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Four killed in Iran ethnic unrest
29.5.2006
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TEHRAN, Iran, --
Four people have been killed and 43 others injured
in northwest Iran (Kurdistan-Iran) during protests
over a cartoon in a government newspaper deemed
insulting to ethnic Azeris, a police official was
quoted as saying yesterday.
The report came as Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah
Ali Khamenei, accused his country's "enemies" of
trying to provoke ethnic unrest while asserting the
alleged conspiracy would be defeated. General Hassan
Karami, commander of security forces in Iran's West
Azerbaijan province, told the ISNA news agency that
the casualties occurred in the town of Nagadah -
around 50 kilometres from where Iran borders both
Iraq and Turkey.
The area is populated by both ethnic Kurds and
Azeris. "The area is now calm," asserted the general
while also reporting 20 arrests in Nagadeh and
another 15 in nearby Urumiyeh.
Referring to Turkey's outlawed separatist Kurdistan
Workers Party, he also said "two armed members of
the PKK were in the crowd" in front of a public
building in Nagadeh, and that they were being
hunted.
There have been a number of reports of rioting by
ethnic Azeris in the northwest after a
government-run newspaper published the offensive
cartoon, which depicted an Azeri as a cockroach.
Ethnic Azeris, concentrated in northwestern Iran,
account for some 25 percent of Iran's population.
The judiciary has shut the paper and arrested the
artist and editor responsible.
According to the semi-official ILNA agency, the
northwestern town of Ardebil also saw violent
demonstrations overnight Saturday with banks and
shops attacked. ISNA also reported some 200 Iranian
Azeri students gathering around the parliament
building in Tehran yesterday before being dispersed
by anti-riot police.
But supreme leader Khamenei blamed Iran's "enemies"
- a term usually used to refer to the United States,
Israel and sometimes Britain. "Provoking ethnic
differences is the last resort by the enemies
against the Iranian people and the Islamic
republic," he said in a meeting with Iranian MPs.
"There is no doubt that this plot will be defeated."
Khamenei underlined that "Azeris decisively defended
the Islamic republic and its integrity during the
war" with Iraq which raged from 1980 to 1988.
"Insulting the Azeris was an unwise mercenary move
to provoke unrest," the deputy head of the
judiciary, Hojatoleslam Ebrahim Raeesi, was also
quoted as saying yesterday. "Today the enemies are
seeking to break the unity in the country.
On one side they want to create a conflict between
Arabs and Iranians, and on the other side they
resort to Shiite-Sunni differences," he added.
AFP
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