Aug10
Q&A: Iran’s Waning Human Rights
The New York Times published a piece by Lionel Beehner, staff writer for the Council on Foreign Relations, about human rights in Iran. The section about the persecution of religious or ethnic minorities makes reference to the the Baha’is:
Persecution of religious or ethnic minorities. According to the State Department, the Iranian government has severely restricted freedom of religion. There have been widespread reports of Iran’s non-Muslim religious minorities–particularly the Baha’is–being harassed or imprisoned by government authorities. Charges of economic neglect and discrimination by various minorities have in some cases led to clashes between police and ethnic or religious minority demonstrators. In March, Baluchis attacked a police motorcade in southeastern Iran, killing twenty. In May, clashes in the northwest city of Tabriz between ethnic Azeris, which comprise a quarter of Iran’s population, and government forces over an offensive cartoon in a state-run newspaper left nine people dead. In another incident, a number of protesting Ahwazi Arabs were killed by security forces in Khuzestan province. Since early 2005, there have been a number of attacks against government targets by Arabs, mainly in southwest Iran, where the bulk of the country’s two million Arabs reside. But “the most difficult question for the regime to resolve is the Kurdish question,” Sadjadpour says. There are 4.8 million Iranian Kurds, and they live in some of the least developed sections of the country. Sadjadpour says “given what they see next door–the newfound confidence of Iraqi Kurds–there’s concern Iranian Kurds will agitate for greater autonomy.”
You can read the full article here
