As a South Azerbaijani dissident journalist, I am overjoyed to live in a world without the tyrant Ali Larijani, Iran’s former Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council. He was the mastermind behind much of the Iranian regime’s policy and a man with a long history of oppressing the Azerbaijani nation. 

Iran is a multi-ethnic country, composed of Persians, Azerbaijani Turks, Kurds, Baloch, Ahwaz Arabs, Lors, and Turkmen, and not a single group constitutes fifty percent of the population. South Azerbaijanis make up at least a third of the population, and for this reason, it is so crucial that Larijani was eliminated.
 
It is true that the late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the late IRGC commander Qasem Soleimani were also known for their hatred of the Azerbaijani people. Soleimani was very active against Azerbaijan during the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict.

He repeatedly urged Iran to send more arms to Armenia and to support them more openly, arguing that Azerbaijanis are “non-Iranian people.” He insisted that any IRGC members of Azerbaijani background should be vetted multiple times and disqualified from senior positions if they had any sympathy towards South Azerbaijan and its people.

However, Iran’s late Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, Ali Larijani, harbored a special and unique venom toward the Azerbaijani people.

Institutionalizing discrimination

Larijani was the first senior member of the Iranian political elite to recommend and enforce entire TV and radio programs aimed at belittling Azerbaijanis, including children’s programs, films, TV series, and even news broadcasts. When he headed the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), he was the architect of the infamous 1995 survey that was used as a pretext to intensify attacks on Azerbaijani identity and ethnicity.

As Professor Brenda Shaffer wrote in her book Iran is More Than Persia, on May 8, 1995, the Iranian paper Ahrar reported that IRIB had conducted a survey of Iranian attitudes toward “Turk” citizens in Iran, otherwise known as Azerbaijanis. Among the 11 questions were: 

“Are you willing to marry a Turk? Would you allow your daughter to marry a Turk? Are you willing to participate in religious ceremonies (like Ashura) together with Turks? If you bought a house, would you be willing to be a neighbor of a Turk? Are you willing to live in a neighborhood or city where there is a Turkish majority? Are you willing to be friends with a Turk? Are you willing to go to the home of a Turk as a guest?”

According to Shaffer, “the results revealed Persian society’s extremely negative attitudes toward the group, with most respondents expressing a desire not to interact with Iran’s Azerbaijanis. The IRIB survey triggered a wave of Iranian Azerbaijani protests beginning on May 9, 1995.”

University students led the demonstrations that were focused on Aryan racist policies in Persian society, which have been ongoing for the past one hundred years, and on IRIB’s motives in conducting and publishing such a divisive survey.
 
The protests began at Tehran University. Azerbaijani students had hoped Persian students would join them, but they did not. In response, Azerbaijani university students formed their own organization, the Azerbaijani Academic Society. 

“Up until then, there had been no separate student unions based on ethnicity,” Shaffer wrote. “Protests followed in Tabriz and other cities with large Azerbaijani populations. At Tabriz University, thousands of students participated in the initial May 9 demonstrations. Azerbaijani university students also launched a letter-writing campaign to the offices of Iran’s president, the Majlis, Friday prayer leaders, and the governors of East Azerbaijan, Zanjan, and Ardabil provinces. The letters condemned the survey and demanded the right to use and study the Azerbaijani language at the University of Tabriz.”

During the Ahmadinejad era, the infamous caricature appeared in the official newspaper Iran. That newspaper, along with the Islamic Republic News Agency, was the only state outlet that provoked another massive city-wide Azerbaijani demonstration in the spring of 2006. 

Millions of Azerbaijanis took to the streets. The protests were so severe in some cities that people briefly took control of entire neighborhoods before the regime crushed them. Thousands were arrested and at least 12 were officially killed, many more unofficially.

Khamenei himself was forced to appear on television and apologize. The caricature depicted Azerbaijanis as “endless cockroaches” that “cannot be ended by killing them.” It called the Azerbaijani language “cockroach language” and claimed that Azerbaijanis “eat toilet s***,” suggesting they should be “sent to the toilet and hammered.”

Those 2006 protests were a direct result of the anti-Azerbaijani policies Larijani had established earlier. Another Iranian TV program later claimed that Azerbaijanis were so stupid they did not know how to use a toothbrush, so they gave an Azerbaijani child a toilet brush and said, “This is how Azerbaijanis brush their teeth.” The regime promised such insults would never happen again, but we all know they would continue because of the institutional framework Larijani had created.

Larijani was such a hardliner on the Azerbaijani issue that he did not even trust hardline pro-regime Azerbaijanis. When he was appointed Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, he pushed President Masoud Pezeshkian aside and ran affairs himself.

For all these reasons, I am delighted that Larijani has finally been eliminated. He was not only a hardliner against the West and Israel; he was also one of the worst enemies of the South Azerbaijani nation.

I hope and pray that the future of the region and of the world will be brighter without him.

The writer is a South Azerbaijani dissident journalist and heads Gunaz TV, an Azerbaijani-language news channel based in Chicago.

Source: https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-893083