February 15, 2019
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini betrayed the principles of the Iranian revolution after sweeping to power in 1979, his first president told Reuters in an interview, leaving a “very bitter” taste among some of those who had returned with him to Tehran in triumph.
Abol-Hassan Bani-Sadr, a sworn opponent of Tehran’s clerical rulers ever since being driven from office and fleeing abroad in 1981, recalled how 40 years ago in Paris, he had been convinced that the religious leader’s Islamic revolution would pave the way for democracy and human rights after the rule of the Shah.
“When we were in France, everything we said to him he embraced and then announced it like Qoranic verses, without any hesitation,” Bani-Sadr, now 85, said at his home in Versailles, where he has lived since 1981.
“We were sure that a religious leader was committing himself and that all these principles would happen for the first time in our history,” he said.
Bani-Sadr, son of a senior Shiite cleric and a former student of economics in Paris, had close family ties with Khomeini and helped him move to France after periods of exile in Turkey and Iraq, becoming one of his closest aides.
“France was the crossroads of ideas and information, which is why he picked it after Kuwait refused to take him,” Bani-Sadr said. “When he was in France he was on the side of freedom. He was scared that the movement wouldn’t reach its conclusion and he’d be forced to stay there.”
For Western observers, at least, Khomeini appeared to endorse a more modern interpretation of Islam in which religion and politics were kept separate and Iran would move away from the Shah’s dictatorship, Bani-Sadr said. (Khomeini, however, had always opposed separation of church and state. And his writings called for clerics to guide the state.)
“It was when he came down the steps from the plane in Iran where he changed…. The mullahs got a hold of him and gave him a new destiny, which is the dictatorship we see today,” he said.
Bani-Sadr represents one view of disappointed revolutionaries. Many others say that Khomeini’s revolution was betrayed by his successors, who built a clerical dictatorship. Others, like Bani-Sadr and most foreign analysts, say Khomeini created a clerical dictatorship himself when he demanded a constitution that put a clergyman at the top of the state.
Bani-Sadr was elected president February 5, 1980, but under the new Islamic Republic’s constitution, Khomeini wielded the real power.
Bani-Sadr recounted how he bemoaned pressure from religious authorities to force women to wear the chador. He said this went against promises Khomeini made in Paris that women should have a right to choose.
“[Khomeini] told me he had said things in France that were convenient, but that he was not locked into everything he had said there and that, if he felt it necessary to say the opposite, he would,” Bani-Sadr related. “For me it was a very, very bitter moment.”
Despite such disappointment and his long exile, Bani-Sadr said he did not regret having been part of the revolution.
But he warned that US President Trump’s effort to bring Tehran to heel through economic sanctions would backfire, hurting ordinary Iranians while reinforcing the existing system.
“If Mr. Trump left Iran alone, you’d see that the system is a lot more fragile than one imagines. We don’t need a new revolution,” he said.
In another interview, with Al-Bawaba, a Jordanian daily, Bani-Sadr said the current regime is even more corrupt than the Shah’s regime.
He also asserted that the Islamic Republic’s activities in foreign countries are intended to make the regime look strong in the eyes of the public and justify its existence.
“The current regime is looking for means to justify its survival in power. It is looking for these means abroad,” Bani Sadr said. “The supreme purpose is to legitimize the regime by saying that Iran dominates the region.”
Bani-Sadr said: “I see that the current regime has taken us back to the dictatorship of the Shah. But what I see is that this system is more corrupt than the Shah’s regime. The difference between them is that the Shah could not use religion for political purposes, whereas this system hides behind religion to justify injustice, corruption, and repression.”
He went on to say: “Today, the Iranian people should be aware that there are alternatives other than returning to the Shah’s regime. There are alternatives such as freedom, independence and the establishment of a system that represents the people…. The Iranian people are afraid of the post-regime phase. Therefore, if external pressures, especially American ones, decline and if Iranian people find themselves in a state of security, they will start moving.”
The former president continued: “We are pushing the people to move as they did with the Shah’s regime and in order to hold their fate in their own hands. If the people did so, the regime would not have the means to prevent such movements. Moreover, who can guarantee that the protectors of the regime, the Pasdaran, will remain loyal to it?”
The Associated Press marked the 40th anniversary of the revolution by interviewing people in Tehran who could remember the years before the revolution about their feelings about the revolution, receiving a wide variety of views.
Mohammad-Reza Tajik, a 60-year-old woodworker and veteran of the Iran-Iraq War, said, “We did not achieve what we wanted.” He said, “Problems do exist, but I relate them to the mismanagement of officials, not the revolution itself. The revolution was a correct thing and should have happened. But it has been diverted from its path by the people in power.”
Bashir Nahavandi, 67, a barber, said, “I am not dissatisfied with my current situation or my job and income. It is true that some people are complaining about prices, but they should put things in perspective and be more tolerant. He lauded the leadership for protecting Islam and enforcing the law that makes it mandatory for women to cover their hair.
Ali Soltani, a 79-year-old retired university professor, called poverty the biggest challenge facing the country. He said that under the Shah there were three classes—rich, middle class and poor—while now, he said, there only the haves and the havenots. “We were really hoping that problems would be solved. But they were not…. Newspapers and the authorities themselves are now admitting to large-scale embezzlements. Today, you see that a part of the people do not even have bread to eat. What can they do?”
Mohsen Fat’hi, a 70-year-old bookseller, said, “We were seeking a better life but, unfortunately, could not get it. Today we are looking for meat and chicken and unable to afford it.”