Black census

Excertos de um artigo de Iqbal Latif, publicado no Iranian.com, a propósito da situação dos Bahá'ís no Irão.
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Counting minorities is an omen of bad prospects and evil designs ahead. According to the wicked plan, each and every Bahai member in Iran was being identified and monitored. Such an action is an impermissible and deplorable interference with the rights of members of religious minorities in Iran. Bahai faith for far too long has been an expunged page from the Iranian official contemporary records; to erase them further and tap their fringe subsistence is a clear-cut program of state-sponsored extinction of an entire community. This new actuarial request and secret state censuses of minorities have a very dangerous precedent. It advances the idea of collusion of silence with the involvement of science.

This testimony of a "black census" of Bahais can be compared to 'The Nazi Census: Identification and Control in the Third Reich,' a book written by Gtz Aly and Karl Heinz Roth and published in 1984 is amongst the first to commence the discussion about link between Nazi and post-Second World War state practices. "It was neither through the ideology of blood and soil nor through the principle of guns and butter, upheld until the end of 1944, that the National Socialists secured their might or carried out their destructive activities. It was the use of raw numbers, punch cards, statistical expertise and identification cards that made all that possible (p.1)." (...)

Iran not a signatory of this UN declaration that sanctifies the right of every human being for a free belief? Iran as a signatory of the Non proliferation treaty wants to send that treaty to the dustbin by not adhering to its limitation imposed on it as a signatory. On the other hand, it similarly wants to send the UN declaration of human rights to the dustbin of history by failing to maintain minimum safeguards as far as recognition and freedom of its minorities are concerned. A clergy-led cabal is putting the entire nation at a collision course with the conscience of the world.

Nations that are led on such a path of self-destruction in this day and age of drone-guided weapons bring havoc and heap misery upon the weakest. Iranians in no way deserve it. The intentional violation of international contracts - from NPT to Human rights - is a blinkered version of clergy that feels they can find their way out by highhandedness and long-windedness. Today the question is: until when will the conscience of Iranian diaspora remain in slumber with a huge dose of self-induced detachment from the grim prospects of Iranian minorities? Iran should take pride instead of persecuting the authors of declarations like these that emanated from Iran in 1869: "The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens."