old has emerged as a prominent figure in the Baloch movement. Credit: Mehrab Khalid/IPS

By Karlos Zurutuza
ROME, Jul 4 2024 (IPS)

A 30-year-old woman speaks before tens of thousands gathered in southern Pakistan. Men of all ages listen to her speech in almost reverential silence, many holding up her portrait and chanting her name: Mahrang Baloch.

This took place on January 24 in Quetta, the provincial capital of Balochistan, 900 kilometers southwest of Islamabad. The large, predominantly male crowd that gathered to welcome a group of women was unexpected for many. However, the reasons behind it were compelling.

They were welcomed back home after leading a women’s march towards Islamabad that lasted several months, demanding justice and reparations for missing Baloch people. In a phone conversation with IPS from Quetta, Mahrang Baloch provides the context behind what became known as the ‘march against the Baloch genocide’.

“For two decades, Pakistani security forces have been conducting a brutal military operation against political activists, dissenters, journalists, writers, and even artists to suppress the rebellion for an independent Balochistan, resulting in thousands of disappearances.”

Divided across the borders of Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan, the Baloch people number between 15 and 20 million, with their own language and culture.

Following Britain’s withdrawal from India, they declared their own state in 1947, even before Pakistan did. However, seven months later, that territory was annexed by Islamabad. Today, they live in the country’s largest and most sparsely populated province in the country, also the richest in resources, yet plagued by poverty and violence.

Mahrang Baloch, a surgeon by profession, recalls being fifteen years old when her father, an administration official known for his political activism, was arrested in 2009. Two years later, his body was found in a ditch after being savagely mutilated.

“There is no Baloch family that has not lost one of their own in this conflict,” says the prominent activist. Remaining silent, however, doesn’t seem to be an option for them.

“We at the Baloch Unity Committee (BYC) will fight against the Baloch genocide and defend Baloch national rights with public power in the political arena. However, we will continue our struggle outside the so-called parliament of Pakistan, which lacks a true mandate from the people and facilitates the Baloch genocide,” explains the mass leader.

Sammi Deen Baloch in Dublin after receiving a human rights award last June. She has not heard from her father since his kidnapping in 2009. (Photo provided by SDB)

Harassment

International organizations such as Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch have consistently accused Pakistani security forces of committing serious human rights violations, including arbitrary detentions and extrajudicial executions.

Pakistani authorities declined to respond to questions posed by IPS via email. Meanwhile, the Voice for Missing Baloch People (VBMP), a local platform, cites more than 8,000 cases of enforced disappearances in the last two decades.

The secretary general of that organization is Sammi Deen Baloch, a 25-year-old Baloch woman who led last winter’s march to Islamabad alongside Mahrang Baloch. Baloch is a common surname in the region. The two women are not related.

Sammi Deen also participated in previous marches conducted in 2010, 2011 and 2013. Her father disappeared in 2009, and she has not heard from him ever since. “Fifteen years later, I still don’t know if I am an orphan, and my mother doesn’t know if she is a widow either,” says the young activist.

Last May, Sammi Deen travelled to Dublin (Ireland) to collect the Asia Pacific Human Rights Award, which is given annually to outstanding human rights defenders.

However, bringing Balochistan into the international spotlight always comes at a cost.

“They resort to all kinds of strategies to silence us, from smear campaigns to threats which are also directed against our families. They even file false police reports against us constantly,” Sammi Deen Baloch told IPS over the phone from Quetta.

Mahrang Baloch visited Norway last June after receiving an invitation from the PEN Club International, a global association of writers with consultative status at the UN. Even in the Scandinavian country she was harassed during her stay, forcing the Norwegian police to intervene on several occasions.

Despite the pressure endured by these women, Sammi Deen points to “significant progress” in the attitude of her people after the last march.

“Until very recently, most of the thousands of affected families remained silent out of fear of reprisals, but people massively joined the last protest. Today, more and more people are raising their voices to denounce what is happening,” claims the activist.

Khair Bux Marri at his residence in Karachi in 2009. Until his death in 2014, he was one of the most influential and respected leaders of the Baloch people. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

Thirst for Leadership

Baloch society has historically been organised along tribal lines. Some of its most charismatic leaders, such as Khair Bux Marri, Attaullah Mengal or Akbar Khan Bugti, eventually paid with imprisonment, exile and even death for their opposition to what they saw as a state of occupation by Pakistan.

Muhammad Amir Rana is a security and political economy analyst as well as the President of the Pakistan Institute of Peace Studies. In a telephone conversation with IPS from Islamabad, Rana points to a certain “need for leadership” as one of the keys behind the massive support for Baloch activists.

“The problem is that all those historical leaders are already dead, and those who remain in Balochistan are seen as people close to the establishment by a large part of Baloch society. They no longer represent their people,” explains the analyst.

He also highlights the presence of an “emerging” Baloch civil society structured around the Baloch Unity Committee (BYC), the Baloch Students Organization (BSO Azad ) or the VBMP.

“Mahrang Baloch is a young woman with an academic background who has managed to put the issue of the missing Baloch people in the spotlight, but who also brings together the feelings of her people and seems to be able to channel that into a political movement,” says the expert.

Karima Baloch used to hide her face for security reasons. The student leader went into exile in Canada, where she died in 2020 under circumstances not yet clarified (Photo: BSO Azad)

It’s an opinion shared by many, including Mir Mohamad Ali Talpur, a renowned Baloch journalist and intellectual.

“The mainstream parties often try to supplant the civil society but they, with their limited aims, are too shallow to take up the mantle. As for the tribal chiefs that remain, they are stooges of the government and their power stems from the governmental support and from the tribes,” Talpur tells IPS over the phone from Hyderabad, 1,300 kilometres southwest of Islamabad.

He also highlights the changes the last march led by women produced.

“Since the last march, all abductions have resulted in protests which include blockades of roads and other similar actions. Mahrang and Sammi have a charismatic aura and emulating them is considered honourable in both urban and tribal sections of society,” explains Talpur. He also stresses that both women give “continuity to Karima Baloch´s legacy.”

He refers to that Baloch student leader forced into exile in Canada, where she died in 2020 in circumstances that have not yet been clarified. The BBC, the British public broadcaster, even included her in its list of “the 100 most inspiring and influential women of 2016.”

As for the more pressing present, Talpur is blunt about the social impact of the women-led march:

“The most significant change is that people have realized that remaining silent about the injustices perpetrated against them only allows things to worsen.”

A moment of the march as it passes through Punjab. Led by women, the march was an unprecedented protest in Pakistan. Credit: Baloch Yakjehti Committee

By Karlos Zurutuza
ROME, Jan 12 2024 (IPS)

“We are the mothers, daughters, and sisters of the missing and murdered Baloch. We are thousands.” Mahrang Baloch, a 28-year-old doctor from Pakistan’s Balochistan province, is blunt when introducing herself and the rest of a group protesting in central Islamabad.

“We are asking for an end to enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings. We also demand the elimination of private militias,” the young woman explains in a phone conversation with IPS.

Divided by the borders of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Balochistan is the land of the Baloch, a nation of 15-20 million with a distinct language and culture. After the British withdrawal from India, they declared a state of their own in 1947, even before Pakistan did. Seven months later, however, Balochistan would be forcefully annexed by Islamabad

Baloch and the group arrived after a march that started in Balochistan last November. Nested in the country’s southeast and sharing borders with both Afghanistan and Iran, it’s the largest and most sparsely populated province in Pakistan, enduring the highest rates of illiteracy and infant mortality. It’s also the one most affected by violence.

Mahrang Baloch stresses that the trigger for the protest was the murder of a young Baloch man last November while he was in police custody. Following a two-week sit-in, the group decided to take the protest beyond the local province, embarking on a march to the Pakistani capital.

Clad in colourful traditional Baloch costumes and bearing portraits of their missing relatives, they received the warmth and support of tens of thousands along the way. However, the march was eventually blocked at the gates of Pakistan’s capital on December 20.

It was then that a police cordon permanently cut off their path on the outskirts of the city. The protesters refused to disband, so security forces responded with sticks, water jets and made hundreds of arrests.

Many women were dragged onto buses that took them back to Quetta, the provincial capital of Balochistan – 900 kilometres southwest of Islamabad. The rest set up a protest camp in front of the National Press Club, in downtown Islamabad.

After spending several hours in police custody, Baloch was eventually released. “We have carried the mutilated bodies of our loved ones. Several generations of us have seen much worse,” the young woman stresses.

She claims to be “mentally prepared” for the possibility of joining the long list of missing persons herself. “We have reached a point where neither forced disappearances nor murders can stop us,” adds the activist.

Mahrang Baloch during a speech in the centre of Islamabad. This young doctor has become a symbol for people who have been so retaliated against. Credit: Credit: Baloch Yakjehti Committee

Mutilated and in ditches

Divided by the borders of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Balochistan is the land of the Baloch, a nation of 15-20 million with a distinct language and culture. After the British withdrawal from India, they declared a state of their own in 1947, even before Pakistan did. Seven months later, however, Balochistan would be forcefully annexed by Islamabad.

Violence has been rife ever since.

In a report released on January 2023, Human Rights Watch accused Pakistani security forces of committing “serious human rights violations which include arbitrary arrests and extrajudicial executions.”

In November 2021, Amnesty International published a report, titled “Living Ghosts,” calling on Islamabad “to end policies of enforced disappearances as well as secret and arbitrary detentions.”

Baloch human rights organization Voice for Baloch Missing Persons (VBMP) points to more than 7,000 missing people in the last two decades.

It was exactly for that reason that Mahrang Baloch was first imprisoned at 13, when she was protesting the disappearance of her father, Gaffar Lango, in 2006 in Quetta. After his release, Lango would be kidnapped again three years later. His body was found savagely mutilated in a ditch in 2011.

Next on the list was her brother Nasir, who was abducted in 2018. “That was a turning point for me. It was clear that no one was safe, that it could happen to anyone,” recalls the activist.

Mahrang Baloch become one of the drivers of change that the traditionally conservative Baloch society is undergoing through civil platforms such as the Baluche Unity Committee (BYC). They launched this protest.

From a less visible position, Saeeda Baloch, a 45-year-old Baloch woman who works for an NGO she prefers not to disclose, has devoted herself to raising funds to offer food and shelter to the participants. Her reasons are powerful.

“My husband was shot to death in 2011 when he was working collecting information about the disappeared and the killed. Moreover, his brother and my nephew have been missing since 2021,” Baloch explains to IPS by phone from Quetta.

He says the initiative has been highly successful “despite the violence they had to face in Islamabad.”

“Women have taken to the streets, many of them spending sub-zero nights with their babies. I can’t think of a more eloquent image of the determination of our people,” says the activist.

The group arrives at the entrance of Islamabad. The march was blocked on the outskirts of Pakistan’s capital. Credit: Baloch Yakjehti Committee

Solidarity

It was not the first time that Baloch men and women marched to the capital of Pakistan to protest over enforced disappearances. In October 2013, an initiative that started in the permanent protest camp of Quetta turned into a foot march to Islamabad.

It was led by a 72-year-old man known as Mama Qadeer. His son’s body was recovered 800 kilometres from Quetta, where he had been kidnapped. He had two gunshot wounds to the chest and one to the head, cigarette burns on his back, a broken hand, and torture marks all over his body.

The figures of the so-called Great March for the Disappeared were as impressive as they were terrifying: 2,800 kilometres in 106 days during which 103 new unidentified bodies appeared in three mass graves.

“What differentiates both protests is the great participation of women in the last one and, above all, its leadership,” Kiyya Baloch, a Norway-based journalist and analyst of the Baloch issue, explains to IPS by phone.

