A State of Fear

by Dr Reza Ghaffari

  In 1920 the British played a key part in installing Reza Shah as dictator – a man who had a nasty little habit of cutting out the tongues of those who criticised him openly – but he started paying court to the Nazis. While I was growing up in the early 1950s, the British were at it again. This time, under a Labour government, they didn’t like a democratically-elected government wanting a fairer share of the oil riches.

  Everyone in our family was kept informed about what was going on by my grandfather. He would come home each evening with a basket of food in one hand and a copy of the nationalist paper Shouresh (Rebellion) in the other. We would sit and listen to him reading the latest court intrigues. I sat close, keen to hear every word. In the paper I saw and liked a cartoon of Churchill, complete with dicky bow and tails, dancing cheek to cheek with the Shah’s twin sister, Ashraf. The editor, Karimpur Shirazi, hammered the political point of the cartoon with an editorial raging against the monarchy’s collaboration with imperialism, and in particular BP.

  My father was a carpenter who left home around half past five every morning to work in a factory two miles away that produced doors and windows. I was the first born and, when I was six, I went to help my father at his work. I used to hold the end of the planks as my father fed them through the machines. He called me his right hand. The noise and smells, hustle and bustle of the workshop were captivating. I was very happy, playing with the piles of fine sawdust on the factory floor. It was official: I was a grown-up.

  We used to get home at about six in in the evening, where our evening meal would be waiting. But not everyone was happy. When I was ten, my grandparents decided to have it out with my father and told him I was out of control and needed to go to school. In truth, when I watched my friends carrying their books to and from school, I did feel jealous. Even at that young age I knew that, without any real education, I faced a bleak future. My father could not read or write a word, even his own name. He agreed that education was essential if I was to avoid his fate and so I started school, albeit as a late developer. I realised from the outset that this was my only life-raft; the penalty for failure was to finish up like my father.

  My mother was born in 1927, some two decades after the proclamation of the universal right to secular education. Nevertheless, like my father, she never learnt to read and write. She was married at 11 and was 12 when I was born. By 20 she had given birth to no less than six children. She was dead by 35, totally exhausted by the birth of her tenth child. She was always a distant figure to me, having yet more children, suckling one baby from the breast, breaking ice during the freezing winter to get water to wash clothes for the others. She never had any opportunity to get to know any of us – that was the way things were in a society that saw child brides as perfectly normal. Her own mother died in her mid-40s of a heart attack while she was washing clothes by hand. The cycle went on, unfortunately. My sisters never had any education to speak of and Khomeini went on to ‘turn back the clock’ so women could be buried up to the neck and stoned to death for such crimes as adultery.

  The years after World War II were a golden age by comparison. Ideas of all kinds were allowed to flourish. Britain had been seriously weakened and its grip on Iran had slackened. The introduction of Soviet troops in the north had inspired many and rocked the ruling class. The country was ripe for change. My grandfather was a simple working man who made quilts for a living – for the Shah’s court – but rather than being a sycophantic flunkey, he somehow knew who his real friends and enemies were. Like millions of others, we were all strong supporters of Mohammad Mossadegh, the prime minister who was democratically elected in 1951.

  He was overturned in 1953 with the help of the CIA and Britain’s MI5. My family’s favourite newspaper editor, Karimpur Shirazi, was murdered in prison and his charred remains displayed on posters to ensure that everyone got the message. Richard Nixon, the new vice president of the United States, came over to review the handiwork of the leaders of the new regime. He condemned Mossadegh as a communist and told the Shah that, ‘the coup would establish an island of stability in the turbulent waters of the Persian Gulf.’

  Massacres and persecutions were a feature of this new ‘island of stability’, including the arrest of 500 Tudeh sympathisers in the officer corps, most of whom were executed. Everyone kept their heads down. I buried myself in my studies but stayed true to my allegiance to Mossadegh’s ideals, joining others to chant support for him during our 15-minute meal breaks, taking part in demonstrations, and distributing leaflets in support of his party, the National Front. There was no going back for me and I threw myself into the world of the political activist.

  I was far to the right of the Tudeh party but I agreed to distribute their leaflets at the school. My luck ran out when, two months after the coup, a hostile teacher caught me and I was hauled before the military authorities and interned in an open air military camp in the centre of Tehran. I was badly beaten, once after my arrest and again after reaching the camp. My home was ransacked and the few books I had confiscated. My arrest even made the national news when they said that I had been arrested for failing to stand up in the cinema before a patriotic song for the Shah. I was eventually released after five months, but was barred from school for a year.

  Years later I entered a military training college. The principal hauled me in and, after praising my grades, stated bluntly that I had no future in the armed forces as I would always be politically suspect. This had a devastating effect as my dream had been to work my way into the officer corps and to get rid of the Shah, opening the way back to democracy. But if I left now I would be required to pay back the entire cost of my education. I had to find a way to square the circle. Six months later, after I had passed all my examinations with distinction and moved to the officers training corps, I sneaked out of my barracks. My heart racing, I used a lamppost to clamber over the barbed wire perimeter.

