Then They Came For Me (43 page)

Khomeini recognizes the weakening of the shah’s regime and asks his followers not to resort to violence. Despite the martial law, people continue to
demonstrate against the shah. In early November 1978, millions of Iranians in Tehran and cities around the country peacefully demonstrate on the holy days of Tasu’a and Ashura, during which Shias commemorate the martyrdom of Hossein, their third imam.

The shah is surprised by the public’s hatred of him. He becomes erratic and unable to make firm decisions. He frees hundreds of political prisoners, who will join the revolution, and orders the arrest of his top officials. In November, he appears on television and says that he has heard the voice of the people’s revolution and he will reform his system. But most Iranians believe that the shah’s time is over. He leaves Iran two months later. The shah spends the rest of his life in exile, in Morocco, the United States, Panama, Mexico, and Egypt, where he dies on July 27, 1980.

Khomeini returns to Tehran on February 1, 1979. Exactly ten days later, a group of commanders of the Royal Iranian Army reach an agreement with Khomeini to put down their guns and accept a new revolutionary government, assigned by Khomeini. The Iranian revolution is victorious. Twenty-five hundred years of monarchy in Iran come to an end.

Less than two months later, in a referendum, 98.2 percent of Iranians vote for the establishment of an Islamic republic. Later in the year, an assembly writes the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Constitution, according to which Khomeini’s concept of governance of the jurisprudent effectively becomes Iran’s form of government.

On November 4, 1979, a group of radical students, with Khomeini’s blessing, raids the American embassy in Iran and takes sixty-six Americans hostage. On the surface, the hostage taking is a protest against the American government’s support of the shah’s dictatorship, but in reality, it is a way for Khomeini to fully consolidate his authority by suppressing the moderates in his government, who criticize the takeover. The hostages are freed after 444 days, but the crisis brings formal Iran-U.S. relations to an end and ignites a series of American-imposed sanctions that are still in place more than three decades later.

Khomeini is the new Iranian tyrant. He accepts no criticism of his absolute rule, and members of opposition groups, even the nonviolent ones, are thrown into jail, tortured, and executed. In turn, violent groups take arms against the regime. Within a few years, terrorist groups assassinate a president,
a prime minister, a head of the judiciary, and dozens of top officials, as well as ordinary sympathizers of Khomeini’s regime. The main opposition group is the Marxist-Islamist MKO (Mujahideen Khalq Organization).

Two close confidants of Khomeini’s, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Ali Khamenei, survive separate assassination attempts. Ali Khamenei’s right hand is paralyzed.

A few months after the Iranian revolution, Saddam Hussein—who has been Iraq’s strongman for almost a decade—becomes the country’s president. In 1975, Saddam was forced by the shah to reluctantly accept a border settlement with Iran.

After gaining power, Khomeini promises to export the revolution and asks Muslims around the world to rise against the despots who rule them. Khomeini is surrounded by exiled Iraqis who oppose Saddam Hussein and makes a number of critical remarks about the treatment of Shias in Iraq. As the Islamic government antagonizes the West, and becomes increasingly opposed by various political groups, Saddam Hussein thinks it is an opportune time to both revisit the border dispute and end Khomeini’s rule.

Iraqi forces invade Iran in September 1980. Saddam Hussein is surprised by the solidarity of Iranians from different backgrounds in defending their country and withdraws from most of the occupied territories in less than two years. But the war gives Khomeini the perfect opportunity to tighten his grip on power and suppress the opposition. Iranian forces invade Iraqi territories, and a war of attrition continues for eight years.

After the impeachment of one president and the killing of another, Ali Khamenei becomes president in October 1981. A junior cleric with conservative ideas, Khamenei has been a follower of Khomeini’s since the early 1960s. In the government, he is regarded as one of the closest people to Khomeini and a member of the more moderate faction of the Islamic regime. Yet Khomeini feels closer to the more radical faction and orders Ali Khamenei to appoint Mir Hossein Mousavi, a radical young architect, as prime minister. Mousavi remains Khamenei’s prime minister for the rest of his tenure as president, until 1989. The relationship between the two men is contentious, and they can’t see eye to eye on many important issues.

Khamenei represents the right, the conservative branch of revolutionaries
who support private ownership and a more moderate rhetoric. Mousavi is regarded as a member of the left, the more radical group within the Islamic establishment, which advocates a more socialist economy and supports more government interference in people’s lives. Khomeini never fully supports one group against the others, but there are more leftists surrounding Khomeini than members of the right. Khomeini often has to mediate between Khamenei and Mousavi, and usually takes Mousavi’s side in decisions. Mousavi becomes known as “the imam’s prime minister.” Ali Khamenei’s strongest ally in the government is the head of the Majlis, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the closest person to Khomeini.

After eight years of atrocities committed by both sides, the morale of the Iranian troops is weakened and international pressure on Iran to end the war mounts. Khomeini accepts the cease-fire in August 1988. He compares this to drinking “a chalice of poison.” The war ends with one million people wounded or killed, mostly Iranian. There is no tangible gain for either nation, except for a more tyrannical rule in both countries.

Before the end of the war, in 1986, the MKO terrorist group moves its headquarters to Iraq. After killing thousands of ordinary Iranians and top officials of the regime, and the imprisonment, torture, and execution of thousands of its own members, the MKO becomes part of Saddam Hussein’s army at the height of the Iran-Iraq War. Toward the end of the war, the leader of the group, Massoud Rajavi, tells his people that a weakened Khomeini regime is vulnerable and that the MKO can take over Tehran in less than a week. Almost seven thousand MKO members enter Iranian territory and are swiftly defeated by the Iranian army and the Revolutionary Guards. The number of casualties from both sides is somewhere between four and ten thousand killed or wounded.

