Iran's August 31 Nuclear Deadline Approaches

[Miss_Naqvi]

Iran's August 31 Nuclear Deadline Approaches

Another round of diplomatic bargaining between Iran and the West seems to have come to naught. Iran has not only refused to suspend its uranium enrichment program, as demanded by the United Nations Security Council in July 2006, but has also upped the nuclear ante by formally inaugurating a heavy-water reactor near Arak, 260 kilometers (162 miles) southwest of Tehran.

The plant had become operational in July 2006, although the project will only be complete by 2009. Heavy water is used to moderate the nuclear chain reaction in nuclear reactors and can be designed to turn uranium into weapons-grade plutonium without the need for enrichment facilities. This was soon followed by Iran test-firing a new long-range submarine-to-surface missile off the Persian Gulf.

Russia and China joined the United States and Europe in July by agreeing to seek a United Nations Security Council resolution ordering Iran to freeze some nuclear activities or face sanctions. While Iran continues to pledge that it remains committed to negotiations, it declines to make clear whether it would accept the international package of incentives to end the standoff over its nuclear program. The package of incentives offered to Iran by the world's major powers include a light water reactor, an international fuel consortium to provide fuel for it, and replacement parts for its U.S.-manufactured aircraft in exchange for Iran agreeing to freeze its nuclear activities.

It was a significant decision on the part of the Bush administration when, after years of resisting any role in dealing with Iran, decided to reverse course and join talks if Tehran agreed to suspend enrichment activities. Iran, however, continued to resist U.S. and European pressure and has claimed that the United States and its allies have set unrealistic preconditions for talks.

Even as the United States and the Europeans scrambled to put in place a united front vis-à-vis Iran, it is clear that Iran intends to go all out with its nuclear program. Iran appears particularly intent on maintaining an independent capability to enrich uranium and seems to have decided to test how far it can push the West.

Strategically, it may be in Iran's interests to acquire nuclear weapons. In a world where states have to fend for their own security, nuclear weapons are an excellent deterrent. Nuclear weapons may not be popular with the public opinion in the West, but all major states that have nuclear weapons know their importance and have no intention of giving them up.

Iran is highly insecure, located as it is in a highly volatile region. Its neighbors, India, Pakistan, and, most importantly, Israel have long had nuclear weapons. Moreover, after September 11, 2001, Iran has had to contend with the presence of its biggest adversary in its own neighborhood, with the United States straddling Iran from both sides in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is also possible that the one lesson Iran may have learned from the U.S. invasion of Iraq is that the only way to prevent the United States from invading is to acquire nuclear weapons as soon as possible.

This strategic drive was further strengthened in Iran with the complete collapse of the reformist political parties in the last elections and the election of a hard-liner, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as the president who had little experience in global politics. He has decided that an effective way to continue to sideline his opponents such as Hashemi Rafsanjani is by adopting an extreme posture vis-à-vis Israel and the United States. Both these causes remain popular among the Iranian masses. This also helps Ahmadinejad to divert attention from a failing economy and soaring rates of unemployment.

For Tehran, it is an ideal time to take on Washington as the United States seems bogged down in Iraq with the American public losing interest in costly military interventions. Iran also realizes that it enjoys great leverage in the political and security environment in Iraq and has the capability to intensify its sabotage activities in southern Iraq.

The global situation is also working in Iran's favor. The credibility of the United States is at an all time low in the comity of states as a result of the bad intelligence in the Iraq intervention. Few states will be willing to place their bets on American pronouncements even if they are accompanied by evidence. Despite their agreeing to send the Iran case to the Security Council in July, Russia and China, two states with real leverage vis-à-vis Iran, are unlikely to support meaningful sanctions for the fear of hurting their own economic interests in addition to their interest of restraining U.S. power. Meanwhile, Iran's standing in the Middle East seems to be at an all time high, especially after the perceived victory of Hezbollah over the more powerful Israeli military.

The debate in the United States is also ratcheting up with the new House Intelligence Committee's report criticizing U.S. intelligence agencies for playing down the threat from Iran and portraying the Iranian regime and its nuclear ambitions as a strategic threat to the United States. The report states that "a nuclear-armed Iran would likely embolden the leadership in Tehran to advance its aggressive ambitions in and outside of the region, both directly and through the terrorists it supports -- ambitions that gravely threaten the stability and the security of U.S. friends and allies."

A bipartisan consensus is emerging in the United States that a nuclear-armed Iran cannot be accepted as a possibility and so everything must be done to avert that. In the words of George Perkovich, a nuclear expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, "With nuclear weapons, Iranian Revolutionary Guards and other militant actors would supply more and better weapons to Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and Hamas, and stimulate their campaigns against Israeli and American targets, confident that their nuclear weapons would deter major counterattacks against Iran."

