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| Akbar Hashemi Bahramani Rafsanjani was an Iranian Shia cleric and politician who was the fourth president of Iran from 1989 to 1997. |
A friend once said: unfortunately, we have not yet been able to present the national demands of the Turks in a transparent way, with legal and rational legitimacy, to the officials, and perhaps this is the main reason for the delay in resolving the issue of ethnic groups in Iran. Of course, by “officials,” my friend mainly meant Turkish officials and most mid-level managers. But he also had one eye on the main players in the country’s political arena. For several reasons, I disagreed with him, and perhaps each of those reasons would need a dozen such writings to explain. Yet one of my reasons for disagreement was precisely these same political players. Maybe the next few lines can explain one of those dozen reasons.
A few years ago, while reading an interview that Emadeddin Baghi had conducted with Saeed Hajjarian, I came across a very interesting paragraph. The interview took place about seventeen years ago, before the failed assassination attempt on Hajjarian. In part of the interview, Hajjarian recalls a story from the final years of Hashemi Rafsanjani’s presidency. During those years, Hajjarian and a number of his friends had placed the “Political Development Project” on their agenda, and the anecdote he shares relates to that project. The text is as follows:
“When I had drafted the master plan, I, along with Mr. Khoeiniha and some friends, went to Mr. Hashemi to present a report on our work. I told him that we had this project on political development on our agenda. With a tone of astonishment and bewilderment, he asked whether this term ‘political development’ was an existing concept that was in use, or whether we had invented it ourselves by analogy with economic development. At the time, he was advancing his own economic development project. I told him that political development is an established academic and political term worldwide, and after World War II academic chairs had been created for it, and it is taught as a subject. Just as economic development, which was in his mind, has its foundations and principles, political development also has its own dimensions. He was surprised and said, ‘I didn’t know this.’ In other words, he was asking whether this political development we were talking about was just some made-up concept of ours, or if it had a genuine scholarly basis.” [1]
Aside from how we understand development, what is important—and too often naively overlooked—is that any conception of development, in order to succeed, requires technocrats and experts. Regarding the ethnic groups living in Iran too—in the most optimistic view, without even taking other factors into account—the resolution of the issue depends on the presence and influence of specialists in the country’s major arenas. The least one can expect from these forces is that, when faced with such terms, they should not be overcome with “astonishment and bewilderment.”
The anecdote Hajjarian recounts is enough to reveal the level of expertise among the country’s top executive officials. Rafsanjani, as the highest executive authority, was unfamiliar even with the term “political development,” let alone capable of theorizing about it or putting it into practice. What is even more striking is that Hajjarian seemed to believe Rafsanjani understood the principles of “economic development”—which means Hajjarian’s grasp of “economic development” was itself something like Rafsanjani’s grasp of “political development.” As for the disaster Hajjarian’s “political development project” eventually brought about—that is another discussion altogether.
[1] Interview with Saeed Hajjarian / For History – Emadeddin Baghi, Nashr-e Ney, Tehran, 2000, p. 45
[1] گفت و گو با سعید حجاریان/ برای تاریخ- نشر نی، عمادالدین باقی؛ تهران. 1379 [صفحه 45]