APA
.....Armenia ambassador to Iran Gegam Garibjanian holding secret talks with government of Iran proposed bringing of military force from his country to stop the actions in South Azerbaijan.
APA
.....Armenia ambassador to Iran Gegam Garibjanian holding secret talks with government of Iran proposed bringing of military force from his country to stop the actions in South Azerbaijan.
IRAN: US GOVERNMENT PLANNING AZERI-LANGUAGE BROADCASTS TO IRAN, By Joshua Kucera. EURASIA INSIGHT, 3/10/08.
The US government is planning to beam Azeri-language radio broadcasts into Iran, in a bid to influence opinion among the significant ethnic Azeri population there.
The new programming was proposed in the State Department budget that begins in October 2008. It must first be approved by Congress. If approved, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty would begin broadcasting two hours a day of Azerbaijani-language programming in shortwave into Iran, said Jeff Trimble, director of programming for RFE/RL.From the archives:"Cooler heads prevailed," said S. Enders Wimbush, the former director of Radio Liberty and a fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington. "There’s nobody, even in this White House, which can get a little loopy at times, who wants 15 more ‘berserkistans’ out there." .......
....Nevertheless, the new Azerbaijani-language programming does have a more subtle political purpose, Wimbush said. "Most of the critical elite in the Soviet Union spoke Russian, but we broadcast in 14 languages because it drew audiences toward us," he said. "The medium, in many respects, was the message: ‘The Americans care enough to treat us, to address us as we are. They don’t feel as if they have to go through this Russian filter.’ And I’m sure that’s very much the same kind of thinking that’s going on here in Iran. It’s a big population – if they were in the Balkans or Eastern Europe we would have broadcast to them a long time ago."
Iran's Ethnic Factions Threaten to Split the State, By S. Enders Wimbush. RAND Paper, P-6477, 1980. (PDF)
Recently, I've been looking at the published work of Soviet nationalities guys like Wimbush, Bennigsen, Paul Henze, and Graham Fuller, from the 80's to the early 90's. I have a creeping suspicion that there are some interesting parts being left out of the historical narrative on the break-up of the USSR. Some interesting stuff.
Bookmarks