“This last march has already become a movement. Other than gathering great support in Balochistan, the Baloch who live in the province of Punjab, historically more silent, have also mobilized for the first time,” the expert emphasises.

The expert also highlights the support received from sectors of Pakistan’s also neglected Pashtun minority, as well as from international personalities including activists Malala Yousafzai and Gretha Thunberg and the writer Mohamed Hanif.

The renowned British-Pakistani novelist made public that he had returned an award he had received in 2018. “I cannot accept this recognition from a State that kidnaps and tortures its Baloch citizens,” Hanif posted on his X account (formerly Twitter).

So far, the Pakistani government has turned a deaf ear.

In a televised appearance in January, Pakistani Prime Minister Anwar-ul-Haq Kakar referred to the protesters as “relatives of the terrorists” before adding that “anyone who supports the protest or writes about it should join the guerrilla.”

A protester makes graffiti in a Baloch town. The participants have had to reconcile activism and family for weeks. Credit: Baloch Yakjehti Committee

“Enemies of humanity”

At 80 years old, Makah Marri set foot in the capital of Pakistan for the first time in her life in the heat of the protest. She does not even speak Urdu, the country’s national language, but she is a well-known face at the numerous protests for the missing held in Balochistan.

She misses her son, Shahnawaz Marri. She has not heard from him since he was taken away in 2012. “What the relatives of the disappeared suffer is daily mental torture,” Marri recalls over the phone to IPS from Islamabad.

The images of the old woman, lifting the photo of her son above her head or being treated on the floor after fainting, have gone viral on social media. Today, she takes advantage of the conversation with the press to ask the rest of the world for “attention and support” for their cause.

The “enemies of humanity,” she emphasizes, not only took away her son but also the father of her grandchildren.

Several women dance and burn their veils during a nighttime demonstration in Bandar Abbas, southwestern Iran. The protest is in response to the tragic deaths of Jina Amini, who was beaten for not wearing the veil properly, and Armita Geravand on October 28 for similar reasons. Credit: Social networks

By Karlos Zurutuza
ROME, Nov 3 2023 (IPS)

On October 28, Armita Geravand, a 16-year-old Iranian teenager, passed away a month after she had been beaten by the police in the Tehran subway for not wearing the Islamic veil correctly.

Geravand’s death took place 13 months after Jina Amini´s, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman also beaten to death after being arrested in Tehran. She was also wearing her veil in the wrong way.

Farsi is the only official language in a country where any expression of identities other than Persian is banned and even punished. But it turns out that minorities are the majority: more than 60% of the almost 90 million Iranians are not Persians

Amini’s murder, however, was the trigger for one of the largest protests that have shaken the Islamic Republic of Iran since its foundation in 1979. Hundreds of thousands of young women and men took to the streets chanting “Women, life, freedom” all across the country.

The Government responded with a wave of repression that resulted in hundreds of deaths and thousands of arrests between 2022 and 2023.

Removing the Islamic veil in public, or even burning it, has been a recurring gesture nationally to denounce the constant violation of women’s rights in Iran.

Such a powerful image became the key symbol in protests which also included demands from the country’s minorities.

Both the previous monarchical regime (1925-1979) and the current one have focused on building a national identity as a homogeneous Persian society, ignoring the rest of the nations of Iran.

Thus, Farsi is the only official language in a country where any expression of identities other than Persian is banned and even punished. But it turns out that minorities are the majority: more than 60% of the almost 90 million Iranians are not Persians.

This is the case of the Baloch, a people numbering about four million in the extreme southeast of Iran, bordering Pakistan and Afghanistan.

An aerial view of Zahedan, the capital of Balochistan under Persian control. To this day it is the only city in Iran where protests continue to take place every Friday. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

A former political prisoner, Shahzavar Karimzadi is today the vice president of the Free Balochistan Movement, a political party banned in Iran that brings together Baloch people from three territories: Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

“We have been fighting for our most basic national rights for many years. We advocate for a secular, decentralized and democratic State, but that does not mean that we rule out our right to self-determination,” Karimzadi told IPS over the phone from London.

Apparently, Balochistan under Iranian control is the only corner of the country where the protest has not yet faded away. Karimzadi stressed that his people continue to demonstrate every Friday in Zahedan – the provincial capital, 1,100 kilometres southeast of Tehran – “despite the violence with which the regime responds.”

It’s true. An Amnesty International report published on October 26 denounced cases of torture of detainees in mass arrests in Balochistan that included children. The NGO urged the Iranian authorities to allow access to a UN mission to investigate human rights violations related to the protest.

The statistics speak volumes. Although the Baloch in Iran make up 4% of the country’s total population, a study by the Iranian NGO Iran Human Rights found that 30% of those executed by the State in 2022 belonged to this ethnic group.

Downtown Iranshar, in Balochistan under Iranian control. It is the poorest and most underdeveloped region of the country and one of the most severely punished by the repression of the clerical regime. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

From the mountains to the sea

Like the Baloch, the Kurds are also predominantly Sunni Muslims, an added stigma to their distinct ethnicity from the Persians under the ruling Shiite theocracy..

With a population estimated between ten and fifteen million, they live mainly in the northwest of the country, on the borders of Turkey and Iraq.

In an interview with IPS in the mountains between Iraq and Iran, Zilan Vejin, co-president of the Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan (PJAK), recalled that the slogan, “Woman, life and freedom” was coined by the Kurdish movement during a 2013 meeting.

“The protest started in Kurdistan led by women. From there, it spread throughout the country because it brings together people of all nationalities within Iran,” explained Vejin.

According to the guerrilla leader, calls against the mandatory use of the Islamic veil are “nothing more than the excuse for a revolt that calls for freedom and democracy.”

Vejin outlined his political project not only for Iran but for the region as a whole. It is a decentralized model, “a democracy built from the bottom up that advocates secularism, gender equality and the right of all peoples to develop their culture and language.”

It could be a solution that the Ahwazis of Iran could also accept.

They number about twelve million and concentrate on the shores of the Persian Gulf, right on the border with Iraq. They have paid for their Arab language and culture with decades of repression — from both the previous and current Iranian regimes.

Faisal al Ahwazi is the spokesperson for the Ahwazi Democratic Popular Front, one of the minority’s main political organizations. In a conversation with IPS by telephone from London, Al Ahwazi explained why his people had distanced themselves from the latest wave of protests.

“The repression we suffered in November 2019 is still too present. Back then, more than 200 Ahwazi protesters were murdered by the regime. That protest had no replicas in the rest of the country and we did not feel solidarity towards us,” lamented Al Ahwazi.

He highlighted the “lack of coordination” in the most recent protests and warned of dangers that may arise from a falsely executed regime change. “If the Persians want to remain in power, there will be a civil war,” said Al Ahwazi.

The moment in which Zilan Vejin was re-elected as co-president of the PJAK. The Kurdish liberation movement advocates a decentralization of the entire Middle East region. Courtesy PJAK

“Separatists”

One of the features of the last wave of protests in Iran has been the high level of participation by young people and their commitment to a “horizontal” movement. Although the absence of leadership has often been taken as a virtue, many analysts identify it as one of the reasons behind its failure.

Mehrab Sarjov, a political analyst and observer of the Iranian issue, also points out the lack of common goals and plans. “We don’t even know what kind of a country they vow for when the clerics are no longer there,” Sarjov explained to IPS from London over the phone.

The expert also recalled that Azeris make the country’s main minority and he highlighted their ties with both Turkey and Azerbaijan.

“Even if it´s Azeri, Kurdish, Arab or Baloch autonomists asking for decentralization and democratization of the country, they´re always labelled as ‘separatists’ by the Persians and automatically discarded,” explained Sarjov.

“It is the rhetoric of the ‘developed centre’ versus a ‘periphery’ whose economic and social backwardness is a consequence, they say, of its distance from that very centre,” he added.

In the absence of an inclusive project from the Persian core of the country, Sarjov points to the country’s minorities as “the main opposition force to the Government.”

But further steps need to be taken.

“Even the most secular and progressive Persians still do not recognize the rest of the peoples of Iran. It will still take time until they understand that they have to sit down and talk to them in order to articulate a movement with a chance of success,” concluded the expert.

Civilians are evacuated in Stepanakert, the capital of Nagorno-Karabakh, after the Azeri attack on September 19. Local administration data estimates the population of Karabakh at 120,000. Credit: Siranush Sargsyan/IPS.

By Karlos Zurutuza
ROME, Sep 26 2023 (IPS)

On September 19, the sound of bombs reminded the world of a long-forgotten conflict. In the Caucasus, the Azerbaijan’s army was launching a massive attack against a small enclave, Nagorno-Karabakh.

Also called Artsakh by its Armenian population, Nagorno-Karabakh is a self-proclaimed republic within Azerbaijan which had sought international recognition and independence since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

But that´s unlikely ever to happen.

Davit Baboyan, former Foreign minister of the enclave, calls the current situation the “worst moment in Armenian history since the genocide"

Aware of the enemy’s military superiority, and exhausted by a ten-month blockade by the Azeri army that has left its residents without even the most basic supplies, the Armenians of the enclave capitulated in less than 24 hours.

These fast-moving events, however, are just the latest chapter in a violent, painful saga dating all the way back to the end of the Cold War.

During the Soviet collapse, conflict between Armenians and Azeris led to a chain of forced expulsions and violence escalated sharply in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Thirty years ago, the First Nagorno-Karabakh War (1988-1994) ended with an Armenian victory this time, leading to the exodus of more than half a million Azerbaijanis back to Azerbaijan.

For the next 25 years, Armenians in the enclave enjoyed their own de facto republic, which they resumed calling by its old name: Artsakh.

However, the international community did not recognize Artsakh. Meanwhile, Azerbaijan spent those decades investing new profits from gas and oil to strengthen its army, investing heavily in new, high-tech military technology.

Azerbaijan would unleash its new force in 2020, during the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War. After 44 days of horror, Baku would retake many of the areas lost years before.

Armenians fled, some even digging up their dead from cemeteries and driving away with their ancestors in the trunk of their cars for reburial elsewhere, so certain they would never return to that land again.

For Azerbaijan, however, it was an incomplete victory. The Armenians had lost two-thirds of the territory under their control in the second war. But the areas Armenian troops had held on included key regions such as the capital and its surrounding districts.

Carnegie Europe’s Thomas de Waal, author of Black Garden: Armenia and Azerbaijan Through Peace and War, describes the conflict between Armenians and Azeris as “ethnic cleansing by each side in turn, rather than diplomacy.”

That the Azeris had squandered their turn three years ago became clear on September 19. The job had to be finished.

Families from Karabakh wait their turn to flee the besieged enclave. Prior to the attack, they had spent ten months under a brutal supply blockade imposed by Azerbaijan. Credit: Siranush Sargsyan/IPS

Now what?

Local sources point to hundreds of dead and thousands of displaced, although it is still too early to know the real figures. What can be confirmed is the mass exodus of thousands of Karabakhis to Armenia.

In addition to the disarmament and dismantling of the Armenian administration of the enclave, Baku has called for its “full integration into Azerbaijani society.”

Could the enclave become an autonomous region within Azerbaijan? It’s unlikely.

If nearly a million members of the Talish people -a Persian-speaking minority, many of whom people also live in neighbouring Iran- do not enjoy any rights as a minority in Azerbaijan, what could the 120,000 Armenians from Karabakh possibly expect?

The only thing standing between them and the Azeris were the Russian peacekeepers deployed after the 2020 peace agreement launched by Moscow.

But it didn´t quite work.

During the three years since the second war, armed incidents were common along an uneasy contact line between the two sides. Russian peacekeepers were hesitant to get between the two longstanding enemies, with Russian forces limiting themselves to observing and taking cover during frequent flareups.

