IRAN: US GOVERNMENT PLANNING AZERI-LANGUAGE BROADCASTS TO IRAN

[Harold Schiffman]

Eurasia Insight:
IRAN: US GOVERNMENT PLANNING AZERI-LANGUAGE BROADCASTS TO IRAN
Joshua Kucera: 3/10/08


The US government is planning to beam Azeri-language radio broadcasts
into Iran, in a bid to influence opinion among the significant ethnic
Azeri population there. The new programming was proposed in the State
Department budget that begins in October 2008. It must first be
approved by Congress. If approved, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
would begin broadcasting two hours a day of Azerbaijani-language
programming in shortwave into Iran, said Jeff Trimble, director of
programming for RFE/RL.  The United States already has 24 hours a day
of programming, via Radio Farda, in Farsi. Persians are a plurality in
Iran and Farsi is the state language. But "research indicates that
people prefer to get news and information in their native language,"
Trimble said. "Iran is an obvious case because the Azerbaijani
population is so large, about a quarter of the population." Much of
Iran's Azeri population lives in northern areas of the country.

RFE/RL already broadcasts Azeri-language content to listeners in
Azerbaijan proper. Even though these broadcasts deal with events
mainly in Azerbaijan, they have a significant following among Iranian
Azeris, according to Trimble. "This new programming will emphasize
issues concerning Iran and the ethnic Azeri, Azerbaijani-speaking
population of Iran," he said. According to surveys conducted by
RFE/RL, about three-quarters of Azeris in Iran have access to
shortwave radio and 12 percent listen to shortwave programming weekly
– figures that are higher than for the population in Iran as a whole,
Trimble said. "That's a pretty high percentage. The potential target
audience for this is pretty high."

Given the long-standing tension between the United States and Iran,
some experts believe that Tehran is likely to interpret the launch of
Azeri-language broadcasting as an American attempt to foment Azeri
separatism. Azeri discontent with the policies carried out by
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's administration has risen noticeably in
recent years. In 2006, thousands of ethnic Azeris protested after an
Iranian newspaper printed a cartoon featuring an Azerbaijani-speaking
cockroach. (The cartoonist and the editor of the newspaper were
arrested after the cartoon was published.)

Trimble denied that the intent of the new broadcasts would be to stir
up ethnic strife. "The professional journalistic code of RFE/RL …
strictly prohibits the airing of programming or any kind of advocacy
for secessionism," Trimble said. "So that is not in any way the design
or intent of this programming for Iran. … All throughout the history
of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, there has been a tradition of
minority-language broadcasting." Mohsen Milani, a political scientist
at the University of South Florida who studies Iran, said that such
explanations likely would not be enough to assuage Tehran's concerns.
"Regardless of what the State Department says, the Iranian government
is going to view this as interference in Iranian affairs," he said.
"They believe this is part of the overall plan to destabilize Iran by
helping ethnic minorities against the Islamic republic."

Mahmudali Chehreganli, an émigré who heads the Southern Azerbaijan
Awakening Movement, applauded the decision to broadcast Azeri-language
programming into Iran. He added that, despite his persistent lobbying,
US policy makers are not entertaining ideas about fomenting an ethnic
uprising in Iran. "After the Iraq war, from 2003 to 2006, I had
hundreds of meetings – in the White House, the State Department, the
Pentagon," Chehreganli said. "I told them that the United States could
easily destroy the regime by helping the ethnic groups. But they never
gave us any help." Chehreganli said he has not had a meeting with a US
government official since 2006.

"Cooler heads prevailed," said S. Enders Wimbush, the former director
of Radio Liberty and a fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington.
"There's nobody, even in this White House, which can get a little
loopy at times, who wants 15 more 'berserkistans' out there." That
idea "didn't go anywhere, because there was no support for it inside
Iran," Milani said. "Iranian nationalism trumps the ethnicities. You
are not talking about Czechoslovakia here, a country that was formed
after World War I or by the Soviets. We are talking about 2,500 years
of history and these ethnic groups have been part of that for all
these years. Especially Azeris, there has been dynasty after dynasty
that came from that part of Iran. There was at one time this idea that
ethnic separatism could really undermine the Islamic republic, but
over the course of the last three years they have realized that is not
going anywhere."

Nevertheless, the new Azerbaijani-language programming does have a
more subtle political purpose, Wimbush said. "Most of the critical
elite in the Soviet Union spoke Russian, but we broadcast in 14
languages because it drew audiences toward us," he said. "The medium,
in many respects, was the message: 'The Americans care enough to treat
us, to address us as we are. They don't feel as if they have to go
through this Russian filter.' And I'm sure that's very much the same
kind of thinking that's going on here in Iran. It's a big population –
if they were in the Balkans or Eastern Europe we would have broadcast
to them a long time ago."


Editor's Note: Joshua Kucera is a Washington, DC,-based freelance
writer who specializes in security issues in Central Asia, the
Caucasus and the Middle East.



http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/insight/articles/eav031008a.shtml

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