Ethnic minorities in Iran

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Ethnic groups in Iran

This article focuses on ethnic minorities in Iran and their related political issues and current realities.

Overview

File:Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,.jpg

Ali Khamene'i, an ethnic Azeri, is the current Supreme Leader of Iran, which makes him the Head of the State and the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces.

Iran is an ethnically diverse country, and interethnic relations are generally amicable. Persians form the majority of the population. However, historically the terms "Iran" and "Persia" have refereed to a confederation of all groups native to the Iranian Plateau, and the speakers of Iranian languages, whether located in Iran or not (e.g. Tajiks, Ossetians, etc.). Therefore, historically, the use of the term "Persian" has included all the various regional dialects and subgroups of Iran.

While many Iranians identify with a secondary ethnic, religious, linguistic, or regional background in some way, the primary identity unifying virtually all of these sub-groups is their distinctly Iranian language, and/or culture. The main ethno-linguistic minority groups in Iran are the Azeris, Kurds, Arabs, Baluchis, Turkmen, Armenians, Assyrians, and Georgians. The tribal groups include the Bakhtiaris, Khamseh, Lurs, Qashqai, as well as others. Though many of the tribal groups have become urbanized over the decades, some continue to function as rural tribal societies. According to the CIA World Factbook and other Western sources, ethnicity/race in Iran breaks down as follows: Persian 51%, Azeri 24%, Gilaki and Mazandarani 8%, Kurd 7%, Arab 3%, Lur 2%, Baloch 2%, Turkmen 2%, other 1%. However, these statistics are largely discredited and viewed as flawed by Iranians themselves, because the Western data ignores considerable intermarriage rates over centuries between these groups, and the fact that almost all of these groups speak Persian as their first language, and identify with their sub-identity only secondarily.

Kurdish wedding dance in Sanandaj, Iran.

Moreover, there is debate as to what the definition of a Persian is. According to Western sources, such as the CIA World Factbook, anyone in Iran who associates with a regional linguistic sub-identity is deemed an "ethnic minority", even though the individual speaks Persian as their first language, and is ethnically indistinguishable from the rest of Iranians, including Persians. Conversely, Western sources erroneously define the "Persian" "ethnicity" as basically anyone living in Iran who does not claim a secondary regional linguistic identity.

While, many of these ethnic groups have their own languages, cultures, and often literature, their languages and cultures are essentially regional variations of Persian and are all native to Iran, similar to the relationship between Welsh, Scottish, and English cultures, which are all similar and are native to Britain. Despite their overwhelming similarities, in modern times, their differences occasionally emerge as political ambitions, largely as a result of provocation from outside powers. Some of these groups are also religious minorities. For instance, the majority of Kurds and Baluchis are Sunni Muslims, while the state religion in Iran is Shi'a Islam. The overwhelming majority of Persians and Azeris are Shi'a.

One of the major internal policy challenges during the centuries up until now for most or all Iranian governments has been to find the appropriate and balanced approach to the difficulties and opportunities caused by this diversity, particularly as this internal diversity has often been readily utilized by foreign powers.

An ethnic Arab wearing traditional costume in Ahvaz, Iran

According to Professor Richard Frye:

Thus the mosaic of peoples living in Iran today reflects the central geographical situation of the country throughout history, frequently described as a crossroads of Eurasia. Although many languages and dialects are spoken in the country, and different forms of social life, the dominant influence of the Persian language and culture has created a solidarity complex of great strength. This was revealed in the Iran-Iraq War when Arabs of Khuzestan did not join the invaders, and earlier when Azeris did not rally to their northern cousins after World War II, when Soviet forces occupied Azerbaijan. Likewise the Baluch, Turkmen, Armenians and Kurds, although with bonds to their kinsmen on the other side of borders, are conscious of the power and richness of Persian culture and willing to participate in it.

Current policy

The Constitution of Iran guarantees freedom of cultural expression and linguistic diversity. Many Iranian provinces have radio and television stations in local language or dialect. School education is in Persian, the official language, but use of regional languages is allowed under the constitution of the Islamic Republic, and Azeri language and culture is studied at universities and other institutions of higher education.[8] Article 15 of the constitution states:

The Official Language and script of Iran, the lingua franca of its people, is Persian. Official documents, correspondence, and texts, as well as text-books, must be in this language and script. However, the use of regional and tribal languages in the press and mass media, as well as for teaching of their literature in schools, is allowed in addition to Persian

Further, Article 19 of the Iranian constitution adds:

All people of Iran, whatever the ethnic group or tribe to which they belong, enjoy equal rights; color, race, language, and the like, do not bestow any privilege.