Armenia’s Prime Minister, Nikol Pashinyan, had frequently accused the international community of looking the other way. Calls for Russia to be more assertive in its peacekeeping mission on the border received a cold shoulder from the Kremlin.

Russian peacekeepers in front of the Dadivank monastery, in Nagorno Karabakh. The failure to fulfil its commitment to protecting the population after the 2020 war has been key to the Azerbaijani victory. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

In early September, Armenia and the United States conducted joint military manoeuvres, widely interpreted as a signal that Armenia had run out of patience with Moscow.

Five Russian soldiers are reported dead in the current Azeri attack. But even that appears to have drawn little response from Moscow.

Complicating the situation further, the European Union maintains gas supply agreements with Azerbaijan, which have become key to making up Russian supplies disrupted by the war in Ukraine.

A complicit silence from the EU on the invasion has allowed Baku and Moscow to close ranks against the West. Only Turkey -a close ally of Azerbaijan- is likely to find an open line to Baku and Moscow now, and may play a crucial role as a third voice.

Amid the high-wire diplomacy, regular Karabakhis have been abandoned to their fate, and for most fleeing to Armenia is the only option. Images from the brutal 2020 second war, of Azeri soldiers cutting off the noses and ears of civilians and vandalizing monasteries, remain fresh in local memory.

A group of women pray in the Dadivank monastery during the 2020 war. The enormous Armenian archaeological heritage is among the victims of the war between Armenians and Azerbaijanis. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

Just a slice of land

The new conflict has also shed light on a longstanding strategic objective of Baku: to join the region to Turkey and the Mediterranean. Azerbaijan has been deploying troops in Armenia´s recognized territory since 2020, in a southern region called Syunik.

The strategic strip of land is the only thing standing in the way of connecting the Caspian region to commercial and military access to the open sea. Importantly, it’s a longstanding goal Baku shares with a key regional power, Turkey.

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev clings to point 9 of the peace agreement that ended the 2020 war.

Where it says: “Ensure the free movement of people, vehicles and goods,” Aliyev believes he reads something about a certain “corridor” that, of course, he would control but that could isolate Armenia from its Persian neighbour.

Its consequences for Armenia would be disastrous: Iran is the only country with which Armenia maintains a fluid commercial link given that its borders with Azerbaijan and Turkey have been closed since the 90s.

On the other hand, relations with Georgia tend to be problematic due to ties of this with Ankara.

On Monday 25, while Karabakhis were fleeing in their dozens of thousands, Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan visited the Azerbaijani enclave of Nakhchivan for the first time.

Bordering Turkey, Nakhichevan would be a strategic part of the controversial corridor.

The fate of Nagorno-Karabakh will surely ripple through the region and beyond. “If Artsakh falls, Armenia will also fall,” Davit Baboyan, former Foreign minister of the enclave, told IPS several months ago.

Baboyan calls the current situation the “worst moment in Armenian history since the genocide.” More than one and a half million Armenians were exterminated in the Armenian genocide, the notorious Anatolian purges that occurred in the first decades of the 20th century.

On August 9, a former prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luís Moreno Ocampo, warned of “the threat of a new genocide against the Armenian people.”

As the world watches the exodus of the Karabkhis from the land they have inhabited for thousands of years, the images may be repeated in Armenia in the short term.

The remains of a shipwreck on a beach in western Libya. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Karlos Zurutuza
ROME, Jun 19 2023 (IPS)

A new catastrophe in the Mediterranean, this time off the coast of Greece. The number of drowned still to be determined — barely 100 survivors speak of more than 700 passengers on board— will be added to almost 30,000 lost at sea since 2014, according to the International Organization for Migrations.

Those are just the people that someone, family or friends, ever claimed. The actual figures are almost certainly much higher.

The long-awaited stability in Libya is key for the region and its people, including those in the northern Mediterranean. But the world continues to look the other way. After this new catastrophe at sea, we will only remember that an entire country, and its people, from a single line, so familiar now: “The boat had departed from Libya”

We read that the traffickers’ boat had left the coast of Libya bound for Italy. We rarely look deeper. Does anyone remember Libya other than as the port of departure after a new misfortune at sea?

Libya has always been a transit country from Africa to Europe. Today, however, we are talking about a scale of unfathomable magnitude, for a very simple reason. Libya has been in chaos for more than a decade, and by now the line dividing trafficking mafias, armed militias, and politicians has become almost invisible.

It might not have turned out this way. We all remember 2011, when a wave of protests against regimes entrenched for decades rocked the Middle East and North Africa. Once that unrest descended into conflict, Libya’s revolt became doubtless the most visible. The eight-month civil war monopolized TV channels and newspapers throughout the world.

The war seemed to end with the lynching of the country’s leader, Moammar Gaddafi, in October of that same year. Literally overnight, Libya disappeared from global attention, as focus shifted elsewhere. There was neither time nor international will to reflect on what had happened, and would come next.

It would prove a missed opportunity. Libya’s immediate future did not look bleak at the time. In 2012, after presidential elections in Tunisia and Egypt, Libya too elected a post-Ghaddafi democratic body, the first General Congress of the Nation, designed to replace the “umbrella” body opposition forces had created during the war, the National Transitional Council.

Elections brought hope to a society that had never been asked its opinion on anything. And at first, unlike what happened in neighboring countries, a self-dubbed “democratic” coalition of new political parties took hold, with political moderates prevailing over an emerging religious extremist wing.

But the euphoria only lasted until that summer. Sectarian attacks against Sufi Muslims took place, followed closely by the assassination of the US ambassador in Benghazi. Images of the burning American consulate anticipated the unraveling to come.

Migrants spotted aboard a sinking dinghy boat somewhere off the Libyan coast. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza / IPS

A new war broke out in 2014, but remained almost unreported and poorly understood outside Libya. The country split between two governments: one in Tripoli that had the backing of the UN, and another in Tobruk, in the east of the country, that had the backing of allies such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates. Both sides claimed to be the legitimate government of Libya.

In the fall of 2015, emails leaked to the UK Guardian revealed that Bernardino León, the United Nations envoy for Libya charged with mediating the conflict, had maintained close links with the UAE, which backed Tobruk’s side in the war. Neutrality was assumed from the UN negotiatorbut this was seemingly not the case.

After “Leongate” forced the UN envoy’s resignation in November 2015, León would move to Dubai, where he was appointed director of the UAE’s Diplomatic Academy. International press remained largely silent on the scandal, and a promised UN investigation never saw the light of the day. Far from contributing to a rapprochement between Libya’s two warring sides, the UN process had led to the war dragging on, and the two sides to entrench.

In 2019, after five years of neither side gaining the upper hand, the Tobruk side, led by strongman Khalifa Haftar — a general who had helped bring Gaddafi to power, and was then later recruited by the CIA— launched a brutal offensive at Tripoli, receiving air and logistics cover from the United Arab Emirates.

The attack on Tripoli was fast and indiscriminate. Civilian targets were bombarded, provoking officials in London and Berlin to initially protest Hafter’s move as “an attack by someone who had not been attacked”. European governments debated calling for Haftar to reign in the onslaught.

Once again, European politics would come into play in Libya. EU parliamentary elections—held in May 2019— filled the Brussels parliament with politicians who were less concerned with the lost to average Libyans, and shared French President Emmanuel Macron’s more hawkish vision.

The French leader’s US counterpart, Donald Trump, also called France and Russia directly and told them he wanted neither Egypt nor the UAE, Haftar’s backers, as enemies. Washington would go on to support Haftar in Tobruk, though the rival Tripoli government had the backing of the UN.

All this would occur in a nation with enormous potential for prosperity. Libya has the largest oil reserves in Africa, as well as reserves of underground water and promising mineral resources. It is very close to Europe geographically, boasting an enormous tourist potential and a network of ports that many governments would dream of.

With a population of barely six million, it would be easy for Libya to turn into a model of progress and well-being for the entire region. But the world’s decision-makers have other plans, it appears. In addition to the calls between Washington, Brussels and Moscow, governments in Ankara, Doha, Dubai, Cairo and Riyadh, among others, also know Libya’s strategic and financial value, and want their share. If they don’t get what they want there, each of them will make sure their rivals don’t either.

While global forces take the country’s fate out of Libyans’ own hands, thousands of Sudanese, Malians, Somalis, Nigeriens and others fleeing war and misery continue to pass through a mirage of a country. Those who survive the brutal desert journey fall in the hands of the deeply-rooted human trafficking networks, which operate unmolested amid Libya’s chaos.

The long-awaited stability in Libya is key for the region and its people, including those in the northern Mediterranean. But the world continues to look the other way. After this new catastrophe at sea, we will only remember that an entire country, and its people, from a single line, so familiar now: “The boat had departed from Libya.”

Pinar Selek, a Turkish writer, is the victim of one of the most Kafkaesque trials in Turkey's history. Credit: Juantxo Egaña/IPS

By Karlos Zurutuza
BIARRITZ, France, Mar 23 2023 (IPS)

The woman we’re meeting in a house on the outskirts of Biarritz -800 kilometres southwest of Paris- is a university professor, the author of several books and hundreds of articles, and a well-known human rights activist.

Several human rights watchdogs have consistently denounced Selek's case. Human Rights Watch describes it as “the perversion of a criminal justice system”; the International PEN Club - a world association of writers with consultative status at the UN- includes Selek in its list of 115 authors who suffer harassment, arrest or violence around the world

According to Turkish courts, she also planted a bomb that killed seven people and injured more than 120 in Istanbul’s Spice Bazaar 25 years ago.

“Up to four scientific reports, including the one from the Turkish police themselves, pointed to a gas explosion, but later they said that it had been a bomb, and that I had planted it,” Pinar Selek tells IPS. This 51-year-old Turkish woman is embroiled in one of the strangest trials in the history of the Turkish judiciary.

“It’s Kafkaesque,” she blurts. “The case is based on the testimony of a Kurdish man who said that we had planted the bomb together. Later, he claimed to have confessed under torture, and that he didn’t even know me. He is free in Turkey, and I am in exile.”

On June 21, 2022, the Turkish public news agency Anadolu announced the annulment by the Supreme Court of Turkey of Pinar Selek’s fourth acquittal. Previously, she had been found innocent in three criminal proceedings.

But the sentence to life imprisonment is already firm and unappealable. On January 6, 2023, the Istanbul Court of First Instance issued an international arrest warrant for her.

Martin Pradel, Selek’s lawyer, talks about a “purely political case”.

“I have never heard of any other case that has gone on for 25 years without legal evidence of any kind. And this is without mentioning that Pinar has been acquitted up to four times,” Pradel told IPS over the phone from Paris.

The lawyer urged the French state to give Selek protection as a French citizen. If not, he added, the next step would be to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

Several French town halls such as the one in Marseille have also turned to her case. On March 29 she will receive the Medaille de la Ville de Paris, a recognition awarded by France´s capital city (Courtesy Pinar Selek)

“Where are they?”

Born into an Istanbul family of left militants, Pinar Selek has devoted her life to making visible those “invisible” in her country of origin: women and Kurds, prostitutes, Roma, homosexuals, Armenians…

“Where are they?” has always been her question as a researcher, and also as an activist. It was this vital commitment that brought her to prison in 1998, after refusing to hand the police a list of Kurdish contacts for one of her sociological studies.

“When they started building new prisons, we resisted being transferred. More than 300 died under attacks in which prisons were even bombed,” remembers Selek.

She was released after more than two years of captivity, torture, and a hunger strike in which, she says, dozens died. Back on the street, she was one of the founders of Amargi, a groundbreaking feminist organization in Turkey, and also the first feminist bookstore in the history of her country.

She has added a set of tales and a few books of her own to its shelves, but she has not been back in a long time. She had to leave the country in 2009 and, after getting her French citizenship in 2017, she settled down in Nice, where she teaches at the University Côte d’Azur, a public institution.