The attack gives Khomeini the perfect excuse to reaffirm his waning authority at the end of the war by ordering the massacre of members of the MKO and other opposition groups. In less than six months, almost five thousand people, many of them prisoners and former prisoners, are summarily executed. The massacre is the most organized killing of opposition members in modern Iranian history. More than twenty years later, many of the people involved in the massacre are still in power in Iran or have become members of the opposition inside the country.

None of the high-ranking members of the regime dares to object to Khomeini’s actions, except for Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who has been
regarded as his natural successor since the beginning of the revolution. Montazeri has been Khomeini’s acolyte since the 1940s, but his objection to the killing of thousands of young men and women leads to his dismissal by Khomeini, after which he is forced to spend the remainder of his life under virtual house arrest.

On June 3, 1989, Khomeini dies after eleven days of hospitalization for internal bleeding. His funeral is the largest public gathering in Iran’s history.

After Khomeini’s death, the Assembly of Experts, which chooses the supreme leader and supervises his actions, gathers to select a successor. In the assembly, Rafsanjani lobbies for Ali Khamenei to succeed Khomeini. Many suspect that Rafsanjani supports Khamenei because he sees him as a weak character, a supreme leader he’ll be able to control. Rafsanjani becomes president, the post of prime minister is abolished, and Mir Hossein Mousavi resigns from politics. Mousavi continues to work as an artist and architect and eventually becomes the head of Iran’s Academy of Arts.

Rafsanjani calls his tenure the “era of reconstruction” and proceeds with repairing the damage of the Iran-Iraq War, allowing the private sector to be more involved in industries and the economy, and improving Iran’s relations with the West. Rafsanjani becomes known as “Akbar Shah” because his presidential style resembles that of the shah and the shah’s father; he has the same interest in the industrialization of Iran and a similar disdain for criticism and freedom of expression. He creates hundreds of new industries and builds thousands of miles of roads, but at the same time scores of student activists and opposition figures are jailed and dozens of intellectuals are mysteriously murdered.

Through unofficial channels, Rafsanjani presents himself as someone the West can work with. His government starts a strategy of rapprochement with the West and Iran’s former enemies in the region, especially Saudi Arabia. Rafsanjani tries to reverse Khomeini’s xenophobic and socialist economic policies by opening Iran’s markets to the rest of the world and encouraging foreign investment. Yet the privatization and free market benefit only a limited number of people, those referred to as Iran’s economic mafia. One of the most important achievements of Rafsanjani was helping to establish, and later expand, the Free University in 1982. This semiprivate university has
educated millions of young Iranians who want to continue their education but cannot pass the extremely difficult entrance exams of the national universities. This has helped to create a generation of politically aware, educated Iranians who will demand their rights as citizens in post-2009 elections.

Rafsanjani’s reconstruction also means the return of consumerism to Iran after ten years of revolutionary idealism. While some technocrats and retired Revolutionary Guards who are hired by the government or have started their own businesses become enormously wealthy, many war veterans find themselves dispossessed. In order to gain more power, Khamenei taps into the nostalgic anguish of this war generation and builds a powerful base that will become increasingly strong in the next two decades.

Radical supporters of Khomeini’s, including many of the students who took over the American embassy, are removed from positions of power during Rafsanjani’s presidency. Ostracized from the government, they study and criticize their past actions and create the Iranian reformist movement. During the 1997 presidential elections, they support Mohammad Khatami in a contest against Khamenei’s preferred candidate, Ali Akbar Nateq Nouri. Khatami wins by a landslide. The majority of Iranians hope that the more honest, anti-establishment Khatami will bring an end to eight years of Rafsanjani’s corrupt rule.

Khatami promises to establish a civil society in which debates are tolerated and people with different viewpoints and from different backgrounds can express themselves. Almost three years later, Khatami’s supporters take over the Majlis. With the help of the Majlis, Khatami attempts to expand the responsibilities of the president and curb the power of the supreme leader. But by the time of Khatami’s election, Khamenei has already developed a broad base of support among ideological religious Iranians, who regard him not only as their leader but as Allah’s representative on earth. He also has the courts and the armed forces under his control. While Khatami’s government tries to make Iran a more open society, Khamenei’s judges and security forces work to suppress any voice of dissent. Dozens of newspapers are shut down, and many reformists are imprisoned on fabricated charges.

When, in the summer of 1999, a group of students protest against the closure of a newspaper, they are brutally beaten by pro-Khamenei vigilantes. Many students are disappointed that President Khatami remains quiet while atrocities are committed against his supporters and that he prefers to use a back channel to reach an agreement with Khamenei.

Khatami’s tenure coincides with the decreasing price of oil in the international
markets, which hits the Iranian economy hard. Iranians become poorer, and hard-liners blame the government’s inefficiency for people’s suffering and the economic crisis.

During Khatami’s presidency, the United States and its allies invade Afghanistan and Iraq. Khatami advocates a dialogue among civilizations, but his attempts to improve Iran’s relations with the United States are sabotaged by Khamenei’s supporters. Iranian hard-liners think that resuming relations with the States will undermine their positions; at the same time, American neoconservatives promote a regime change in Iran. They believe that after what they see as their successes in Afghanistan and Iraq, Iran can be contained or even dominated militarily by the United States. In his State of the Union speech in January 2002, President George W. Bush calls Iran part of an “axis of evil,” along with North Korea and Iraq.

A combination of diplomatic ineffectiveness, the poor economy, and the failure to realize a civil society leads to the demise of the reformist movement. Yet the eight years of Khatami’s relatively democratic and open-minded style of governance and cultural policies change Iran forever and make ordinary Iranians more aware of their rights as citizens.

Khatami’s tenure also makes the hard-liners more determined to do their utmost to stop reformists from ever again coming to power.