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The 12th Anniversary of the Bloody Uprising of the South Azerbaijani People against Fascism on May 2006

Tabriz, South Azerbaijan, May 22

Today is the twelfth anniversary of the bloody uprising of South Azerbaijani people against Fars Chauvinism on 22nd of  May 2006.

Following years of mistreatment and discrimination at the hands of the Iranian government, on May 12, 2006, an Iranian newspaper with the name of “IRAN Newspaper” printed an insulting cartoon mocking Azerbaijan people, which depicted a cockroach speaking Azerbaijani language. The cartoon was accompanied by an article criticizing the country’s Azerbaijan Turks population.

The article reads: “… in dealing with cockroaches… one should not adopt violence, because it takes the fun out of it. In a civilized way, we should sit at a table and have a dialogue with them. Unfortunately, the cockroaches do not understand human language, and the grammar of their own language is so difficult that 80% of them prefer to speak the language of others. When cockroaches do not understand their own language, how do you expect them to understand us? It is at this point that dialogue comes to an end, and you have to resort to more violent ways.”

 The event sparked a wave of demonstrations among South Azerbaijani across the country–mainly in the Azerbaijani-populated cities of northwestern Iran–against the Iranian regime. The demonstrations were initially concentrated in Tabriz, the cultural center of Iran’s Azerbaijani provinces, but soon spread throughout the country and “paralyzed these cities for several days, in some cases even weeks.

The protesters demanded a formal apology from the government and called for respect of Azeri ethnic and cultural rights and for Azerbaijani Turkish to become an official state language in Iran.

The Tehran-central government, however, did not meet their demands, did not condemn the caricature, and provided no official response. The anti-state demonstrations soon came to a halt due to pressure from the Iranian security forces.

 Some reports indicate that South Azerbaijan National and civil right activists, in particular, were targeted by the security forces. As a result, dozens of protesters were killed and hundreds were arrested.

However, the exact number of fatalities is unknown due to the Iranian government’s distorted and unreliable information as well as its exclusion from Iranian media reports.

In response to the demonstrations, the Iranian government eventually made some amendments to appease the protesters. The newspaper’s editor-in-chief and the authors were fired.

In addition, the publication of the newspaper was temporarily suspended. Still, there was no official government apology. The demonstrations constituted a major uprising against Tehran’s policies toward the country’s Azerbaijani population and were among the largest ethnic protests since the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

In this uprising, millions of Azerbaijanis showed their disgust at Fars chauvinism on the streets. Special forces of the Iranian government also shot and killed the protesters.

According to Pourmohammadi, the Minister of the Interior at that time, in the uprising of South Azerbaijan, 1825 people were arrested, 135 people were sentenced to imprisonment, 183 were injured and 5 South Azerbaijani were shot and dead by Iranian security forces.

After the uprising in 2006, the national-civil movement of South Azerbaijan entered a new stage. All Azerbaijani people united against the Chuanizm of Fars.

It should be noted that a Conference on the occasion of 22 May 2006 uprising of South Azerbaijan people was held by the sponsorship of  GAMAC(South Azerbaijan National Liberation Front ) and the cooperation of the Yildirim Bayazid University in Ankara on Monday 30th April 2018.

For more information: https://bit.ly/2II3gv0

 

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