IRANIAN GOVERNMENTAL DAILY CLOSED DOWN OVER INSULTING CARTOON
Deutsche Presse-Agentur
May 23, 2006 Tuesday 10:21 AM EST
The governmental daily newspaper Iran was closed down Tuesday over
an insulting cartoon against the country’s ethnic
Azeri population, the news agency ISNA reported.
The press supervising commission ordered the temporary closure of
the daily due to what it called “provoking cartoon.”
The Azeris comprise more than 25 per cent part of the Iranian
population and mainly live in the north-western provinces bordering
the Republic of Azerbaijan and Turkey but also in other cities such
as in the capital Tehran.
The Azeris, whose main language is very close to Turkish and therefore
are referred to in Iran as Turks, dominate most of the commercial
centres in Iran but have always been branded by Persians as naive
and dull.
In line with Persian jokes on the alleged naivety of Azeri Turks,
the daily Iran last Friday carried a cartoon on which a boy was
frightened by seeing a cockroach and therefore shouting cockroach in
Farsi, but the cockroach asked the boy in Azeri dialect “what?”
Although the Iran daily has already apologized for the cartoon and
the cartoonist already fired, still protests by Azeris throughout Iran
have continued during the last three days. Even the Iranian parliament
referred several times to the insult as “efforts to disintegrate the
Iranian people.”
The Iran daily is affiliated to the state news agency IRNA and hence
controlled by the government and under direct supervision of the
press department of the Culture Ministry.
As the Azeris are Muslims and even follow the Shiite wing of
Islam, they are not classified as minority like Jews, Armenians
or Zoroastrians.
Many Iranian officials, including the head of the Iranian Atomic
Energy Organization Gholam-Reza Aqazadeh, are Azeris.