Iran calls it a mistake, but a fiesty daily newspaper in Azerbaijan says the flying of an Azeri flag upside-down in Tehran during a visit last week by the Azeri leader was a national insult and is fervently demanding that Iran officially say it is sorry for the incident. "We urge all patriotic colleagues to teach Iranian politicians a lesson because they show disrespect for the Azerbaijani state and its symbols," the opposition Azadliq daily said in a fiery opinion page commentary that it has published three times in the past week.
In what appears to have been a diplomatic mishap during what was meant as a fence-mending visit by Azerbaijan's President Ilhan Aliyev to the Iranian capital last week, an Azerbaijani tricolor was hoisted the wrong way up, the newspaper claims.
Now Azadliq has announced it would publish Iran's flag upside-down in its own pages until the theocratic Islamic state's embassy in Baku delivers an official apology to the former Soviet republic.
The paper, which has already printed Iran's Green, White and Red tricolor upside-down alongside its two-column commentary three times since last week's visit, has called on other Azeri newspapers to join into its shame campaign.
Two of Azerbaijan's most vehement opposition papers have taken up the call, but it has been politely ignored by the rest of the country's press and while Iranian officials have acknowledged the flag incident they have also made clear that a formal apology would not be forthcoming.
"There were more than 50 flags of Azerbaijan during the president's visit and only one flag was wrong," Iranian Ambassador Afshar Suleymani told AFP. "I don't see the problem. This is a mistake."
But Azadliq's editor, Qanimat Zahid, said his position would not change and threatened to expand the campaign to include an upside-down portrait of the deified founder of the Islamic republic, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, if he doesn't hear from the Iranians soon.
"They say Islam is the most important so the green stripe has to be on top," Zahid said, charging that the upside-down flag episode was intentional. "But it's our forefathers who decided which order the stripes should be in."
Azerbaijan's national flag consists of an eight-pointed star and a crescent moon in white centered over three horizontal stripes: the top one blue, symbolising Turkic peoples, the middle one red for modernity and the lower one green, the color of Islam.
Rauf Talyshinsky, editor of one of Baku's leading broadsheets, Echo, said he too hoped Iran would apologise for the flag incident but added he had no plans to jump on the Azadliq bandwagon.
"That would be too emotional an approach," he said.
Azerbaijan's ties to Iran go back centuries: the small Caspian nation was a part of the Persian Empire until it was handed over to Russia after the Gulistan treaties in the 1800s.
A province inside Iran - also called Azerbaijan - has an ethnic-Azeri population more than twice as large as the population of the country of Azerbaijan to the north.
And Persian words permeate Azerbaijan's Turkic language while Azerbaijan and Iran are two of only three countries in the world with majority Shiite Muslim populations.
Political analysts viewed Aliyev's recent visit to Teheran, which was closely watched by Moscow, as a demonstration of independence before Russia and the United States. The United States has invested heavily in oil-rich Azerbaijan while in Iran it has stepped up pressure over the country's nuclear program, which is being run by Russian companies.
Russia hopes it will one day be able to use Azerbaijan as link in a transport corridor that would connect its own territory with Iran's ports in the Gulf region.
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