Show of strength in Tabriz

Press, 15 December 1979, Page 8

Show of strength in Tabriz

NZPA-Reuter Teheran Supporters of Iran’s dissident religious leader, Ayatollah Kazem Shariat-Ma-dari, have staged an enormous show of strength in the north-western city of Tabriz, suggesting that the country’s latest regional crisis is far from over. About half a million Tur-kish-speaking Azerbaijanis roared with approval in the city centre as demands for greater local self-rule and amendments to Iran’s new Constitution were read out over loudspeakers at a peaceful demonstration. In a startling departure from recent practice, State television showed Iranian viewers a long report of the Tabriz events, including film of the huge crowds chanting “Shariat-Madari, we are all your soldiers.” There was no immediate explanation for the television’s lengthy coverage of the Tabriz rally, which it said included “thousands of people” demonstrating.

In a later television interview, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr,

leader of the ruling Revolutionary Council’s peace mission to Azerbaijan, said misinformation by radio and television was one of the causes of the Tabriz unrest.

“Part of the background to the Tabriz troubles is that radio and television have not been telling people the truth,” Mr Bani-Sadr said. The Tabriz crowds, while demanding limits to the sweeping powers the strict new Islamic Constitution gives to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeiny, pledged their loyalty to Iran’s revolutionary leader, chanting “the whole world should know that Khomeiny is our leader.” Mr Bani-Sadr, whose peace mission has so far only met mostly proKhomeiny leaders in Tabriz, offered no concessions to the unruly Azerbaijanis in his interview. Instead, he invited them to join with other Iranians in building the country’s progressive' forces. The Teheran authoritiesappear to have dropped their j initial denunciations of the!

Tabriz rebels as plotters, American stooges, and agents of imperialism, Zionism, and the Savak, the former Shah’s hated political police.

The demonstration heard demands which imitated to the letter the programme of the Muslim People’s Republican Party, which claims Ayatollah Shariat-Madari as I its spiritual leader.

Earlier this week, Ayatollah Khomeiny accused M.P.R.P. members of not being Muslims — a remark pointedly contradicted the next day by Ayatollah Sha-riat-Madari. Clashes between factions supporting the two leading Ayatollahs erupted into violence in Azerbaijan last week-end in which seven people died and at least 35 were injured. Units of the para-military gendarmerie marched with the Tabriz protesters in what local people said was the biggest demonstration ever held in the city, near the Soviet border. Anti-Government rebels from another of Iran’s troubled provinces, Kurdistan, sent messages of support.

Abdulrahman Qassemlou, leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, said in a television interview broadcast in the Kurdish stronghold of Mahabad: “We defend the demands of the Azerbaijani masses who demand autonomy.”