"THE RABBLE"
by Husam Itani

Dar Al-Hayat
ah/40300
July 21 2009
Lebanon

In the language of Iran’s official media, those participating in the
unrest taking place in China’s Xinjiang province are only "rabble"
which the authorities there have had to prevent from destroying
property and assaulting citizens.

Former Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani condemned in
his speech last Friday the bloody repression to which protesters of
Uyghur ethnicity were subjected, as well as the coverage provided by
the Iranian media. Those taking part in prayer at Tehran University
responded positively to Rafsanjani’s words by chanting slogans
denouncing China and also Russia, which drove members of the
Conservative movement present there to chant the slogan demanding
death to America.

The reason for the bias of Iran’s official media in favor of Chinese
authorities may be attributed to the depth of cooperation between
Tehran and Beijing in the economic and military fields, and to
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s need for international allies, which
have become scarcer than the proverbial faithful friend. Moreover, this
is not the first time the Iranian government ignores the oppression
to which the Muslims of other countries are subjected to, placing its
tangible interests ahead of its ideological claims. This happened in
the 1990s, when Tehran supported Armenia in its war against Azerbaijan
(a Muslim country with a Shiite majority and millions of its citizens
sharing the ethnic identity of Iranian counterparts). It also happened
in the 1980s, when Ayatollah Khomeini ignored the calls of the Afghan
opposition (which would later turn into the Mujahideen movement) to
obtain the support necessary to confront Soviet occupation towards
the end of 1979.

Both the Armenian and Soviet chapters in Iran’s foreign relations
confirm the pragmatic nature of the regime in Tehran. Some will say
that leaving the Afghans alone to face the Soviets was strategically in
the service of the Iranian Revolution, which sought at this early phase
of its establishment to stand firm and strengthen its hold on power
in its own country, despite the fact that this led to strengthening
Afghan voices that called for allying with the US to combat Soviet
troops, which in turn led the way to the known developments that took
place in Afghanistan.

The stance on the Uyghur in China is indicative not only of the
separation between "State and Revolution", as is famously said
in Lebanon, but also of an effective renouncement of the slogans
of Islamic unity in order to preserve incomparably more important
interests with China, regardless of the religious, ethnic or political
identity of the current rule there.

Thus, the identification of Ahmadinejad’s government and those who
speak in its name with the authorities of Xinjiang province and Beijing
is not unusual. Indeed, the "rabble", of which more than a hundred were
killed by the bullets of Chinese security forces, is an identical copy
of another "rabble", killed by the bullets of the Basij in Tehran. The
excessive use of violence there, in order to prevent a minority – which
considers itself culturally and politically oppressed and is demanding
the minimum of recognition within the framework of the Chinese state –
from expressing itself, is no different in its bases and aims from
similar excess which was resorted to in order to revoke the right
of part of the Iranian public to repeat the elections, after having
become haunted with "doubts", in the words of Hashemi Rafsanjani,
regarding the soundness of these elections, which took place last June.

Perhaps one may, in this context, speak of a unity that brings together
the points of view of two governments that claim to hold power in the
name of "the masses", "the workers", "the downtrodden", and other
similar epithets, while in fact adopting, realistically, a stance
that believes only in staying in power whatever the price, exceeding
the features of pragmatism to the limits of blatant opportunism,
equally whether their slogans are those of an Islamic republic,
communism or otherwise.