"People will start to kill each other, "the rival warns
It is said of the Azerbaijanis, the rugged mountain people who flourish in the northwestern tip of Iran, that they are like a camel—hard to rouse and get up onto their feet, but once up, hard to stop. So it is that their opposition to the Ayatullah Khomeini began as a protest, turned into a demonstration, then a revolt, and now a challenge to the theocratic regime that Khomeini has just imposed on the nation.
Azerbaijan may seem a remote corner of the world, but this was once the land of the all-powerful Medes, the birthplace of Zoroaster, and from its capital of Tabriz the Mongol Khans ruled an empire that stretched from Egypt to Cathay. Though a disastrous series of earthquakes leveled every trace of Tabriz's great palaces, the region's ethnic Turks remain a driving force in Iran. Not only do they represent more than a third of the population (5 million in Azerbaijan, 8 million more in the rest of the country), but they are the nation's middle class. They dominate the bazaars of Tehran. They dominate the army, providing about two-thirds of its officers. They provide many of the nation's intellectuals, writers and teachers. That is why the revolt of Azerbaijan is not just a provincial squabble but a potential threat to the survival of Khomeini's regime.
The only force restraining that revolt seems to be its leader, the mild and benevolent Ayatullah Kazem Sharietmadari, 81, once the mentor of Khomeini and widely regarded as his spiritual equal, if not superior.
Sharietmadari abhors violence and avoids confrontations, and he uttered only a soft-spoken complaint two weeks ago against the constitution that grants all power to Khomeini, but that was enough to inspire a threatening Khomeini mob to surround his house and kill one of his guards. So the battle began, and within a short time Khomeini's officials had been driven from Tabriz. Khomeini has been uncertain how to fight back. At first, he tried words. In a rhetorical broadside, he castigated the rebels as "mere heathens, foreign-led agents whose dossiers are in our hands." He tried to rally the Azerbaijanis to his anti-American crusade. Said he: "Now that we are at war with the great Satan, any gesture or utterance aimed at weakening the government is apostasy."
When that failed to quell the uprising, Khomeini tried force. The government sent a planeload of revolutionary guards to reassert Tehran's authority in Tabriz. Their first goal was to oust the rebels from the local radio and TV station, where a large portrait of Sharietmadari flapped from the antenna. Backed by crowds shouting pro-Khomeini slogans, the guards chased the rebels out of the bungalow-style building. The Sharietmadari supporters then tried to seize the station again, but the guards drove them off with automatic weapons, killing three and wounding more than 60.
Soon afterward, a three-member commission from Tehran, headed by Economic and Finance Minister Abol Hassan Banisadr, arrived in Tabriz to negotiate a truce with Sharietmadari's supporters. But the emissaries were immediately discredited by Banisadr, who announced insultingly that he would deal only with individual Azerbaijanis, not with Sharietmadari's political organization, the Muslim People's Republic Party.