Mr. Medadi’s reply follows.

Dear Maryam,                    Mon 1/8/2007 4:37 PM

Thank you for sharing your thoughts! Correct me if I am wrong but did my article anger you? I regret that. Indeed it was not my intention to anger anyone because I was not angry when I wrote it.

I respect your opinion. The US is a democratic country, so comparing it to Iran in this regard, to my humble opinion, is not very helpful. The US does not even have an official language. People can send their children to any school they wish, and the US is the United States of America, which is a federation in which every relatively independent state is free and all the citizens of each state have the right to choose their own leaders but at the same time they are united under the US constitution.

If you are angered by me being bothered to not having my own distinct language, history and culture crushed at the expense of Persian, for the sake of whole Iran, then I am also saddened that you my fellow Iranian have not accepted assimilation to the great US values of freedom and respect, which have not been forced upon you.

You make also good points in your letter, especially regarding the limited resources that the Pahlavi regime had. For a matter of fact Azerbaijan has had its own literature and very many books (though definitely fewer than Persian because Persian language has been considered the language of writing even by many of Iran's Turkic rulers because they ruled over a country with a population that was mostly Persian, or related to Persians). The limited resources were not the reason, but there was and is a well-documented policy of assimilation in order to create a Persian Iran.

Please my dear fellow Iranian, I am an Iranian myself and being an Azerbaijani does not make me any less Iranian, but respect me being an Azerbaijani, don't expect me to be or become Persian, as I have no desire to make anybody anything but what he/she is, and wishes to be. And you have no reason to get angry, because the article has a social significance and it does not pretend otherwise, as (expectedly) accused of separatism (which is an insult).

As far as I know Azerbaijanis have contributed no less than Persians to building Iran so they are extremely unlikely to leave it all to Persians. But this does not mean we are Persians and the current regime is not only doing harm to a much greater extent to the religious minority but also to the ethnic minority. Because what we as non-Persian Iranians have inherited as culture, language and history is no less than what you, as Persians, have inherited from you ancestors. You may say they are the same but let others decide what they think is the same with yours, rather than you deciding for them that they are the same as you.

And you said that Azerbaijanis have not been discriminated because they are, and have been, ministers and so on. Reading my article you could have noticed that I did not deny that after Reza Shah those Azerbaijanis who accepted Reza Shah's policies were accepted among their ranks, and during the current Islamic regime, those Azerbaijanis who have accepted the policies of the Islamic regime have been accepted among high-ranking politicians. Do you seriously think that Iranian society could have functioned properly if Azerbaijanis were totally sidelined? Not that they are exceptional (you can say that but I cannot offer myself flattering comments) but because they are too many. And not only that Azerbaijanis are too many, they also have the history behind we are all aware of, as being high-ranking officials during the Qajar, and of course even before. We cannot deny those facts.

The idea of the article was to offer a debate about a wrong policy and I was sure (as I had also predicted in the article) "probably" most Persians would disagree with me.

Thank you for your e-mail.

Best wishes,

Ben

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