The greening of human rights in Iran: Lake Orumiyeh,human rights,and environmental justice

The Iranian New Year (Nowruz) is celebrated on the spring equinox (March 20) and, on the thirteenth day of spring (Sizdah Bedar), it is customary for Iranians to spend time outdoors, hiking and attending picnics with family and friends. In recent decades, the Sizdah Bedar holiday has become interchangeable with Nature Day (Roz-eh Tabi’at), which conveys the importance of environmental stewardship of the mountains, forests, and lakes that Iranians typically visit during the first weeks of spring.

A poignant demonstration was held on the shore of Lake Orumiyeh on Nature Day (April 1, 2010) in the northwestern Iranian province of West Azerbaijan. Once among the largest saltwater lakes in the world, Lake Orumiyeh has undergone rapid desiccation, losing nearly 90 per cent of its water volume and surface area over the past two decades (AghaKouchak et al., 2015). The protest was held on the lake's southern shore, which was in danger of completely disappearing. The desiccated lake stood in sharp contrast with ubiquitous images of Nature Day and protesters emphasized this incongruity by incorporating familiar, yet somber, elements of springtime celebrations into the demonstration. Families gathered for picnics on the lake's receding shoreline, with small tents nestled within the desiccated lakebed. Instead of family hikes, parents kneeled to help children pour water from bottles into the dried, cracked lakebed.

The Nature Day demonstration marked the beginning of several protests in the Iranian Azerbaijan region to demand increased environmental protections for Lake Orumiyeh. Staging a demonstration on Nature Day was highly strategic and drew national attention to the critical state of Lake Orumiyeh. Given the risks of openly criticizing the government, protests initially focused on ecological impacts from the dozens of dams along the lake's tributary rivers and economic impacts on the ecotourism industry. The Iranian government has long maintained that the lake's desiccation is driven by climate change while remaining largely silent about the impact of state-sponsored damming projects that have impacted the lake. Protesters called on the government to save the lake by halting dam construction and restoring the lake's water levels by diverting water from nearby rivers. This demonstration did not resemble more highly politized protests organized around political grievances or human rights, which was rather the point. Despite the outward appearance of families gathering out of concern for Lake Orumiyeh, this political act was a pointed critique of state inaction to save the dying lake. While initial protests grew out of concern for the rapidly desiccating lake, they soon shifted to the myriad consequences of environmental degradation on local – largely ethnic minority - communities, thus developing into a platform for making multi-dimensional claims against the state.

Conceptually, the aim of this article is to examine how protesters in Orumiyeh used environmental justice, both as a concept and political strategy, to make human rights claims against the Iranian state. Drawing from environmental justice and critical human rights literature in geography, combined with an empirical and visual analysis of these protests, I examine how Orumiyeh protesters strategically ‘greened’ the language of human rights to protect themselves from state violence. I posit that environmental justice functions as a coded language in this political context, where it is challenging to speak openly about human rights. Specifically, I analyze two protests organized in 2010 and 2011 to demonstrate how the site of the lake was used to signify broader grievances against the state. Taken together, these protests illustrate how limiting activism to binary frameworks of the environmental or political renders invisible the multidimensional claims of protesters.

Situating environmental justice as human rights in Iran

Geographers have long demonstrated a commitment to studying environmental and social injustice and, although explicit engagement with human rights remains nascent in geography (Carmalt, 2017; Laliberte, 2015; Loyd, 2014; Ross, 2011), there is a robust literature that analyzes how experiences of environmental injustice extend into the realm of civil rights. These empirical studies focus on the distribution of environmental ‘bads,’ such as the siting of industrial facilities and hazardous waste sites that result in the concentration of, and disproportionate exposure to, toxicity in low-income communities and communities of color (Bullard, 2005; Cole and Foster, 2001; Holifield et al., 2018; Walker and Bulkeley, 2006), health risks resulting from exposure to environmental hazard (Harper, 2004; Richmond et al., 2005), and structural barriers to accessing resources critical to health and overall well-being (Pulido, 2000, 2016).

Building on these important interventions, the burgeoning literature on global environmental justice theorizes how social difference shapes uneven exposure and differential vulnerability to environmental hazard in Global South contexts, while being attentive to commonalities that span environmental movements globally. This scholarship examines how the discourse of environmental justice has circulated beyond the US, with particular attention to its global uptake as a transnational organizing strategy (Schlosberg, 2007; Schroeder et al., 2008; Sikor and Newell, 2014; Walker and Bulkeley, 2006). As a collective action frame, environmental justice can make the aims of social movements legible for various audiences, thus aiding in gaining recognition of environmental crises from the state and international community (Walker, 2009). Simultaneously, local narratives of social movements are critical to expanding and reformulating dominant understandings of environmental justice, offering pluralistic frameworks for advancing environment and ecological justice (Schlosberg, 2007).

