Mahdi Hamidi — October 30, 2017
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| Activists display a placard reading, “Don’t forget the 30 million South Azerbaijan[i] Turks,” during the annual Babak Castle gathering in the early 2000s. |
The government eventually became alarmed by these civic gatherings, which were among the first of their kind. Every year, around the anniversary of Babak’s birth, the authorities blocked the roads leading to Babak Castle under various pretexts. They did not stop at closing the roads. The matter was even referred to senior religious authorities for formal rulings, and several clerics—including Lotfollah Safi Golpaygani and Abdolkarim Mousavi Ardebili—issued rulings declaring Babak an unbeliever and a heretic.
As the violent repression of Azerbaijani civil activists intensified, the ceremony was never again held with its original splendour, scale, and magnificence. At the time, many media activists and so-called advocates of democracy supported the repression of these popular and civic gatherings. They praised the prevention of the gatherings on the grounds that they supposedly promoted Pan-Turkism, separatism, and hostility toward Iran.
Now, after several years, the government has prevented people from gathering at the Tomb of Cyrus under similar pretexts. All those media activists and self-proclaimed democrats are now loudly protesting the government’s actions.
It is therefore time to ask them: Do you not remember that, through your approval and silence regarding the popular gatherings at Babak Castle, you opened the way for the state to act in this manner?
What was the difference between the gathering of Azerbaijani people at Babak Castle and the gathering at the Tomb of Cyrus, other than the fact that no racist or xenophobic slogans were chanted at Babak Castle? That platform was used solely to demand the most basic rights of the Azerbaijani people, including the right to education in their mother tongue.
At the Tomb of Cyrus, however, anti-Arab and racist slogans were repeatedly heard the previous year. Yet you interpreted the first gathering as hostility toward Iran and Pan-Turkism, while you now interpret the second as patriotism and democracy. What explains this contradiction?
There is undoubtedly a significant difference between the character of these two gatherings and those who organized them. However, what makes the first appear undemocratic and the second democratic is the same dominant and hegemonic discourse of ancient Persian glorification and Aryan nationalism—a discourse that cannot tolerate any voice other than its own.
In this political and cultural geography, one of the principal criteria used to distinguish those considered “insiders” from those treated as “outsiders” is unquestionably the Persian language and the history of the Persian ethnic group.
Original text in Persian:
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