  After some time in hiding I was free to go to the University of Tehran. I passed the entrance examinations in five faculties but I still didn’t feel safe. I qualified for a place at a foreign university, but was not granted a visa despite many applications. An exasperated official eventually whispered, ‘You might have passed our exams but you have failed Savak’s. Talk to them if you want to know.’

  I finally got permission through my one and only contact with the intelligence services. My father was appalled at the astronomic costs of the US, but the family had a whip-round and, in 1961, I made my way to Wyoming. I took any job that would pay. My fellow students were convinced that I owned at least half a dozen oil wells in Iran and I gave them some cock and bull story about a delayed inheritance. College jobs and summer holiday work enabled me to pay my way to a degree at Brigham Young University in Utah. Initially, I studied petroleum engineering, but moved into economics. I did not forget the huge sacrifice the family had made and saved enough to send back $1,000.

  After moving to New York I was able to combine my doctorate with covert campaigning against the Shah (I still have copies of my articles for International and the American Militant, credited to ‘Kaveh Ahangar’). By 1974, the year I returned home to Iran, I had established a reputation as a young tenured lecturer.

  Savak had not forgotten me and were unimpressed by the name I had made for myself in the US. With the temperature rising at home I found myself in the firing line once again. But by this time I had learned to box more cleverly, despite regular and extended chats with the secret police who watched my every move. I was a man with a mission. In Tehran I was working at one tenth of the salary I had been offered in the private sector. But money was not important. The real agenda was making contacts and building up influence as the regime moved inexorably into crisis. I accepted invitations to lecture at provincial universities throughout Iran to learn more about the people of my country, their problems and aspirations. It was also a useful method of familiarising myself with the geography of Iran as, after 12 years away, I was something of a stranger.

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bsp; The 1953 coup had forced the left in Iran to reassess the future and take a long hard look at the nationalist politics of Mossadegh. Tudeh was discredited by failing to act to defend the gains made by the nationalisation movement. It then lost even more credibility when it appeared to subordinate itself to the foreign policy interests of the Soviet Union, which was trying to gain an economic foothold in Iran.

  Young people in Tudeh and the National Front found alternative models in both the Cuban struggle as personified by Che Guevara and in the Vietcong’s battle in Vietnam. Their revolutionary ideals led to the formation of a dizzying array of political and religious groups, determined to change the regime. The Fedayeen was one of these groups and they were set up in 1970. Out of this organisation emerged the Rahe Kargar, originally called the Prison Boys. These Marxists broke with the politics of Guevarism and identified the working class as the main agency of revolution. Other young people in the National Front and the religious movement formed the Mojahedin, committed to armed struggle and social change. They were linked with Islam and their secular equivalent was Peykar, a Maoist group with overtones of Marxism-Leninism. They considered Albania ‘the most progressive socialist state in the universe’.

  I had moved on too, politically. I still had a soft spot for Dr Mossadegh but now leaned towards some kind of socialism rather than nationalism. Yet the Soviet Union had shown itself to be repressive and China’s Maoist quasi-religious dogma was equally unappetising. Vietnam had demonstrated that the Third World could buck the trend and Castro’s Cuba seemed to offer the way out of tyranny. The Shah made his last visit to Washington to see President Carter in 1977 and we all seethed as he mouthed Nixon’s monstrous phrase about Iran being an ‘island of stability’. Could it be made to happen again? Could 1978 or 1979 be the year of another revolution… and more?

  CHAPTER 4

  REVOLUTIONARY DAYS

  In the late 1970s the Iranian government faced an economic crisis and its counter-inflationary policies led to strikes and even uprisings. No one was left untouched. The millions that had been ruined by the Shah’s policies and now lived in the shanty towns saw their squalid corrugated-iron shacks bulldozed. When they protested, guns were turned on them. But there were more protests, uprisings and massacres and each was larger and angrier than the last. The state response became bloodier, culminating in South Tehran in September 1977 with an outright massacre. Tanks and helicopter gunships tore through wide swathes of Tehran’s poor and hungry.

  The world of academia was not left untouched. The university of Tehran sat in the centre of the city. To the north of the campus lay the villas of the rich and to the south were the shanty towns. From the top floor of the main block, you could – and still can – see the rift through Iranian society expressed in that division through its capital. My colleagues at the university saw the tanks roll through the city centre and heard the whirr of the helicopters overhead. Every day the papers brought further reports of repression. When I say we saw blood in the streets, I am not speaking metaphorically. On that terrible day when the Shah’s troops slaughtered thousands in Tehran, there were rivers of red flowing across the pavements and down the gutters.

  After each massacre there was a shocked silence. A small group of us at the university decided we would speak out. Out of a staff of three thousand, a hundred of us signed an open letter of condemnation. It was a small voice circulated and republished by the opposition press, read in the factories, the bazaar, and even at prayer in the mosques. It spread far and wide.

  The confidence of the people was growing. In the middle of the government campaign against rising prices, oil workers actually secured a wage increase of 20 per cent. Their success spearheaded a wave of brave strikes at a time when some shopkeepers were actually jailed for raising prices by the equivalent of one tenth of a penny.

