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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan triggered a diplomatic crisis between his country and Iran by reading a poem. The Iranian government feels slighted and the country’s sovereignty is in doubt. The issue made the headlines of several Iranian newspapers on Saturday.
Tehran had already called the Turkish ambassador, after which Turkey called the Iranian ambassador for insulting Erdogan.
Erdogan quoted the poem “Aras, Aras” in his speech at Azerbaijan’s victory parade after the war against Armenia in Nagorno Karabakh on Thursday in Baku. It refers to the division of the settlement area of the Azeris along the Aras River, which today forms the border between Iran and Azerbaijan.
Iran saw this as an attack on its sovereign rights over its northern provinces. The border was established in the Treaty of Turkmanchai in 1828 after Persia was defeated by Russia. The area to the north of the river was assigned to Russia, the area to the south remained with Persia.
“Didn’t he (Erdogan) know that with this poem he was questioning the sovereignty of Iran?” Asked Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammed Jawad Sarif. “No one” should speak this way about the Iranian provinces of East and West Azerbaijan and Ardabil. The three provinces are “an Iranian fortress and an inseparable part of the country.”
The Turkish side found this comment insulting. “We condemn the aggressive remarks about our president and our country under the pretext of a poem,” Erdogan’s spokesman Fahrettin Altun said on Saturday. The Iranian government is trying to distort the context of the verses.
In Iran, there are more than 11 million Azeris in the eastern and western provinces of Azerbaijan, Ardabil in the northeast of the country and Sanjan, Hamedan and Ghazvin in western and central Iran. In addition to Persian, they speak Azeri, which is similar to the Turkish language. Many Azeris in Iran are successful entrepreneurs and most of the country’s supermarkets are run by them. There are no serious discussions in Iran about the union of the Azeri provinces with the Republic of Azerbaijan.
