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| Behzad Jiddi |
Behzad Jiddi says that after the May uprising of 2006, the rift between Iranian Azerbaijan and Tehran deepened. According to the national activist speaking to Voice of America, the Iranian government's and civil society's anti-Azerbaijan stance during the second Nagorno-Karabakh war further deepened this sense of fragmentation.
According to him, "Since that time, when there have been protests in Tehran and the central regions, there is silence in Azerbaijan, and when there are large protests in Azerbaijan, there is silence in Tehran and the central areas. Although the Iranian cultural community is against the government, when it comes to the issue of Azerbaijan, they support the Iranian government."
In the recent Nagorno-Karabakh war, Jiddi believes there was a significant divergence of opinion between Iranian Azerbaijan and Tehran regarding the Turkish community.
Jiddi states that "I divide Iran's stance on the second Karabakh war into two parts. The first part was from September 27 to October 1, that is, from the beginning of the war until the widespread protests in Southern Azerbaijan. During this period, the Iranian government did not take the events in Karabakh seriously. They treated the ceasefire violations as just an ordinary clash. Therefore, they did not take it seriously. They tried to boycott the news from Karabakh and keep the Southern Azerbaijani community away from the issue while continuing their aid to Armenia. After the protests, Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and his spokespeople tweeted calling on Azerbaijan and Armenia to stop fighting and resolve the issue through dialogue."
He emphasizes that the reverberations of the Nagorno-Karabakh war further deepened the rift between Iranian Azerbaijan and Tehran that had been growing since 2006:
"On the Karabakh issue, political activists from other non-Persian ethnicities in Iran, though not enough, gave some voice to the protests in Southern Azerbaijan. However, the Persian and Iranian cultural communities clearly sided with Armenia and supported Armenia in all their writings. Iran's media outlets also wrote against Azerbaijan. Therefore, the rift that had previously existed among political activists deepened even further within society," says Behzad Jiddi.
Link to the original interview in Turkish on the Azerbaijani section of Voice of America:
"2006-dan bəri İran Azərbaycanı və Tehran arasında yaranan çat müharibədən sonra daha da dərinləşdi"