From the archive: The revolution turns to repression

New Statesman​

5 hours ago

The Iranian Revolution overthrew the Shah and installed Ruhollah Khomeini, whose successor Ali Khamenei rules Iran today, as Ayatollah in February 1979. The NS's man in Tehran, Fred Halliday, assessed the state of things six months into the new Islamic Republic. George Monaghan
It does not take one long to sense the ferocious right-wing Islamic fervour that grips much of Iran today. In the airport arrival hall, in front of the (unattended) health controls, hangs a poster on which the dove of peace is being ripped open by a hammer and sickle. Underneath runs the simple message: 'The Mirage'. Along the walls on the way into Tehran the slogans 'Death to Communism' and 'Death to the Fedayin' can be seen, and amid the plethora of renamed streets none is called after any left-winger who gave his or her life in the 25 year struggle against the Shah. Huge placards show an Iranian revolutionary breaking through shackles imposed by both the Russian and US flags, and the walls of the massive Soviet embassy compound in the centre of the city are daubed with hostile slogans.
The second night I was in Iran I attended the first major public rally held by the Tudeh, or Communist Party, in the 30 years since it was banned by the Shah. A crowd of around 50,000 people had gathered to hear Ehsan Tabari, the party's leading theoretician and the grandson of an Ayatollah, who was now a candidate in the coming elections for a Council of Experts to discuss the constitution. Most of the crowd appeared to be students, but there was more than a sprinkling of older people, gnarled representatives of another age. As several hundred stewards with linked arms guarded the perimeter of the meeting, groups of right-wing youths, named 'Phalangists' by their opponents, roamed around shouting 'Death to the Tudeh and the Fedayis, Social Parasites' and repeating the most frequent rightist slogan heard in Iran: 'There is no Party but the Party of God, No Leader but the Spirit of God', the latter being a reference to Khomeini. Thwarted in their main aim of disrupting the meeting, these Islamic militants turned on a hapless Iranian press photographer, and, after chasing him across the campus grounds, smashed his equipment and pummelled him to the ground amid chants of 'Allah is Great'.
This hysteria is not confined to Muslim activists on the street, but can be found at the centre of the Islamic government from which it receives strong encouragement. Three of Khomeini's top advisers whom I interviewed – Foreign Minister Yazdi, Radio and TV Director Ghotbzadeh, and Economics Adviser Bani-Sadr – all blamed the left for Iran's present troubles and claimed that the left had played no role in the revolution that overthrew the Shah. A similar view is held by Ayatollah Nuri, one of the key organisers of last year's anti-Shah demonstrations in Tehran.
For weeks, offices and bookshops belonging to left-wing organisations in the provinces have been attacked. On Friday 10 August, for example, crowds coming out of the mosque in the Azerbaijani town of Urumieh burnt down the Fedayin bookstore, and this was followed by attacks on left-wing offices and bookstalls in Tehran on the following Monday. The new press law, which makes criticism of the Ayatollahs illegal and enforces wide-ranging censorship of domestic and foreign reporting, is another blow at those who criticise the policy of the Islamic government.
The attack on the left by leading government officials often takes the form of a rather crude scape-goating. Bani-Sadr told me that the left was to blame for the standstill in industry, and both he and Ghotbzadeh blamed the unrest among Turks, Arabs and Turcomans on leftist interference, avoiding the question of whether the demands of these people were legitimate or not. Their defence of current policy towards the Kurds sounded like Ethiopian officials legitimating their repressive policies in Eritrea on the grounds that the regional opposition forces were also 'agents' of foreign powers.
In a tragic irony many of those who were in the forefront of the struggle against the Shah are now once again on the receiving end of government repression and right-wing violence . Mohammad Reza Sa'adati, a member of the Kojahidin of the People guerillas, who spent years in jail under the Shah, has now been arrested on charges of being a 'Soviet spy' and has the dubious distinction of being the first of the new political prisoners known to have undergone torture. Slogans calling for his execution have been written on walls in Tehran. Over a dozen members of the Socialist Workers Party, arrested weeks ago in the southern town of Ahvaz, still await trial, as does the poet Nasim Khaksar, who earlier spent eight years in the Shah's prisons. A lawyer I met had spent three years in jail, had been tortured by hanging on a cross – 'like Spartacus and his poor friends' as he put it to me – and had then had both his legs broken by SAVAK agents after his release. He was recently kidnapped by unknown assailants and taken up into the hills north of Tehran where he was badly burnt on his back and chest.
