Mohammad Khiabani
Tabriz, Iran--Nobody doubts Tabriz's revolutionary credentials. During a November 2009 visit to the city, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recalled, "the people [of Tabriz and Iranian Azerbaijan] are pioneers of the pro-constitution movement, repelling the aggressors and acts of mischief and defending the supreme ideals of the Islamic Revolution."
The uprising of 29th of Bahman (February 19, 1978) in the city was a key continuation of the forty-day cycles of protest that spurred the Iranian Revolution forward. Further back, Tabriz, due to its closeness to Turkish and Russian intellectual circles, was a vanguard of intellectual agitation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From the 1891 Tobacco Protest and the 1906 Constitutional Revolution to the 1946 Autonomous Azerbaijan's People's Government, Tabrizis have a long lineage of rebelliousness. How does this history resonate in the current, still-simmering political crisis centered in Tehran?
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Unlike many of Iran's ethnic minorities, Iranian Turks have two things that are important in politics: numbers and money. It is estimated that between a quarter to a third of Iranian's 73 million citizens are of Azeri decent. Iranian Azerbaijan historically has been a center of trade and commerce in the region, ensuring that a large cohort of merchants and industrialists throughout Iran's history were Turkish. This wealth translated into intellectual and political influence, and as Turks migrated to all corners of Iran's territory, from Abadan to Mashad, they did not end up on the bottom rungs of the social ladder. Nor do Iranian Turks sit solely on one side of the regime's politics. While most outside of Iran are unaware, former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi and current Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei are both Turks (although Khamenei was born in Mashhad).
Tabriz also featured some of the largest Green Movement protests outside of Tehran during the post-June election crisis. According to the official (and disputed) results, Ahmadinejad won the city with 57 percent of the vote. While Tabriz is no Tehran, the results surprised many, given that many of its residents are similar in disposition to the capital's large middle class. Today, however, with the "new chill" in Green activities after the Revolution Day rallies on February 11--both because of increased repression as well as the internal debate on tactics and strategy within the opposition--it appears that the city's life has returned to normalcy, even if temporarily.
read on at InsideIRAN