Ilya Topper, a Spanish journalist and analyst based in Istanbul for more than ten years, sees the trial opened against Selek in 1998 as “part of that brutal campaign against everything that seemed to treat Kurdish demands as a topic that could be discussed.“

“Until around 2005, anyone within a hundred meters of a protest which held a banner with a slogan that had any remote resemblance to a phrase once said by someone from the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) would be put in jail for many years,” the expert told IPS over the phone from Istanbul.

Until just over a decade ago, he adds, mayors were still sentenced for saying something in Kurdish on charges of “speaking a non-existent language.” He illustrates it with a concrete case:

“In 2011, a Kurdish mayor was sentenced to half a year in prison and a fine of 1,500 euros for naming a public park after Ehmedi Xani, an 18th-century Kurdish poet. The controversial issue was not the writer, but the initial letter of his last name: it is written with X, which exists in Kurdish, but not in Turkish.”

The trial against Selek, underlines the analyst, “highlights the deterioration of the Turkish Judiciary in a country where you can go to prison for any reason.”

Pinar Selek fears that her international arrest warrant will affect her family in Turkey and restrict her movement even within France. Credit: Juantxo Egaña/IPS

Solidarity

Several human rights watchdogs have consistently denounced Selek’s case. Human Rights Watch describes it as “the perversion of a criminal justice system”; the International PEN Club – a world association of writers with consultative status at the UN- includes Selek in its list of 115 authors who suffer harassment, arrest or violence around the world.

In a telephone conversation with IPS, its president, Burhan Sönmez, mentioned other notorious cases in Turkey, such as that of the publisher and human rights defender Osman Kavala, or the opposition politician Selahattin Demirtaş

“Both remain behind bars despite the European Court of Human Rights ruling for their immediate release,” Sönmez stressed from London.

Solidarity goes hand in hand with denunciation. More than a hundred personalities including intellectuals, political leaders and social agents will attend the hearing to be held in Istanbul on March 31. It’s a legal formality to notify Selek of her firm life sentence.

Michele Rubirola, former mayoress of Marseille and today the first deputy of the consistory, is the one chosen to represent the city. In a telephone conversation with IPS, Rubirola spoke of “someone who is a victim of injustice and oppression.”

“Selek ‘s academic struggles have turned into political struggles, and the relentlessness of the political and judicial power she is facing consolidates her as a true human rights activist,” added the delegate.

A judicial process that has lasted a quarter of a century is reaching a key moment just a few weeks before decisive elections in Turkey, a referendum on the more than two decades in the power for Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

“My trial is one of the indicators of the evil rooted in Turkey: it reflects both the continuity of the authoritarian regime and the configurations of the repressive devices,” laments Selek.

She also confesses concern about how it may affect her family in Turkey, and herself in her host country.

“I am convicted of a massacre and my movement may be restricted internationally, and even within France. Moreover, Turkey is asking me for millions in compensation for the deaths and the destruction and there´s an international financial convention that could be executed in France,” she recalls.

Today, her only certainty is that she will try to move on with her life. Other than her work at the university, she also gives talks and organizes events and protests. Exile, she says, “may have uprooted me from my country, but not from the street.”

A week after the earthquake that shook Turkey and Syria, cleaning up works continue in Adiyaman, in Turkey´s south-east. Credit: Lara Villlalón.

By Karlos Zurutuza
ROME, Feb 14 2023 (IPS)

Geology explains the terrible earthquake that shook Turkey and Syria on February 6 with academic coldness: the Arabian, Eurasian and African plates pressure the Anatolian plate. On the surface, geopolitics resorts to concepts like “fault”, “tension” or “fracture” to explain things too. When one looks at Turkey, both disciplines’ maps can easily overlap each other, with a death toll calculated in the tens of thousands.

The earthquake’s epicentre lies in a chasm that has been widening since World War I (1914-1918), when the Kurdish people were left stateless. Over 40 million Kurds remain spread across the borders of Iran, Turkey, Syria and Iraq.

Half of them live in the southeastern region of Turkey. It is not by chance that the broken North-South socioeconomic divide in Anatolia actually shows itself from west to east.

Tour operators offer two main tourist packages: touring the west of the country in clockwise or anti-clockwise directions.

The east is never an option, even if you miss the astonishing Neolithic archaeological site of Gobekli, or the source of the Tigris and Euphrates, among other treasures.

Actually, “Kurdistan” has always been a taboo word for the Turkish national narrative, which favours euphemisms such as “the southeast” to refer to that part of the country. After all, what name can be given to what doesn’t even exist?

For decades there was no talk of Kurds, but of “mountain Turks.” Their language, Kurmanji, still has not reached newspapers or schools. There is indeed a television channel in Kurdish – there are around fifty in neighbouring Iraq – but it is government funded. Accordingly, there´s no deviation from the official discourse.

Without leaving the epicentre of the earthquake, the city of Kahramanmaras owes its name to the Turkification of its original Maras (of disputed origin) to which is added the Turkish Kahraman, “hero”. Also, better not look for “Amed” on maps when trying to get to Diyarbakir, Turkey’s main Kurdish city.

These are just two of the thousands of examples that speak of this drive to erase all “foreign” traces from the maps. The next step is to do it physically. The city of Hasankeyf, a 12,000-year-old archaeological treasure once protected by UNESCO, was completely flooded in 2020.

Diyarbakir´s city centre after the military operation launched by Ankara in 2015-2016 across the country´s main Kurdish cities. Credit: KNK.

Today, Hasankey lies out of reach under a network of dams through which the water supply from the Tigris and the Eufrates to Syria and Iraq is often cut off.

The most modern cities are not spared either. In the 1980s and 1990s, thousands of Kurdish towns were burned down by the Turkish Army in the war against the Kurdish guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

In the wake of the umpteenth military operation launched by Ankara in 2015 and 2016, the rubble in several of them was reminiscent of that of the last earthquake. Once again, the civilians then took the worst part.

"If my mother tongue is shaking the foundations of your state, it probably means that you built your state on my land"

Musa Anter, a Kurdish journalist and writer assassinated by Turkish intelligence agents in 1992


“You are not Kurdish, you are Armenian and we are going to do the same we did to you a hundred years ago,” this reporter heard a Turkish police officer shout over a loudspeaker during the curfew enforced on the Kurdish city of Cizre, in September 2015.

Two earthquakes (in 1912 and 1914) announced what was to become the first genocide of the 20th century, when more than a million and a half Armenians were swallowed by that same fault.

Today, in Turkey there are barely 60,000 castaways from that Eurasian plate, and the waves are still hitting neighbouring Armenia, which remains sandwiched between two Turkic states (the second one is Azerbaijan).

“How happy is the one who says I am a Turk,” read murals across Turkey, paraphrasing Kemal Ataturk, the controversial father of the republic. “The homeland is indivisible” is also a recurrent one.

The cruelest paradox decrees that the country celebrates its first hundred years of existence slit open. Turkish President Recep Tayip Erdoğan has already declared a state of emergency for three months in ten devastated regions.

The complaints that relief does not arrive pile up, creating an even more precarious situation for over three million Syrian refugees who´ve crossed the border to Turkey since the war started in Syria in 2011.

The earth has burst under their feet after more than a decade since the war broke out in his country. They are the most direct victims of the Arabian plate, the one governed by autocrats such as Bashar al Assad in Syria, General Abdulfatah al Sissi in Egypt or the satraps of the Persian Gulf.

They all share with Erdoğan an obsession with perpetuating themselves in power and an exclusive discourse on which to articulate their respective country models.

More paradoxes in history make Erdoğan come to power in the aftermath of the Izmir earthquake in 1999 -it left more than 17,000 deaths-, and the last one occurred on the eve of decisive elections next May.

But perhaps the deepest fault is that of democracy.

After more than two decades in power, Erdoğan had shielded his re-election by disqualifying Ekrem Imamoglu, the mayor of Istanbul and his most direct rival in the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP).

He had also outlawed the third political force, the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP). Their leaders, Selahattin Demirtas and Figen Yüksekdağ, have been in prison since 2016.

“If my mother tongue is shaking the foundations of your state, it probably means that you built your state on my land,” said Musa Anter, a Kurdish journalist and writer assassinated by Turkish intelligence agents in 1992.

Add to that the brutal jolts of geology, and disaster is served.

Just another day in the main hall of the Qamishli campus. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Karlos Zurutuza
QAMISHLI, Syria, Sep 27 2022 (IPS)

There is a main hall as well as workshops, laboratories and, of course, a cafeteria, where the half-hour break flies by amid card games and laughs. It could well be any university if it wasn’t for those men armed with assault rifles at the entrance.

This is the campus of University of Rojava in Qamishli (700 kilometres northeast of Damascus), an institution that opened its doors in October 2016, in the midst of a war that still rages on.

The Kurdish minority in Syria coexists with Arabs and Syriacs in the so-called Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES). It's in this corner of Syria, which shares borders with both Turkey and Iraq, where such a network of universities has been built. It now rivals the institutions of the Syrian Arab Republic government

“Lessons in the Kurdish language are one of our hallmarks,” Rohan Mistefa, the former dean, tells IPS from an office on the second floor. Other than the language of instruction, significant differences from other Syrian universities are also visible in the curriculum.

“We got rid of subjects such as Ideology and History of the Baath Party (in power in Damascus since 1963) and replaced it with `Democratic Culture,'” explains this Kurdish woman in her mid-forties. The creation of a Department of Science for Women (Jineoloij, in Kurdish), she adds, has been another milestone.

The University of Rojava hosts around 2,000 students on three campuses. There are, however, two other active universities in Syria’s northeast: Kobani, working since 2017, and Al- Sharq in Raqqa. The latter has been operating since last year in a city that was once the capital of the Islamic State in Syria.

“Unlike the universities of Kobani and Rojava, in Raqqa they study in Arabic because the majority of citizens there are Arabs,” says Mistefa, who is today co-responsible for coordinating between the three institutions.

Mustefa has been closely linked to the institution since its inception. She helped to found the first Kurdish university in Syria in her native district of Afrin in 2015. That pioneering initiative had to close its doors in 2018: territorially disconnected from the rest of the Kurdish Syrian territories, Afrin was taken over by Ankara-backed Islamist militias. It remains under occupation to this day.

“Many people ask us why we open schools and universities in the middle of the war. I always tell them that ours is a culture of building, and not that of destroying our neighbours and their allies”, says the Kurdish woman.

Ideologues and martyrs of the Kurdish cause are also present on the walls of the University of Rojava. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

The Kurds call “Rojava” (“west”) their native land in northeast Syria. In the wake of the so-called “Arab spring” uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa in 2011, Kurds opted for what was then known as the “third way”: neither with the government nor with the opposition.

Twelve years on, the Kurdish minority in Syria coexists with Arabs and Syriacs in the so-called Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES). It’s in this corner of Syria, which shares borders with both Turkey and Iraq, where such a network of universities has been built. It now rivals the institutions of the Syrian Arab Republic government.

A “titanic task”

After the opening of the first Kurdish-language schools in the history of Syria, the University of Rojava is one more step forward in a revolution that has placed education among its main values.

It consists of nine faculties that offer free academic training in various Engineering branches, as well as Medicine, Law, Educational Sciences, Administration and Finance, Journalism and, of course, Kurdish Philology.

“I chose Philology because I love writing poems in Kurdish; I am very much into folklore, literature… everything that has to do with our culture,” Tolen Kenjo, a second-year student from the neighbouring city of Hasaka tells IPS.

The 19-year old still remembers being punished at school whenever she would utter a word in her mother tongue. For more than four decades, the ban on the Kurdish language in Syria was just another chapter within an ambitious assimilation plan that also included the displacement of the country’s Kurdish population and even the deprivation of citizenship of tens of thousands of them.