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Mossadeq's grandson, lawyer Hedayat Matin-Daftari, who was flogged and thrown over the side of a mountain in 1967 and imprisoned by the Shah last year, had to flee last week into hiding in order to escape arrest after the National Democratic Front, of which he is one of the leaders, organised the demonstration to protest the closure of opposition papers. A few days earlier I had lunched with him and had found him, despite the evident tension in the country, to be quietly optimistic. He sensed, as other opposition members did, that the akhunds or religious leaders were overreaching themselves by interfering in so many areas of public life and by their apparent inability to run the country. Many people felt that despite the current government onslaught the left, allied with the movement for regional autonomy, could in the longer-run establish a democratic system. One Azerbaijani poet I met went so far as to argue the daring thesis that events in Iran would mean 'the end of Islam', as popular revulsion against the akhunds led to backlash in the months ahead.
Some signs of such resistance can be seen on the streets of northern and central Tehran. Music banned on the state radio is available in cassette form, and even though this is the month of Ramadhan when all-day fasting is obligatory, stalls selling soft drinks are open. People were smoking and playing music in public, and hosts proudly produced the odd bottle of whisky or champagne. In the fields, so I was told by a reliable source, the government is taking no chances with the oil workers who demonstrated their power so effectively last year: there the workers' canteen remains open all day, Ramadhan or not.
Yet the power of the Islamic right must not be underestimated. Its appeal is not just an ideological one, since its strength rests on a set of institutions that retain great power at the neighbourhood level. Ayatollah Nuri, for example, explained how he could call on thousands of people all over Tehran who had been students at his lectures over the past few years, and the new anti-left tone of Khomeini's regime is transmitted not just over the radio but in the Friday sessions at the mosque and through local Islamic associations.
The position of women illustrates the uncertain status of the new Islamic regime. Khomeini's claim before his return to Iran that Islam guarantees the equality of men and women was always untrue, given the theory and the practice of all Islamic societies. But the attempt to impose Muslim clothing, whether the cloak-like chador or the scarf-like hejab, was successfully resisted by the women's demonstrations of last March. Since that time, there has been no marked increase in the wearing of Muslim clothing by women in the centre and north of Tehran, and many women even in government offices remain without it.
However, Khomeini may well try to enforce the hejab in the future and he is reported to have told a woman poet who visited him that he would do so after the Islamic constitution becomes law. In the meantime other factors are eating away at women's position. Although there are still women announcers on the radio, all solo women singers have been taken off the media – and Director Ghotbzadeh tried to tell me this was because they had all been connected with the Imperial Court. Women's sports have been virtually stopped, and the few women judges serving in the courts have been reallocated to other positions. A young male judge told me, with evident disgust, that once Muslim law is imposed in the courts the Islamic prescription that one man's testimony as a witness must be considered equal to that of two will come into force. One woman was elected to the 73-person Council of Experts now discussing the draft constitution, but she was a nominee of Khomeini's and her election poster was a tragi-comic one , showing two eyes and a nose emerging from behind a black chador.
Probably the gravest attack on women's position has come in the realm of employment, where discrimination, as in other countries, is justified on grounds of economic constraint. Additionally, the organised feminist tide that was so successful in March has not continued. Most left groups seem to regard the question of women as a secondary one, but while I saw no women at the Fedayin headquarters wearing headscarves the Mojahidin told me that all women who join their organisation must wear one.
One change the government will find hard to put through is the segregation of schools, since only 15 per cent of primary school teachers are men and an almost reverse situation operates in secondary education. But the everyday pressures on women continue and it is easy for the demagogues of the right to talk of women's emancipation as part of some 'alien' imposition on Iran. Even the late Dr Ali Shariati, supposedly the theorist of a new enlightened Islam, argues in his Omat va Imamat that woman's liberation is a plot by the western cosmetic monopolies to boost their exports to the third world. Here again, the power of Islamic reaction over women must not be underestimated and one has only to see the phalanxes of chanting black-cloaked women on right-wing demonstrations to realise that Khomeini and his people can mobilise large numbers of women for their cause, such as fascist movements in Europe did in the 1930s.
