afghans in iran - the long lost relatives

bargeboo: i grew up in iran till i was almost 18. during the 80s, when i was a teen i was fiercely protected by my mother and sheltered in many ways. among other things, it also meant that i had pretty much no contact with any afghanis. to my arrogance self, they were only a source of annoyance. being female seemed to be enough for them to stare and stare and stare at me, to the point of making me very uncomfortable.

to me they were the refuges who were the construction workers, those who sold balloons on intersections, worked for less than minimum wage, the thieves, the robbers, the rapists and the brutal nasty men who would cut off the head of anyone who dared to try and stop them in their crimes.

aside from this “persona" i had attached to them all due to many stories that i had heard but not lived myself, i did come across one kind often; the ones who worked on construction sites. i would go far out of my way so i could avoid walking by a site. every single time they would stop work. they would either stare or would actually walk up to me and breath the filthiest comment imaginable in my ear if i happened to walk by close enough or they would shout out something equally lewd if i was just out of ear shot.

needless to say that really didn’t help their cause and i never thought of afghanis as anyone i wanted to associate with.

since then, i still have not had the privilege of knowing anyone from afghanistan. when i was experiencing the above i still didn’t know any of them. i realize now what i went through is pretty much what i encounter just as often when i walk by a construction crew these days, living in the good old polite country of canada.

so … now that i am older and have seen my share of non-iranians in the world; and also because i have now been living as the foreigner myself for 13 years,  i can freely and humbly confess that i was an ignorant fool to generalize them into one big bag of nastiness. me who had not seen one black or oriental person in my life before i left iran for my first family vacation to europe in 1982 was closed minded enough to spin philosophical insights on how the west is different from “us” and how iranians are this and that.

i did it about everyone including the various ethnicities in my own country: the turks* were the stupid ones, the isfahanis* the money pinchers, the rashtis* the one with no backbone, the kermanis* the druggies, the ghazvinis* the homosexuals, etc. etc. then when i was done with the home crowd i would move to the “others”: the americans were the ignorant, the germans the racists, the arabs the sex crazed, the japanese the rich tourists and so on and so forth. sadly i was not alone in my way of thinking.

in the 80s, the borders of iran were far more closed to outsiders. tourism pretty much was non-existent in the first ten years after the revolution. the iranians of the 90s saw more non-iranians than i ever did while i was living there. more and more tourists have been traveling to iran including many who so very obviously did not “look” iranian. but not so in the 80s; not when i was growing up. so the only non-iranians i was used to seeing were the afghanis and boy, were they ever the foreigners whom we loved to hate.

in the past couple of weeks i have been coming across this petition and becoming curious enough to read on the subject in as many iranian news sources and weblogs as i can.

assuming most iranians have the same attitude towards afghans as i did while living in iran i was indeed eager to see if things have changed over the last 13 years. specially because afgan immigration wave to iran although was not a new thing it certainly accelerated in a rapid and alarming way during the reign of the islamic regime in iran, specially when taliban came to power in afghanistan.  i had an interesting conversation on the subject with my father-in-law.

apparently the afghan refuges arrived because they needed money to live. comparatively iran had a booming economy with a growing population in need of housing and services, fast. the first wave was that of  the construction workers, labourers who were willing to work for wages far bellow the standard minimum specially those who had arrived illegally and had no work permit. they also worked much harder than their iranian counterparts, willing to do jobs that many iranians saw as beneath them, so they could send the money back home to their families. during the reign of the taliban in afghanestan, the steady flow became a tidal wave and since there was basically no finger printing, no identification documents, and basically no control mechanism in place at the afghanistan /iran border, these newcomers to iran spread all over and rapidly increased in number. slowly in the last ten years or so they had begun to assimilate in the iranian society as much as possible, many marrying iranian women and raising children. thousands of these children do not have a birth certificate, and are not able to go to school. sometimes the parents are both afghanis and still do not have work permits and/or live in iran illegally therefore they enjoy no social benefits. no one is quite sure how many of these children exist today. there is a schooling system set up for some of these children and i will get to that in my next post, as part of my translation from a weblog.

immigration is not a modern phenomenon. people have always migrated to areas where they feel they can survive and their children can thrive. however, i am thoughtful about this issue on many levels. one being the way the islamic regime has handled the situation. second, the way i and many other iranians in iran treated them and viewed them the way we did. it’s quite an irony how so many iranians have had to leave their own beloved country and work as laboureres across the world, facing the same savage intolerance, bigotry, and racism. we are so very quick to point out how unfair we -the iranians living outside of iran- have been treated because of where we come from, the colour of our skin or the accent of our speech. we assume it’s our right to be included and accepted and are rightfully hurt when we are dealt with otherwise. why have we not been able to offer the same respect to afghanis?


*turks : people of turkish descent living mostly in azarbayegan area, north-west of iran
*isfahanis: people from isfahan, one of the largest cities in iran, central iran
*rashtis: people of rasht, central north, border of caspian sea
*kermanis: people of kerman, east of iran
*ghasvinis: people of ghazvin, central iran, near tehran