The cafeteria during the half-hour break. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

Today, the university’s walls are covered with posters: climate maps, the photosynthesis cycle, quotes from the Russian classics. For the first time in Syria, all are in the Kurdish language. The corridors get crammed with students during the breaks between classes, often amid the laughter that comes from a group of students playing volleyball in the courtyard.

In the Department of English Language and Translation, we find Jihan Ayo, a Kurdish woman who has been teaching here for more than three years. Ayo is one of the more than 200,000 displaced (UN figures) who arrived from Serekaniye in 2019, when the Kurdish district was invaded by Islamist militias under Ankara´s wing.

“Turkey’s attacks or those by cells of the Islamic State are still a common currency here,” Ayo tells IPS. When it comes to lessons, she points to a “titanic task.”

Work is still underway to translate teaching materials into Kurdish — to train not only students but also those who will become their teachers. Among other things, Ayo remembers those “very tough” 18 months during which the pandemic forced lessons to be suspended.

“We tried to cope with things online; we got help from volunteer teachers from practically all over the world, but, of course, not everyone here has the means to connect to the Internet…”

She also faces a fight to gain the trust of many local citizens, towards an educational network that has no recognition outside this corner of Syria. Although the Kurdish administration administers the region, the “official” schools -those ran by Damascus- continue to function and, of course, they stick to the pre-war curriculum.

Teaching in the middle of a war has been one of the challenges faced by the Syrian Kurds. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

Recognition

In a comprehensive report published in September 2022 on the university system in northeast Syria, Rojava researchers Information Center (an independent press organization) stress the importance of international recognition that can make the institution more attractive to students.

“While the quality of the education received at these universities in itself is comparable to other institutions’ in the region, the lack of recognition abroad may make it impossible for the students to continue their studies outside of Syria, find employment abroad, or even have their technical knowledge recognized by companies and institutions not tied to the AANES,” the report warns.

It also claimks that the University of Rojava maintains cooperation agreements with at least eight foreign universities, including Washington State University (U.S.), Emden/Leer University of Applied Sciences (Germany) and the University of Parma (Italy)..

It´s just a ten-minute walk from the campus to the headquarters of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), the dominant political party among Kurds in Syria. From his office, PYD co-chairman Salih Muslim wanted to highlight the role of universities as “providers of necessary cadres to build and develop the places they belong to and come from.”

“Our universities are ready to cooperate and exchange experiences with all the universities and international institutions to gain more experience and they are welcome to do so,” Muslim told IPS.

Despite the lack of international recognition, academic life goes on in this corner of Syria. Noreldin Hassan arrived from Afrin after the 2018 invasion and today is about to fulfil his dream of graduating in Journalism. The 27-year-old tells IPS that his university is “working in the right direction” to achieve international recognition. However, he has chosen not to wait for a degree to begin his career, and he has been working as a reporter for eight years already .

“Getting a diploma is important, but, at the end of the day, journalists learn by sheer practice while looking for stories and covering those,” stresses the young man.

The last story he covered? One about those women forced to marry mercenaries on a Turkish payroll. The story he´d like to cover the most? No surprises here:

“The day when the Kurds of Afrin can finally go back home.”

A PKK fighter holds his position in Nouafel, an Arab village west of Kirkuk in northern Iraq. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Karlos Zurutuza
KIRKUK, Iraq, Sep 9 2015 (IPS)

Reminders of the last occupants of camp K1 in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk are only visible on the murals at the main gate leading into the compound: Iraqi soldiers saluting the flag, pointing their weapons or being cheered on by grateful families.

But Iraq’s 12^th Infantry Division fled, leaving everything behind, after the arrival of fighters with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in June 2014.

"We have a very good relationship with the PKK and we’re fighting together not only for the Kurds, but also because ISIS is the enemy of mankind as a whole." -- Peshmerga Colonel Jamal Masim Jafar
Today, the military garrison hosts a joint Kurdish force of Peshmerga units – Kurdish army soldiers – and guerillas from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

The PKK and the Peshmerga fought each other back in the 1990s, but a powerful common enemy – ISIS – brought them together last summer.

A visit to the trenches where the united front is still holding back the Jihadi militants offers a glimpse into the region’s complex ethnic and ideological dynamics, as well insight into the relationship between armed groups and the local population.

After a brief introduction, Heval Rebar – Kurdish for ‘Comrade Rebar’ – offers to accompany this IPS reporter on a drive south alongside an earthen wall.

A chain of checkpoints gives us access to military posts or villages recovered from ISIS, some of which have been completely destroyed by air strikes led by the U.S. and its allies.

Peshmerga Colonel Jamal Masim Jafar welcomes IPS from inside a bunker standing close to a 15-meter-high promontory, which has its replica every thousand meters along the wall.

Jafar talks of “constant” fighting: “We get sniper fire from two houses and a tower the enemy has raised but they also hit us with an improvised device made of gas canisters,” explains the official, adding that the last fire exchange was “just an hour ago”.

Despite the hardships, he appears satisfied with his PKK counterparts.

“We have a very good relationship with the PKK and we’re fighting together not only for the Kurds, but also because ISIS is the enemy of mankind as a whole,” he stresses.

Sitting to his right, Comrade Rebar nods.

After the mandatory cup of tea, Jafar invites us to the promontory, which overlooks Al Noor, one of the many villages built by Saddam Hussein – Iraq’s ousted ruler – to host Arab settlers on Kurdish land.

Al Noor remains under ISIS control, but last week Kurdish forces launched a major offensive southwest of Kirkuk, taking back nine villages like this one plus a 24-square-km swathe of land.

“These gains are only possible thanks to international aid, both supplies and air strikes,” Jafar notes while he walks towards one of the armed pick-up trucks.

“We have just installed machine guns on the back of the vehicles. They are French and we got them recently. We are also getting night vision goggles, which are essential in this environment and MILAN guided missiles from Germany. Regarding air cover, we get it every time we need it,” explained the Kurdish officer.

He said he had spent seven years with American troops in Iraq, and that he would welcome western foreign troops in the region.

Female PKK fighters are also present in the combat line against ISIS in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

No man’s land

Coordination between Kurdish factions is more than evident but that has not been the trend in this part of Iraq over the last decade.

Historically claimed by Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen, oil-rich Kirkuk is among the so-called “disputed territories” by Baghdad and the north-western Kurdish city of Erbil, very much one of Iraq’s thorniest issues even years before the emergence and advance of ISIS.

Ethnic and sectarian clashes have been rife in this part of the country, with the local population being constantly targeted from every side.

Our next stop on our way south is Nouafel, an Arab village next to the wall where PKK fighters keep their positions. From their makeshift headquarters in one of the houses, Comrade Selim prefers not to disclose the exact number of his fighters deployed here.

“We have enough to fight ISIS,” he tells IPS, settling the question with a smile. From the little hill where they hold their positions, another fighter, Comrade Farashin uses a pair of binoculars to monitor Wastaniya – the closest village under ISIS control.

Relying on light assault, snipers and a couple of machine guns, the PKK guerrillas don’t look as heavily armed as their Peshmerga counterparts. However, Comrade Aso’s testimony stands as proof that the PKK fighters are far from neglected:

“In the spring we received a course in urban warfare for two months conducted by two Italian instructors. I learned many things they had not taught me during my training in Qandil [the Kurdish mountain stronghold],” recalls this fighter, a young man in his early 20s hailing from the nearby town of Tuz Khormato, a predominantly Turkmen district located 170 km north of Baghdad.

“They were very professional,” he added. “They never let us take their picture and we were never told which organisation they were working for.”

Peshmerga Colonel Jamal Masim Jafar says he’s satisfied with the support his forces are receiving from the PKK. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

What makes this combat post particularly interesting is not only the fact the village remained under ISIS control for seven months, but also that the majority of the local villagers have not left the area.

At the request of Comrade Rebar, a dozen locals agree to meet this IPS reporter in a house just a few metres away from the one occupied by the guerrillas.

At first glance, the relationship between civilians and fighters looks cordial. Greetings are exchanged and some of the fighters try a few words in Arabic to break the ice. Meanwhile, our host, Arkan Ali Bader, serves Arabic coffee, which everyone drinks from the same cup.

The sound of incoming fire from the other side hardly provokes any visible emotion among the villagers. That’s been part of their daily life for over a year. However, Ali Bader says he regrets that his land, and that of most of the villagers, lies today in “no man’s land” – between the Kurds and ISIS.

Also dressed in the traditional lose garments, Juma Hussein Toma claims that during the seven months the village was under Jihadi control, life for ordinary people did not undergo significant changes.

“When ISIS came they announced through the mosque’s loudspeakers that they had freed our village from infidels, and that it was the victory of the revolution, but no one here suffered threats of any kind,” explains Toma.

“There are a few who left because they had no work here, but not because of the war,” adds the peasant.

“ISIS killed a few [people] in Al Noor because they had been members of the Awakening Councils [a US-backed Iraqi militia that fought against Al Qaeda] but none of us was hurt,” stressed Mohamed al Ubeid.

Locals in Nouafel said they were happy about the arrival of the PKK fighters. However, such statements were made in the presence of those very fighters, making it impossible to ascertain whether or not they were coerced.

After the expected polite farewell, a PKK fighter points to the deep ditch surrounding their headquarters in the village.

“We had to dig it because we do not trust the villagers,” he admits, just before returning to his guard shift by the earthen wall.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Moroccan security forces charge against a group of Sahrawi women in Laayoune, occupied Western Sahara. Credit: Courtesy of Equipe Media

By Karlos Zurutuza
LAAYOUNE, Occupied Western Sahara, Aug 23 2015 (IPS)

Ahmed Ettanji is looking for a flat in downtown Laayoune, a city 1,100 km south of Rabat. He only wants it for one day but it must have a rooftop terrace overlooking the square that will host the next pro-Sahrawi demonstration.

“Rooftop terraces are essential for us as they are the only places from which we can get a graphic testimony of the brutality we suffer from the Moroccan police,” Ettanji told IPS. This 26-year-old is one the leaders of the Equipe Media, a group of Sahrawi volunteers struggling to break the media blackout enforced by Rabat over the territory.

Ahmed Ettanji and a fellow Equipe Media activist edit video taken at a pro-independence demonstration in Laayoune, occupied Western Sahara. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

“There are no news agencies based here and foreign journalists are denied access, and even deported if caught inside,” stressed Ettanji.

Spanish journalist Luís de Vega is one of several foreign journalists who can confirm the activist´s claim – he was expelled in 2010 after spending eight years based in Rabat and declared persona non grata by the Moroccan authorities.

“The Western Sahara issue is among the most sensitive issues for journalists in Morocco. Those of us who dare to tackle it inevitably face the consequences,” de Vega told IPS over the phone, adding that he was “fully convinced” that his was an exemplary punishment because he was the foreign correspondent who had spent more time in Morocco.

“The Western Sahara issue is among the most sensitive issues for journalists in Morocco. Those of us who dare to tackle it inevitably face the consequences” – Spanish journalist Luís de Vega
This year will mark four decades since this territory the size of Britain was annexed by Morocco after Spain pulled out from its last colony of Western Sahara.

Since the ceasefire signed in 1991 between Morocco and the Polisario Front – the authority that the United Nations recognises as a legitimate representative of the Sahrawi people – Rabat has controlled almost the whole territory, including the entire Atlantic coast. The United Nations still labels Western Sahara as a “territory under an unfinished process of decolonisation”.

