In the language of Iran's official media, those participating in the unrest taking place in China's Xinjiang province are only “rabble” which the authorities there have had to prevent from destroying property and assaulting citizens. Former Iranian President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani condemned in his speech last Friday the bloody repression to which protesters of Uyghur ethnicity were subjected, as well as the coverage provided by the Iranian media. Those taking part in prayer at Tehran University responded positively to Rafsanjani's words by chanting slogans denouncing China and also Russia, which drove members of the Conservative movement present there to chant the slogan demanding death to America. The reason for the bias of Iran's official media in favor of Chinese authorities may be attributed to the depth of cooperation between Tehran and Beijing in the economic and military fields, and to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's need for international allies, which have become scarcer than the proverbial faithful friend. Moreover, this is not the first time the Iranian government ignores the oppression to which the Muslims of other countries are subjected to, placing its tangible interests ahead of its ideological claims. This happened in the 1990s, when Tehran supported Armenia in its war against Azerbaijan (a Muslim country with a Shiite majority and millions of its citizens sharing the ethnic identity of Iranian counterparts). It also happened in the 1980s, when Ayatollah Khomeini ignored the calls of the Afghan opposition (which would later turn into the Mujahideen movement) to obtain the support necessary to confront Soviet occupation towards the end of 1979. Both the Armenian and Soviet chapters in Iran's foreign relations confirm the pragmatic nature of the regime in Tehran. Some will say that leaving the Afghans alone to face the Soviets was strategically in the service of the Iranian Revolution, which sought at this early phase of its establishment to stand firm and strengthen its hold on power in its own country, despite the fact that this led to strengthening Afghan voices that called for allying with the US to combat Soviet troops, which in turn led the way to the known developments that took place in Afghanistan. The stance on the Uyghur in China is indicative not only of the separation between “State and Revolution”, as in Leninist saying, but also of an effective renouncement of the slogans of Islamic unity in order to preserve incomparably more important interests with China, regardless of the religious, ethnic or political identity of the current rule there. Thus, the identification of Ahmadinejad's government and those who speak in its name with the authorities of Xinjiang province and Beijing is not unusual. Indeed, the “rabble”, of which more than a hundred were killed by the bullets of Chinese security forces, is an identical copy of another “rabble”, killed by the bullets of the Basij in Tehran. The excessive use of violence there, in order to prevent a minority – which considers itself culturally and politically oppressed and is demanding the minimum of recognition within the framework of the Chinese state – from expressing itself, is no different in its bases and aims from similar excess which was resorted to in order to revoke the right of part of the Iranian public to repeat the elections, after having become haunted with “doubts”, in the words of Hashemi Rafsanjani, regarding the soundness of these elections, which took place last June. Perhaps one may, in this context, speak of a unity that brings together the points of view of two governments that claim to hold power in the name of “the masses”, “the workers”, “the downtrodden”, and other similar epithets, while in fact adopting, realistically, a stance that believes only in staying in power whatever the price, exceeding the features of pragmatism to the limits of blatant opportunism, equally whether their slogans are those of an Islamic republic, communism or otherwise.