Another framing mechanism for social movements is through language of human rights which, although rhetorically powerful with clear moral imperatives (Ackerly, 2018), do “not necessarily map well onto the normative architecture of rights” or sufficiently outline redress for environmental harms (Woods, 2017: 153). While there have been attempts to clearly link environmental justice and human rights, including the Stockholm Declaration of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (1972), the Rio Declaration on Environment (1992), the UN Commission on Human Rights resolutions on Human Rights and the Environment (1994, 1996), and the Paris Agreement (2015), environmental rights do not command the same recognition as those included in the human rights canon (i.e. International Bill of Human Rights).

Within the global environmental justice literature, geographers offer compelling examples of how social movements have successfully advocated for the expansion of the human rights canon to include environmental rights, such as the human right to water (Harris et al., 2015; Mirosa and Harris, 2012; Sultana and Loftus, 2013). However, a number of studies have identified the limits of rights-based approaches for advancing environmental justice including: the exclusion of key environmental rights from the human rights canon (Mehta et al., 2014; Woods, 2017); a Western liberal framing that advances individual rights over collective rights (De Sousa Santos, 2015); anthropocentric understandings of environmental rights (Harris et al., 2015; Rawson and Mansfield, 2018); and, the appropriation of human rights discourses to further neoliberal agendas (Bakker, 2007; McLaren, 2017). More broadly, a universal framing of human rights can obscure the complexity of historical, political, and socio-economic factors implicated in creating conditions of social and environmental injustice and, as feminist scholars have argued, fails to account for differential experiences of injustice (Fraser, 2009; Young, 1990). Collectively, these studies demonstrate both the possibilities and limitations of political mobilization through a human rights framework, including the important contributions of social movements in demanding international recognition and enforcement of environmental rights.

This article draws on critical human rights and global environmental justice literature to examine the limitations for rights-based political mobilization that are particular to Iran, specifically that the language of human rights is largely inaccessible to Iranians. Protests to save Lake Orumiyeh demonstrate how environmental justice as a collective action frame can be used to assert rights claims in a political context where it is immensely challenging to speak openly about human rights. I find Peluso and Watt’s (2001) concept of violent environments particularly helpful for situating protests to save Lake Orumiyeh, which reveal other forms of social struggle embedded within local histories and state power relations. More broadly, the Orumiyeh case raises important questions about the ontological distinction between environmental and social justice. These themes are broadly addressed in literatures on environmental justice and political ecology, particularly through debates in liberation ecology that critique human-centered forms of justice that treat environmental injustice as separate from political grievances (see, for instance, Peet and Watts, 2004; Peluso and Watts, 2001; Perreault et al., 2015; Robbins, 2019). I extend these insights to analyze how environmental justice – as a concept and political strategy - is used to articulate other forms of social struggle in Iranian Azerbaijan. As such, this study demonstrates the importance of a critical pluralistic framework (Schlosberg, 2007) that not only allows for different articulations of environmental justice, but that also enables the recognition of demands from social movements that fall outside of normative human rights frameworks.

In my analysis of political mobilization in Orumiyeh, I draw from global environmental justice studies which posit that struggles for environmental rights can be read by the state as apolitical (Mehta et al., 2014; Schlosberg, 2007). It is precisely this interpretation that allowed Orumiyeh protesters to organize public demonstrations during a period of political upheaval in Iran, where environmental activism has historically been far less politicized than mobilization through human rights frameworks. ¹ Since the 1979 Revolution, the Iranian regime has coded human rights as a tool Western imperialism. Iranian government officials routinely denounce the uneven enforcement of international rights conventions, which stems from historical and contemporary encounters with Western imperialism justified through the language of human rights (Abrahamian, 2008; Dabashi, 2011). The state's anti-imperialist discourse is used as a pretense to surveil civil society and imprison human rights activists, who are often accused of conspiring to incite revolution, acting against national security, and cooperating with foreign governments against the state. Consequently, social movements organizing through human rights frameworks are subjected to heightened surveillance and repressive tactics in Iran. However, the government is relatively tolerant of environmental movements which have generally been read as apolitical perhaps, in part, because environmental rights are not internationally recognized as fundamental human rights.

