Broadcast May Be Intended to Undercut Support for Obama in Iran

State-run television in Iran showed what it said was a televised confession on Thursday by Abdolmalek Rigi, the recently captured leader of Jundallah, a militant group that claims to be defending Sunni Muslims in Iran’s southeast and has killed hundreds of Iranian soldiers and civilians since 2003.

According to Press TV, Iran’s state-controlled, English-language broadcaster, Iranian officials said that Mr. Rigi had been detained after his flight from the United Arab Emirates to Kyrgyzstan was ordered to land as it passed through Iranian air space. But Al Jazeera, the satellite TV channel based in Qatar, reported that Mr. Rigi was arrested in Pakistan last week and handed over to Iran.

Mr. Rigi’s group says it is fighting on behalf of Sunni Muslims from the Baluchi ethnic group, which is found on both sides of the border between Iran and Pakistan. Jundallah has taken responsibility for a string of bombings in Iran, including one last October that killed 15 members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and 25 civilians.

As Scott Lucas, an expert on the Middle East who runs the blog Enduring America, noted on Friday, Press TV published an English translation of Mr. Rigi’s statement and showed this video of him delivering it in Persian, with an English voice-over:



Coming after a series of similar televised confessions from political reformers arrested in the wake of Iran’s disputed presidential election last year, it is hard to say how seriously viewers in Iran might take what Mr. Rigi said, but his remarks were striking mainly because of his claim that the Obama administration supported his violent insurgency. (Commenting on the apparently forced confessions of dissidents broadcast after the disputed election, Haleh Esfandiari, an Iranian-American scholar told my colleague Jim Dwyer last year, “The good thing about Iran is that nobody — I mean nobody in the country — believes these confessions.”)

Whoever composed Mr. Rigi’s statement was very careful to make sure that there would be no doubt about the fact that he would tell the Iranian people that contacts between American intelligence and his group had come during the Obama administration. (In 2008, Seymour Hersh reported that a former C.I.A. officer said that the Bush administration had provided support to Jundallah.) The very first words of the statement are: “After Obama was elected, the Americans contacted us and they met me in Pakistan.” The statement is even strangely specific about the timing of the first contact from the new administration. Mr. Rigi said that American intelligence officers promised to provide “military equipment, arms and machine guns” to his fighters “around March 17″ of 2009.

That date is significant because, if true, it would mean that President Obama’s administration was offering to arm militants fighting an ethnic insurgency the very same week that the president himself delivered this video greeting to the people of Iran on the occasion of Nowruz, the Persian new year:



Mr. Obama said in his message to the Iranian people and its leaders that “my administration is now committed to diplomacy,” and he spoke of replacing “threats” with “engagement that is honest and grounded in mutual respect.”

One month after Mr. Obama’s personal attempt to recast the relationship between the United States and Iran, Jon Lee Anderson reported in The New Yorker:

In the Bush years, it was easy for Ahmadinejad to argue that President Bush was not interested in anything but a hostile relationship with Iran. Obama’s message was “a game-changer,” Vali Nasr, an expert on Iran and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said. “Now the U.S. has come out with an extraordinarily different kind of message, one that is warm, and seems sincere about engaging with Iran. So the Iranians now will ask of their government, why aren’t you engaging?” Nasr added, “Obama has cleverly created a debate between the Iranian people and their leaders, and within the leadership itself — and also, because this comes just three months before the elections, made it a campaign issue.”

The possibility that Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was ill-placed to take Mr. Obama up on his offer of engagement was indeed an issue in the presidential campaign that took place in Iran just after Mr. Obama’s attempt at outreach. Supporters of the leading opposition candidate, Mir-Hussein Moussavi, even carried posters to his rallies that said, in English, that he would deliver “A New Greeting to the World.”

On Tuesday, Reuters reported that after Iran’s intelligence minister claimed that Mr. Rigi had been at an American military base less than 24 hours before his capture, Geoff Morrell, a Pentagon spokesman, said that was “absolutely false” and dismissed them as “nothing more than Iranian propaganda.” Mr. Morrell also said: “Allegations that we played some role in creating or supporting Jundallah is just another false claim in a long list of ridiculous Iranian fabrications.”

Reuters reported earlier this week that Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist who was once a member of an insurgent group in Baluchistan himself, told the news agency that Jundallah had “evolved through shifting alliances with various parties, including the Taliban and Pakistan’s ISI intelligence service, who saw the group as a tool against Iran.”

Given the fact that the leadership of the Afghan Taliban is known as the Quetta Shura, because it is located in the capital of Pakistan’s Baluchistan region, it is interesting that Mr. Rigi also said that he was in Quetta in his statement. While much of the attention of the Western press has been on militants in the tribal areas of Pakistan, the province of Baluchistan remains a center for militant groups and more than one insurgency.

In an article in The New York Review of Books last October, “The Afghanistan Impasse,” Ahmed Rashid wrote that the province (which he calls Balochistan), bordering both Afghanistan and Iran, is only slightly more under the control of Pakistan’s central government than the country’s tribal areas:

Much has been made of Pakistan as a potential failed state on the verge of breakup, yet if there is even a remote chance of that happening it will not be because of the Taliban, but because of an underlying crisis that has been studiously ignored by the West—the separatist movement in Balochistan. [...]

Balochistan is Pakistan’s largest province, comprising 48 percent of its territory and sharing a long border with southern Afghanistan; but it is a land of rugged mountains and deserts, with a population of only 12 million people. Ever since Pakistan’s creation in 1947, the Baloch tribes have been in revolt against what they see as the chauvinism and denial of their rights by the Pakistani army in favor of Punjab, the country’s most populous province, with 86 million people.

In five major insurgencies against the army, the Baloch have demanded greater autonomy, royalties for the province’s gas, development funds, and genuine political representation. The fifth insurgency began in 2005 and has intensified because of the brutal repression and hundreds of “disappearances” of Baloch nationalists, for which the army under former President Pervez Musharraf was responsible. [...]

The civilian government under President Zardari arranged a cease-fire with the guerrillas last year but failed to follow it up with serious talks, and guerrilla attacks have resumed. Pakistan’s past military rulers have ignored the fact that their country is a multiethnic, multireligious state and the policies of an overtly centralized military do not work. The army’s refusal to acknowledge this led to the loss of East Pakistan—now Bangladesh—in 1971. Tomorrow it could be Balochistan.

Last year, my colleague Carlotta Gall reported on the tensions in Baluchistan, in an article that also noted “Baluch nationalists and some Pakistani politicians say the Baluch conflict holds the potential to break the country apart.”
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