I write about foreign policy and national security issues.
With international pressure
over its nuclear program mounting, and the recent collapse of its latest round
of negotiations with the West, this might seem like a strange time for
The cause was the convening,
in late March, of a conference by the “South Azerbaijan National Liberation
Front,” an umbrella group of Iranian Azeris and expatriates seeking
independence for their part of Iran . At the gathering, held in Azerbaijan ’s capital of Baku , speakers reportedly urged
activists inside Iran to capitalize on Western pressure on the Iranian regime
and “build a state in the northwest provinces bordering the Republic
of Azerbaijan
The event caused a firestorm
in Tehran . Azerbaijan ’s envoy was promptly summoned to the Iranian Foreign
Ministry and issued a public reprimand, broadcast on state television,
regarding the “serious damage” that had been done to bilateral ties.
But the scandal didn’t end
there. In early April, Mansour Haqiqatpour, chairman of the Iranian parliament’s
influential National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, publicly called for
a referendum on the feasibility of absorbing Azerbaijan, arguing that there is
real desire in Azerbaijan for such a union. Days later, Hossein Shariatmadari,
editor-in-chief of Kayhan, an
influential hardline newspaper known to be close to Supreme Leader Ali
Khamenei, penned an editorial calling
for an Iranian intervention to “save” that country’s Azeris—a sure sign that
Iran’s clerical ruler approves of the idea.
Predictably, others have since piled on,
arguing in favor of building public support for Azerbaijan ’s absorption. Iran ’s parliament has even begun drafting a bill to re-annex the country.
These moves aren’t without
precedent. Ties between Baku and Tehran have historically been troubled. The discord dates back to
the 1800s, when an expanding Russian empire managed to wrest control of most of
what is modern-day Azerbaijan from Iran . The southern regions of the Azeri homeland, however, stayed
under Iranian control—and expanded. According to official U.S.
government estimates, Azeris today are Iran ’s largest ethnic minority, making up nearly a fifth of the
total Iranian population of 79 million. At some 13 million souls, that is
significantly more than the entire population of the whole nation of Azerbaijan .
No wonder, then, that the
Iranian regime is haunted by the specter of Azeri separatism. Simply put, it
believes that a politically vibrant and economically prosperous Azerbaijan will feed latent separatist tendencies among Iran ’s own large Azeri population, with potentially disastrous
consequences for the Islamic Republic as a whole. So, over the past two
decades, it has waged a persistent, clandestine campaign to destabilize the
regime next door, with the aim of ensuring that Azeri separatism never gains
enough traction to pose a threat to Iran ’s own territorial integrity.
But of late, bilateral relations
have gone from bad to worse. Among the reasons are Azerbaijan’s growing
political ties to Israel, which have fueled suspicions in Tehran that—despite public utterances to the contrary—officials in
Baku might facilitate an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear program, should one
take place. Local Iranian politics also play a part; with the country’s
presidential elections now just two months away, the Iranian regime is seeking
to forestall any possible domestic disturbances—and leery that its restive
Azeri north might become a real flashpoint.
So it’s not surprising that
the recent outbreak of Azeri separatism, even if just confined to political
rhetoric from the comforts of Baku , has engendered such a violent reaction from Iran ’s leaders. Worried over their political legitimacy ahead
of national polls, and facing a mounting sense of economic siege brought about
by Western fiscal pressure, the Iranian regime now has to deal with what is perhaps
the thorniest domestic issue of all: keeping its diverse, and restive,
population under wraps.
Article source: http://www.forbes.com