Methods

My research methods for this study included observation and semi-structured interviews to gain a more nuanced understanding of human rights grievances emerging from the complex dynamics of environmental degradation, ethnic rights grievances, and political repression by the state. Given the politically complex nature of this project, my methodological approach is informed by the feminist literature of care ethics that recognizes the intersecting vulnerabilities of research participants, particularly along the lines of gender, ethnicity, religion, and class (Bartos, 2018; Lawson, 2009; Mackenzie et al., 2014; Noxolo et al., 2011). A methodology of care is mindful of what respondents can securely disclose. Given the political sensitivity associated with the language of human rights in Iran, as well as my positionality as a dual citizen of the US and Iran, my interview questions focused on Lake Orumiyeh and environmental change. The semi-structured interviews included questions about the perceived causes of the desiccation of the lake, the impacts of environmental degradation on local communities, and government proposals to restore the lake. My analysis is largely based on how environmental injustice, broadly construed, is used to indirectly voice human rights concerns.

During seven months of fieldwork in Iran between 2013–2015, I conducted 20 semi-structured interviews with residents of Orumiyeh, West Azerbaijan, and 14 semi-structured interviews with activists, academics, and university students directly involved in efforts to restore Lake Orumiyeh. I also draw on 3 group interviews conducted in 2015 in Orumiyeh; two groups were comprised of university students and one group included environmental engineers and scientists. I conducted 22 interviews with human rights activists and university students in the surrounding northern Iranian provinces of Mazandaran and Tehran that broadly focused on human rights in Iran. I identified research participants through professional and personal contacts that I have developed during frequent visits to Iran between 2004–2016. Additionally, I draw from Gillian Rose’s (2001) critical visual methodology to analyze protest materials and images from protests organized in 2010–2011. These images are helpful for supplementing my interview data, as I did not ask interview respondents about protests in the region.

This article is also informed by two months of observation as a fellow with an Iranian environmental non-governmental organization in 2013, when I observed dozens of meetings with environmental activists, indigenous communities, and governmental officials overseeing environmental management programs in Iran. One of the most striking aspects of my observations from 2013 were the ways in which various groups communicated concerns about human rights through an environmental conservation framework. During meetings with indigenous groups throughout Iran, the NGO facilitated discussions about which needs were most important to these communities to determine action plans for local and national advocacy. While their stated needs were diverse and myriad, ranging from land grabbing by the state to environmental degradation and socio-economic marginalization, community leaders took great care in how they publicly framed their grievances. In private space, many of the conversations between the NGO and community leaders would include allegations that the government had infringed on their economic and socio-political rights through development schemes. However, in public space, community leaders would frame their grievances in apolitical terms, namely through environmental conservation, to avoid direct criticisms of the government. As an example, during a meeting in the Kurdistan province (a highly surveilled region in Iran), disquiet about the political marginalization of Iranian Kurds was expressed through the need for greater autonomy to safeguard and oversee regional wetlands that the state had failed to protect. Similarly, the NGO was extremely strategic in how it described its work in meetings with government officials, yet proposals to international donors were often framed through human rights advocacy. In this article, I attempt to elucidate some of the disconnects and tensions between political grievances - and the divergent framings of injustice for different audiences within and outside of Iran – that I observed during my fieldwork.

The desiccation of Lake Orumiyeh

Lake Orumiyeh is a national park, a protected wetland, and a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, with additional environmental protections under the Ramsar Convention (UNEP, 2018). Despite the numerous protections afforded to Lake Orumiyeh, the 2000 square mile lake had lost nearly 90 per cent of its surface area by 2015 (AghaKouchak et al., 2015). While the lake has historically experienced fluxes in water levels, the current rate of desiccation is unprecedented (Khazaei et al. 2019).

Within Iran, the debate over the causes of desiccation varies, with the government focused on physical changes to the environment, local engineers and scientists centering the environmental impacts of infrastructure and hydro-development projects, and protesters viewing the critical state of the lake through the lens of social difference and inequality. Within Orumiyeh, there is widespread critique of climate change as the primary explanation of the lake's desiccation, as it deflects from the state's responsibility to protect the lake and address harms resulting from environmental degradation. The region of Iranian Azerbaijan is generally viewed within Iran as an ‘othered’ region due to its high concentration of ethnic minority communities and, in my interviews, some viewed the state's unwillingness to protect the lake as an intentional act of neglect that reflects a longer history of marginalization. The city of Orumiyeh is located in the province of West Azerbaijan, which is comprised of 76% Azeris and 22% Kurds, as compared with 16% and 7% of Iran's national population, respectively (Hassan, 2008). Azeris are largely Shi’ite Muslims and Kurds are generally Sunni, and there are also Jewish and Christian Armenian and Assyrian communities in Orumiyeh. The ethnolinguistic and religious diversity of Orumiyeh stands in stark contrast with post-revolutionary state nationalism that is largely predicated on Shia Islam and privileges Iran's ethnic Persian population through, for example, the sole recognition of Persian (Farsi) as Iran's official language. These social differences are particularly pronounced in conversations about the impacts of the lake's desiccation.

