climate of the area, polluting of the environment, causing desertification preventing cultivation and destroying the people’s livelihood. During the past year the protests of thousands of Ahwazi citizens and civil society activists and the holding of several meetings and protest marches on the banks of the river Karun have failed to stop the plans to divert the water. During November, the authorities destroyed a number of Ahwazi families’ houses under the pretext of unlicensed construction. This was carried out in the poor districts where half a million impoverished Ahwazi citizens were living on the outskirts of the cities in slums reduced to the lowest level of existence. During the Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s visit to Al Ahwaz at the beginning of the current year a number of Ahwazi activists asked him to address the urgent demands of the people to deal with serious crises such as unemployment, addiction, and environmental pollution, and to solve the problem of drinking water and lift discrimination by granting job opportunities to Arab citizens and allocate part of the oil revenues for construction in the province. However, Rouhani, in spite of the pledges he had signed did not address any of these requests but instead increased the executions and unlawful arrests. Levels of unemployment and poverty have increased and diseases and epidemics have spread widely, clarifying that the problems of minorities haven’t changed with the change of government whether the government is extremist or moderate. The problems are rooted in the centralised totalitarian state structure which doesn’t grant the national regions any power to administer their own affairs, or to solve serious crises. The authorities are concerned about security in the regions and, as President Rouhani’s assistant and the former minister of information, Ali Younis explained, this security perspective is the decisive factor in the police situation in Al Ahwaz and even in Kurdistan and Baluchistan. In reality, the failure to meet the demands of the Arab minority which is mired in deep poverty, deprivation and marginalisation in a region, which contains 80% of Iran’s oil production, and the failure to fight rampant unemployment, which is at 35%, or to provide equal job opportunities put a limit on environmental pollution or grant cultural rights such as studying in their