Mohamed Mayara, also a member of Equipe Media, is helping Ettanji to find the rooftop terrace. Like most his colleagues, he acknowledges having been arrested and tortured several times. The constant harassment, however, has not prevented him from working enthusiastically, although he admits that there are other limitations than those dealing with any underground activity:

“We set up the first group in 2009 but a majority of us are working on pure instinct. We have no training in media so we are learning journalism on the spot,” said Mayara, a Sahrawi born in the year of the invasion who writes reports and press releases in English and French. His father disappeared in the hands of the Moroccan army two months after he was born, and he says he has known nothing about him ever since.

Sustained crackdown

Today the majority of the Sahrawis live in the refugee camps in Tindouf, in Western Algeria. The members of Equipe Media say they have a “fluid communication” with the Polisario authorities based there. Other than sharing all the material they gather, they also work side by side with Hayat Khatari, the only reporter currently working openly for SADR TV. SADR stands for ‘Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic’.

Hayat Khatari, the only reporter currently working openly for SADR TV in Laayoune. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

Khatari, a 24-year-old journalist, recalls that she started working in 2010, after the Gdeim Izzik protest camp incidents in Laayoune. Originally a peaceful protest camp, Gdeim Izzik resulted in riots that spread to other Sahrawi cities when it was forcefully dismantled after 28 days on Nov. 8.

Western analysts such as Noam Chomsky have argued that the so-called “Arab Spring” did not start in Tunisia as is commonly argued, but rather in Laayoune.

“We have to work really hard and risk a lot to be able to counterbalance the propaganda spread by Rabat about everything happening here,” Khatari told IPS. The young activist added that she was last arrested in December 2014 for covering a pro-independence demonstration in June 2014. Unlike Mahmood al Lhaissan, her predecessor in SADR TV, Khatari was released after a few days in prison.

In a report released in March, Reporters Without Borders records al Lhaissan´s case. The activist was released provisionally on Feb. 25, eight months after his arrest in Laayoune, but he is still facing trial on charges of participating in an “armed gathering,” obstructing a public thoroughfare, attacking officials while they were on duty, and damaging public property.

In the same report, Reporters Without Borders also denounces the deportation in February of French journalists Jean-Louis Perez and Pierre Chautard, who were reporting for France 3 on the economic and social situation in Morocco.

Before seizing their video recordings and putting them on a flight to Paris, the authorities arrested them at the headquarters of Moroccan Association of Human Rights (AMDH), one of the country’s leading human rights NGOs, which the interior ministry has accused of “undermining the actions of the security forces”.

Likewise, other major organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have repeatedly denounced human rights abuses suffered by the Sahrawi people at the hands of Morocco over the last decades.

Despite several phone calls and e-mails, the Moroccan authorities did not respond to IPS’s requests for comments on these and other human rights violations allegedly committed in Western Sahara.

Back in downtown Laayoune, Equipe Media activists seemed to have found what they were looking for. The owner of the central apartment is a Sahrawi family. It could have not been otherwise.

“We would never ask a Moroccan such a thing,” said Ettanji from the rooftop terrace overlooking the spot where the upcoming protest would take place.

Edited by Phil Harris   

(From left to right) Fatima, Aza and Rabab, three Sahrawi women activists, pose from an undisclosed location in Laayoune, the capital of occupied Western Sahara. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Karlos Zurutuza
LAAYOUNE, Occupied Western Sahara, Jul 17 2015 (IPS)

Ten women are gathered to discuss how to transmit Sahrawi culture and tradition to the younger generations. As usual, it´s a secret meeting. There is no other way in the capital of Western Sahara.

Rabab Lamin chose the place and the date for this latest meeting of the Forum for the Future of Sahrawi Women, an underground organisation yet seemingly far from being disorganised.

“We set up the committee in 2009 and today we rely on 60 active members, an executive committee of 16 and hundreds of collaborators,” Lamin, the mother of a political prisoner, tells IPS.

“Here you´ll hardly come across any Sahrawi who has not been mistreated by the police, nor a family who has not lost one of their own" – Aza Amidan, sister of a Sahrawi political prisoner
“Our goal is to fight for the fundamental rights of the Sahrawi people through peaceful struggle,” adds the 54 year-old woman, before noting that she was born “when the Spaniards were here.”

This year will mark four decades since Spain pulled out of Western Sahara, its last colony, leaving the territory in the hands of Morocco and Mauritania. While Rabat claims that this vast swathe of land – the size of Britain – is its southernmost province, the United Nations labels it as a “territory under an unfinished process of decolonisation.”

Since the ceasefire signed in 1991 between Morocco and the Polisario Front – the authority that the United Nations recognises as a legitimate representative of the Sahrawi people – Rabat controls almost the whole territory, including the entire Atlantic coast.

Only a tiny desert strip on the other side of the wall built by Morocco remains under Sahrawi control. That´s where the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) was announced in 1976, a political entity today recognised by 82 countries.

The most immediate consequence of Sahara´s frozen conflict was the displacement of almost the entire Sahrawi people to the desert of Algeria. Those who dared to stay still suffer the consequences of their decision:

“Since the Moroccans took over our land we have only faced brutality,” laments Aza Amidan, the sister of a political prisoner. “We are constantly harassed and beaten; they raid our houses, they arrest our men and women, even kids under 15.

“Here you´ll hardly come across any Sahrawi who has not been mistreated by the police, nor a family who has not lost one of their own,” says Amidan. The 34-year-old activist stresses that the founder and current leader of the Forum, Zukeine Ijdelu, spent 12 years in prison.

Sahrawi women activists who have taken to the streets in Laayoune, capital of occupied Western Sahara, are often forcibly dispersed. Credit: Mohamed Salem

In a report issued two months ago, Amnesty International labels the practice of torture in Morocco as “endemic” while underlining that Sahrawi political dissidents are among the main targets. The NGO also accused the Moroccan government of “protecting the torturers, and not the tortured.”

Sahrawi activists claim that one of the main tasks of this women´s organisation is to support, “both morally and economically”, those who have suffered prison or their relatives. Amidan gives the details:

“We gather money among the community for those women as they are always the ones who suffer most. Whether it´s them who are arrested or their husbands, it´s them who have to sustain their families.”

Despite several phone calls and e-mails, the Moroccan authorities refused to speak to IPS on these and other human rights violations allegedly committed in Western Sahara.

Assimilation

At 62, Fatima Hamimid is one of the senior veteran activists of the Forum. She says torture is “something that can one can cope with.” But there are other grievances that are seemingly “irreparable”.

“Today’s workshop sought to raise awareness among the new generations over the cultural assimilation we´re being subjected to at the hands of Rabat. Morocco seeks to deny our mere existence by either erasing our history or including it into their own.”

The most eloquent proof of such policies may be the total absence of Hassaniya –the Arabic dialect spoken by Sahrawis – in the education system or the administration.

However, Hamimid also points to other issues such the explicit ban over the Sahrawi traditional tent, the harassment  women wearing their distinctively colourful garb often have to face, or the prohibition of giving names that recall historical Sahrawi dissidents to their children.

“This is yet another reason that drags us to the streets to organise and take part in demonstrations,” notes Hamimid. Peaceful protests, she adds, are another important axis of action of this group.

But it is neither easy nor free of risks. In its World Report 2015, Human Rights Watch denounces that Rabat has “prohibited all public gatherings deemed hostile to Morocco’s contested rule.”

The New York-based NGO also points to the “large numbers of police who blocked access to demonstration venues and often forcibly dispersed Sahrawis seeking to assemble.”

Under such circumstances, Takbar Haddi chose to conduct a hunger strike for 36 days in front of the Moroccan consulate in Gran Canaria (Spain), which ended with her hospitalisation in June.

Haddi is still asking the Moroccan authorities to deliver the body of her son, Mohamed Lamin Haidala, stabbed in February in Laayoune, and that both the circumstances of the crime and the alleged lack of an adequate health assistance be investigated.

The activist´s close relatives in Laayoune told IPS that the family had rejected an economic compensation from Rabat in exchange for their silence.

“Some people think that being free is just not languishing in prison, or not suffering torture,” explains Hamimid, while she serves the last of the three cups of tea marking Sahrawi tradition. “We, Sahrawi women, understand freedom in its full meaning.”

Edited by Phil Harris    

View of Zahedan, administrative capital of the troubled Iranian Sistan and Balochistan region whose population “has decreased threefold since the times of the Pahlevis”. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Karlos Zurutuza
GENEVA, Apr 17 2015 (IPS)

Nasser Boladai is the spokesperson of the Congress of Nationalities for a Federal Iran (CNFI), an umbrella movement aimed at expanding support for a secular, democratic and federal Iran. IPS spoke with him in Geneva, where he was invited to speak at a recent conference on Human Rights and Global Perspectives in his native Balochistan region.

Could you draw the main lines of the CNFI?

There are 14 different groups under the umbrella of the CNFI: Arabs, Azerbaijani Turks, Baloch, Kurds Lors and Turkmen … all of which share a common cause vow for a federal and secular state where each one´s language and culture rights are respected.

Nasser Boladai, spokesperson of the Congress of Nationalities for a Federal Iran (CNFI), an umbrella movement aimed at expanding support for a secular, democratic and federal Iran. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

The CNFI is meant to be a vehicle for all of us as there are no majorities in the country, we are all minorities within a multinational Iran. Today´s is a regime based on exclusion as it only recognises the Persian nation and Shia Islam as the only confession.

Which poses a biggest handicap in Iran: a different ethnicity or a religious confession other than Shia Islam?

Iran’s population is a mosaic of ethnicities, but the non-Persian groups are largely located in the peripheries and far from the power base, Tehran.

Elements within the opposition to the regime claim that religion is not an issue and some centralist groups would support a federal state, but not one based on nationalities. The ethnical difference is doubtless a bigger hurdle in the eyes of those centralist opposition groups as well as from the regime.

Iran appears to have been unaltered by turmoil in Northern Africa and the Middle East region over the last four years. Is it?

In 2007 we had several meetings in the European Parliament. Our main goal was to convey that, if any change came to Iran, it should not be swallowed as happened with [Ayatollah] Khomeini in 1979.“Islamic extremism of any kind, no matter if it comes from the Ayatollahs or ISIS [Islamic State], cannot solve the people´s problems so both are condemned to disappear” – Nasser Boladai, spokesperson of the Congress of Nationalities for a Federal Iran (CNFI)

In May 2009 there were demonstrations against the regime in Zahedan before the controversial elections but the timing could not have been worse for a change. Mir-Hussein Moussavi was leading the so called “green movement” against [incumbent President Mahmoud] Ahmadineyad but he had no real intention of diverting from Khomeini´s idea.

Among others, the green movement failed because the people´s disenchantment was funnelled into an electoral dispute, but also because that movement did not include the issue of nationalities in its programme.

However, the changes in North Africa and the Middle East will have a positive psychological effect on the Iranian psyche in the long run in the sense that they can see that a tyrannical system cannot stay forever.

Islamic extremism of any kind, no matter if it comes from the Ayatollahs or ISIS [Islamic State], cannot solve the people´s problems so both are condemned to disappear.

Hassan Rouhani replaced Mahmoud Ahmadineyad in the 2013 presidential elections. Was this for the good?

Not for us. Since he took power there have been more executions and more repression. Rouhani is not only a mullah; he has also been a member of the Iranian security apparatus for over 16 years.

The death penalty continues to be applied in political cases, where individuals are commonly accused of “enmity against God”. Iran´s different nations´ plights have not yet been discussed. They have often promised language and culture rights, jobs for the Baloch, the Kurds, etc., but we´re still waiting to see these happen.

You come from an area which has seen a spike of Baloch insurgent movements who seemingly subscribe a radical vision of Sunni Islam.

It´s difficult to know whether they are purely Baloch nationalists or plain Jihadists as their speech seems to be winding between both in their different statements.