The Iranian government contends that climate change has critically impacted the lake, deflecting from its responsibility to enforce environmental protections. Simultaneously, largely under the purview of the quasi-military Revolutionary Guard, dozens of dams have been constructed along the lake's tributary rivers, many of which are fully operational but not currently in use (Garousi et al., 2013). While international reports attribute the lake's desiccation to climate change in tandem with dams and the diversion of surface water for agricultural use (see, for instance, UNEP, 2012), scholarship within Iran is largely limited to studying the impacts of climate change and drought. For example, in February 2015, I attended a conference on the lake’s desiccation at an Orumiyeh research center. Senior scholars discussed how the shallow lake is susceptible to drought and natural processes of evaporation that are exacerbated by warmer temperatures resulting from climate change in the semiarid region, yet failed to address the impact of dams. As an endorheic lake, Lake Orumiyeh has no outlets to other bodies of water and instead accumulates water through precipitation and tributary rivers, which makes it particularly vulnerable to restricted water flows through damming. The reticence to study the anthropogenic causes of the lake's desiccation may reflect the securitization of Iranian universities. ²

In interviews with environmental engineers in Orumiyeh, they attributed the lake's desiccation to unsustainable agricultural and hydro-economic development, as well as a significant increase of groundwater extraction, with the number of wells increasing fivefold between the 1970–2000 (Shahi, 2019). An engineer in Orumiyeh commented on the need for better environmental management:

The lake had problems in the past. There are some important things that people did not do to protect the lake…We can solve some of the processes that are leading to the lake drying. This will take time and good environmental management. It is a special lake. It is very shallow. The water in Orumiyeh is evaporating because it cannot maintain a water level necessary to keep it from evaporating. The lake is highly dependent on temperature and the environment is very sensitive to climate change. (Group interview B, February 5, 2015)

Local engineers also discussed how the construction of the Orumiyeh Lake Bridge negatively impacts the lake. The bridge was completed in 2008, despite environmental impact warnings that the gap in the causeway would not allow for adequate flow between the north and south parts of the lake. The bridge and effectively partitioned the lake in half, increasing both the rate of evaporation and salinity levels within the lake (Eimanifar and Mohebbi, 2007).

As the lake continues to evaporate, the salinity has increased upwards of 300 g/l, which has impacted life in and around the lake (Ibid.). Given the high concentrations of sodium chloride, an issue of particular concern are salt flats from the lakebed that have become increasingly exposed as the lake continues to lose surface area. The exposed salt flats from the drying lake leave the adjacent environment vulnerable to saline dust storms that are comprised of salt-rich sediments from the dried lakebed and contain high concentrations of alkaline material including sodium sulfate, sodium chloride, and other potentially toxic components (Ravan et al., 2022). The saline dust is trapped by the surrounding mountain range and concentrated within the city of Orumiyeh. Noxious dust storms can have myriad effects ranging from impacting the soil quality of surrounding agricultural lands to increased health risks, including rising rates of asthma and cancer (Garousi et al., 2013; Golabian, 2010; Najafi, 2012; Pengra, 2012).

Interview respondents often spoke of their anxiety regarding the potential health risks posed by salt flats. During a group interview with local university students, respondents discussed their alarm of how quickly the lake was evaporating and their trepidation about environmental health, with one respondent describing his experience of observing a salt storm in Orumiyeh. “We are afraid that the lake will become completely dry. We are also afraid of the salt storms from the wind. After many years of watching the lake dry, we have become depressed. We worry” (Group interview A, February 5, 2015). Despite their spatial proximity to the lake, many interview respondents emphasized that the lake's degradation impacts the wider region. “The lake is dry. The water is evaporating. There is lots of salt exposed. The wind blows the salt. The effects will be felt down to Qazvin [a province bordering Tehran]” (Group interview, February 12, 2015). Other respondents discussed impacts on communities in Azerbaijan and Turkey that live near the Iranian border and were dismayed by the government's unwillingness to address threats to environmental health. “The lake is dry and there is more salt in the air, which is blown by the wind over a 1500 km radius. This impacts farmland. It will lead to desertification. There are increases in skin cancer and lung cancer…The decision-makers are not able to see clearly or make good decisions for the lake. They are short-sighted and corrupt. The entire ecosystem is impacted” (Interview, February 7, 2015).

