offered in Iran for the very first time. In addition, Payame Noor University, which has 229 campuses and nearly 190,000 students throughout the country, in 2008 declared that Arabic will be the "second language" of the university, and that all its services will be offered in Arabic, concurrent with Persian. Regional and local radio programmes are broadcast in Arabic, Armenian, Assyrian, Azerbaijani, Baluchi, Bandari, Georgian, Persian, Kurdish, Mazandarani, Turkoman, and Turkish. However, some human rights groups have accused the Iranian government of violating the constitutional guarantees of equality, and the UN General Assembly has voiced its concern over "increasing discrimination and other human rights violations against ethnic and religious minorities." In a related report, Amnesty International says: Some Western journalists and commentators have expressed similar views. John Bradley is of the opinion that: Separatist tendencies, led by some groups such as the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran and Komalah in Iranian Kurdistan, for example, had led to frequent unrest and occasional military crackdown throughout the 1990s and even to the present. In Iran, Kurds have twice had their own autonomous regions independent of central government control: The Republic of Mahabad in Iran which was the second independent Kurdish state of the 20th century, after the Republic of Ararat in modern Turkey; and the second time after the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Jalal Talabani leader of the Iraqi Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), in a 1998 interview, contrasted the situation in Iran with that of Turkey, with respect to Kurds: Foreign involvement One of the major internal policy challenges during the centuries up until now for most or all Iranian governments has been to find the appropriate and balanced approach to the difficulties and opportunities caused by this diversity, particularly as this ethnic or sectarian divisions have often been readily utilized by foreign powers, notably during the Iran–Iraq War. According to Professor Richard Frye: Foreign governments, both before and after the Islamic Revolution have often been accused of attempting to de-stabilize Iran through exploiting ethnic tensions. In 2006, U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence commissioned two research projects into Iraqi and Iranian ethnic groups. Ahwazi Arabs dissidents in Iran have been persecuted by the Iranian authorities, with a number of activists reporting being arrested, imprisoned, tortured, and forced to give false confessions. Some Iranians accuse Britain of "trying to topple the regime by supporting insurgents and separatists". Other states however are also believed