The Iranian leadership is falling into the same trap that their arch-enemy the Shah of Iran fell into in the 1970s. They are not listening to the people. After a meeting with Shah Reza Pahlavi, the US ambassador William Sullivan complained: "The king will not listen." Soon afterwards, the king had to leave the country, and Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile in triumph. Khomeini's successor as Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, claimed at Friday prayers at Tehran University that "foreign agents" were behind efforts to stage a velvet revolution. This appears to be a classic case of blaming the messenger.
I have no regard for the regime of the former Shah of Iran. As a student activist I opposed him and tried to highlight the injustices of his regime. I was particularly horrified that the Scout Movement, which I was involved with, planned to have its International Jamboree in Iran in 1979. I was criticised for using Private Eye’s epithet for the Shah, “The Sh#t of Iran” in opposing this event but this non-political organisation was hugely naive as the Shah’s son (Who nowadays lives in Potomac, Maryland and answers to “Mr. Pahlavi”) was honoury Chief Scout and the whole operation was to be propaganda for the dynasty.
Grandiosity became the Shah. He staged a pitiful rodeo down in Persepolis to honour his forebears – the Pahlavi dynasty was actually introduced as a British colonial project – to which the great and the good and Princess Anne came along. After months of violent protests, the Shah fled Tehran on 16 January 1979. He ended up in the US where he received treatment for lymphatic cancer, from which he died in 1980. His father, commander of the Persian Cossack Brigade, took power in 1925 and was a genuinely capable and modernising figure in the Ataturk mould but his dictatorial instincts got the better of him. In 1941, on the slimmest of pretexts, the Soviet Union and Britain occupied scrupulously neutral Iran and shamelessly used the countries oil resources for their own wartime benefit. Many don’t realise American troops also entered Iran to assist its allies in the war effort and operated the railway system.
After the war the Soviet Union had nurtured an Iranian communist party and encouraged separatist movements in Northern Iran. They did not leave Iran until the end of 1946 in what was to be the first stress point of the Cold War. The Shah’s son was made leader in his father’s place but at the encouragement of the USA and Britain (who are now concerned about democracy in Iran) he subverted the constitution. Crucially, the Iranian revolution had a messianic leader in Ayatollah Khomeini who was a visible alternative to the Shah, a leader whose claims to legitimacy were compromised even before he came to the throne. The Iranian revolution might well have failed in the early days when Khomeini's courts feared a counter-coup, which was the reason for all the firing squads. They had not forgotten how the CIA and MI6 destroyed Mohammed Mossadeq's democratically elected government in a coup in 1953. Operation Ajax, the Americans called it (the British chose the more prosaic Operation Boot).
There was not much mercy in the Iranian revolution: all the courts did was sentence men to death. But then there hadn't been much mercy before the revolution, when the Shah's imperial guard, the Javidan, or "immortals", slaughtered the crowds. The notorious Savak security service had a well earned reputation for brutality, torture and summary executions, many families were told their loved ones hanged themselves in prison.
Nonetheless the Islamic Republic imposed its doctrines with particular brutality systematically liquidating its allies in the struggle against the Shah hanging thousands, especially women, so that the trees looked like they had roosting bats from a distance. Hundreds of thousands fled into exile. The West’s response was to bankroll Saddam Hussein in the terrible Iran / Iraq war (1980-1988) where the West’s salesmen, including Donald Rumsfeld, sold Iraq the gas and other materials to commit war crimes on the Iranian people. Casualty figures are highly uncertain, though estimates suggest more than one and a half million war and war-related casualties -- perhaps as many as a million people died, many more were wounded, and millions were made refugees. Iran acknowledged that nearly 300,000 people died in the war; estimates of the Iraqi dead range from 160,000 to 240,000. Iraq suffered an estimated 375,000 casualties, the equivalent of 5.6 million for a population the size of the United States. Another 60,000 were taken prisoner by the Iranians. Iran's losses may have included more than 1 million people killed or maimed. It should also be remembered, despite subsequent events in Iraq and Iran’s subsequent bluster that militarily Iran lost the conflict. This and the downing of an Iranian civilian airliner taking off on a scheduled flight from a civilian airport by the US Navy is why Iranians won’t lose any sleep at America’s crocodile tears for the dead of Tehran.