Ecotourism is also deeply impacted by the lake's desiccation. The lake's ecosystem encompasses brackish marshes and over one hundred small islands that serve as a staging area for the 200 species of birds, including flamingos, which are a large draw for the local tourism industry (Eimanifar and Mohebbi, 2007). In interviews conducted in Orumiyeh, respondents would often gesture to dilapidated lakeside resorts to illustrate the economic impact of the lake's desiccation. Neglected parks and deteriorating hotels line the receded shorelines, and outlines of evaporated mineral spring pools lay adjacent to holistic spas. The shuttered spas represent a cruel irony that Lake Orumiyeh was once a place of healing. However, as the lake shrinks, it poses health risks to those living in the region.

Multidimensional rights claims in the Nature Day protests

Public demonstrations calling for the enforcement of environmental protections for Lake Orumiyeh began in 2009. The year 2009 is significant in two respects, marking the convergence of stark changes to the ecological and political environment in Iranian Azerbaijan. First, the southern half of the lake began to lose sizable surface area following the construction of the Orumiyeh Lake Bridge, making visible the extent of the lake's degradation. Second, a national civil rights uprising - the Green Movement - emerged in the wake of the contested 2009 presidential election and engulfed the country in the largest protests since the 1979 Iranian Revolution (Dabashi, 2011). Although the Green Movement and efforts to save Lake Orumiyeh are not directly related, the Iranian government's brutal suppression of mass protests and crackdown on civil society shifted the political landscape and subsequently shaped the tenor for demonstrations in Orumiyeh. The government focused on containing the fallout from the Green Movement protests in 2009 and, in addition to international condemnation of human rights violations against Green Movement protesters, Iran faced increasing international pressure over its nuclear program. The impending environmental catastrophe in Orumiyeh was simply not a priority for the embattled government.

During this period of political unrest, the government closely monitored any form of public dissent and it was, therefore, critical that protests to save the lake were read as apolitical by the state. Unable to openly criticize state hydro-development projects or explicitly name the impacts of the lake's desiccation on local minoritized populations, protesters strategically centered on the ecological impacts stemming from the lake's demise. Protests organized in Orumiyeh and the nearby city of Tabriz between 2010–2011 grew out of concern for the rapidly desiccating lake. While protesters were clearly concerned about the myriad impacts of environmental degradation, I argue that Lake Orumiyeh was also used to signify broader grievances against the state. In the following sections, I compare two protests to elucidate how protesters in Orumiyeh used the site of the lake to assert multi-dimensional rights claims against the state, decoding several strategies that protesters used to critique government inaction while simultaneously attempting to protect themselves from state violence.

The Nature Day Protest of 2010

Returning to the Nature Day protest in April 2010, I now turn to the ways that protesters made ‘coded’ human rights claims framed through concerns for the lake including the collective performance of grief, the personification of the lake, and a focus on wildlife habitats. During the 2010 demonstration, protesters highlighted the dangers of environmental degradation by personifying the lake to demonstrate how a collapsed ecosystem would impact all life in the region. Using the metaphor of a sick and thirsty lake, protesters subtly drew attention to water insecurity and health risks from salt storms. Images from the protest show families standing in semi-circles along the shore, holding signs with the words, “Lake Urma [Orumiyeh] is thirsty”). Footage from the protest show families walking along the shoreline and pouring water into the cracked lakebed while chanting, “Let's cry and fill Lake Orumiyeh with our tears” (see, for instance, the حفظ دریاچه ارومیه Facebook Community, 2010). Some of the publicly available images from this protest show the faces of participants retroactively blurred, ostensibly to protect the identity of protesters. Images circulating on Facebook during this period depict ‘Lady’ Orumiyeh as a sorrowful woman, mirroring the affect of the protest. As an example, one illustrated poster shows a young woman crying. Her tears create a river that connects to the lake, symbolizing an undammed tributary river feeding the lake's thirst. The poster caption reads, “Wipe your eyes,” in Azeri and Farsi, signifying community care for the lake. The use of both languages is also significant, a point I will return to in the following section.

Another way of making visible the myriad impacts of lake's desiccation was to highlight how desertification and salt storms affect local wildlife. This strategy was illustrated through a poster campaign that featured pictures of the evaporating lake superimposed on figures of birds indigenous to the region, with the caption, “Lake Urmia [Orumiyeh] is drying, life is dying.” In images from the demonstration, children pour water into the lake while holding up posters of birds indigenous to the region. While ‘life’ was symbolized by birds in the posters, the birds can also signify how the lake's evaporation would impact all life in the region. In my interviews conducted in Orumiyeh, respondents often spoke about potential health outcomes related to the destruction of the lake. These concerns were not reflected in protests chants or signs during the 2010 protest, as it is overtly political to publicly name the potential health risks of salt storms on ethnic minority communities in Iran. However, the focus on risks to local wildlife through a framework of environmental conservation identified environmental health concerns without explicitly connecting the impacts of the lake's desiccation to minoritized communities in Iranian Azerbaijan.