The position of the urban working class is, as yet, uncertain. Many factories are idle or running at a reduced level of output, and the masses of migrant workers who flocked to the cities to work in construction have been dispersed by the standstill in this sector, evident in the lines of unmoving cranes along the Tehran skyline. In the factories some of the workers' committees set up during the last months of the struggle against the Shah have continued to operate. But it seems that many of these have been taken over by the akhunds or by the Revolutionary Committees and no substantial organisations linking different factories have yet emerged to form the basis of a new trades union structure. The Islamic forces have been quick to see the need to pre-empt any threat from this source. While he fulminates against the left, Khomeini appeals to the workers in the name of Islam and a widely distributed poster depicts an industrial worker holding an Islamic banner beneath a quotation from the Koran promising a speedy victory.
The rhetoric of the regime places great emphasis on what it is doing for the mostazifin, a neologism based on the Arabic word for 'weak', and usually translated as the 'deprived'. A classic populist concept, it is designed to appeal to the working class without thereby scaring off the other class allies of the Islamic movement. Yet it would seem that despite the immense suns of money available from oil, the new regime has not brought tangible benefits to these people. Loans for housing of up to £12,000 (300,000 Tomans) are available but only to those who can make a deposit of one tenth this amount. The economics correspondent of one pro-Islamic paper told me that apart from providing electricity of under 100 Kilowatts free of charge nothing had been done to benefit the poor in the six months since Khorcini came to power. Meanwhile inflation runs at over 30 per cent.
The standard themes of Islamic theorists are those familiar to right-wing populist, and indeed, fascist movements elsewhere. Bani-Sadr's 'Unitary Economics', a farrago of Islamic and socialist ideas, is little more than confusionist rhetoric, laced with some religious allusions, and has so far led to no concrete programme that could begin to solve Iran's economic problems. When I met him, Bani-Sadr laid great emphasis upon how Iran remained a dependent country in which imperialism still played a major role, but neither what he told me, nor what he had previously written, led me to believe that he has a coherent grasp o f the Iranian economy. Earlier, he told me that the spirituality of Khomeini had an important consolatory role to play given the serious material privations to which the people would be exposed.
The oft-heard slogan that 'There is No Right nor Left in Islam' and Khomeini's appeals for Islamic unity are the conventional fare of overtly fascist regimes, coupled as they are with attacks on all opponents as being 'enemies of Islam' and with a facile attribution of links with imperialism to all who question his views. Although he hardly ever mentions Iran, much of Khomeini's Islamic rhetoric is nationalistic and his favourite ploy is to attack the left for being western-influenced and alien to Iran's traditions, His denunciation of the intelligentsia, especially writers and lawyers, and his attacks on the press, indicate a willingness to stifle all critical discussion on the grounds that they are part of an 'imperialist conspiracy'. Yet so devalued have accusations become that more than one Iranian I met was able to argue at great length how Khomeini himself had been installed by the CIA…
It is as yet hard to evaluate the forces opposed to Khomeini, but they certainly go beyond the organised parties of the left. While Ayatollah Taleqani seems o have fallen into line behind Khomeini's rightist crusade, Ayatollah Sharriat-Madari, who called on his followers to boycott the recent elections, remains a powerful force, especially in his native Azerbaijan and among the estimated 1.5 million Azerbaijanis who live in Tehran. The other non-Persian nationalities are also resistant to the centralising tendencies of the Islamic government, and the Kurds in particular are well-armed and should be able to resist the central government for a long time. While they stress that they do not want to secede from Iran, the Kurds do want some form of substantial regional autonomy, and the draft constitution, offering only some ill-defined local councils which bear no relation to the nationalities themselves, is clearly inadequate to their demands.
The left itself, based in Tehran but with substantial provincial support, comprises a number of competing groups. The National Democratic Front, which broke away from the National Front in March, comprises a number of liberal and socialist groups. Although not a party, and formally nearer the centre than other left organisations, it has so far been the most consistently critical of the Khomeini government. Not only did the NDF call for a boycott of both the referendum on the Islamic Republic and the Council of Experts elections, but it took the initiative in organising the protests against censorship that sparked the recent clashes.