While this may indeed be true, it is not clear if the United States and the Europeans have any meaningful strategy to deal with Iran. Economic sanctions and the military option against Iran seem to suffer from serious problems. Indeed, history suggests that if a country makes a strategic decision that it wants to have nuclear weapons (a choice that the Iranian political elite seems to have made), there is little that the international community can actually do, short of invading the country and seizing its nuclear assets.

On the other hand, some have argued that diplomacy had long ceased to be a serious option. As long as Iran realized that it could play the Europeans against the United States, it kept up with the charade of diplomacy. When Iran saw that the Europeans were moving closer to the U.S. line, it openly defied the U.S. and E.U. decrees.

Iran will take negotiations seriously only when it recognizes that the risks of pursuing a nuclear weapons program far outweigh the benefits. As of now, however, it seems that there is very little the West can do to influence that calculus. The end game starts now as Washington will, in all probability, press the U.N. Security Council to begin the process of imposing punitive sanctions against Iran and the Europeans may have realized that even as their governments were trying to negotiate, Iran was merely using the negotiations as a stalling technique and was enriching uranium. The U.S. has made it clear that Iran's position "falls short" of the demands of the United Nations Security Council. Yet in the current international context, the United States will find it increasingly difficult to mobilize global opinion against Iran.

The Europeans remain circumspect and reluctant to openly call for sanctions. Even as the French do not seem satisfied with the Iranian response, they have warned that it would be worse "to lend fire to a confrontation between Iran on one side -- the Muslim world with Iran -- and the West." Russia and China have also urged patience and called for more negotiations. While calling on Iran to cooperate with international inspectors and suspend its enrichment activity, Russia and China have made it clear that they are unlikely to support the imposition of sanctions on Iran.

Given these diverging perceptions, what will happen in the Security Council after August 31, the deadline given to Iran by the United Nations for suspending uranium enrichment, remains a matter of conjecture. The International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.) also has to report to the Security Council by mid-September on Iran's nuclear program and on Tehran's cooperation with U.N. inspectors. Iran recently denied access to the U.N. inspectors to its underground facility at Natanz, thereby hampering the I.A.E.A.'s efforts.

What is clear, however, is that despite much diplomatic back and forth in the last few years, the two sides are stuck, more or less, at the same stage where they were two years ago. The West would like Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment program before negotiations can start, while Iran refuses to accept any preconditions for talks. This does not augur well for the future of diplomacy in this case of the Iranian nuclear program.

Drafted By: Dr. Harsh V. Pant
http://www.pinr.com

[Miss_Naqvi]

IRAN'S ETHNIC GROUPS

Introduction

Although Iran’s state religion is Shiite Islam and the majority of its population is ethnically Persian, millions of minorities from various ethnic, religious, and linguistic backgrounds also reside in Iran. Among these groups are ethnic Kurds, Baluchis, and Azeris. Many of them face discrimination and live in underdeveloped regions. Though they have held protests in the past, they mostly agitate for greater rights, not greater autonomy. Most are integrated into Iranian society, participate in politics, and identify with the Iranian nation. Tehran occasionally criticizes the United States and Israel for stirring up trouble among its large ethnic groups but the extent of outside involvement with these groups is not clear.

What are Iran’s predominant minority groups?

Iran has small pockets of Baha’i, Turkmen, Christian, and Jewish communities, but its primary ethnic minorities are:

Azeris. Roughly one out of every four Iranians is Azeri, making it Iran’s largest ethnic minority at over eighteen million (some Azeris put the number higher). The Turkic-speaking Azeri community is Shiite and resides mainly in northwest Iran along the border with Azerbaijan (whose inhabitants are more secular than their Azeri cousins in Iran) and in Tehran. Although they have grievances with the current regime in Tehran, most Azeris say they are not treated as second-class citizens and are more integrated into Iranian society, business, and politics (the Supreme Leader is an ethnic Azeri) than other minorities. A common complaint among Azeris is they are often poked fun at by the Iranian media. Last May, violent demonstrations broke out in a number of northwest cities after a cartoon published in a state-run newspaper compared Azeris to cockroaches.