However, insurgency against the central government in Iran has a long tradition among the Baloch and we have episodes in our recent history where even Shiite Baloch were fighting against Tehran, an eloquent proof that their agenda was a national one, completely unrelated to religion.

Paradoxically, Tehran is to blame for the rise of Sunni extremism in both Iranian Kurdistan and Balochistan. Both nations are mainly Sunni so they empowered the local mullahs; they were brought into the elite through money and power to dissolve a deeply rooted communist feeling among the Kurds and the Baloch.

Khomeini just stuck to a policy which was introduced in the region by the British. They were the first to politicise Islam as a tool against Soviet expansion across the region.

You once said that Iranian Balochistan has become “a hunting ground”. Can you explain this?

It´s a hunting ground for the Iranian security forces. Even a commander of the Mersad [security] admitted openly that it had been ordered to kill, and not to arrest people.

As a result, many of our villages have suffered house-to-house searches which has emptied them of youth. The latter have either been killed systematically or emigrated elsewhere.

The fact that our population has decreased threefold since the times of the Pahlevis speaks volumes about the situation in our region.

Human Rights Watch has further documented the fact that the Baloch populated region has been systematically divided by successive regimes in Tehran to create a demographic imbalance.

Less than a century ago, our region was called “Balochistan”. Later its name would be changed to “Balochistan and Sistan”, then “Sistan and Balochistan”… The plan is to finally call it “Sistan” and divide it into three districts: Wilayat, Sistan and Saheli.

How do you react to the claims of those who say that Iran also played a role in the creation of ISIS, similar to Tehran’s backing of Al Qaeda in Iraq to tear up the Sunni society and prevent it from sharing power in post-2003 Iraq?

The theocratic regime in Iran indirectly supports extremist religious forces and, at the same time, manipulates them to control and deter them from becoming moderate and uniting with moderate religious, liberal or democratic forces in Iran.

The Iranian and Pakistani governments cooperate in the building and using of the extremist groups to first, create controlled instability in Balochistan, and second, to create false artificial political dynamics in the form of Islamic extremists to obstruct and distort Baloch struggles for sovereignty and self-determination.

They also try to change the Baloch liberal and secular culture, which is based on moderate Islam, into an extremist version of their own creation of fundamentalist Islam.

Balochistan’s geopolitical location allows access to the sea, something that the Islamic groups need. Balochistan’s division between Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan enables the groups to communicate with each other across the borders and move to and from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran to the Arabian Peninsula and beyond.

With the support and tacit consent of both Iranian and Pakistani government, they also use the region to transport fighters and suicide bombers to the Arab countries and other locations in the world. From there, financial help is brought to extremist groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Edited by Phil Harris    

Excerpt:

Baloch youngsters ride their motorbikes along the dry bed of the Helmand River. The total lack of economic and social opportunities pushes them to illegally migrate to neighbouring Iran, seeking a better life. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Karlos Zurutuza
ZARANJ, Afghanistan, Mar 18 2015 (IPS)

Balochistan, divided by the borders of Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan, is a vast swathe of land the size of France. It boasts enormous deposits of gas, gold and copper, untapped sources of oil and uranium, as well as a thousand kilometres of coastline near the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz.

Despite the wealth under their sandals, the Baloch people inhabit the most underdeveloped regions of their respective countries; Afghanistan is no exception.

“Against all odds, our national identity is [growing]. We just need the rest of the world to know about us.” -- Baloch intellectual and historian Abdul Sattar Purdely
Often overlooked, the Afghan Baloch count as just one among the many groups that make up the colourful ethnic mosaic of Afghanistan. And like the Pashtuns, the Tajiks and the Uzbeks, they have also seen their land divided by the arbitrary boundaries in Central Asia.

Baloch historian and intellectual Abdul Sattar Purdely tells IPS there are “about two million of us in Afghanistan, but only those living in the southern provinces of Nimroz and Helmand speak Balochi.”

In his late sixties, this former MP during the rule of Mohammad Najibullah (1987-1992) is today a professor, writer, and a leading advocate for the preservation of the Baloch language and culture in Afghanistan.

In coordination with the Afghan Ministry of Education, Purdely has written textbooks in Balochi that go as far as the 8th grade, which are already being used in three schools.

The Baloch in Afghanistan make up just a tiny portion of a people scattered throughout the Iranian Plateau, but they are united by the experience of religious, linguistic and ethnic persecution in a region increasingly marked by Islamic extremism.

A shepherd and his family walk their sheep in Zaranj, capital of Afghanistan’s Nimroz Province. In the absence of comprehensive census data, the Baloch intellectual Abdul Sattar Purdely tells IPS that Afghan Balochs number about two million, though not all speak the Balochi language. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

The Baloch people, who hail from the Iranian plateau, have settled for centuries alongside the banks of the Helmand River in Afghanistan. But severe droughts and the excessive use of the river’s water for opium cultivation in Nimroz have lead to the collapse of agriculture in the province, affecting scores of Baloch families. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

The majority of the Baloch people are Sunni Muslims but their moderate vision of Islam has turned them into victims of growing Islamic extremism in the region. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

The neglected village of Haji Abdurrahman, in Afghanistan’s Nimroz province, is a hub for Afghan and Pakistani Baloch people, the latter seeking shelter in Afghanistan. Dozens of families struggle to survive in this cluster of mud houses without electricity or running water.

Baloch youngsters ride their motorbikes along the dry bed of the Helmand River. The total lack of economic and social opportunities pushes them to illegally migrate to neighbouring Iran, seeking a better life. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

A Baloch teenager poses next to his portrait inside his house in Nasirabad, another mud-hut village in Afghanistan’s Nimroz province. Like the majority of the local population, he is also illiterate. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

In Pakistan, for instance, the Baloch people have long weathered a crackdown against what the government calls an insurgency, while “Tehran is constantly trying to quell any Baloch initiative in Nimroz [a province in southwest Afghanistan] as they consider it a potential threat to their security,” according to Mir Mohamad Baloch, a political and cultural activist.

This Afghan-born Baloch tells IPS that an independent Balochistan is a “life dream” for him – but under current political conditions in the region, this dream is a long way from reality.

Currently, Zaranj hosts the only TV programme in Balochi in Afghanistan for one hour a day between five and six pm. Although the first TV channel in Balochi was set up in 1978 preceding the printing of the community’s first books and newspapers, the fall of the Communist government led to a sharp cultural decline in Afghanistan.

Historically a nomadic group, the Baloch people have endured years of brutal repression for their moderate vision of Islam. Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, even issued a fatwa, an Islamic edict, against the people of Nimroz, calling for the ethnic cleansing of the Baloch and Shia population.

“Against all odds, our national identity is [growing] bigger despite the ongoing chaos in the country,” proclaims Abdul Sattar Purdely from his office in downtown Kabul. “We just need the rest of the world to know about us.”

A Baloch family from the Taliban-stronghold of Kandahar stand for a photograph. While millions of Afghans have fled to Pakistan over the past four decades, Pakistani Balochs are taking the opposite route, fleeing to Afghanistan to avoid repression by the Pakistani government. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

This Pakistani Baloch elder and his two sons are today hiding in Afghanistan. Rights groups have criticised the Pakistan government’s crackdown on the Baloch people. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

Baloch fighters from the Balochistan Liberation Army crouch at an undisclosed location along the Afghan-Pakistan border. There are several Baloch insurgent groups fighting for independence in Pakistan. Some of their fighters often cross the border to evacuate the wounded and treat them in Afghan hospitals. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

Karim and Sharif Baloch, both of them from Pakistan, show the portraits of their lost brother and father at their current residence in Zaranj. They tell IPS their relatives were killed in 2011 during a Pakistani military operation. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

A truck travels down a lost road in Nimroz, the only Afghan province where the Baloch minority form a majority. In the country’s remote southwest, Nimroz shares a 500-kilometre border with both Iran and Pakistan. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

A truck pauses at the Afghan-Iranian border in Zaranj, the administrative capital of Afghanistan’s Nimroz Province. Pakistani writer Amhed Rashid tells IPS this province is a smuggling hub through which heroin goes out and weapons come in. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

This Pakistani Baloch elder and his two sons are today hiding in Afghanistan. Rights groups have criticised the Pakistan government’s crackdown on the Baloch people. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Karlos Zurutuza
ZARANJ, Afghanistan, Mar 18 2015 (IPS)

Balochistan, divided by the borders of Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan, is a vast swathe of land the size of France. It boasts enormous deposits of gas, gold and copper, untapped sources of oil and uranium, as well as a thousand kilometres of coastline near the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz.

Despite the wealth under their sandals, the Baloch people inhabit the most underdeveloped regions of their respective countries; Afghanistan is no exception.

Often overlooked, the Afghan Baloch count as just one among the many groups that make up the colourful ethnic mosaic of Afghanistan. And like the Pashtuns, the Tajiks and the Uzbeks, they have also seen their land divided by the arbitrary boundaries in Central Asia.

In his late sixties, this former MP during the rule of Mohammad Najibullah (1987-1992) is today a professor, writer, and a leading advocate for the preservation of the Baloch language and culture in Afghanistan.

In coordination with the Afghan Ministry of Education, Purdely has written textbooks in Balochi that go as far as the 8th grade, which are already being used in three schools.

The Baloch in Afghanistan make up just a tiny portion of a people scattered throughout the Iranian Plateau, but they are united by the experience of religious, linguistic and ethnic persecution in a region increasingly marked by Islamic extremism.

In Pakistan, for instance, the Baloch people have long weathered a crackdown against what the government calls an insurgency, while “Tehran is constantly trying to quell any Baloch initiative in Nimroz [a province in southwest Afghanistan] as they consider it a potential threat to their security,” according to Mir Mohamad Baloch, a political and cultural activist.

This Afghan-born Baloch tells IPS that an independent Balochistan is a “life dream” for him – but under current political conditions in the region, this dream is a long way from reality.

Currently, Zaranj hosts the only TV programme in Balochi in Afghanistan for one hour a day between five and six pm. Although the first TV channel in Balochi was set up in 1978 preceding the printing of the community’s first books and newspapers, the fall of the Communist government led to a sharp cultural decline in Afghanistan.

Historically a nomadic group, the Baloch people have endured years of brutal repression for their moderate vision of Islam. Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, even issued a fatwa, an Islamic edict, against the people of Nimroz, calling for the ethnic cleansing of the Baloch and Shia population.

“Against all odds, our national identity is [growing] bigger despite the ongoing chaos in the country,” proclaims Abdul Sattar Purdely from his office in downtown Kabul. “We just need the rest of the world to know about us.”

Balochistan Liberation Army commander Baloch Khan checks his rifle alongside his three escorts, somewhere in the Sarlat Mountains on the Afghan-Pakistani border. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Karlos Zurutuza
SARLAT MOUNTAINS, Afghanistan-Pakistan border, Dec 24 2014 (IPS)

The media tend to portray Balochistan as “troubled”, or “restive”, but it would be more accurate to say that there´s actually a war going on in this part of the world.

Balochistan is the land of the Baloch, who today see their land divided by the borders of Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is a vast swathe of land the size of France which boasts enormous deposits of gas, gold and copper, untapped sources of oil and uranium, as well as a thousand-kilometre coastline near the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz.

In August 1947, the Baloch from Pakistan declared independence, but nine months later the Pakistani army marched into Balochistan and annexed it, sparking an insurgency that has lasted, intermittently, to this day.

Now senior Baloch rebel commanders say that Islamabad is training Islamic State (IS) fighters in Pakistan´s southern province of Balochistan.

