The real cause of Iran’s water problems is the incompetent regime’s policies. Indeed, water shortage in Iran is acting like a silent earthquake towards regime change erupting in the form of people’s protests in various cities across the country and shaking the foundation of the regime.
The role of Iran’s water crisis in the recent protests
Earlier this month, protests erupted in Khorramshahr and other cities of Khuzestan province over lack of access to drinking water. The protests soon turned into anti-government demonstrations, marked by slogans against the regime’s president, supreme leader, and the entirety of the mullahs’ theocracy.
Protests over water are not new, although the new wave of nationwide uprisings that have started since the beginning of the year have given them new fuel. Iran’s water problem has lasted for more than a decade and can be seen in different provinces of Iran, including in Isfahan, where farmers are protesting over the poor irrigation facilities, in Azerbaijan, where the country’s largest lake is drying, in Kermanshah, Kurdistan and elsewhere.
Hassan Rouhani, the Iranian regime’s president, recently acknowledged that Iran’s water scarcity problem has become a national security issue. But unsurprisingly, his regime’s response to protests over the shortage of water has been to violently crack down on demonstrators and to make up absurd excuses to blame the country’s environmental problems on other countries in the region.
The water crisis in Khuzestan province
But how is it that Iran, a country that is rich with natural resources, is suffering from water problems?
According to the regime’s own media, between September and December 2017, Iran saw its driest period in over 67 years, and 40 percent of the country is undergoing a serious drought. Those figures were reported by the National Drought and Monitoring Center. Iran is also facing a deforestation, desertification, and severe water and air pollution. A stark example is that of Khuzestan, which is faced with periodic waves of dust storms, which are taking their toll on the province’s population.
People in the city of Borazjan in southern Iran shout “we don’t have water”
Residents of Borazjan, the capital city of Dashtestan County in Iran’s southern province of Bushehr, took to the streets on July 7, 2018 to protest against lack of water, particularly drinking water, in the province. The protesters gathered in the city’s Hospital Square and chanted slogans such as “Death to the Dictator” and “We don’t want an incompetent government.”
The role of Iran’s water crisis in the recent protests
One of the main reasons behind Iran’s water and environmental problems is the excessive creation of dams by the incompetent organs such as the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC). This is a practice that was intensified during Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presidency and continues to this day. The creation and administration of dams has become a lucrative business for the IRGC and has disrupted Iran’s ecological balance and has triggered and aggravated the drought in Urmia, Isfahan and elsewhere.
The IRGC’s destructive activities in paralleled by severe budget cuts on the country’s environmental institutions, which has been the norm since the 1979 revolution. Rouhani’s own deputy environment minister, Kaveh Madani, recently fled the country because he was being accused of colluding with foreign powers.
The regime has also shown hostility toward environmentalists. Following the nationwide uprisings that started at the end of December 2017, the regime arrested dozens of environmentalists, again accusing them of cooperating with hostile foreign states. One of them, Kavous Seyed-Emami, died under mysterious conditions in the regime’s prison and the regime’s authorities claimed that he had committed suicide. But given the regime’s record of killing prisoners and declaring their deaths as suicide, the validity of that claim is highly questionable. Following the widespread arrest of protesters at the beginning of the year, the regime has murdered several prisoners in custody in the same manner.
After fleeing the country, Madani tweeted, “Yes, the accused fled from a country where virtual bullies push against science, knowledge, and expertise and resort to conspiracy theories to find a scapegoat for all the problems because they know well that finding an enemy, spy or someone to blame is much easier than accepting responsibility and complicity in a problem.”
(Source: PMOI/MEK Analysis)