However, some human rights groups have accused the Iranian government of violating the constitutional guarantees of equality, and the UN General Assembly has voiced its concern over "increasing discrimination and other human rights violations against ethnic and religious minorities."[9] In a related report, Amnesty International says:

Despite constitutional guarantees of equality, individuals belonging to minorities in Iran, who are believed to number about half of the population of about 70 millions, are subject to an array of discriminatory laws and practices. These include land and property confiscations, denial of state and para-statal employment under the gozinesh criteria and restrictions on social, cultural, linguistic and religious freedoms which often result in other human rights violations such as the imprisonment of prisoners of conscience, grossly unfair trials of political prisoners before Revolutionary Courts, corporal punishment and use of the death penalty, as well as restrictions on movement and denial of other civil rights .

Some Western some columnists and commentators have expressed similar views. John Bradley is of the opinion that:

Iran’s ethnic minorities share a widespread sense of discrimination and deprivation toward the central Tehran government. Tehran’s highly centralized development strategy has resulted in a wide socioeconomic gap between the center and the peripheries, where there is also an uneven distribution of power, socioeconomic resources, and sociocultural status. Fueled by these long-standing economic and cultural grievances against Tehran, unrest among the country’s large groups of ethnic minorities is increasing.' The violence in remote regions such as Khuzestan and Baluchistan clearly has ethnic components, but the far greater causes of the poverty and unemployment that vexes members of those ethnic groups are government corruption, inefficiency, and a general sense of lawlessness, which all Iranians, including Persians, must confront.

Nevertheless, representatives of various ethnic minorities have enjoyed a successful political career in Iran. For example Ali Khamenei the current Supreme Leader is Azeri and Ali Shamkhani the former defense minister is Arab. Many, if not most, members of the national cultural and political elite have mixed ethnic roots, with many Iranians in Tehran of mixed Persian and Azeri origin. Most provincial governors and many members of the local ruling classes and clergy are members of the relevant ethnic groups. Many, if not most, members of the national cultural and political elite have mixed ethnic roots.

Separatist tendencies, led by some groups such as the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran and Komalah in Iranian Kurdistan, for example, had led to frequent unrest and occasional military crackdown throughout the 1990s and even to the present [10]. In Iran, Kurds have twice had their own autonomous regions independent of central government control: The Republic of Mahabad in Iran which was the second independent Kurdish state of the 20th century, after the Republic of Ararat in modern Turkey; and the second time after the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

Jalal Talabani leader of the Iraqi Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), in a 1998 interview, constrasted the situation in Iran with that of Turkey, with respect to Kurds:

Iran never tried to obliterate the Kurd's identity. There is a province in Iran called Kordestan province. The Iranian name their planes after the province in Iran [including Kordestan]".

Similar tendencies have been observed in other provinces such as Balochistan, Khuzestan (see Politics of Khuzestan) and Iranian Azerbaijan. However, many have been suspected of being instigated by foreign colonial powers.

After installation by Ayatollah Khomeini of an Islamic regime in February 1979, treatment of ethnic and relgious minorities grew worse. To varying degrees these minorities face discrimination, particularly in employment, education, and housing, and they tend to live in underdeveloped regions. Over the years they have held protests demanding greater rights. Even though the constitution guarantees the rights of ethnic and religious minorities, in reality, the central government emphasizes the Persian and Shiite nature of the state.

Foreign involvement

Foreign governments, both before and after the revolution, have often been accused of attempting to de-stabilize Iran through the formation of ethnic tensions, which ignore the United Nations declaration on the "inadmissibility of interference in the Internal Affairs of States". Western media reports and statements from former CIA operatives seem to corroborate such suspicions

While some commentators claim that these ethnic unrests in Iran are not inspired by foreign governments but by the policies of the Iranian government which have been described as discriminatory, others disagree. Professor Bernard Lewis in fact first unveiled a project for the separation of Khuzestan from Iran, formally proposing the fragmentation or balkanization of Iran along regional, ethnic, and linguistic lines especially among the Arabs of Khuzestan (the Al-Ahwaz project), the Baluchis (the Pakhtunistan project), the Kurds (the Greater Kurdistan project) and the Azerbaijanis (the Greater Azerbaijan Project).