Some families brought children to the protest, which signified how the collapse of the Orumiyeh ecosystem would impact future generations. Interestingly, the children attending the protest dressed in clothing symbolizing Azeri identity, perhaps signaling how this community would be particularly impacted by the impeding environmental crisis. Young girls were dressed in traditional Azeri clothing, bright red satin adorned with woven gold patterns on vests and caps. A few boys sported Traktor scarves, a popular soccer team from nearby Tabriz in East Azerbaijan. As opposed to the two main soccer teams in Iran - Estiglal and Persepolis – Traktor is immensely popular in Iranian Azerbaijan, which more broadly can be read as a form of ethnic nationalism exhibited through sports. The children's clothing sharply contrasted with the post-revolutionary, state sanctioned Iranian hijab that the was worn by mothers at the protest. The presence of children also helped position the demonstration as a Nature Day community ‘gathering’ as opposed to a protest, adding another layer of protection against state violence. It is important to note that it is highly unusual for children to participate in protests in Iran as public demonstrations are usually heavily surveilled and, at times, violently repressed by security forces.

The public performance of multigenerational protesters refilling the lake through symbolic tears was a collective act of care that conveyed the importance of Lake Orumiyeh to the region. Importantly, these public performances of care and grief functioned as a coded critique of state inaction to save the lake. The sorrowful chants and images were a notable departure from the festive mood that characterizes Nature Day celebrations and this incongruity was key to drawing national attention to the state of the lake. Grief has long functioned as an acceptable form of public affect in Iran and public performances of sorrow are deeply embedded in Shi'ite practice. There is a long history of religious performances that have been used to signify political grievances against the state, including during the Iranian Revolution. Strategically, the affective performance of grief for the impending death of the lake and local wildlife, along with a focus on ‘feminine’ familial acts of care, was critical to the protest being read as nonthreatening to the state.

The Nature Day Protest of 2011

Despite increased national attention toward Lake Orumiyeh following the April 2010 protest, there was little substantive action from the government and the lake continued to rapidly deteriorate. On the one-year anniversary of the 2010 Nature Day demonstration, protests were again held in Orumiyeh and the nearby city of Tabriz, a former capital of Iran in the East Azerbaijan province. In light of the compounding environmental and political tensions in the region, the tenor of protests became increasingly charged with the 2011 iteration of Nature Day protests significantly diverging from the previous year.

A key difference between the 2010 and 2011 Nature Day protests was the stark change in narrative. The 2010 demonstration focused on the impacts of environmental change on wildlife, using the non-human to illustrate how the lake's desiccation would affect all life in the region. The 2011 protesters, however, were unambiguous in their claims, emphasizing how the vulnerability of the lake heightened the precarity of local communities. Drawing attention to water insecurity resulting from ongoing dam construction, the 2011 protesters chanted, “Break down dams and let water flow into the Lake Urmia!” and “Lake Orumiyeh has no water in it! If Azerbaijan does not wake up now, it will be too late!” (ADAPP YouTube, 2011). These chants warned against irreversible environmental damage if the lake's water levels were not restored and echoed concerns from my interviews about the inability to live in a region impacted by water insecurity, dust storms, and desertification that degrade agricultural land. Similar to the 2010 protest, the 2011 chants personified the lake but conveyed greater urgency. The 2011 protesters shouted “Lake Orumiyeh is burning of thirst!” rather than the more subdued “Let's cry and fill Lake Orumiyeh with our tears.” The 2011 chants underscored protesters concerns about climate change (burning) and water scarcity (thirst) in Iranian Azerbaijan.

The change in protest narrative reflected an affective shift from collective grief to anger, as well as a notable shift in the gendered dynamics of the protest. The 2010 protest was comprised of families performing grief by symbolically refilling the lake with their tears. These acts of care allowed protesters to position themselves as nonthreatening to the state while the presence of families signified the generational impacts of the lake's desiccation. In contrast, footage from the 2011 Nature Day protests showed large crowds of men shouting chants that drew parallels between the impending death of the lake and the ‘death’ of the region. In images from this protest, young men held up a long green banner with the words, “The death of Urmu [Orumiyeh] lake = The death of Azerbaijan.” This was accompanied by rallying cries that asserted a regional nationalism: one man would call out “Azerbaijan” and the crowd would respond, “Long live [Azerbaijan]!” (Association for the Defence of Azerbaijani Political Prisoners, 2011).

