The most powerful allegory of the failure of the regime of the ayatollahs is the agony of Orumieh
Neither East nor West “Ayatollah Khomeini sanctioned in one of his most famous speeches: the Islamic Republic would have worked its way into much opposition to communist materialism as corruption and capitalist, with Islam as a guiding star, the Iranians would crouch in the womb a state with the character of a father-master who does not admit failure, but repays you with a model more just society. Filed nepotism Pahlavi, Iran was the time of the honest and the past.
There is no more powerful allegory of the failure of that social contract of the long and seemingly unstoppable agony of Salt Lake Orumieh, the largest lake in the Middle East started to premature death dall’insipienza regime. Orumieh is also the name of the small town in the Iranian region of Azerbaijan, a country that, historically, because of its proximity to Russia and Turkey, has been a crossroads of many different ideas and temptations, from the constitutional revolution of 1906- 11 communism.
or Orumieh Urmia, as the regime has renamed according to the ancient Assyrian name, which means “City of Water”, was known in ancient Persian by the name of that Chichast “sparkling”, a reference to minerals suspended in the water of the lake that offer a particular luminescence. Azeris, who represent the most populous among minorities in Iran (about a third of the population), revere this body of water as a symbol of their identity and call it “the lonely turquoise Azerbaijan”.
Orumieh has already endured long periods of drought, but in the last fifteen years has arrived to lose 90 percent of its volume of water, for experts it is an ecological disaster comparable to the drying up of the Aral Sea, for Iranians is something much worse, the “great catastrophe” (fajeh -e-Bozorg in Farsi) that, together at sunset of a precious ecosystem, also threatens to alienate Azerbaijan million people.
“The majority of Iranians aspire to a better future, but he also knows that the country will face an even greater problem of the nuclear issue – wrote in an article in Le Temps, in late August, the dean of the Institut de Hautes Etudes Internationales et du Développement in Geneva, Mohammed Reza Djalili – It is a problem whose responsibility lies with the regime and that, unfortunately, can not be solved by a negotiated nuclear “. Of “catastrophe” spoke explicitly also the former Agriculture Minister Issa Kalantari Sharvand in an interview with the newspaper, in which he compared the management of water resources at Iranian ‘”prelude to genocide.”
Lake Orumieh extends (or extended) over an area of 5200 square kilometers and its national park home to 212 species of birds, 41 of reptiles and 27 mammals, including the rare Persian fallow deer. About 5 million people depend on the lake for their livelihood, but his death is likely to be dangerous for those who live in other regions, because in this basin lie 8 billion cubic meters of salt that once drained the lake, will travel , carried by the strong winds of the desert, to corrode the cultivation of other ten regions of Iran, as well as to poison the nearby lands Turkish, Armenian and Azerbaijani (Azeri here is understood in relation to the independent state of Azerbaijan).
Kalantari argues that, if things remain the same, 70 percent of Iran’s population may be forced to leave the country because of desertification. Collaborator before Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammed Khatami then, Kalantari is one of the advisers to the Government on matters relating to water, agriculture and the environment that President Hassan Rohani has repeatedly called “a national emergency”, and yet, net of the declarations and dozens of studies that have been commissioned, in Orumieh not change anything: the delegations come and go without a trace and the lake followed to withdraw (according to the newspaper Etemaad, the water level drops to 3 millimeters each day) .
RELATED PRODUCTS Until the late nineties, tourists plying the waters of the lake and reached rocky islets as Shahi, where guides retraced the exploits of Hulagu Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan and conqueror of Baghdad. On the lakeside there were still restaurants and bungalow to admire pelicans and flamingos. Now no one surfs or swims and the carcasses of flamingos are trapped in a surreal desert of salt. Everything is arid and desolate empty. The swan-shaped pedal boat scandiscano a lunar landscape and abandoned ships rusting in the sun. Where once was practiced waterskiing appeared a couple of tracks of go-karts, someone is still the lake of course, but visits are melancholic. The residents of the villages that now you are depopulating tell passing infrequently because the view of the lake is similar to that of a love that dies.
A Orumieh there are more almond and remember the times that were still only the mud with which they sprinkled bathers, although often that mud is hopelessly dust. And the dust does not bring anything good when it joins the salt and minerals are very focused on the lake bed. Alongside storms increases the incidence of hypertension, lung cancer and miscarriages.
“Living here – said the UN coordinator for Iran, Gary Lewis, the New York Times – means to live in a cup of salt with dust blowing around you and a whirlpool that sucks you in. Resurface when they are a landscape by the end of the world “. For years the authorities have blamed the disease of the lake to global warming and the harmful consequences of a decade of drought (“Do they really think they can command the lake does not dry up and if the order is disregarded believe that there is in place a few conspiracy “said dejected Amir Arjomand, former advisor to Mir Hossein Mousavi).
It ‘true that in the last two decades the rains have decreased by 20 percent. “We are faced with a future of hotter and drier in this region and Iran is the epicenter of this crisis,” said the coordinator of the UN Lewis, but in Iran despite falling just 200 mm of rain a year, one third of the global average, and only 75 percent on 25 percent of its territory, Tehran has an important history of hydraulic engineering – illustrated first by qanat tunnels similar vertical wells connected by a culvert gently sloping allowing water to flow by gravity from the aquifer to the final destination even for long distances without losing large amounts of water to evaporation – which in the past have allowed it to overcome periods of equally poor rainfall. According to historians, without the qanat 75 percent of the land plowed in Iran would be left at the mercy of the desert and who knows what would have become of lush gardens depicted in Persian miniatures.
