Follow is an article signed by Omid Behrang from issue no 56 of Haghighat, the publication of the Communist Party of Iran (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist).
Lake Urmia is on the verge of drying up. This would be a disaster not only for the environment but also the lives and livelihood of millions of people. But sorrow at the lake' collapse is being transformed into determination to struggle by the people of the cities of Iran's Azerbaijan. The widespread youth protests in some of these cities has won a wave of support of the people all over the country. These protests embody the cry of a lake under threat which is demanding immediate action to rescue it.
While the Islamic Republic regime withdrew an emergency bill to save the lake, the people of Azerbaijan chanted, "Lake Urmia is dying, the Parliament orders its murder". The regime, as usual, suppressed these protests and harassed, beat and arrested those who consciously rose to defend the environment. It was reported that so far four people have been killed and many more injured in those protests, and around 4,000 were arrested.
There is no doubt that the sacrifice and the effort of the people of Azerbaijan will not be wasted and will contribute to sowing the seeds of revolution. The Islamic Republic will have to pay for murdering this lake and all other crimes it has committed. The truth is that even nature has lost its patience in the face of its destruction by the rotten capitalist system and demanding a revolution.
Why Lake Urmia is drying up
With a length of 150 kilometres and a width of 50, Lake Urmia is one of Iran's biggest lakes and the twentieth biggest lake in the world. It is more than 400,000 years old. Its approximately hundred islands were once home to a broad variety of plants and animals. People around it used its coastal sediments for medical purposes. Now around 60 percent of the lake has turned into salt desert. The average depth of the lake has fallen from 16 metres to seven metres. If action is not taken urgently, the lake will dry up entirely in the next two to five years, according to environmental experts.
The consequences for the region's people would be dire. Breathing in the salt and metal residue is a health hazard. The disappearance of the lake's water and the humidity it creates will severely harm crop lands and grazing lands. Even worse, salt cyclones could destroy farms as far way as of 200 kilometres.
At present, the lake has retreated 15 kilometres from its former banks and almost 40 villages around it have been ruined. People who made their living from the tourism in the region or from the lake ferries are in serious trouble. If the dying out continues at this pace, one of Iran's main agricultural areas will be destroyed, along with the lives and incomes of several million people (between 4 and 14 million, according to various estimates). A deliberate murder is under way! The logic of profit and the anarchy of the capitalist system are targeting the life of this lake.
A plan drawn up during the presidency of Ali Akbar Rafsanjani (1989-97) has been carried out step by step for twenty years. The development plan adopted by the "commander of construction", as Rafsanjani's supporters called him, was based on the ever greater plundering of natural resources and ever greater exploitation of the labour force. Export-oriented agriculture replaced the relatively self-sufficient local economy, or, better said, destroyed it. The plan was that the export of locally-grown fruit would enable the government to pocket more foreign currency. In order to meet this target, over the last 20 years, 36 dams were built on 21 rivers that run into Lake Urmia. Thus the lake was robbed of its main sources of water, approximately 5.5 million cubic metres. Moreover, the government encouraged landowners who cultivate fruit to dig deep wells. The result was the drying up of the underground water supplies that were another of the lake's main water sources.
A decrease in rain in some of the last few years has also added to the problem. The Islamic Republic authorities claim that the shortage of rain has been the main factor drying up the lake, but that is false because similar lakes in the broader region, such as Lake Van in Turkey and Lake Sevan in Armenia, where similar meteorological conditions prevail, are not threatened by this fate.
Government institutions such as the Pasdaran (the regime's "Islamic Revolutionary Guards" and the Jihad of Construction have amassed great wealth by selling the water stored behind the dams, the orchards grown in the newly-dry land and villas built around the dams.
The Islamic Republic's order to build roads and bridges over this lake has caused further destruction. More than five billion tons of sand and gravel have been poured into the lake to build a causeway that has divided the lake into two, disrupting its ecosystem. The natural circulation of water and air and the sources of nutrition that were formed along the banks of the lake were destroyed. The lack of a natural exchange of water between the two parts of the lake quickly increased the amount of salt in the northern part, leading to the extinction of the only aqueous creature, the Artemia (the source of what is known as Lake Urmia caviar) there. The noise and ecological pollution produced by vehicular traffic have had serious consequences for the region's birds.
Some people believe that the Mafia-like companies involved in this project are connected with Ayatolah Khamenei, the leader of the Islamic Republic. But the workings of the capitalist system inevitably produce anarchy and disorder. This anarchy results in the destruction of human and natural resources. There is no logic and no long term programme that commands this system except the logic of profit. The fate of Lake Urmia, like that of millions of Iranians, is marked by the development plans or "restructuring" plans Rafsanjani put forward in accord with IMF and World Bank proposals. The essence of this imperialist-dependent restructuring has been destruction and anarchy in the service of the interests of a minority of the society, the exploiters. For such a system, the long-term results of their economic plans are not important.
At the moment, these so-called "self-reliant developmental plans" have reached a dead end. Salt cyclones have damaged the products (fruit) that was supposed to be exported and endangered the people's health. If previously it was possible to dig a six metre-deep well to find water for agriculture, currently wells must be drilled to a depth of 120 metres. At the same time, the lake's now salty water is finding its way into the wells, often making them useless.
To protect the environment, a class solution is needed, not a national solution
In today's world, the protection of the environment is one of the most essential problems facing humanity. In fact, human existence itself is under threat. Any solution in the framework of the existing regime or any like it would only add to the problems.