The 2011 protest revealed how environmental violence in Iranian Azerbaijan intersects with ethnic tensions which, in this case, were symbolized through language rights. An example of this intersection is through the overtly political messages of protest materials, which were another departure from the coded critiques that characterized the 2010 protest. As an example, one protest flyer featured an outline of a muscular man against a red background. His green veins resemble tree roots and are connected to his heart, which is in the shape of Lake Orumiyeh. Interestingly, the colors in this poster – red, green, and blue – are the colors of Azerbaijan's flag, representing an intersection between environmental grievances and historical territorial claims over Iranian Azerbaijan. “Do not resist Azerbaijan” is written over the outline of the male figure, in both Azeri and Farsi, an explicitly political act that contests Iranian state nationalism and centers deeply rooted tensions between the central state and Azerbaijan (Urmiye Photo Blog, 2010). The poster positions Lake Orumiyeh as a site of environmental violence (Peluso and Watts, 2001), resulting the government's environmental policies in Iranian Azerbaijan and state suppression of protests to save the lake. The poster also evokes language from Azeri ethno-linguistic and cultural rights movements, reflecting a longstanding grievance that Farsi is the only officially recognized language in Iran despite Azeris comprising the largest ethnic minority group in the country.

Additionally, when compared against the 2010 protest that depicts a vulnerable female lake in need of care, the 2011 poster with a hypermasculinized image of a man representing the Azeri ‘nation’ is particularly striking. Interestingly, the ‘Lady’ Orumiyeh poster represents key elements from 2010 Nature Day protest when protesters implored the state to intervene through performing grief, while the “Do not resist Azerbaijan” flyer more closely resembles the affective dimensions of anger expressed during the April 2011 protest. These highly gendered flyers reflect the stark change in protest participants, narratives, affect, and notably a shift away from coded grievances to explicit demands for environmental and political rights.

The 2011 Nature Day protest was brutally suppressed with over 70 people arrested, likely due to protesters explicitly voicing political grievances through the site of Lake Orumiyeh. Following the crackdown of subsequent protests in summer 2011, public demonstrations to save the lake ceased. When speaking with a university student in 2015 who observed the protests, I asked whether there would be any more demonstrations to save Lake Orumiyeh. She responded, “There are still people in prison who organized the protest to save dear Lady Orumiyeh. People are now afraid to protest” (Interview, January 29, 2015).

Multidimensional claims in the Nature Day protests

This set of protests are an important entry point to understanding how environmental justice and human rights are inextricably linked in Iranian Azerbaijan. In many of my interviews with residents of Orumiyeh, the deterioration of the lake is viewed as an extension of state policy that has historically marginalized ethnic minority communities. An important illustration of these tensions is the conflation of language rights with environmental mismanagement. The right to receive an education in one's native language is a highly politicized issue in Iranian Azerbaijan. For example, during a group interview with university students about environmental change in Orumiyeh, they discussed the marginalization of indigenous languages in relation to the lake. “Iran is racist towards Turks and Arabs. There is only Fars [Persians]. I can't even write in my own language!” (Interview, January 29, 2015) In another interview, a student remarked, “The government does not want the Azerbaijan provinces to be progressive or developed because we are Turks [Azeris]. They don't admit this. Tehran is very different from here. The facilities and resources are focused on Tehran” (Interview, February 25, 2015). The inclusion of language rights in the critique of the environmental policies is an example of how the lake is used to signify broader grievances against the state.

Interview respondents were often critical of what they viewed as discrepancies in government responses to environmental protests in Iranian Azerbaijan versus Persian-majority regions experiencing similar environmental crises. Despite the government's sensitivity to any form of public opposition following the 2009 Green Movement protests, the response to demonstrations to save the lake appeared to be much different compared to environmental movements elsewhere, making Orumiyeh an apt case study for analyzing which rights are politicized in Iran and in what contexts. During a group interview with university students in Orumiyeh, I asked whether the government has responded differently to Orumiyeh protests than environmental protests in other parts of Iran and, if so, why?

Respondent 1: “People are looking for solutions. I’m praying to God to make the lake full again. Esfahan is becoming a desert. The government does not keep its promises [to restore Orumiyeh] because we are Turks [Azeris]. The government is not serious about Orumiyeh.

Respondent 3: We need resources. We want money from the government or the justice system. But there is no money for solutions. There are Turks here…We do not receive help. Esfahan was the Persian capital and [it received government assistance for environmental issues because] it is important for the economy.

