What the water crisis tells us about the Islamic Republic

By Ali Ansari

Iranshahr

Afrāsīāb was a demon (dēv) incapable of changing his nature and therefore unable to reach salvation. His most characteristic destructive activity is the suppression of waters, draining of rivers, and causing of drought, famine, and desolation.1

In the current craze for statues of ancient kings and mythical heroes in the Islamic Republic, there is one notable absence, Afrasiab. Given his association with ‘drought, famine and desolation’, putting a statue up to him might be more appropriate.

Afrasiab was the famed King of Turan, and mortal enemy of Iran, with whom - as narrated in the Shahnameh - Iran and her Kings fought a series of protracted wars. Re-identified as ‘Turks’ in the Islamic period, the Turanians were descended from one of three sons of Fereidoon, the rightful king restored to his throne following Kaveh’s rebellion against Zahhak (see here), when he divided his inheritance, giving the West (Rum/Rome2) to Salm, the East (Turan) to Touraj and the prize of Iran, situated between them, to his youngest son Iraj. So outraged and jealous were his brothers that they murdered Iraj, triggering the cycle of wars between Iran and Rome to the West and Turan to the East.

The struggle with the East was by far the most important cycle of conflicts in which Iran engaged (whatever the presumptions of Western historians), and that fratricidal struggle was both more intense and stark, echoing in many ways the realities of the conflict between Iran’s historical rulers (Achaemenid, Parthian and Sassanian) and the peoples of Central Asia, marking the distinction between the sedentary Iranians and the nomadic Turanians. This was the perennial struggle between civilisation and barbarism, centre and periphery, settled and unsettled peoples.

Afrasiab’s name hinted at another more critical struggle, between the agriculturists of the Iranian heartlands and the pastoralists beyond. Settled agriculture demanded water and in the Iranian world this meant vast irrigation networks that would get the water to where it was most needed. Afrasiab, as his name suggested, represented the destruction of that network and the onset of drought and desolation. He was the mythical representation of what truly haunted Iranian rulers - a failure to harness water resources for the welfare and prosperity of the kingdom.

Iran was rare among Middle Eastern countries in enjoying sufficient water resources for economic development (enough in modern developmental terms for industrial ‘take off’), but it fell in the wrong places and needed to be distributed. Successive rulers understood this and built extensive irrigation channels - including the famed qanat - to channel it and support the agriculture that was the basis of their prosperity. The Sasanians (224-651 AD), for whom the leaders of the Islamic Republic have kindled a new romance, were famous for their patronage of extensive irrigation networks and their cultivation of Mesopotamia in particular.3

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In the 20th C as the population grew, Iranian planners became especially anxious about the management of water resources and throughout the 1970s extensive plans were set in place to ensure a steady supply to enable sustainable growth and industrialisation. All this, and much else, was discarded with the onset of the Islamic Revolution, the wilful neglect and ignorance of ‘planning’, compounded by the exponential demographic growth which saw the population grow from 38m to 90m in short order. We have to go back to the Mongols (13th C) to see a similar neglect and destruction of the country’s irrigation infrastructure, though it goes without saying that in scale and magnitude, the leaders of the Islamic Republic have surpassed anything that happened before in terms of the destruction of the environmental fabric of the country.

Iran is of course not immune to the wider impact of climate change affecting all of us, but the scale of the environmental damage has been multiplied several times over by the woeful mismanagement, short-termism and corruption that has become a hallmark of the current political economy. Iran is not simply facing a drought but the cataclysmic consequences of ‘water-bankruptcy’, and as some have warned, the dramatic depletion of the water table leaves many sites, including those of cultural heritage, vulnerable to subsidence.

What does the environmental catastrophe facing Iran tell us about the Islamic Republic?

1. It lays to rest the notion that all Iran’s woes are down to sanctions. Sanctions have undoubtedly made things worse, but they represent the salt rubbed into what is very much the self inflicted wound of internal corruption. As anyone who lives in Iran knows the greatest impediment to Iranian economic development is the nature of the Islamic Republic.

2. The Islamic Republic is the extractive State par excellence. It has systematically failed to invest in the infrastructure of the country, preferring short term profit over long term investment. This lack of proper capital investment is not limited to the environmental infrastructure, but extends to the wider economy, politics and ideology. The recent outburst of ‘nationalism’ is a good example of this - too vulgar, too little & too late.

3. Having inherited a comparatively powerful and wealthy state from the Pahlavi monarchy (1925-79), with relative ease, the Revolutionaries never appreciated the value of the State they had acquired and the effort it had taken over decades to build. Wallowing in the spoils of their victory they proceeded to spend down their inheritance in the perverse belief that there will always be enough, Providence will always deliver, and all that is needed is some faith, prayers and needless to say, proper adherence the Islamic dress code. Any sense of strategic planning, foresight and longer term investment has given way to short-termism and a belief that matters can be turned around by the flick of a switch. Fatalism, superstition and complacency, infects all aspect of policy but can be seen in the environmental crisis in the belief that all Iran needs is some rain.

4. The sudden downpour (and snowfall) which affected parts of Western Iran in the last few weeks has rightfully been greeted with unalloyed joy by Iranians but the accompanying flooding highlights the dry and brittle nature of the ground and the infrastructural failure which has no means of retaining the water, as it flows away. Indeed, the forest fire that is sweeping parts of the Caspian province of Mazandaran, is a salutary reminder of the underlying dryness as environmentalists decry the loss of a temperate rainforest ‘older than Iranian civilisation’.

5. The rapid dissipation of the flood water serves as a useful metaphor for the political economy of Iran as money flows in and out (mainly into private bank accounts) without really benefitting the Iranian economy. It is defined by a ‘mercantile mentality’ which dominates thinking and underpins much that is wrong. Iran is not a poor country but it is a corrupt country whose economy is determined by what Adam Smith called ‘merchant capital’. In such a system of capital accumulation, trade dominates, and industry serves the interests of trade. Regulation (laws), transparency and accountability are of marginal importance. As Marx, drawing on Smith, would later argue:

Merchant’s capital, when it holds a position of dominance, stands everywhere for a system of robbery, so that its development among trading nations of old and modern times is always directly connected with plundering, piracy, kidnapping, slaves, and colonial conquest.’

There are few better descriptors of the political economy of the Islamic Republic.

It is remarkable how little attention is being paid to what is an existential problem so long in gestation and with few immediate solutions in sight. Environmental scientists such as Kaveh Madani (who had to flee the country in 2018 after returning a year earlier to do a brief stint as deputy head of Iran’s department of the environment) and tireless activists such as Nikahang Kowsar, who have been warning Iranians for years, are treated as Cassandras bleating in the wind.

Others have been incarcerated for their efforts. Most senior officials have buried their heads in the sand preferring to bask in their glorious ‘victory’ against Israel last summer - nationalism being the real opium of the masses among Iranians. Others, including many abroad, are still discussing the finer details of centrifuges and the prospect for negotiations.

At least President Pezeshkian appears to be paying attention, though his call for the possible evacuation of Tehran shows how fundamentally unserious the government of the Islamic Republic is (for some thoughtful prescriptions see here). How would such an evacuation work and where would 15 million people go? As for the Supreme Leader, his silence on these issues is deafening. Complacency and conceit are coming home to roost.

The ground is literally shifting beneath their feet and the tragedy is it could have been avoided. Unlike the kings of old who they now praise, the leaders of the Islamic Republic have not fought the good fight against Afrasiab: they have invited him in.

1
https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/afrasiab-turanian-king/

2
In practice, the Eastern Roman Empire.

3
Peter Christensen The Decline of Iranshahr (1993), 86-93