Yashar Gulshen - September 25, 2005
It is not an irrelevant statement to say that the cornerstone of all political and social struggles and efforts for achieving freedom and democracy is the demand for freedom of expression. All debates and conflicts regarding press freedom, the rights of opponents, electoral struggles, the right to organize, the right to form and join political and trade unions, freedom of thought, and essentially everything related to human rights principles cannot have concrete meaning without freedom of expression. Political demands, such as the fight for the freedom of political and ideological prisoners, also have no meaning other than the demand for freedom of expression.
The key point in this regard is the absolute nature of freedom of expression, meaning that limitations on the "subject" and "tools" of expressing the thoughts of individuals and political and social organizations negate the principle of freedom of expression. For example, any form of subject-specific limitation on the free expression of opinions about ruling political figures, religion, and the prevailing ideology of the country fundamentally contradicts the issue itself. The same applies to any restrictions on the tools of freedom of expression, such as the press, the internet, books, and radio. In other words, democracy can only become a reality when freedom of expression, both in terms of subject matter and tools, is free from restriction. A concrete example is that in Iran during both the Pahlavi regime and the Islamic Republic, freedom of expression existed in a limited form according to the policies of these two systems, but no one takes seriously the democracy they claim.
Naturally, the absolute nature of freedom is related to criticism and political exposure against authorities, parties, policies, and anything that relates to the public sphere, but does not include the private lives of individuals or moral issues related to young groups. Additionally, insulting racial and ethnic groups, since it is the cause of the limitation of freedom, is not covered by freedom of expression in any democratic society.
Thus, we can conclude that the struggle for freedom of expression is essentially the struggle to remove governmental restrictions from the subjects and tools of expression. We can also conclude that any political force that, based on its interests, imposes restrictions on the subject and tools of free expression in its political program, or remains silent in the face of these limitations while fighting for freedom of expression, or implicitly endorses the existing governmental restrictions, is actually contradicting what it claims to fight for. With this clarification—although stating the obvious—we can address one of the most serious issues in the topic of freedom of expression: the issue of nationalities in Iran.
The reality is that Iran is composed of many ethnicities, and the people of Iran have various cultures and languages. The use of the term "ethnic diversity" in this context does not change the essence of the issue. Here, the discussion is solely about linguistic diversity, not other national or historical affiliations. Furthermore, it is undeniable that the policies of the ruling governments from the era of Reza Shah onward have been aimed at promoting and institutionalizing a single language as the only common language of the country. According to this policy, one of the serious restrictions on freedom of expression has been the issue of the language of expression. Naturally, this limitation affects only a portion of the Iranian population whose mother tongue is not Persian. Because the essence of expression is at risk under this limitation—whether in restricted or unrestricted subjects—the language limitation is undoubtedly the most important and vital barrier to freedom of expression for at least half of the Iranian people, who speak a different language in their homes, gatherings, and places where they are not subject to the pressures of official state law.
Therefore, as an example, in the ruling of Mr. Abbas Lesani in the Kaleybar court, the defense in the Turkish language was considered an offense against the regime. The mother tongue and spoken language of more than half of the people of Iran are suppressed by the official state policy, and thus, the concept of the struggle for freedom of expression for nearly half of the people of Iran essentially begins with the demand for freedom of language, so that after gaining the ability to use their language, freedom of expression can take practical form.
In these circumstances, any individual or social force that claims to seek democracy and its cornerstone, freedom of expression, must first, without hesitation, define clearly and precisely the tools to implement this freedom and clarify whether they have an issue with government restrictions on the language of expression or accept that the first step toward real democracy begins with equal rights for the languages spoken in Iran. If a political force does not explicitly declare, first and foremost, that other languages must enjoy the same rights as Persian—which naturally includes the right to education and use in administrative matters—it implicitly endorses or remains silent in the face of the current government's repressive policies, thus contradicting what it claims to advocate for. Consequently, its audience has the right to conclude that these calls for freedom are, in reality, a way to shift limitations based on their own group interests, nothing more.
Endorsing or remaining silent about a policy that imposes the most degrading insults and humiliations on other cultures and languages, a policy that uses various tricks to promote distrust among those whose mother tongue is not Persian, and a program to absorb and dissolve them into the desired monolingual system, which aims to suppress and neutralize any sense of independent linguistic and cultural affiliation, follows a fascist theory of a single nation—it neither aligns with democracy nor fits within the internationally accepted human rights framework, which explicitly supports the right to education and the use of one's mother tongue. The scope of these suppressed languages includes more than half of the people of Iran.
It seems that due to the lingering effects of decades of national homogenization policies in Iran, some opposition forces, even those who are sincere in their freedom-oriented slogans, show reluctance to address this issue. As they have often said in the past, they leave everything for the future establishment of democracy. This is a dangerous naivety whose disastrous consequences have been proven many times. Beautiful and grandiose slogans about democracy and freedom of expression, even if eventually implemented, will still only encompass less than half of the people of Iran at the cost of continuing the national suppression of the other half.
Of course, the target here is those figures and forces that believe in linguistic diversity arising from ethnic diversity in Iran. As for those who, by denying the reality, consider all Iranians to be Aryan and all the national languages of Iran to be branches or dialects of Persian, their stance is already clear. Anyone who denies the identity of half of the people of Iran by distorting the facts cannot be a freedom-lover or democrat but is a racist who would be legally prosecuted in any democratic society that is committed to human rights.