The two main former guerrilla groups, the Fedayin and the Mojahidin, enjoy substantial support among young people and could probably mount some kind of armed resistance to a right-wing onslaught. But their leadership, drawn from people who have spent much of their adult life in jail, is inexperienced and they have been indecisive in their attitude to Khomeini's regime, trying to conserve their militant following while not breaking completely with the government. Like the Peronist guerrillas who emerged into the open after the fall of the Argentinian military dictatorship in 1973, they have found it difficult to turn their undoubted prestige as militant fighters against the old regime into a durable political movement.
The oldest and wiliest of the left groups is the Tudeh, in effect the Communist Party. Founded in 1941 their leadership is much older than that of other groups, and they evidently have a substantial organisation. They have chosen to back Khomeini without major reservation at this time: 'We consider him on balance progressive, and since we cannot lead, we have to choose', was how one party leader explained it to me. They remain in the most traditional sense a pro-Soviet party, something that must do them immense harm in the current Iranian situation where anti-Russian feeling runs high. It is unlikely that their concessions to Khomeini will in the end spare them from the force of the rightist onslaught, and their paper is among those closed this week. Indeed, on Monday the authorities sealed the offices of the party.
The core of Khomeini's support lies in the poorer, southern district of Tehran and in the cities running southwards from there along the edge of the great desert that forms the core of Iran – Qom, Isfahan, Kashan, Yazd, Shiraz. The second main holy city after Qom, Mashad, may also favour him and the resistance to his concept of an Islamic Republic in the rest of the country is still fragmented. But with the economy in a major recession, and unrest in the regions, the initiative is slipping from the government's hands.
It is in these circumstances that the state of the army and other repressive units becomes of major importance. Most estimates I heard indicate that about half of the pre-revolutionary army, say upwards of 150,000 men, remains in existence and there certainly seemed to be plenty of soldiers in the barracks I saw in Tehran and in the mountains to the north. The air force is still flying missions, although Foreign Minister Yadzi categorically denied the reports put out by opposition papers that some dozens of US technicians had been brought back to the country. The army and air force have, however, lost most of their top commanders, and it will certainly take time to rebuild the esprit de corps and the command structure previously reliant on the Shah which were shattered in the revolutionary period.
An extremely ominous development in the growth of irregular military units, recruiting young unemployed men to carry out vigilante duties. Security Chief and Deputy Premier Mostafa Chamran is said to command a force called the Regiment of Youth, and a group named the Black Shirts has been growing in south Tehran. The Jamshidabad barracks in Tehran are the centre of another semi-official force called the Army of Guards, and then there are both the Guards of the Islamic Revolution, organised by the government, and the Committee Guards, under individual mollahs and district chiefs. Ill-trained and divided as these units may be, and incapable of facing seriously armed foes like the Kurds, they are nonetheless a formidable force for urban repression and can be sure of further expansion in a time of high unemployment. In late July up to 60,000 of such irregulars paraded through the streets of Tehran. In a clampdown on the left it would be to these elements, as much as to the regular army, that Khomeini would be likely to tum. Equally sinister is the rise of a new secret police organisation called SAVAME–SAVAK with one word altered ('Country' changed to 'Nation'). According to one man who recently came out of Evin jail, the imprisoned members of the former Counter-Espionage section of SAVAK were summoned to the central office there some weeks ago and asked to start working again, for SAVAME. Some of the indictments against left-wingers now in jail are based on old SAVAK files.
Amid the clamour and confusion of contemporary Iran, it has become obvious, more quickly than was generally expected, just how incapable Khomeini and his associates are of running Iran and how quickly they are falling back, turbaned akhunds and western-educated ministers alike, on demagogy about 'foreign plots' and on repression. Unwilling to guarantee basic democratic rights to the press, the opposition or the nationalities, or to implement a serious programme of social change, they are dragging the country towards a bloodbath the outcome of which no one can predict. Khomeini may believe that Allah is Great, but it certainly seems to be the Devil who is working overtime in Iran today.
[See also: From the archive: The apotheosis of Tammany Jim]
Related
This article appears in the 18 Jun 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Warlord