Some Iranians even accuse Britain of "trying to topple the regime by supporting insurgents and separatists". Other states however are also believed to be involved in the politics of ethnicity in southern Iran. Professor Efraim Kash traces out the origins of Saddam Hussein's wish to annex Khuzestan using the ethnic card:

Nor did Saddam’s territorial plans go beyond the Shatt al-Arab and a small portion of the southern region of Khuzestan, where he hoped, the substantial Arab minority would rise against their Iranian Oppressors. This did not happen. The underground Arab organization in Khuzestan proved to be a far cry from the mass movement anticipated by the Iraqis, and Arab masses remained conspicuously indifferent to their would-be liberators

During Iran's 1979 revolution, after sending thousands of Iraqi Shi'ites into exile in Iran and the quick and brutal suppression of Kurdish dissent,

Saddam Hussein saw an opportunity to take advantage of Iran 's instability during its political transition and the weakness of its military (which had been decimated through regular purges of military officers once loyal to the former regime) in order to seize Iran 's oil-rich, primarily Arab-populated Khuzestan province. Hussein had wrongly expected the Iranian Arabs to join the Arab Iraqi forces and win a quick victory for Iraq.

During the cold war, the Soviet Union's "tentacles extended into Iranian Kurdistan". As the main supporter of ethnic communist enclaves such as the Republic of Mahabad, and (later on) as the main arms supplier of Saddam Hussein, both the Soviet Union and its predecessor the Russian Empire, made many attempts to divide Iran along ethnic lines. Moscow's policies were specifically devised "inorder to sponsor regional powerbases, if not to annex territory". For example, in a cable sent on July 6th 1945 by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the Secretary of the Communist Party of Soviet Azerbaijan was instructed as such:

TOP SECRET

To Cde. Bagirov

Measures to Organize a Separatist Movement in Southern Azerbaijan and Other Provinces in Northern Iran

1. Consider it advisable to begin preparatory work to form a national autonomous Azerbaijan district [oblast’] with broad powers within the Iranian state. At the same time develop a separatist movement in the provinces of Gilan, Mazandaran, Gorgan, and Khorasan.
2. Establish a democratic party in Southern Azerbaijan under the name “Azerbaijan Democratic Party” with the objective of guiding the separatist movement. The creation of the Democratic Party in Southern Azerbaijan is to be done by a corresponding reorganization of the Azerbaijani branch of the People’s Party of Iran and drawing into it supporters of the separatist movement from all strata of the population.
3. Conduct suitable work among the Kurds of northern Iran to draw them into the separatist movement to form a national autonomous Kurdish district.
4. Establish in Tabriz a group of responsible workers to guide the separatist movement, charging them with coordinating [kontaktirovat’] their work with the USSR General Consulate in Tabriz.

Foreign interest in the ethnic politics of Iran continues to resurface in modern times. In April 2006, Seymour Hersh brought widespread attention to claims of covert operations in Iran when his article in The New Yorker revealed special units that were "working with minority groups in Iran, including the Azeris in the north, the Baluchis in the southeast, and the Kurds in the northeast of Iran." According to the report, US troops in Iran were "recruiting local ethnic populations to encourage local tensions that could undermine the regime".

Former United Nations weapons inspector Scott Ritter has also suggested that the US military is setting up the infrastructure for an enormous military presence in Azerbaijan that will be utilized for a land-based campaign designed to bring down the government in Tehran. He also claims CIA paramilitary operatives and US Special Forces are training special Azerbaijani units capable of operating inside Iran in order to mobilize the large Azeri ethnic population within Iran..

Statements made by various Pentagon officials have supported such claims. In September 7, 2004, referring to Iran's ethnic minorities, U.S. Secretary of Defense Richard Armitage stated:

There are some things internal to Iran that one has to look at. Demographics are one. The Persians are almost a minority in their own country now -- they're like 52% or something. There are many more Azeris in Tabriz than there are in Azerbaijan , just for the record. So that has an effect over time of changing things.