Respondent 2: Lake Orumiyeh is important to us. The government isn't serious. People in Esfahan got their river filled. How many years have we complained?! Nothing has happened.

Respondent 1: Because we are Turks, there are no serious interventions.

Respondent 3: It is not just because we are Turks, but it is an important reason [for government inaction]. (Group interview, February 5, 2015)

While the responses from this group interview appear to engage only with questions of environmental degradation, there were also pointed criticisms of how social identities shape government responses to environmental crises. The neglect of the lake reflects feelings of exclusion from the national imaginary of a Persian Iran and referring to Esfahan is geographically significant to this imaginary. The river Zayanderud that runs through Esfahan has almost completely dried, largely due to damming. Once the capital of the Persian Empire, Esfahan remains a cultural capital of Persian language and identity and a powerful economic hub in Iran. In this group interview, the students argue that despite the similarity of environmental crisis in Orumiyeh and Esfahan, the government response to protests were markedly different based on social identities associated with these two cities.

However, in interviews with older Iranians that had lived through the 1979 Revolution, respondents spoke of the general repression of civil society by the Iranian government. They gave examples of the regime's suppression of any political opposition to contextualize the surveillance and arrest of protesters in Orumiyeh and Tabriz, while also acknowledging that the government was far less tolerant of civil disobedience in Iranian Azerbaijan. “There were violent responses not only in Orumiyeh but in Esfahan, when eleven people died in protests. The government is selling our limited valuable water here and in Esfahan. The government are business people. They are not thinking about Orumiyeh. It is not strategically important. It is just about money, not my people” (Group interview B, February 5, 2015). These sentiments are another example of how conversations about environmental change reveal grievances towards the Iranian state.

Narrating Lake Orumiyeh

The desiccation of Lake Orumiyeh illustrates how environmental injustice, state violence, and human rights are deeply intertwined in Iranian Azerbaijan. The lake is a powerful example of a violent environment (Peluso and Watts, 2001), in which the Iranian government's inaction to save the lake is a form of state violence while, simultaneously, political grievances expressed through the site of the lake reveal broader struggles in this region. Importantly, the case of Lake Orumiyeh demonstrates the limitations of rights-based political mobilization in a political context in which alternative rights narratives are strategic and necessary. Through the juxtaposition of two protests to save Lake Orumiyeh, I have attempted to demonstrate both the importance and the limits of ‘greening’ human rights as a protest strategy. Through a focus on the ecological impacts of the lake's desiccation – as opposed to the human cost of unsustainable development – protesters avoided speaking openly about any grievance that could be interpreted as a ‘human’ rights issue. These veiled grievances were a necessary tactic to protect demonstrators from state violence; however, the 2010 protest was only legible as an environmental demonstration, obscuring the political dimensions of this environmental crisis. Narratives from the 2011 Nature Day protest shifted from framing grievances as environmental concerns to explicit claims for human rights (i.e. language rights and the right to health). In English-language media, this iteration of protests was interpreted as a reflection of ethno-nationalist tensions, demonstrations against an authoritarian state, or environmental conflict resulting from climate change. These explanations minimized the deep relationality between Lake Orumiyeh and local communities, positioning the lake as a mere backdrop to ethnic tensions.

Importantly, regardless of whether protesters mobilized around environmental or political claims, neither iteration of protest resulted in compelling the government to substantively intervene to protect and restore Lake Orumiyeh. Both iterations of protests failed to achieve action to save the lake, in part, because legibility for national and international audiences rested on viewing these demonstrations as either environmental or political. The 2010 protest demonstrates the possibilities of using an environmental justice framework to assert rights claims against the Iranian state, as well as significant limitations including the erasure of political grievances. However, the 2011 protest demonstrates how protests that fall into familiar registers of activism are read as political, which increases global visibility while making protesters more vulnerable to state violence.

The ‘greening’ of human rights as a political strategy raises important questions about the legibility of protests in authoritarian settings. Limiting analyses of protests to binary understandings of the environmental or political renders invisible multidimensional rights claims, while also reifying ontological distinctions between environmental and social justice. These misreadings of coded grievances underscore the importance of widening our analytical gaze to incorporate protests that register rights claims outside of normative frameworks of environmental justice and human rights.

Highlights

Environmental justice can function as a coded language in political contexts where it is challenging to speak openly about human rights.

Limiting scholarly analysis of activism to binary frameworks of the environmental or political can render invisible the multidimensional claims of social movements.

This study demonstrates the importance of widening our analytical gaze to incorporate protests that register rights claims outside of the normative framework of human rights, thereby accounting for political contexts where alternative rights narratives are both strategic and necessary.