Do Not Manage the Next Crisis… Do Not Leave Its Cause Alive
A letter to world leaders and the international community ahead of the General Debate of the 81st Session of the United Nations General Assembly, asking whether the world has spent decades managing the consequences of crises linked to the Iranian state while leaving their underlying causes intact. It places the Ahwazi Arab people and their right to determine their own future at the center of the question, calling for direct international access to Ahwazi voices, safe channels for civil society and testimony, and no settlement concerning Ahwaz to be shaped without the people’s free will or by excluding independence in advance if that is their freely expressed choice.
This letter was sent on 10 September 2026 to a number of permanent missions and international bodies, ahead of the General Debate of the 81st Session of the United Nations General Assembly.
Do Not Manage the Next Crisis… Do Not Leave Its Cause Alive
A Message to World Leaders and the International Community Before the General Debate of the Eighty-First Session of the United Nations General Assembly
To the leaders of states,
and to the representatives of peoples gathered at the United Nations,
I write to you from Ahwaz.
But I do not write about Ahwaz alone.
I write about a question the world has postponed for so long that the cost of ignoring it has become greater than the cost of facing it:
Who has the right to determine the future of a people?
In every crisis connected to the Iranian state, the world’s attention turns to the consequences: the nuclear program, missiles, wars, sanctions, energy, maritime passages, and security threats.
All of these are real issues.
But what if, for decades, the world has been treating what the crisis sends outward, while leaving untouched the cause that keeps reproducing it?
What if the deeper question begins with the relationship between power and the human being, with the land it controls, with the wealth it extracts, and with the right of the owners of the land to decide their own future?
This is where the question must begin.
Not with the missile.
Not with the sanction.
Not with the next agreement.
But with the human being.
Ahwaz Is Not a Margin
The Ahwazi Arab people are not a minority waiting for someone else to grant them a definition, nor a cultural detail inside a file written by others.
They are a people with a land, a memory, a language, a history, and a will, and they have the right to determine their future.
Since 1925, Ahwaz has been under Iranian occupation, and its land, wealth, and resources have been subjected to an authority to which the Ahwazi Arab people never gave their free will.
I say “occupation” deliberately.
Because a people denied the right to name what happened to them enters dialogue with the world after part of its narrative has already been taken from it, before it even begins to speak.
The owners of the land do not need permission to be the owners of their narrative and their future.
When the Value of the Land Rises and the Will of Its Owner Falls
In Ahwaz there is a contradiction the world should no longer be able to ignore.
Oil matters.
Gas, water, ports, and geographic position matter.
But what about the human being to whom this land belongs?
What happens when an authority’s need for the land becomes greater than its willingness to recognize the right of its owners to determine their future?
Then wealth may be transformed from a source of strength for a people into another reason to cling to control over them.
The value of the land rises, while the value of the will of the human being who belongs to it falls.
Oil is seen, energy is counted, ports and passages are monitored, while the Ahwazi human being disappears behind the strategic importance of his land.
The wealth of a people must never become a reason to deprive them of their freedom.
A human being who cannot freely say “no” must never have his silence used as proof that he said “yes.”
The Human Being Before the Map
The international system has learned to fear changes in maps.
But it has not learned with the same seriousness to fear the human cost of fixing, without end, a reality imposed by force.
The map does not suffer.
The human being suffers.
I am not asking the United Nations to grant the Ahwazi Arab people a right it owns, nor am I asking any foreign state to choose the future of Ahwaz.
I am asking for recognition of a simpler truth:
The future of Ahwaz is the right of the Ahwazi Arab people themselves.
And a choice is not free if the one who holds power draws its limits in advance.
When the holder of power decides beforehand what a people may be allowed to choose, he has not given that people freedom of choice; he has kept the right to choose itself under his control.
That is why independence must not be excluded in advance if it is the free will expressed by the Ahwazi Arab people.
Self-determination whose outcomes are defined before it begins is not self-determination.
Do Not Make the Human Being Become a Crisis Before He Is Heard
When the paths of free expression and future-determination are closed before a people, generation after generation, the question does not disappear.
It accumulates.
The surface may appear calm.
But:
Calm that needs repression in order to continue is not stability. It is a postponed crisis.
The most dangerous lesson an oppressed people can learn is that the world hears them only when their suffering becomes a danger to others.
When pain is not seen until it turns into war, displacement, unrest, or a threat to international interests, the oppressed receive a deeply dangerous message:
That silent suffering is not enough.
And that catastrophe is the shortest road to attention.
Do not make the human being become a crisis before he deserves to be heard.
Wise politics does not wait for the explosion before recognizing that the cause existed.
That is why any agreement that deals with weapons, sanctions, the nuclear program, or regional threats, while leaving the owners of the land under the same structure that deprived them of decision, may stop an immediate danger, but it does not create lasting peace.
It may buy time.
But it does not remove the cause.
The standard must therefore be clear:
Any settlement that determines the future of a people without their free will does not resolve the crisis; it transfers its cost from the present to the future.
Ask of any coming agreement:
Did it merely make the crisis less disturbing to the world?
Or did it make the human being who will live under its consequences more able to determine his future?
This is the real test of stability.
What Do I Ask For?
I am not asking for another statement of sympathy, nor for an occasion in which the name of Ahwaz is mentioned and then everything ends when the occasion ends.
I ask that the world begin with the owner of the right himself.
Listen directly to the Ahwazi Arab people.
Open safe and independent international channels through which witnesses, human rights defenders, researchers, and Ahwazi civil society can reach international institutions without the very attempt to reach them becoming a reason for punishment.
Do not allow any vision for the future of Ahwaz to be drafted over the heads of the owners of the land.
Make the free will of the Ahwazi Arab people the foundation of any discussion about their future.
Do not exclude independence in advance if that is the free will expressed by the people.
We are not asking for war.
Nor for revenge.
Nor for the liberation of one people to become injustice against another human being.
A liberation that produces a new oppressor is not complete.
But peace is not built either by denying the owners of the land their right to determine their future.
Time does not transform force into right.
Fear does not become consent because it has lasted long.
Control does not become legitimate because it has succeeded in continuing.
My Final Message
The world can wait for the next crisis, treat its consequences, sign a new agreement, and then return years later to find the same question waiting beneath it.
Or it can face it now:
Who owns the future of the human being?
If the answer is whoever owns force, prison, and weapons, then we have not solved the problem.
We have merely given force another name.
But if the people are the owners of their future, then the question becomes:
By what right is a people prevented from choosing the future they want for themselves?
I am not asking you to save Ahwaz.
Nor to speak in our name.
Nor to grant us existence.
We exist.
I ask you to stop building policies of stability on the assumption that the Ahwazi Arab people should not be asked about the future of Ahwaz.
Do not replace the voice of the owners of the land with the voice of the authority that occupies it.
Listen.
Open the peaceful path.
Protect the right of the people to say what they want.
Then have the political courage to respect their answer.
Put the human being before the map.
The will before force.
And the right of the people to choose their future before the comfort of the international system with the status quo.
Because a solution that keeps the cause of the crisis alive is not a solution.
And stability that transfers the crisis to the next generation is not stability.
And the most dangerous thing the world can do is not to answer the people’s question incorrectly.
It is to prevent the people, once again, from answering it themselves.
— Hamid Shayea Al-Ahwazi —
10.9.2026