On the dock of the catastrophe Orumieh we have the arrogance of the regime and also the refusal of the traditional model. In the fifties in Iran came the mechanical extraction of water through wells animated by powerful turbines. The novelty was presented by one side as a panacea against drought and, on the other, as a means of eliminating the traditional landowners control over their peasants. The landowners were responsible for the maintenance and proper functioning of the qanat and then held the power over water. Those were the years of the White Revolution that abolished feudalism and distributed the lands of the landowners to farmers at a price lower by 30 percent compared to the market value. A half million peasant families now possessed the lands they had cultivated for life happily and began searching cheap water by investing in wells mechanized. Gradually began the decline of the qanat.
At the same time began to be built the first dams, most of the time with the help of foreign companies. Shah personally executed 14 in 38 years, the Islamic Republic more than 500 in 25. Ali Khamenei has repeatedly stressed the primacy: “In the previous system, our engineers had the opportunity to build or grow from the scientific point of view and technology because they left everything in the hands of foreigners. Today our engineers build dams, hydroelectric plants, highways, railways and factories. “
Build, build, build was the mantra of the Rafsanjani presidency. The population increased (up to double), he had to grow, prove to be strong and independent, to be the best and fastest of the experts paid by the Shah. Build to suit good constituencies, build to accommodate “friends of friends”. So by the end of the eighties the regime began planning water infrastructure on the basis of considerations of feasibility rather than of opportunity in social, cultural and scientific. “Unfortunately – said the Guardian Professor Kaveh Madani Imperial College London – this perspective autarkic has overlooked the fact that many developed countries are instead dismantling dams because of their harmful ecological effects.”
The short circuit between nationalism, aggressive development and dams is tragically visible in Orumieh. More than 37 dams have intervened to divert the course of rivers that fed the lake, a looting which also contributed to the “pragmatic” Rasfanjani and “mild” Khatami, but the main one responsible is the former president-Pasdaran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad . Thanks to his engineering degree, has entrusted Khatam al Anbia, the powerful corporation of the Revolutionary Guards, all projects, effectively shattering any kind of competition. It is not clear how much has been spent to complete this infrastructure, but analysts said these figures are second only to investments in gas and oil.
In the mountains above Orumieh, Ahmadinejad took over the Works Dam Chahchai now boasts a reservoir of its own for the local farmers. 90 percent of that water would naturally be flowed toward Orumieh. Hard to think of a more harmful action, but Ahmadinejad has once again exceeded by dividing in half the east side and the west of the lake with a 15 kilometer-long causeway connecting the two major cities of Azerbaijian, Tabriz and Orumieh, not a bridge that would have allowed water to move from side to side, but yet another barrier which, moreover, increases the levels of salinity. The coup de grace.
Thousands of people demonstrated in recent years against the senselessness of the management of the lake. In 2009 they showed their desperation emptying bottles of “tears” in the lake. In 2010 and 2011 other peaceful demonstrations ended with hundreds of people arrested and, in 2011, with two deaths. That year the police charged the demonstrators brutally and video on You Tube can see riot police wielding sticks and throwing tear gas to disperse boys shouting: “The lake is thirsty.” In Tehran he has staged a play entitled “The salt land” and the issue of the lake resonates periodically in stadiums where the Tractor Sazi, the football team of Tabriz, beats slogans about great catastrophe. The region of Azerbaijan is of great strategic importance from the point of view of agriculture and as a main transit route for exports to Turkey, Central Asia and the European Union and the regime represses the intolerance with an iron fist (were also arrested many supporters of Tractor Sazi) also to prevent claims from becoming ecological demands for independence.
Hassan Rohani has stopped the construction of five new dams, formed a task force dedicated to the lake and promised the equivalent of $ 5 billion to save it. Yet in Azerbaijan the population remains skeptical (“buy water by the Chinese?”, Said a resident of the Guardian), the local government complains of being excluded from the choices in Tehran and experts warn: within two years will be nothing to talk about.
Meanwhile, the farmers tear the roots of dead trees and are desperate because the water extracted from the wells is so salty that even the cattle do not dare touch it.
‘other gimmick Ahmadinejad was to liberalize the concessions for the wells: today there are thirty thousand wells in the legal and an unknown number of illegal wells, and as the aquifers were looted will have to dig deeper and deeper. A Sulduz, a village overlooking the lake, ten years ago he tried to water 30-40 meters, now even 70 meters is nothing and if by chance the blue gold finally materializes, 80 percent is still lost because too many farmers still flood the earth without considering that, in a climate such as the Iranian, in this way, the water evaporates. A series of pilot projects for drip irrigation is giving encouraging results, but it is too little, too late (a recent conference organized by Iran in cooperation with the United Nations ruled that the programs put in place in 2010 have since Here significant effect) and the administration Rohani, neutralized by conflicting interests, apparently unaware of the fact that the crisis of Orumieh is a local drama, but the light of a catastrophe potentially much wider – Iran is drying up and if he is thirsty lake Azeri, thirsty also to Hamoun, in eastern Iran, near the border with Afghanistan and waterways in Khuzestan and Esfahan Zayanderud – which should push the regime to think about what kind of development is really chasing.
The paradox is that the post-revolutionary economy has always favored the profit, which would be legitimate if it were not that the revolutionary rhetoric preached a new world, unlike any other, a world in which factories financed by the state they squandered water for the villages. A harsh world, but a just world.
For the counselor Kalantari the disappearance of the lake “is a threat worse than that represented by the US or Israel, we must admit that we have not been able to defend our heritage” but Rohani is content of the promises and nobody knows that the word “paradise” comes from the Persian word, pairidaeza, “heavenly garden”. And ‘it is protecting the water from the desert that Iran has built a civilization, but in Tehran if they are forgotten.
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