Alireza Asgharzadeh: Racism in Contemporary Iran

На сайте BAYBAK.COM опубликовано интервью с азербайджанским социологом Алирезой Асгарзаде (ныне проживающем в Канаде). Небольшая выдержка:

- Many say that if Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is a reported Azeri, how can racism still exist in Iran? And the same could be said about Mir-Hussein Mousavi, the "unofficial leader" of current opposition movement in Iran, who happens to be an Azeri. How can you explain this?

- The supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's father was an Azeri from the city of Khameneh, but his mother is Persian and he himself was born in the Persian city of Mashhad. A few weeks ago, on the occasion of The Mother's Day in Iran, a group of children and adolescents were visiting him. And in this visit he talked about his own childhood, his upbringing, and his parents, identifying his mother as a Persian and a "Hafez-Shenas" (someone well-versed in Hafez, the great Persian poet). So his mother tongue is Farsi but he has picked up some Azeri words from his Azerbaijani father which he occasionally blabbers–for the sheer purpose of demagoguery– when he visits Azerbaijani cities or when Azerbaijanis visit him. Interestingly enough, the leader of current opposition movement, Mir-Hussein Mousavi, too, is an Azeri-Turk, born in the Azerbaijani town of Khameneh and migrated with his family to the capital city of Tehran at the age of 12. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to assume that, in the context of Iranian politics, ethnic lineage plays any role in disturbing Iran's dominant national identity as modeled on the identity of the Persian ethnic group.

People like Mousavi and Khamenei are assimilated Azerbaijanis to whom the local Azeri vernacular refers as "Manqurt": i. e., someone who has forsaken his/her own roots and embraced the identity of the dominant to the exclusion of his/her former identity. Put differently, a "Manqurt" is someone who assumes someone else's identity and at the same time fights against the "former" community from which he or she has originally come. As such, it would be a mistake to presume that Mousavi's ascendency to power will bring about any improvement in the condition of his Azerbaijani community, just as the role of Khamenei as the supreme leader has not done so. If anything, the dominant Persian group uses the examples of individuals like Khamenei and Mousavi to deny the existence of racial/ethnic discrimination in the country, employing these assimilated figures as decoys to masquerade its domination of non-Persian communities.

Conversely, the elite and assimilated members of non-Persian communities whole-heartedly support the dominant group and its racist/exclusionary policies vis-à-vis the marginalized communities. These "Manqurts" include elite members of parliament, heads of local and provincial apparatuses of government, mayors, governorates, university presidents, local educational authorities, heads of police stations and military units, and so on and so forth. In terms of representing the rights of local communities, the "Manqurts" not only fully support the repression of human/ethnic/linguistic rights of their community members, they even go farther than the central government's oppressive policies in an attempt to show their loyalty to the state which in turn guarantees their positions of power and privilege. This process could be viewed in recent Iranian election, where the choice between the Persian candidate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and the Azeri candidate Mir-Hussein Mousavi, to Iran's Azeri population was clearly a choice between Scylla and Charybdis.

Изначально интервью появилось на блоге сайта 'The Advocacy Project'. Блог посвящен проблемам тюрков Южного Азербайджана.