As Soviets Battle Ethnic Blaze, Iran Backs Away From Fire It Fueled

While the Soviet Union struggles to control ethnic strife in its republics of Azerbaijan and Armenia, Iran to the south faces as great a threat from the challenge of nationalist separatism along the Soviet-Iran frontier. The crucial factor is that the local peoples involved are on both sides of the border--as disaffected from Tehran as they are from Moscow.

The Soviet and Iranian empires are similar. The ruling people inhabit a central area, with subordinate peoples of different race or language or religion--or all three--around the periphery. Ignoring these differences, Farsi-speaking Persians of central Iran until recently have been using the Islamic appeal in propaganda aimed at the brothers or cousins of its frontier peoples on the other side of the border, to subvert their loyalty or destabilize the communist system.

On Iran’s northern border, these transfrontier peoples are the Azerbaijanis--or Azeris, as they are usually called, plus the Turkomen and Uzbeks; on the southern and western periphery are the Baluchis, Arabs and Kurds. Except for the Azeris, who have Shiism in common, (though as many as 30% are Sunni Muslims), all these peoples differ from Persians in many ways.

Whether from land hunger or because of family and communal links, the Soviet Azeris have been tearing up frontier fences in the last few weeks. Their original demand was for easier access to relatives and to Shiite shrines across the Araks River; this then hardened into a demand for permanent opening of the frontier. In short, they wanted the sort of arrangement that has been implemented between the two Germanys. But then an extremist Azeri group, National Salvation, asked for a separatist state of Iranian and Soviet Azerbaijanis, to include the border enclave of Nakhichevan. Their demand stressed the Islamic link, and some publications in Tehran also spoke of this urge for “Islamic unity” as a triumph for Iran’s pan-Islamic propaganda.

These few references apart, official reaction of the mullahs’ regime in Tehran to the Azeri actions has been decidedly ambiguous. After an initial period of puzzled silence, the Iranians called upon the Soviets to keep their Azeri citizens under control. Then when the Soviet Azeris assembled on a northern bank of the Araks, the Iranians, using loudspeakers from the other bank, advised them to contact their local authorities so that visits could be properly arranged. There was no exploitation of the Islamic brotherhood theme at all.

The Iranians went further, commending the restraint of Soviet frontier guards who had helped “in checking the overexcitement of the Muslim Soviet Azerbaijanis.” One skeptical Iranian official even described Azeri agitation as the triumph of nationalism over reason. After emergency talks in Moscow, both sides have presented the frontier situation as a simple problem in tourism that called for an administrative solution.

Why, after a decade of excited, subversive propaganda, have the mullahs adopted this low-key, even discouraging, attitude just when the propaganda seemed to be producing results? One factor is that the sub-religion of nationalism is anathema to propagators of a universalist faith like Islam (or communism). And nationalism leading to a local separatist movement is not only wicked but dangerous, especially for Iran with its numerous restive frontier peoples. Hence, while the use or teaching of the Azeri language (a simple form of Turkish) has not been banned in Iran as has Kurdish, its use has been discouraged by Tehran.

Furthermore, ever since the so-called Islamic revolution, Tehran has felt the need to keep a particularly suspicious and watchful eye on the Azerbaijan region. Azeris, led by Ayatollah Kazem Shariat-Madari, played a part in overthrowing the shah, but soon afterward rejected Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s key doctrine of velayat-e-faqih, the semi-divine right of the clerical caste to rule. Eventually Shariat-Madari was stripped of his clerical role, accused of treason and placed under house arrest for life. This humiliation offended the Azeris, who still revere their ayatollah; force has had to be used to suppress Azeri dissidence. The mullahs certainly do not want to see any swelling of the numbers of troublesome Azeris, who have been talking of an Azeri nation-state separate from both the Soviet Union and the Islamic republic.

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev has confirmed that the dissidents in Azerbaijan are striving for an independent Islamic republic that would unify Soviet and Iranian Azeris. This would be the last thing the Tehran regime would want--a separate source of Islamic power, differing from the Iranian Islamic Republic in race, language and political and social structures. It would also set a precedent for other possible independent Islamic republics, unifying Sunni Muslim Turkomen or Uzbeks or Kurds straddling Iran’s borders.

The real danger to Iran is that if ever the Azeris achieved that state, then the dominoes would begin to tumble all round the rim of the Persian metropolitan homeland, and Iran could lose up to half of its current territory and population. Because Iran and the Soviet Union face the same secessionist danger, they have come to see the Azeri-Persian issue eye-to-eye.

Closer contacts with Soviet Azeris would lead Iranian Azeris to making comparisons, dangerous to Tehran, between the economic, cultural and social development of the two groups. The northern area of Soviet Azerbaijan is industrialized and urbanized because of the oil industry around Baku. Even the less-developed area of Nakhichevan on the border is far ahead of Iranian Azerbaijan, a typically neglected backward part of a Third World country.

Soviet Azerbaijan is also culturally advanced, with several centers of higher learning and a well-developed publishing industry. After 70 years of secular communist rule, the attitudes and style of the Soviet Azeris are much different from their Iranian cousins, particularly because of the Islamic republic. The northerners would find it very difficult to accept the rule of the mullahs, as would Soviet Azeri women the wearing of the black chador.

The problems of trans-frontier and cross-cultural integration were brutally revealed when many members of the Turkish minority fled pell-mell from Bulgaria into Turkey. When their number reached 300,000, Turkey had to close its frontier and introduce visas. The immigrants were soon disillusioned because of Turkey’s relative backwardness and a lack of suitable employment--100,000 have already returned to Bulgaria and more are on their way. Azeri or Turkoman unification would produce the same problems.

In fact, Iran’s Islamic pull might be unable to compete with the counter-pull of a better way of life in the ethnically linked areas across the Soviet frontier, especially if those areas became autonomous or even independent. If chunks of the Soviet empire drop away, that, by itself, could cause fissuring and falling away of parts of Iran’s empire as well.