Protesters gather in Iran’s Baluchestan after professor insults Balochs, Sunnis
A number of university students and citizens of the Zahedan, the capital city of Iran’s Baluchestan province, protested on Saturday after a college professor reportedly insulted Baluch and Sunni minorities.
Baloch activists published a video on YouTube which included the professor while insulting the minority groups and threatening them with suppression and abusing them.
Molavi Abdul Hamid, one of the seniors of the Baloch and Sunni minority groups in Iran, issued a statement on Saturday condemning the professor’s statements against the Baloch and described him as “one of the incitement elements related to the hardliners party”.
“He cannot tolerate harmony and peace of nationalities and sects in Iran; he intends to raise tensions and differences,” he added.
He called the Iranian officials to consider the behavior of this university professor as a hate crime and one against the national security in Iran.
Director of the Balochistan Studies Center, Abdulstar Dushuki told Al Arbaiya that he rejected this behavior saying: “This Zahedan University professor used very offensive and hateful language against the Baloch and the Sunnis”.
“According to the Intellectual Education for Children and youth center website, he is a children’s coach and a writer in the Specialized Islamic Al-Arfan magazine. He was chosen in 2005 as the best researcher of free universities in Sistan and Baluchistan province. He has written a book entitled “The Cup of mind in Persian Literature”. However we find him using a racist tone against Sunni religious men and threatening his students with repression and bloody abuse,” he added.
“This university professor’s view about the Baloch and the Sunnis is malicious and raising hatred, considering what he said as a model that has been applied over the last four decades throughout the Balochistan in Iran,” he said.
History of bloody clashes
The Sistan province and Baluchistan as it is officially called, is located on the southeast region of Iran on the border with Pakistan and Afghanistan.
It is the third largest province in Iran with a population of about three million, mostly Sunnis. The Sunni Baloch represent about 87 percent of the province’s population, 13 percent of the Shiite Sistani Persians who live in the Zabol region in the far north of the province.
During the past three decades, the province witnessed bloody confrontations between Balochi armed groups, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and the border guards in the province.
Baloch activists accuse the central authority of practicing national and sectarian discrimination against them and deliberately depriving their region of development and keeping its people in very difficult living conditions.
