Word: azerbaijan
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Early this year, Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott was in the Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan, near the Iranian border, assessing Soviet policy in the tumultuous Middle East. A few months later, he was on the other side of Iran, flying over the Persian Gulf in an Omani air force helicopter, watching Iranian warships steaming out of the port city of Bandar Abbas. When border tensions between Iraq and Iran erupted into a full-scale war four weeks ago, Talbott was back at his desk in Washington. But he found that his recent opportunity to "look at Iran from both sides," literally...
...Union, Reza Shah, a Nazi sympathizer, was forced into exile. His son, then 21, initially was little more than a figurehead. At war's end he confronted his first crisis when Soviet forces, refusing to leave the country, set up a puppet regime in the northern province of Azerbaijan. Iran took the issue to the United Nations and, with considerable support from the U.S., succeeded in having them expelled...
...addition to treading carefully in its policies toward Islam, the regime has also tried to neutralize anti-Russian sentiment by buying off the populations of Transcaucasia and Central Asia with material benefits and protection. The citizens of Soviet Azerbaijan live more prosperously, and certainly more calmly, than their ethnic cousins in the northwestern provinces of Iran. The Muslim groups that straddle the Sino-Soviet border, for example, have traditionally fared somewhat better under Moscow's tutelage than Peking's. The Russians' fast-approaching status as a minority in their own country forces them to be more compromising than...
...Soviets are discreetly supporting the Kurdish Democratic Party, the principal force behind the struggle for autonomy in Kurdistan. Iranian military intelligence believes the Soviets have airdropped weapons and ammunition for the K.D.P. Moscow, for the time being, does not intend to revive the Turkish Democratic Party, which separated Azerbaijan from Iran in 1945-46. But neither Moscow nor Tudeh can afford to antagonize the Tehran government. Thus, for the present, they support it with ostentatious ardor. Their apparent strategy is to do what they can to prevent better relations between Iran and the West while they wait for the present...
...Iraq and in NATO ally Turkey. Muslim militants declare a holy war on the godless Marxists and take to the hills. An embattled government in Tehran appeals to Moscow for help, and the Soviet Union accuses NATO of interfering in Iran's internal affairs. Authorities in Soviet Azerbaijan and Turkmenia stress their ethnic ties with the Iranians. Finally, in come the Soviet transports, loaded with soldiers and equipment. Given the Carter Administration's declared determination to resist such a move with force, history might well repeat itself-to reverse Marx's famous aphorism-not as farce...