A regime for whom the people have no value cannot be expected to respect nature.
The struggle to protect Lake Urmia has turned into a struggle against national oppression. Some see the deliberate killing of the lake as an expression of the Persian chauvinism that tramples Azari rights. It is true that the Islamic Republic allocates most of the budget to the central regions and holds back funding for the remote regions of oppressed nations. This is a clear expression of discrimination and national oppression. The main reason for the oppression of this region is that the Islamic Republic does not want to loosen its control over these regions. The regime knows that retreat on this issue means giving in to the demands of the Azari people. National oppression of minority peoples in Iran is one of the regime's main pillars, and it doesn't compromise on this.
Many Azari youth see this as a national (Azari) issue. Some people are trying to use the issue of protecting Lake Urmia to promote their own extreme and reactionary nationalism, such as pan-Turkism. Without drawing a dividing line with these political groups which are often connected to the regime in one way or another and/or the capitalist powers on a world scale, it is not possible to achieve a real solution. Within the narrow framework of "my land" and "my nation" it is not possible to resolve a problem that is the product of a global economic and social system. Protecting the environment is a country-wide and far more importantly global issue.
The only way to understand the real problem and the real solution is with an international horizon and a scientific outlook. So it is necessary to rupture from the common bourgeois thinking and to look for a real and serious solution.
It was the thinkers of the bourgeois system that for the first time talked about the domination of human beings over nature. They distorted the relationship between humans as part of nature and nature itself, in order to protect the interests and functioning of their system and alienate human beings from nature. Marx and Engels, the outstanding theoreticians of communist revolution, were among the first to criticize such views.
They emphasised that humanity itself is a part of nature. The permanent dependence of human beings on the natural environment they are part of limits humanity's ability to dominate nature. As Marx said ''Nature is man's inorganic body – that is to say, nature insofar as it is not the human body. Man lives from nature – i.e. nature is his body – and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that man's physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.” (Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844). Nobody owns the land and other natural resources. Humanity is only its caretaker and must hand it over in better condition to the next generation. That is why Engels emphasized ''Let us not, however, flatter ourselves over much on account of our human victories over nature. For each such victory nature takes its revenge on us. Each victory... at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature — but we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.'' ( John Bellamy Foster, Marx's Ecology: Materialism and Nature).
Only the class that is suffering the most including the most from pollution can overcome the system that is based on profit and liberate the society.
The proletariat is the only class who can overcome the profit system. This class can liberate itself only by fully liberating all humanity and nature from the capitalist system.
Lake Urmia cannot be protected without revolution
It is possible to save Lake Urmia from collapse by taking urgent action, such as releasing the waters trapped behind the dams, preventing the digging of deep wells, banning the cultivation of crops around the lake such as sugar beets that need a lot of water. It is also possible to allocate funding and pay compensation to those whose lives and income have been seriously damaged. It is possible to mobilise the masses, and to combine the knowledge of experts and technology on a countrywide and international scale with the determination and will of the masses of people in Azerbaijan to find other solutions.
But under the Islamic Republic it is impossible to proceed in this manner. A regime that is deeply woven into the international profit system, one where corruption, robbery, suppression, crime and superstition and religion prevail, can do nothing to rescue the lake and save the environment and lives of the people. The Islamic Republic is resisting the people's demands because it is the guardian of the dominant economic and social structure in Iran and in particular Azerbaijan. The carrying out of even such simple measures would mean disrupting the functioning of the economic structure of the region, overturning the existing social relations and political power, and challenging the existing relations between the dominant and oppressed nations and the rich and poor. Effective measures to save the lake could only become possible by organising a revolution in social relations, a revolution whose aim is the interests of the people and nature. The first step of such revolution is the revolutionary overthrow of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
To change the relationship between humanity and nature, first of all there must be a change in the relationships among the people. Nature will face plunder and destruction until there is a just and free society whose aim is to eliminate all forms of oppression and exploitation. In today's world, the protection of the environment is a complex task. There are a variety of contradictions. But by reviewing all the positive and negative experiences of the past, including socialism in the Soviet Union and China in the days of Lenin, Stalin and Mao, humanity can make a decisive breakthrough.
The revolutionary communists are reviewing and learning from the past experiences of building socialism in China during the time of Mao and in Soviet Union during Lenin and Stalin. We are learning from the positive experience under Lenin's leadership when for the first time, in 1920 in the Soviet Union, a plan for the protection of natural regions was established, and the positive experience of socialist China when a special plan for reducing the harmful effects of industrial waste was organised, and also learning from the negative experience of over reliance on developing the productive forces in the Soviet Union during Stalin that led to over use of the natural resources.
There is also the reality of a short sided emphasis by the communists on the welfare of the people without regard to effects on nature and economic development. Consequently the development of the productive forces caused too much pressure on nature and natural forces and used up natural resources more than necessary. The scientific and critical summation of these experiences is part of new synthesis of the science of communism that is essential for leading a victorious revolution by the masses of people.
Once one of the dreams of the people of Azerbaijan was to transform Lake Urmia from a salt water body to a fresh water lake. A dream that could have turned into reality by controlling the salt of the Ahaar and Sabalan rivers (two rivers from north Azerbaijan that run into Lake Urmia. That dream will come true when the social relations among the people are transformed by communist revolution, a revolution that can combine a wise ecology and the liberation of humanity.
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