9 October AFP
| |||||||||||||||
|
Iranians voiced fears Monday about a new wave of Afghan refugees as well as
anxiety about what kind of government would replace the hated Taliban in Kabul,
following the launch of US-British strikes on Afghanistan.
Iranians
interviewed in Masshad, a sprawling city of three million people and scores of
thousands of Afghan refugees close to the border with Afghanistan, generally
echoed their government's condemnation of the strikes. However, a few
supported them as a necessary response to terror.
What people feared most
was another wave of refugees to add to the more than two million already living
in Iran, most of them in the border provinces of Sistan-Baluchistan and
Khorassan, which includes Masshad. "If this happens, we would be
confronted by an economic crisis," said Mortaza, who runs a fabric shop in the
bazaar near the shrine of Imam Reza, which draws millions of Shiite Muslim
pilgrims every year.
Iranians complain that Afghans take jobs from
Iranians, as well commit crimes such as robbery and drug
trafficking. There were signs Monday that new refugees were already
heading to the Iranian border, in addition to the Pakistani and central Asian
borders. An official with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)
cited unconfirmed reports from inside Afghanistan that groups of people are
heading towards the Iranian border from both the northeast and
southeast.
The UNHCR is preparing for a first wave of 80,000 refugees,
though it has a worst-case scenerio of 400,000 people. The Iranian
government insists it will keep its borders shut and build refugee camps on the
other side, though several people interviewed here were not so sure it could
keep the borders sealed for long.
While Iranians in Mashhad complained
that the Afghans presented social and economic problems for Iran, most
empathized with the plight of a people who have known only war for more than two
decades. "I'm worried about the Afghan people," said Simin, a university
professor who wore the Iranian chador, a black robe covering her hair down to
her shoes.
A number of highly educated people such as Muslim clerics and
university professors expressed anxiety about US strategic aims in
Afghanistan. "I'm opposed to the Taliban rulers but also to the American
attack," said Ghanbar Hosseini, a cleric who teaches at the Samer religious
school in Mashhad. "The chances are further now for peace because America
will set up its own government in Kabul and that government cannot bring peace,"
said the bespectacled cleric, who wore a white turban and long brown
robe.
Shiite Iran is hostile to Afghanistan's ruling extremist and
puritanical Sunni Taliban militia which is sheltering Osama bin Laden, the prime
suspect in the September 11 terror attacks on New York and
Washington.
However, Hosseini and university professors feared that
whatever replaced Taliban rule could hurt not only Iranian interests but provoke
widespread instability in the region. "America will set up a government
there and it will not be a people's government," according to Ahmad Mohaghar, a
political science professor at Ferdowsi University of Mashhad. "We're
worried about it. It may be dangerous to our national security," he
said. And because the new government will be a US-backed regime without
popular support, it is condemned to the same fate of all the previous Afghan
governments, provoking more regional instability, he said.
IranExpert: All the News Updated 24 Hours a Day |