Yazdi was foreign minister when the US embassy was seized in 1979. When Ayatollah Khomeini supported the seizure, Yazdi and the entire cabinet of Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan resigned. Yazdi has not held public office since then.
After Bazargan died, Yazdi became the leader of Freedom Movement of Iran, the political party Bazargan had founded in the 1960s that advocated social democratic principles with an Islamic cast.
It was distinguished from the many other anti-Shah parties by its opposition to secularism. Yazdi, now 80, has been arrested repeatedly in recent years.
But for a long time he was tolerated by the regime and trotted out for foreign reporters to prove that the regime did not repress the opposition.
The offense that appears to have caused his latest imprisonment and conviction was an open letter to Rachid Ghannouchi, the leader of the mildly Islamist Tunisian political party, Ennahda, which came in first in the recent parliamentary elections. In that letter, Yazdi cautioned Ghannouchi not to repeat the errors Iran made after its 1979 revolution.
Yazdi also commented in that letter that he didn’t believe Muslims had enough experience with democracy to make it work. “We fight and overthrow dictators but not dictatorship itself. Despotism is not just a political structure; it has its corresponding social and cultural dimensions, which enable it to persist and become ingrained in individuals and whole societies afflicted by despotism for a long time.
“The result is that we Muslims overthrow despots often, only to see new ones replace them. This is indeed what has befallen us in Iran. We deposed the Shah, but neglected to ad- dress the shah-personality within our own selves.
Thus, the vicious circle continues,” he wrote. Yazdi worked as a cancer researcher in Texas before the revolution. He now suffers from prostate cancer.
He is an American citizen and most of his children live in the United States. Yazdi refused to defend himself at his trial, refusing to accept that the court had jurisdiction over him when the Constitution says political crimes should be tried by a jury in an open court.
He was formally convicted of “activities against national security and publishing falsehoods.” In addition to the eight-year prison term, he was banned from all civic activities for five years after completing his prison sentence.