  Although there were no legal unions, Iranian workers came together to use their new-found strength. They extended their demands to include freedom of the press, breaking the state monopoly on television and releasing thousands of political prisoners. In late 1978 student activists held a university-wide sit-in. Their demands echoed those of other workers and it did not take long for the Shah’s minions to identify this centre for education as a hotspot of trouble. All universities were closed. But this just spread the opposition further afield as students took their demands to factories and shanty towns.

  University staff were barred from entering the empty buildings and began a process of consultation. I was elected as one of the two representatives from the Economics faculty. We decided that an occupation of the university was the most appropriate response to the Shah’s actions. Around 30 of us – one from each department – walked through the police cordon and went to see the chancellor. Filing into his room in the administration block at the centre of the campus, we demanded that the university be immediately reopened.

  ‘It is not my decision,’ he told us. ‘His Majesty and the military governor of Tehran must decide that’.

  For two hours we haggled. Things became heated. Some of my older colleagues even began brandished their walking sticks to emphasise their arguments. Eventually the chancellor stormed out, slamming the door behind him. We barred the doors and phoned the university faculties and student groups.

  ‘The occupation’s on!’

  As others arrived, university officials cleaned their desks and left. Within just 24 hours we were in control of the entire administration block. The oil and electricity workers were out on strike again but we still had power. While the Shah ate cold chicken by candlelight, our five-storey block was a brilliantly illuminated watch-tower. It was an unforgettable symbol of solidarity. Looking out over the city we could see the pin-pricks of millions of candles in the blackness. Unfortunately, our privileged status also made us sitting ducks for soldiers squinting at us down their gunsights.

  On the second day, lecturers from other colleges in Tehran occupied the Ministry of Science and Education. A Savak sharpshooter opened fire on them, killing one young lecturer. A crowd of hundreds of thousands gathered spontaneously to help carry his coffin from the hospital morgue for miles through the city, passing it from shoulder to shoulder to the university. The academic staff formed a single line along the front of the building with a eulogy written for the young martyr and all those murdered by the Shah. Just the other side of the square, we could see the crowd heading towards a large roundabout. Thousands of voices were chanting as one.

  Tanks, mortars, machine-guns,

  Bakhtiar and his cronies,

  Will not stop the masses!

  Then the roar of automatic fire ripped through the air. We stared with horror at the slaughter, frozen. A few people fainted. Suddenly the reality of the situation hit us and we bolted for cover. I ran, head down, as if all the hounds of hell were after me. From the echoes we believed we were being fired on – it later emerged the soldiers were on rooftops, firing down at the crowds – and we took refuge in the loft of the administration block. Between a hundred and two hundred people were killed, unarmed men and women, ambushed at Reza Shah Roundabout – later renamed, after the Shah’s fall, Revolution Roundabout.

  The university occupation became a potent symbol of the resistance. Each day, the latest news, along with political pamphlets and press releases, was discussed and formed the basis of our developing strategy. There was a small but active minority of lecturers – around ten – who were left-wing, alongside about 20 hardline Islamists. Although none of them spoke of ‘Islamic universities’ at this time, under Khomeini many of them were actively involved in purging the universities of every last vestige of secularism. The others – the majority – were liberals and democrats.

  Some of the liberals continued to insist that our occupation was not political and that we had nothing to do with what went on outside. They argued that our only aim should be the reopening of the university. The minister for education had their ear and he used his influence to ensure that the occupation re
mained ‘non-political’. As for me, I argued that we should hang banners from the balconies and windows. Given that there was strong anti-US sentiment and that the Shah’s government was created and sustained by the CIA, I proposed that we hang a banner reading ‘Down with US imperialism.’ It took no less than 20 days of relentless discussion to get this accepted.

  Ayatollah Talaghani, the most prominent figure in the Islamic opposition movement in the country at the time, sought to link his movement with us. The Islamists managed to jump on his bandwagon with the help of professors such as Dr Mohammed Malaki. The good doctor later became the head of the university of Tehran as a reward for obeying instructions until he fell from favour and was jailed for a total of seven years. He was even forced to participate in one of the humiliating show trials staged by the Islamic revolution’s prosecutor Haji Lajiverdi.

  Some of the other Islamicists were more fortunate. One of them – perhaps the quietest – became Minister of Agriculture. To this day, I honestly don’t believe he knew one end of a turnip from another! Some of his fellows are now in the Iranian equivalent of government. As these committed academics came to learn, the wages of sin are not eternal damnation, but parliament.

  We published a daily occupation news report which was pasted on the university walls. Discussions would begin with our immediate proposals for the reorganisation of the institution, aimed at making it more democratic and responsive to the needs of its students. But as our cause spread and became a movement of the masses – millions throughout the country – we were driven to consider a much wider and more fundamental problem: the total restructuring of Iran. It now seemed obvious that shoras composed of students, workers and lecturers should run the university. Some of us went further and believed that shoras should run the entire country. It sounded unrealistic to some, but this was no academic pipe dream. In early 1979 more workers were mobilising and testing their strength and ability.