Kurds. Predominantly Sunni, the Kurds reside mainly in the northwest part of the country—so-called Iranian Kurdistan—and comprise around 7 percent of Iran’s population (there are roughly four million Kurds living in Iran, compared to twelve million in Turkey and six million in Iraq). Unlike Iran’s other minorities, many of its Kurds harbor separatist tendencies, creating tensions with the state that have occasionally turned violent (the largest in recent years occurred in response to Turkey’s February 1999 arrest of Abdullah Ocalan, then-leader of the Kurdistan Workers' Party). The governments of Turkey and Iran fear the creation of a semiautonomous state in northern Iraq might motivate their own Kurdish minorities to press for greater independence. But Kaveh L. Afrasiabi, a U.S.-based expert on Iranian foreign policy, says Iran’s concern about Kurdish separatism does not approach the level of Turkey’s. Still, there have been repeated clashes between Kurds and Iranian security forces, the most recent of which was sparked by the July 2005 shooting of a young Kurd. Some experts say Israel has increased its ties with Iranian Kurds and boosted intelligence-gathering operations in northwest Iran to exploit ethnic fissures between the Kurds and the majority Shiite Persians.

Arabs. Along the Iranian-Iraqi border in southwest Iran is a population of some three million Arabs, predominantly Shiite. Arabs, whose presence in Iran stretches back twelve centuries, commingle freely with the local populations of Turks and Persians. During the 1980s, they fought on the side of the Iranians, not the Iraqi Arabs. However, as Sunni-Shiite tensions have worsened in the region, a minority of this group, emboldened by Iraqi Arabs across the border, has pressed for greater autonomy in recent years. In the southern oil-rich province of Khuzestan, clashes erupted in March 2006 between police and pro-independence ethnic Arab Iranians, resulting in three deaths and over 250 arrests (the protests were reportedly organized by a London-based group called the Popular Democratic Front of Ahwazi Arabs). In April 2005, rumors spread that the authorities in Tehran planned to disperse of the area’s Arabs, leading to protests that turned violent, according to Human Rights Watch.

Baluchis. Iran has roughly 1.4 million Baluchis, comprising 2 percent of its population. Predominantly Sunni, they reside in Baluchistan, a region divided between Pakistan and Iran. The southeastern province where Baluchis reside remains the least developed part of Iran and boasts high unemployment rates. That, plus the porous border between the two countries, has encouraged widespread smuggling of various goods, including drugs. Iranian Baluchistan, despite holding few resources, remains an important region militarily because of its border with Pakistan. Earlier this year the Iranian government built a military base there. Tehran has kept a watchful eye on Baluchi militants in the region. In March, a group called Jundallah attacked a government motorcade (which left twenty people dead), kidnapped a number of hostages, and executed at least one member of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

What are these groups’ grievances with the Iranian government?

Although the Iranian constitution guarantees the rights of its religious and ethnic minorities, many of these groups say they face discrimination. They say some schools do not teach their languages (as the constitution requires), they are denied government jobs, and their regions are neglected by the state, resulting in above-average unemployment. A February 2006 Amnesty International report points to land and property confiscations, restrictions on movement, and unlawful imprisonments of ethnic minorities. Iran’s Sunni population, which includes Kurds and Baluchis, complain there is not a single Sunni mosque in the country (the authorities reportedly blocked one from recently being built in Tehran) and the government has barred public displays of Sunni religion and culture.

How has the Iranian government responded to ethnic unrest?

In general, the authorities in Tehran downplay differences and grievances among Iran ’s ethnic groups. But most experts and rights monitors say the state marginalizes its minorities, puts down demonstrations with force, and extracts public confessions from those it suspects of initiating unrest, executing those ethnic minorities found guilty. A. William Samii, regional analysis coordinator at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, writes in the Christian Science Monitor that the typical government response is “a combination of repression and scapegoating.” In 1981, for instance, an Azeri uprising in the northwest city of Tabriz was put down violently, resulting in the executions of dozens of Azeris. More recent demonstrations by Arabs in the southwest province of Khuzestan have been blamed on the British, Samii says, because of their military presence across the border in Iraq and the historical role of British oil companies like Shell in the region (90 percent of Iran’s oil is located in Khuzestan).

What role does the United States play with these groups?

There are mixed accounts about U.S. affiliations with such groups. Seymour M. Hersh reports in the New Yorker the Pentagon has established “covert relationships” with many of Iran’s minority groups and “has encouraged their efforts to undermine the regime’s authority in northern and southeastern Iran.” Although many of these minority groups have satellite offices in the United States (as well as in Europe), some experts remain doubtful. Although the Pentagon and Kurds in the region have longstanding ties, Afrasiabi doubts the United States will assist the Kurdish desire for greater autonomy. “The Iranians believe the United States is not foolish enough to push this arc of Kurdish separatism in Iran too far because of the compounding effect this would have on regional security issues,” he says. But whenever demonstrations break out among Iran’s minorities, Tehran blames foreign agitators, says RFE/RL’s Samii. “In the May 19 Friday Prayers sermon in Tehran, which was broadcast across the country by state radio, Ayatollah Mohammad Emami-Kashani pinned southeastern [Baluchi] violence on the United States and Israel.”

http://www.cfr.org/publication/12118/