The Ayatollah Khomeini died on 03 June 1989. The Assembly of Experts - an elected body of senior clerics - chose the outgoing president of the republic, Ali Khamenei, to be his successor as national religious leader in what proved to be a smooth transition. In August 1989, Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, the speaker of the National Assembly, was elected President by an overwhelming majority. The new clerical regime gave Iranian national interests primacy over Islamic doctrine. However, today Iran and its people are not well served by the leadership of the Islamic Republic who are definitely second stringers.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was a minor cleric promoted rapidly by Ayatollah Khomeini when he realised his health was failing. Like Reza Pahlavi’s son he is not anywhere near the match of his predecessor. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was an obscure councillor who became Mayor of Tehran because of his links to Islamists. He spent his term in gesture politics towards the poor and rolling back diversity and increasing social control in the city and its institutions. His rise to power and landslide victory in 2005 surprised the international community, which anticipated a win for the incumbent president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Since then, Mr Ahmadinejad has developed a reputation internationally for his fiery rhetoric and verbal attacks on the West. Meanwhile Iranians have gone backwards economically and socially in a country which even Ruhollah Khomeini described as a “slum”, a very literal description of South Tehran despite years of Ahmadinejad.
Mahmoud AhmadinejadThe Islamic Republic has sneered at the way the “weak” Shah rolled over to popular protest and is programmed with Iran's Revolutionary Guards and the thuggish Basij militiamen wielding clubs determined to intimidate, mutilate and kill peaceful protestors or “terrorists” as they have been labelled in the Newspeak of the Islamic Republic. It is clear that the Iranian regime had its post-election repression organised in advance. They knew the election was to be rigged, there are no independent observers, no tally sheets, no independence at the election count. Indeed it may be not the first rigging as Ahmadinejad was the surprise winner of the 2005 election with roughly the same share of the vote? If Ayatollah Ali Khamenei believes as he said at Friday prayers that the election couldn’t be rigged as Islam is the religion of truth let him open up the ballot boxes, election registers and tally sheets to inspection. Surely, especially in Islam, truth cries out to be heard?
The fact of the matter is that Persia is a great nation and its people are a great people, rich in language, literature and culture long before the West. They are “Iran” literally the Aryan Nation, after Egypt the world’s first superpower and the home of the Zoroaster, recognised by Islam as “People of the Book” whose prophet was first to proclaim belief in “The One God”, - thus spake Zarathusa. But the truth is that there is little hint of this greatness in the lives of ordinary Iranians who have been badly served by the stupidity of their rulers for a very long time.
There is a velvet rebellion taking place. It is not a revolution yet - but it could evolve into one if the Supreme Leader and his associates do not listen to the people. Dozens of peaceful, young Iranians are saying they want change. Sixty percent of the population are under 30 years old. They have no memory of the Islamic revolution in 1979. Many of them use the internet and watch satellite TV. Their window on the wider world is irreversibly open. Many of them simply want peaceful change - and in particular an end to the strict laws that govern personal behaviour in Iran.
They want to be able to sing and dance. They wonder why the Iranian leadership continue to ban such expressions of human joy - a ban very similar to the rules imposed on Afghanistan during the Taliban regime.
Neda Salehi Agha Soltan, the 26-year-old Iranian woman shot dead during Saturday’s demonstrations in Tehran
At least 10 people were killed in Tehran on Saturday as police clashed with "terrorists" in protests over a disputed poll, Iranian state TV says. State media also said family members of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani - a powerful opponent of the re-elected president - were arrested during the protests. Defeated candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi has condemned "mass arrests" of supporters, Reuters news agency says.
Let us do what we can to support the Iranian people in their desire to live free lives, to be true to themselves and be free from doctrinaire and repressive government. One small gesture is if you're on Twitter, set your location to Tehran & your time zone to GMT +3.30. Iranian security forces are hunting for bloggers using location/time zone searches. The more people at this location, the more of a logjam it creates for forces trying to shut down Iranians' access to the internet.
Cut & Paste & Pass it on.Otherwise I am reminded of the quote from my townsman Edward Fitzgerald’s translation (or more probably re-writing) of the words of the Persian Astronomer and Poet, Omar Khayyam;
“When I want to understand what is happening today or try to decide what will happen tomorrow, I look back.”
