Ethnic uprising in Iran and the

historical, political, realities of the

By Khalid KhayatiGlobe Political Desk

The uprising ofAzeri peoplehere have been vast demonstrations in several cities of the country’s northwestern part with thousands of ethnonational Azeris who are protesting against a cartoon which was published earlier this month in a state-own newspaper called Iran.

The cartoon which portrayed a cockroach speaking Azeri language, as it was outlined in a humiliating way, provoked sharpreactions among the country’s largest ethnonational minority. Even if, the Iranian govern-which is mono-ethnic and mono-confessional and as a consequencehighly discriminatoryand exclusionary. An Iranian non-democratic nation with such distorted identity is not only constituted upon a set of dictatorial politicalinstitutions that violate individual freedom but also upon a state-ideol-ogy that deny systematically the political recognition of those nations that do not belong to the Persian-Shiite groups.Therefore, the resistance and protest of the Iranian ethno-national subjects should be seen as a reaction to the denial policy of the Iranian regime and as a miss-contentment against the fact how the power-re-lation is shaped in this country. The dialectical relation between the re-

A man holds a placard which reads in Persian “Long Live Azerbaijan” as Iranian-Azeris attend a demonstration controlled by polce ofﬁcers in front of Iran’s Parliament Sunday, May 28, 2006. (AP) The sparked riots by the Azeri population in Iran are a noticeable indication to the fact that the prevailing national identity is highly inadequate for reaching cohesion and the feeling of togetherness among the larger Iranian population, writes Khalid Khayati.

ment has suspended the paper but it did not help in any rate to hold back the demonstrations that have started in Tabriz, the principal Azeri city for reaching successively other localities such Ardabil, Urmiya, Naqadeh, Meshkin Shar, etc. Reports from these cities indicated that Iranian security forces ﬁred on protesters, killingat least seven, injuring dozens of others and arresting hundreds.

Ethno-national Azeris who constitute 25% of the Iranian population are regularly and systematically mocked by the Persian majority, most often through associating this people with pejorative and humiliating adjectives and vocabularies. It is essential to stress the fact that the mockery cartoon was only a catalyserthat sparked the tension among the Azeri nationsistance and denial has been previously studied by the Kurdish scholar Abbas Vali intending to explain the systematic repression of the Kurdish political movement by the Iranian central government.

The fate of ethnic Baluchi and Arabs

Today, the ongoingethno-national protests are not forciblylimited to the Azeri population. At present, a couple of thousand kilometres away from Azerbaijan, namely in south-eastern Iranian province Baluchistan the national army has newly deployed a huge military force in order to hold back a Baluchi rebellion that becomes bigger and bigger with each passing day. It is important to call into mind Baluchistan is the most stripped region of Iran. The destiny of the Iranian ethnic Arabs is not so promising either. The Arab population resided on a very oil-rich and agriculturally fertile soil of Khuzestan province, has been subjected to the policy of impoverishment and ethnic cleansing since the establishment of the modern Iranian nation. The last mass protest among the Arab population has brought about a ﬁerce repression that in some cases ended up with the public execution of the local activists.

Kurds and the daily violence

In such a context, the historical aspirationof Kurds for obtaining their political and cultural right in Iran is likewise violently suppressed. It is however perceived as a threat to the national unity and territorial integrity of the country. The huge military presence on the Kurdish soil and their daily use of violence and the control of all local authorities by non-Kurdish functionaries can be apprehended as a sign of such a national phobia that targets the Kurdish people. Thus, in such a vicious circle, the Kurdish reality, likewise other ethnonational aspirations in Iran can not be treated as profound and dynamic political, historical and social claims, accumulated throughout years of deprivation and repression. Instead, it is regarded in a permanent way as a matter of security implying however a very violent treatment of the issue. And this is against the background of such a context that the violence which appears in its physical, structural and symbolic way is so tangible and omnipresent in the everyday life of Kurdish people in Iran. The violence and the politics of denial are used effectively in order to conﬁne the Kurds within the limited real or imaginary spacesthat are designated and dictated but non-Kurd subjects.

The risk of national disintegrationin Iran

As a consequence of the mono-ethnic and m o n o-c o n f e s s i o n a l character of the Iranian nation and of course its non-democratic nature the access to the public spaces has been ﬁrmly denied to the other religious, cultural and ethnic groups in the country. Instead, they have been conﬁned to remain within the folkloric and private sphere of the society which is designated and determined by the dominant ethnic group i.e. the Persians. The sparked riots bythe Azeri population in Iran are a noticeable indication to the fact that the prevailing national identity is highly inadequate for reaching cohesion and the feeling of togetherness among the larger Iranian population. It is time to reverse the costly and old-fashioned order of things in Iran. In the era of nuclear crisis and global aspiration for democracy and respect for human rights there is only two options that the Iranian people has at its disposal: whether opting for a federative administrative organisation based on the “lan-guage-state” principleor facing a gradual and painful disintegration of the nation.

The Globe * Tuesday, May 30, 2006 - No. 59

Ethnic uprising in Iran and the

The fate of ethnic Baluchi and Arabs

Kurds and the daily violence

The risk of national disintegrationin Iran