Pentagon officials have further met with minority separatists such as Mahmudali Chehregani. And both Iran and Turkey reacted angrily to a map of "The new Middle East" by Colonel Ralph Peters, when it was revealed that the map was used in training programs at NATO's Defense College for senior military officers, and National War Academy. (Interview with Colonel Ralph Peters)

Some representatives of Western governments have even met with leaders of such groups. An example is June 31st 2005, when Pierre Pettigrew met Rafiq Abu-Sharif, a separatist representative of the Al-Ahwaz Arab Peoples Democratic Popular Front. According to the front's website, Abu-Sharif "submitted a detailed letter to Pettigrew...detailing the nationalities under oppression in Iran", further meeting with Canadian parliamentaries "to further discuss the matter".

The Republic of Azerbaijan is also accused of encouraging ethnic divisions in the Iranian region of Azerbaijan. According to James Woolsey, former director of CIA, "Washington should also pay attention to Iran's geographic and ethnic fissures - for example, a large share of Iran's oil is located in the restive Arab-populated regions in Iran's south". Iason Athanasiadis, quotes another CIA operative describing:

Iranian Azarbaijan was rich in possibilities. Accessible through Turkey and ex-Soviet Azerbaijan, more Westward-looking than most of Iran, and economically going nowhere, Iran 's richest agricultural province was an ideal covert action theater.

Iason Athanasiadis continues:

In his book Know Thine Enemy, Reuel Marc Gerecht constantly mentally prods methods of destabilizing the Islamic republic, from cultivating high-ranking Azeris to inciting separatist Kurds to fostering divisive clerical rivalry between the holy Shi'ite cities of Najaf in Iraq and Qom in Iran.

The Sunday Telegraph in an article titled "US funds terror groups to sow chaos in Iran" on February 25, 2007, wrote:

In a move that reflects Washington's growing concern with the failure of diplomatic initiatives, CIA officials are understood to be helping opposition militias among the numerous ethnic minority groups clustered in Iran's border regions. The operations are controversial because they involve dealing with movements that resort to terrorist methods in pursuit of their grievances against the Iranian regime. Funding for their separatist causes comes directly from the CIA's classified budget but is now "no great secret", according to one former high-ranking CIA official in Washington who spoke anonymously to The Sunday Telegraph. His claims were backed by Fred Burton, a former US state department counter-terrorism agent, who said: "The latest attacks inside Iran fall in line with US efforts to supply and train Iran 's ethnic minorities to destabilise the Iranian regime.

In some instance, Iranian government try use "foreign interference" as an excuse for repression.

The central government typically reacts to ethnic unrest with a combination of repression and scapegoating. For example, two men were executed in early March (2006) for their roles in fatal October bombings in the southwest. They "confessed" on state television the night before their executions that Iranians in Canada and Britain instructed them to create insecurity.

In an interview with BBC Persian Service, Canadian Foreign Office spokesman Rodney Moore claimed that the Iranian allegation of spying and inciting ethnic unrest were baseless. He claimed that accusations were in retaliation for his government's move in the UN General Assembly to condemn the Iranian government's treatment of minorities.[11]

Historical notes

Iran (then called Persia) traditionally was governed over the last few centuries in a fairly decentralised way with much regional and local autonomy. In particular, weaker members of the Qajar dynasty often did not rule much beyond the capital Tehran, a fact exploited by the imperial powers Britain and Russia in the 19th century. For example, when British cartographers, diplomats, and telegraph workers, traveled along Iran's southern coast in the early 19th century laden with guns and accompanied by powerful ships, some local chieftains quickly calculated that their sworn allegiance to the Shah in Tehran with its accompanying tax burden might be optional. When queried, they proclaimed their own local authority.

Reza Shah Pahlavi, and to a lesser degree his son Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, successfully strengthened the central government by using reforms, bribes and suppressions. In particular, the Bakhtiaris, Kurds, and Lurs until the late 1940s required persistent military measures to keep them under governmental control.

In studying the history of ethnicity in Iran, it is important to remember that "ethnic nationalism is largely a nineteenth century phenomenon, even if it is fashionable to retroactively extend it."

See also

• Religious minorities in Iran
• Iranian Kurdistan
• Iranian Kuwaitis
• Anti-Persianism by Arabs
• Armenian-Iranians
• Georgians in Iran
• Demographics of Iran
• Azarbaijan (Iran)
• Iranian Azeris
• Human rights in Iran
• Koreans in Iran

External links

• Ethnic groups of Iran
• (Video) A series of lectures hosted by The American Enterprise Institute
• Khuzestan: The First Front in the War on Iran? by Zoltan Grossman