Fears of another Iraq or Libya fiasco are holding back tougher action against Iran’s Mullah regime. But appeasement won’t deliver stability, it will only prolong and exacerbate the coming collapse of the regime. Previously untranslated archival speeches of Ali Khamenei reveal what the dictator is really afraid of — and why his regime is already losing control.

To understand the downward spiral the regime is in, it is vital to consider the historical and demographic context in which it has to operate. Today’s Iran is not an ethno-state of Persians. As academics have made clear, Iran is “unrivalled in terms of cultural diversity” and the Persian language may well be “the mother tongue of less than half of its citizens”. The prevalence of mixed marriages makes it a fool’s errand to put exact percentages on Iran’s ethno-linguistic makeup, but one regime official who tried to do so in 2011 ended up estimating that roughly 40% of the current Iranian population speak Turkic languages, such as Azerbaijani, Turkmen or Qashqai. Significant numbers of Iranians also speak other distinct minority languages such as Kurdish, Lori, Achomi, Gilaki, Mazandarani, Talysh, Tati, Assyrian and Armenian.

In the early, most zealous years of the Mullah regime, the clerics believed they could plaster over these ethno-cultural diversities by creating a single Shia-Islamist identity that would supplant all else. The war with Saddam’s Sunni-dominated Iraq gave them a convenient sectarian backdrop for this project. Among those quick to embrace this new form of identity were many people from non-Persian, but religiously Shia, ethnic groups that had been cruelly repressed under the previous Pahlavi dictatorship, especially Iranian-Azerbaijanis. In the name of secular Persian nationalism, Pahlavi’s officials had sought to eradicate the Azerbaijani language, and other non-Persian tongues. Such relentless Persian chauvinism was unprecedented in historically multi-lingual Iran, and had in fact been developed in 1920s Berlin by exiled Iranian writers who were “deeply influenced by interwar Germany’s intellectual and political milieu”. Scholars have documented how these policies inadvertently “enabled the use of Shiʿism as a surrogate ideology of difference”.

As a result, Iranian-Azerbaijanis are strongly represented within the power centres of the Shia-Islamist regime today. Javad Khamenei, the father of the current tyrant Ali Khamenei, was an ethnically Azerbaijani imam who originally came from the village of Khamaneh near Lake Urmia — in the heart of Iranian Azerbaijan. Ironically, Khamenei’s strongest rival within the power structure of the regime, the now-detained reformist leader Dr. Mir-Hussein Mousavi, hails from exactly the same village, and is of course also Iranian-Azerbaijani by heritage. The regime’s puppet president, Masoud Pezeshkian, an ultra-religious medical doctor, was born to an Iranian-Azerbaijani father and an Iranian-Kurdish mother: Pezeshkian has stunned audiences with his flawless ability to recite the famous 1950s Azerbaijani language poem Heydar Babaya Salam, a dissident work written “during the heydays of Pahlavi racism” against Iranian-Azerbaijanis.

The regime’s internal coherence, and ultimately its continued existence, depends on its........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)