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| Dr. Reza Baraheni - 1976 |
I speak here for the oppressed nationalities of Iran who constitute 60 percent of the whole population, but are forced to learn the mother language of the present Shah of Iran, namely Persian.
The Shah considers all Iranians to be Aryans, thus overlooking the ethnic diversity, which exists in the country. Everyone has to learn one language, Persian. This is a great injustice to the other nationalities. I belong to the Turkish-speaking Azerbaijani nationality. The men and women of my generation were told by the Shah to forget about their language and to read and write everything in Persian. When I write a poem about or a story about my parents, my mother, who is alive and doesn’t know how to read or write or speak Persian, cannot understand it. I have to translate it for her so that she can understand.
The present population of Iran is 34 million. There are only 14 to 16 million Persians in the country. Of the rest, 10 million are Turks, 4 million are Kurds, 2 million are Arabs and 2 million are Baluchis. There are other ethnic minorities too, such as Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians. But only one language is the official language of the country. The Shah considers all Iranians to be Aryans, thus overlooking the ethnic diversity which exists in the country. Everyone has to learn one language, Persian. This is a great injustice to the other nationalities.
I belong to the Turkish speaking Azerbaijani nationality. The men and women of my generation were told by the Shah to forget about their language and read and write everything in Persian. We did so under duress and learned Persian. When I write a poem or a story about my parents, my mother, who is alive and doesn't know how to read and write and speak Persian, cannot understand it. I have to translate it for her so that she can understand.
The Shah's efforts to Persianize the Turks and the Kurds and the Arabs and the Baluchis have failed. But this cultural discrimination still prevails. For instance, the 3000 American children brought to Iran by their parents working for Grumman can go to an English-speaking school. Yet millions of native Iranian children born to Turkish, Kurdish and Arab parents do not have even one school in which they can study everything in their native languages. This is only one aspect of the Shah's racism.
Another aspect of this racism lies in the fact that the Shah is purging the Persian language of all that is Arabic and Turkish in it. This makes the learning of Persian further difficult for those whose native languages are Arabic or Turkish. In doing so, the Shah is also purging the present Persian language of 40% of its vocabulary. Arabic although a Semitic language, stands in relation to Persian, an Indo-European language, as Greek and Latin do to English, from the stand-point of vocabulary. Imagine eliminating all Latin and Greek words from English because the two ancient languages are alien in spirit to English. In passing let me note this ironical fact that the Shah himself speaks Persian very badly. He speaks French and English much better than Persian.
The Shah is destroying not only the cultures and languages of the Iranian Turks, Kurds and Arabs, but he is also mangling the linguistic and cultural identity of the Persians themselves. He is destroying the traditions of a whole civilization. Of this whole tradition and civilization he wants to preserve only the worst part, that is, the crown placed upon his head by the CIA and protected through the auspices of former President Richard Nixon and Ambassador Richard Helms.
Source:
United States. Congress. House. Committee on International Relations. Subcommittee on International Organizations. (1976). Human rights in Iran: hearings before the subcommittee on international organizations of the committee on international relations, house of representatives, ninety-fourth congress, second session, August 3 and September 8, 1976. Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off.