By: H. Turkelli,

Despite the heavy crack down on protests yesterday, thousands of arrests and the regime’s military presence in South Azerbaijani cities, the people of S. Azerbaijan is not willing to easily drop off the fights.
Azerbaijani students have continued the anti-racism protests today and pledged to continue many days to come.
Protests and rallies stated this morning are mostly being held in the universities including University of Tabriz, University of Madani Tabriz, University of Maragheh , University of Zengan, University of Urmia and other centers of higher education.

With signs and banners such as ” Say no to racism”, ” Education in mother language”, ” End Persian racism NOW”, and ” We Are Proud to be TURK” the Azerbaijani Turkic intellectuals are demanding an end to possibly most disgusting type of racism freely exercised by Persian(fars) media and state-run TV channels against non-fars ethnics particularly Turks.

A Brief Background

Turks who make up over half of Iran’s population had established powerful states, dynasties and empires such as Safavid, Avshar, Ayabaks, Ghajar, etc which had ruled hundreds of ethnic groups including Persians for more than a thousand years.

However, after the collapse of the last Turkic empire, the Ghajar Dynasty in 1920’s and establishment of current “Iran” nation- state in 1936 by British colonialists and their puppet, Riza Pahlavi, the Turkic language and culture which once dominated “Iran” and surrounding countries for a 1000 years have been strictly forbidden and the Farsi language, the language of a small ethnic minority in Iran, has been proclaimed the sole official language in attempt to negatively assimilate Turks and other ethnic communities into Farsi-Persian language and culture.

In spite of the fact that Farsi language has proven to be incapable, mainly due to its flows and inadequacies, to freely influence very resourceful Turkish language and culture, the Iranian regimes have chosen to conduct unimaginable racist policies and masseurs against other non-Farsi cultures especially the Turkic culture which they fear the most.

The state media usually ridicules Turkic culture and language and demonstrate the Turks as “idiots”, of course, with the evil intention to cause inferiority in Azerbaijani Turkic people particularly children and ease up their negative assimilation into Farsi language, a dialect comprised of Hidi, Urdu, Arebic and Turkic verbs and terminologies.