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Iranian Governmental Daily Closed Down Over Insulting Cartoon

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  • Iranian Governmental Daily Closed Down Over Insulting Cartoon

    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.
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