The Time Has Come for Ahwaz to Say It with One Voice: Independence
A call to the Ahwazi Arab people, their institutions, and the international community to state the demand for independence without ambiguity: ending Iranian occupation and restoring Ahwaz as an independent, fully sovereign Arab state. The text presents independence as the recovery of sovereignty and political agency, and calls for transforming it from a deferred or fragmented demand into an openly declared, peaceful, and organized national objective carried by the people and their institutions into the Arab and international arenas.
A Call to the Ahwazi Arab People, Their Institutions, and the World
The time has come for the Ahwazi Arab people to tell the world, in one voice that leaves no room for interpretation: we want to end the Iranian occupation and restore Ahwaz as an independent Arab state with full sovereignty.
We are not asking for a better place within the occupying state, nor for a federal arrangement that would keep our land under Tehran’s sovereignty, nor for autonomy whose existence derives from the occupier’s constitution, nor for a republic to be replaced by a monarchy, or one authority by an opposition that would inherit Ahwaz as though it were part of the spoils of victory. We demand our homeland in full: its land, its people, its sovereignty, its wealth, its decision, and its future.
Independence is not an option that the occupying state may place alongside other options; it is the ending of the occupier’s presumed right to set the options in the first place. Sovereignty does not begin when a people is allowed to choose an answer. It begins when that people possesses the right to formulate the question that will determine its future.
When an Ahwazi is told to choose between centralism, federalism, and autonomy while Iranian sovereignty remains over his land in every case, he is not exercising self-determination. He is merely choosing the form in which the denial of his right will continue. A people is not free when it is permitted to choose the shape of its cage. It is free when it regains the right to leave it.
For this reason, independence can no longer be a word we postpone until circumstances permit us to say it, nor a right whose name we hide out of fear of the occupier or because of the calculations of others. A right that its own people do not name clearly will be renamed by the world in ways that serve other interests.
Occupation does not hold land by weapons alone. It keeps a part of its hold over that land every time it succeeds in making its rightful people lower their voice when naming their right. Declaring independence, therefore, is not merely a political position. It is the restoration of human sovereignty over fear itself, and of the right to say, without evasion, what one wants for one’s homeland. Freedom begins within the human being on the day the occupier ceases to determine which words he is allowed to dream in.
From here, we call upon the Ahwazi Arab people, their parties and organizations, their intellectuals and writers, and their human rights and media institutions to make independence a declared national demand and a direction for action beginning now. We are not asking everyone to become one organization. We are asking them to unite around one right and one objective: ending the occupation and restoring the independent Ahwazi state. Every institution must state its position without ambiguity and place its writing, media work, human rights advocacy, and political and diplomatic activity in the service of this objective. And if no unifying national platform for this demand yet exists, then this is the moment to build one and to launch a public Ahwazi charter for independence.
From now on, the demand for independence must appear openly in our public civic discourse: in the programs of parties and organizations, in the writings of intellectuals, in the work of human rights and media institutions, and on banners and in peaceful activities wherever this can be done safely. Let the unifying slogan be: “End the occupation, restore the state, sovereignty to the people of Ahwaz.” A slogan is not linguistic decoration. It is the condensation of an objective and a way of preventing others from renaming our right. And our people inside Ahwaz, before those abroad, must declare this demand in a voice that the fear of occupation cannot lower: the full independence of Ahwaz. Let this demand be written, raised, and heard in every possible space, so that the occupier and the world understand that silence imposed by force was never consent. When the people of the land themselves declare the future they want, every claim by the occupier that it represents them or has the right to determine their destiny collapses.
Do not wait for others to begin. Let the writer write independence under his own name. Let the party declare it in its program. Let the media carry it in its discourse. Let the human rights institution place it within its defense of the people’s rights. And let those working in diplomacy turn it into a demand that reaches the world. A voice that remains fragmented is easy to ignore. But when an entire people carries its right in clear language, the world can no longer pretend that it did not hear.
And to Arab and international media, we say: stop handing your platforms to the machinery of the Iranian occupation, its institutions and parties, and then to those in the opposition and the Pahlavi current who aspire to inherit its power, as though those competing for rule in Tehran owned Ahwaz and had the right to decide its future. The most dangerous thing the media does is not always to tell a direct lie. Sometimes it is to make the people of the land invisible, and then present their absence as evidence that they do not exist. A camera is not neutral when it gives power a face and a voice while turning the human being whose rights are being crushed into a margin outside the frame. Media that discusses the future of Ahwaz with the occupier and those who hope to inherit it, while excluding the voice of its Arab people, is not merely observing erasure. It becomes part of its machinery.
The declaration of Ahwaz’s independence requires no permission from Tehran, because an occupier has no right to grant freedom to the people whose land it occupies. Sovereignty is not granted; sovereignty is restored. The Iranian people are not to vote on the future of Ahwaz, nor does the Iranian opposition inherit sovereignty over it if the current regime falls. Changing the ruler in Tehran does not change the rightful holder of sovereignty in Ahwaz. Sovereignty does not pass from one set of hands to another among those who compete for it. It returns to the people from whom it was taken.
After the occupation has ended and independence has been restored, the Ahwazi Arab people will determine the form of their state, its constitution, and its system of government through their own free will. At that point, the question will no longer be: will Ahwaz remain subordinate to Iran? The fundamental question of sovereignty will already have been settled by its return to its rightful holders. The question then will be: how do we build a just state that protects the human being, safeguards rights and freedoms, preserves the dignity of all its residents, manages its wealth for the benefit of its people, and conducts its relations with the world on the basis of peace and cooperation? When a people regains control of its own decision, the land regains its name, and the future regains its meaning.
And to the international community, we say: lasting peace cannot be built upon an authority that does not derive its legitimacy from the people to whom the land belongs. Stability based on silencing that people is not peace. It is a postponed crisis whose cost continues to accumulate for the region and the world. We are not asking you to create our right. We are asking you to stop standing between us and its exercise, to add your voices to the demand for the independence of Ahwaz, and to support a peaceful transition that protects the human being and builds a responsible state that can become a partner in the security and prosperity of the region.
This is not a call to hatred or revenge. It is a call to end injustice at its root. The movement that begins now is peaceful, organized, and cumulative. It does not retreat from the right, and it will not allow the courage of the moment to become a passing voice.
From this moment on, we do not ask for a place within the occupying state, nor do we wait for Tehran to propose the form of our freedom. We declare it before our people and before the world: Ahwaz is an occupied Arab homeland. Its independence is our definitive national demand. Its sovereignty is neither inherited nor granted, nor is it subject to a vote by those who occupied it.
We do not choose the shape of the cage; we end the cage’s claim to be our homeland.
End the occupation. Restore the state. Sovereignty to the people of Ahwaz.
Ahwaz is our homeland. Independence is our decision. Sovereignty belongs to our people.
— Hamid Shayea Al-Ahwazi —
21 October 2026