About Safe Environment for South Azerbaijan
A safe environment is ideal for South Azerbaijan (SAZ) and any inch of the world. This is in the making in many parts of the world but confronted with barriers in some other parts. We have a story to tell about our ideals for a safe environment and how the environmental movement took off in South Azerbaijan, with more details to emerge as we go on in time.
Background
Baseline: The situation in South Azerbaijan was rife for a safe environment prior to 1990. By this time, Nature in South Azerbaijan was pretty much in its pristine state with only a handful of encroachments against the environment. Qualitatively, we may regard the years up to 1990 as the baseline for the environment in South Azerbaijan.
Phase I (Onset of Environmental Movement in South Azerbaijan): In circa 1990, or thereabouts, the governing hegemony in Iran pushed the environment in South Azerbaijan to a slippery slope and embedded every aspect of it with a series of potential disasters, exemplified by the massive dam-building program, let us capture its key features:
• Since 1990, the governments in Iran, one after another, have fast-tracked the building of more than 40 dams in this small basin of 50,000 km2 with no environmental impact assessment or strategic environmental studies. This program would have been uniquely destructive in any country, let alone in Iran.
• Abstraction of water from aquifers and watercourses is subject to a gross violation of any norm, regulation or law, so much so that inflows to the lake are effectively cut off. Any hydrologist knows that in a closed system: No inflows to a lake mean no annual recovery from evaporation; hence its desiccation. This is the case in Lake Urmia.
• The volume of misinformation injected into the media can only be matched by the absence of the truth, as the scale of irrelevance by alleged causes overwhelms the reality.
All in all, the governments in Iran, one after another, spearheaded the construction of the dams without any interruption and did not hesitate to break their laws to ensure that the dams were constructed. During this process, we saw the confabulation of many causes to conceal the true cause for the desiccation of the lake to confuse the layperson. Their underlying message was that the catastrophe was an act of God and inevitable, with no feasible measure to revive it. In the meantime, the newly created water mafia devoured water and cut off the environmental flows to maintain Lake Urmia, literally, with no opposition from the government.
Of course, South Azerbaijanis were not neutral observant but regarded the catastrophe of Lake Urmia as the national problem of South Azerbaijan instigated by the State of Iran. They have staged at least two protests every year from 2010 until 2023 and suffered the detentions of up to 100 activists in each of these protests. In addition, it is a running theme in the national campaign of South Azerbaijanis through the football and basketball games in Tabriz and Urmia, with huge fans attracting more than 50,000-100,000 in each match. Sadly, the State in Iran was determined to ensure the desiccation of Lake Urmia and we have stories to tell in this website for the international audience how the process took place.
Phase II (Rallying for Safe Environmental): Hope emerged out of despair in the brief post-desiccation thanks to freak hydrometeorological events. At this time, South Azerbaijan environmental activists were still under prosecution by the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence, and while the Iranian disinformation machinery was hard at work to fabricate an array of fantastic reasons for concealing the true cause instigating the desiccation of the lake. The freak events gave a new lease of life to Lake Urmia, but South Azerbaijan environmental activists learned that the Iranian government was the cause of the death of Lake Urmia. The events in 2024 took a different shape, as the former Iranian president suffered his suspicious death, and the so-called newly elected president Pezeshkian criticized the past governments but has not done anything positive for the sake of reviving Lake Urmia and strengthening that the Iranian power system is part of the problem.
It is under these conditions that Safe Environment for South Azerbaijan is forming as an NGO and non-profit organization. A safe environment can mean many different things depending on the circumstances. The circumstance for a Safe Environment in the context of South Azerbaijan underpins the fact that without good governance in South Azerbaijan, saving its environment is not feasible. So, we are not activists to save the environment of South Azerbaijan as the experience has shown that the adamancy of the Iranian State makes this impossible but identify a safe environment for saving the environment in South Azerbaijan.
We believe this is feasible and intend to dig into past events to identify the baseline, the events at Phase I and posthumously identify the safe environment for the future when the conditions are hopefully right.