IPS met Baloch fighters at an undisclosed location in the Sarlat Mountains, a rocky massif, right on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and equidistant from two Taliban strongholds: Kandahar in south-eastern Afghanistan and Quetta in southwest Pakistan."Today we speak of seven Baloch armed movements fighting for freedom but all share a common goal: independence for Balochistan" – Baloch Khan, commander of the Balochistan Liberation Army

The fighters claimed to have marched for twelve hours from their camp to meet this IPS reporter.

They are four: Baloch Khan, commander of the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), and Mama, Hayder and Mohamed, his three escorts, who do not want to disclose their full names.

“This is an area of ​​high Taliban presence but they use their own routes and we stick to ours so we hardly ever come across them,” explains commander Khan, adding that he wants to make it clear from the beginning that the Baloch liberation movement is “at the antipodes of fundamentalism”.

“Today we speak of seven Baloch armed movements fighting for freedom but all share a common goal: independence for Balochistan,” says Khan. At 41, he has spent half of his life as a guerrilla fighter. “I joined as a student,” he recalls.

The senior commander refuses to disclose the number of fighters in the BLA’s ranks but he does say that they are deployed in 25 camps throughout “East Balochistan [under the control of Pakistan]”.

Khan admits parallelisms between his group and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), also a “secular group fighting for their national rights,” as he puts it

“We feel very close to the Kurds. One could say they are our cousins, and their land is also stolen by their neighbours,” says the commander, referring to the common origin of Baloch and Kurds, and the division of the latter into four states: Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey.

Historically a nomadic people, the Baloch have had a moderate vision of Islam. However, Khan accuses Islamabad of pushing the conflict into a sectarian one.

The Baloch insurgent groups in Pakistan are markedly secular and share a common agenda focusing on the independence of Balochistan. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

“Until 2000 not a single Shia was killed in Balochistan. Today Pakistan is funnelling all sorts of fundamentalist groups, many of them linked to the Taliban, into Balochistan, to quell the Baloch liberation movement,” claims the guerrilla fighter, adding that target killings and enforced disappearances are a common currency in his homeland.

The Voice for Baloch Missing Persons, a group advocating peaceful protest founded by some of the families of the disappeared, puts the number of people from Balochistan since 2000 at more than 19,000, although exact figures are impossible to verify because no independent investigation has yet been conducted.

However, in August this year, the International Commission of Jurists, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch called on Pakistan’s government “to stop the deplorable practice of state agencies abducting hundreds of people throughout the country without providing information about their fate or whereabouts.”

Baloch insurgent groups, however, have also been accused of murdering civilians. In August 2013, the BLA took responsibility for the killing of 13 people after the two buses they were travelling in were stopped by fighters in Mach area, about 50km (31 miles) south-east of the provincial capital, Quetta.

Pakistani officials said they were civilians returning home to Punjab to celebrate the end of Ramadan. Commander Khan shares another version:

“There were 40 people in two buses. We arrested and investigated 25 of them and we finally executed 13, all of whom belonged to the Pakistani Security Forces,” assures Khan, lamenting that a majority of the foreign media “relies solely on Pakistani government official sources.”

Could an independence referendum like the one held in Scotland possibly help to unlock the Baloch conflict? Khan looks sceptical:

“Before such a step, we´d need to settle down both the national and geographic borders as many parts of our land lie in Sindh and Punjab – the neighbouring provinces. Besides, there´s a growing number of settlers and the army is in full control of the country, election processes included,” the commander claims bluntly.

Instead of a consultation, the rebel fighter openly asks for a full intervention, “not just moral support but also a military and economic intervention.”

“The civilised world should support us, not Pakistan. Why help a country that is struggling to feed fundamentalist groups across the world?” asks the guerrilla commander before he and his men resume the long way back to their base.

Balochistan and beyond

The meeting with the BLA leader was only possible via Afghanistan, because Pakistan’s south-western province remains a “no go” area due to a veto enforced by Islamabad.

“The province has the worst record in Pakistan for journalists being killed so local journalists usually censor themselves to avoid being harassed, jailed or worse. Meanwhile, foreigner journalists are deported if they try to access the area,” Ahmed Rashid, a best-selling Pakistani writer and renowned Central Asia commentator, who was an activist on behalf of Balochistan in his youth, told IPS.

The visa ban over this reporter after working undercover in the region was no hurdle to get the viewpoint of Allah Nazar, commander in chief of the Baloch Liberation Front (BLF).

Through a satellite phone, this former medical doctor from Quetta corroborates commander Khan´s statements on a “common goal for the entire Baloch insurgency movement”. He also endorses the BLA commander´s analysis of Islamabad’s alleged backing of fundamentalist groups.

“Pakistan is breeding fundamentalists to counter the Baloch nationalist movement but it has entirely failed. Now they are trying to use the instrument of religion in order to distract attention from the Baloch freedom movement,” Nazar explains from an unspecified location in Makran – southern Balochistan province – where the BLF has its strongholds.

According to the movement´s leader, such threat could well transcend the boundaries of this inhospitable region. Commander Nazar gave the coordinates of “at least four training camps” where members of the Islamic State would reportedly be receiving instruction before being transferred to the Middle East:

“There´s one is in Makran, and another one in Wadh, 990 and 315 km south of Quetta respectively,” says the guerrilla fighter. “A third one is in the Mishk area of Zehri – 200 km south of Quetta – and there are more than 100 armed men there: Arabs, Pashtuns, Punjabis and others who are based there with the help of Sardar Sanaullah Zehri [a local tribal leader]. The fourth camp is near Chiltan, in Quetta.”

Nazar adds that Pakistan’s ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) is “both activating and patronising the Islamic State.”

“The Islamic State is overwhelmingly present among us. They even throw pamphlets in our streets to advocate their view of Islam and get new recruits,” denounces Nazar.

In October 2014, six key Pakistani Taliban commanders, including the spokesman of Tehrik-e-Taliban – a Pakistan conglomerate of several Pakistani insurgent groups – announced their allegiance to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

“IS is simply an upgraded version of the Talibans and finds sympathy with the ruling establishment in Pakistan,” human rights activist Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur told IPS.

Talpur, who has been challenged and attacked repeatedly for writing about such uncomfortable issues for Islamabad, claims that creating the Taliban is “the core of state policy which has not yet given up on this megalomaniacal scheme of Islam ruling the world.”

Despite repeated calls and e-mails, Pakistani officials refused to talk to IPS. However, the issue is seemingly a well-known secret after the Minister of Interior himself, Nisar Ali Khan, recently told Parliament that even in the naval base in Karachi –Pakistan´s main port and commercial city – there is support for the activities of radical religious groups.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Sub-Saharan migrant garbage collectors push their carts through the streets of Tripoli´s old town. Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Karlos Zurutuza
TRIPOLI, Libya, Dec 18 2014 (IPS)

It’s easy to spot Saani Bubakar in Tripoli´s old town: always dressed in the distinctive orange jumpsuit of the waste collectors, he pushes his cart through the narrow streets on a routine that has been his for the last three years of his life.

“I come from a very poor village in Niger where there is not even running water,” explains the 23-year-old during a break. “Our neighbours told us that one of their sons was working in Tripoli, so I decided to take the trip too.”

Of the 250 Libyan dinars [about 125 euro or 154 dollars] Bubakar is paid each month, he manages to send more than half to his family back home. Accommodation, he adds, is free.

“We are 50 in an apartment nearby,” says the migrant worker, who assures that he will be back in Niger “soon”. It is not the poor working conditions but the increasing instability in the country that makes him want to go back home.

Thousands of migrants remain detained in Libyan detention centres, where they face torture that includes “severe whippings, beatings, and electric shocks” – Human Rights Watch
Three years after Libya´s former ruler Muammar Gaddafi was toppled and killed, Libya remains in a state of political turmoil that has pushed the country to the brink of civil war. There are two governments and two separate parliaments – one based in Tripoli and the other in Tobruk, 1,000 km east of the capital. The latter, set up after elections in June when only 10 percent of the census population took part, has international recognition.

Accordingly, several militias are grouped into two paramilitary alliances: Fajr (“Dawn” in Arabic), led by the Misrata brigades controlling Tripoli, and Karama (“Dignity”) commanded by Khalifa Haftar, a Tobruk-based former army general.

The population and, very especially, the foreign workers are seemingly caught in the crossfire. “I´m always afraid of working at night because the fighting in the city usually starts as soon as the sun hides,” explains Odar Yahub, one of Bubakar´s roommates.

At 22, Yahub says that will not go back to Niger until he has earned enough to get married – but that will probably take longer than expected:

“We haven´t been paid for the last four months, and no one has given us any explanation,” the young worker complains, as he empties his bucket in the garbage truck.

While most of the sweepers are of sub-Saharan origin, there are also many who arrived from Bangladesh. Aaqib, who prefers not to disclose his full name, has already spent four years cleaning the streets of Souk al Juma neighbourhood, east of the capital. He says he supports his family in Dhaka – the Bangladeshi capital – by sending home almost all the 450 Libyan dinars (225 euros) from his salary, which he has not received for the last four months either.

“Of course I’ve dreamed of going to Europe but I know many have died at sea,” explains Aaqib, 28. “I´d only travel by plane, and with a visa stamped on my passport,” he adds. For the time being, his passport is in the hands of his contractor. All the waste collectors interviewed by IPS said their documents had been confiscated.

Defenceless

From his office in east Tripoli, Mohamed Bilkhaire, who became Minister of Employment in the Tripoli Executive two months ago, claims that he is not surprised by the apparent contradiction between the country´s 35 percent unemployment rate – according to his sources – and the fact that all the garbage collectors are foreigners.

“Arabs do not sweep due to sociocultural factors, neither here nor in Egypt, Jordan, Iraq … We need foreigners to do the job,” says Bilkhaire, Asked about the garbage collectors´ salaries, he told IPS that they are paid Libya´s minimum income of 450 Libyan dinars, and that any smaller amount is due to “illegal subcontracting which should be prosecuted.”

Bilkhaire also admitted that passports were confiscated “temporarily” because most of the foreign workers “want to cross to Europe.”

According to data gathered and released by FRONTEX, the European Union´s border agency, among the more than 42,000 immigrants who arrived in Italy during the first four months of 2014, 27,000 came from Libya.

In a report released by Human Rights Watch in June, the NGO claimed that thousands of migrants remain detained in Libyan detention centres, where they face torture that includes “severe whippings, beatings, and electric shocks.”

“Detainees have described to us how male guards strip-searched women and girls and brutally attacked men and boys,” said Gerry Simpson, senior refugee researcher in the same report.

In the case of foreign workers under contract, Hanan Salah, HRW researcher for Libya, told IPS that “with the breakdown of the judicial system in many regions, abusive employers and those who do not comply with whatever contract was agreed upon, can hardly be held accountable in front of the law.”

Shokri Agmar, a lawyer from Tripoli, talks about “complete and utter helplessness”:

“The main problem for foreign workers in Libya is not merely the judicial neglect but rather that they lack a militia of their own to protect themselves,” Agmar told IPS from his office in Gargaresh, west of Tripoli.

That is precisely one of the districts where large numbers of migrants gather until somebody picks them up for a day of work, generally as construction workers.

Aghedo arrived from Nigeria three weeks ago. For this 25-year-old holding a shovel with his right hand, Tripoli is just a stopover between an endless odyssey across the Sahara Desert and a dangerous sea journey to Italy.

“There are days when they do not even pay us, but also others when we can make up to 100 dinars,” Aghedo tells IPS.

The young migrant hardly lowers his guard as he is forced to distinguish between two types of pick-up trucks: the ones which offer a job that is not always paid and those driven by the local militia – a false step and he will end up in one of the most feared detention centres.

“I know I could find a job as a sweeper but I cannot wait that long to raise the money for a passage in one of the boats bound for Europe,” explains the young migrant, without taking his eyes off the road.

(Edited by Phil Harris)