“They can remain in Azerbaijan with their citizenship rights preserved and integrate into society.”

These are the words attributed here to officials of the Azerbaijani government regarding thousands of Armenian families who have taken the road of migration and are leaving their homes. The images need little further explanation.

The people of Azerbaijan and Armenia are, in the end, people, and like all other peoples there is no shortage of beauty and goodness among them. But what creates this degree of intolerance among us?

This entire planet is no more than a small blue dot in the galaxy, and its people remain unable to live alongside one another on a beautiful strip of nature’s kindness.

Ethnic nationalism is a disease of humanity’s childhood, and we are still afflicted by it. What a naïve idea it is to believe that creating dozens of small “-stans,” separated by borders of language, race, ethnicity, and religion, will create lasting happiness for us.

Look at the result: from Afghanistan to Pakistan and Azerbaijan, and from Panjshir and Kashmir to Karabakh, fault lines of hatred and war stand everywhere. Every small “-stan” becomes surrounded by hostile neighbouring “-stans,” none of which will ever know lasting stability.

For years there have been attempts to reduce Iran to a single ethnicity, so that borders of unrest and separation might be created within this land.

We have already travelled this road once in history, and the dream of Iran was created from the union of the peoples of the Iranian plateau. Iran is not the name of one ethnicity, religion, or language. Iran is our shared dream of connection rather than separation.

If we abandon this dream, we will leave to tomorrow nothing but small lands separated from one another by borders of hostility and conflict. I am an Iranian whose ancestors over recent generations came from Azerbaijan, Gilan, Isfahan, the Caucasus, and Georgia. I see the beauty of this land not in closed purity but in its colourful union.

If we do not become larger than our borders, we will become smaller than them. We will see these bitter images repeated throughout our history, and all of us, wherever we are, will find within ourselves the capacity to repeat them. Unless we find a bond greater than ethnicity, language, and religion, we will remain forever imprisoned in an identity limited to those elements.

If we do not possess a common language for dialogue, it will not be long before we can no longer speak to one another of our pains and dreams or find a path into one another’s hearts.

Aydin Areta