This is John Batchel, a conversation with the author, Brenda Schaefer.

Iran is more than Persia, to the moment in 1979 when the Islamic Republic of Iran was born out of the imagination, the assertion, the predation of a small group of clerics led by the Homeni who had returned from exile in Paris.

The reason this moment is important is because the Farsi-speaking Persians in Tehran lie to the ethnics of Iran. There are many languages, many face, many tribes in Iran.

It's not, it's dominated by any particular place except for the guys with the guns. That would be

the Farsi speakers. And Brenda Schaefer tells the story of how they misled and deceived and then

didn't follow through on their promises to endorse their native languages in schools,

and the history of their background, the Azaries, the Huzids, and the Arabs of Husistan, the, the Kurds, all the mixes of the Middle East are in Iran,

and yet the Islamic Republic of Iran brutalized them. It still does. Here's Brenda Schaefer to

explain. Much more of this tonight. The story of the Islamic Republic was that

after Fulmini returned, returned to Iran, his emissaries, you know, basically they reached out to all

the major ethnic groups and they offered them, you know, language rights, cultural rights, schools.

And so if you think about it,

they offered this because they knew that this was attractive to the minority. So it tells you

something about, you know, those who claim that, oh, they don't care about their languages

anymore and it's not important to them. They try to seduce them to support the regime

with language rights and school rights to

educate their children and their native languages.

But the minute they gained power, they crystallized their power, they take away this offer of these rights.

And this created a huge rebellion among, you know,

most of the ethnic minorities. When you read the history books of the revolution, Islamic

Revolution in 79, you hardly hear these stories, like the uprising of the Hwasi Arabs,

uprising of the Turkmen, you know, very fierce, you know, hundreds killed.

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