Well, it seems Iran is back in the news again. Many of us, including myself, have written diaries celebrating the resumption of the protests, telling the atrocities of the "Islamic" Republic, and hoping we might, finally, see an end to them. But its important to see the events of 2009 in light of the events of 30 years ago. In this dairy, I'll provide a bit of history of the Islamic Revolution and the first few years of Khomeini for context, along with some thoughts on the current protests. Hopefully, I'll help put the current news in a little context, and I want to bring home (in a way that I don't think people often do) the seriousness of what is happening.
But now, the story turns back to thirty years ago, and the beginning of a new era for Iran.
Note: I get much of this history from two books, The History of Iranby Elton Daniel andThe Soul of Iranby Afshin Molavi. I recognize that there are many people on here more knowledgible about the Revolution than I am, and I welcome any comments or corrections
No one in the 1970's predicted the overthrow of the Shah. Iran then was known as a "modernizing" country and a growing power, and one of the major components of America's anti-communist alliance in the Middle East. Even in 1978, when the Shah had less than a year to remain in power, Jimmy Carter would declare the country an "island of stability".
The Shah's regime can best be described as secular right-wing nationalist, with a bit of fascistic elements (especially towards the end). It was a one party state, and a personality cult existed around the Shah, who gave himself increasingly grandiose titles (such as "King of Kings" and "Light of the Aryans"). While it possessed a westernized upper class, more than half of the nation was illiterate, and people in the countryside and poorer parts of the cities lived in grinding poverty. The Shah made enemies of the Islamic Clergy, who he saw as a backward influence, and denegrated the Islamic period of Iran's history, instead glorifying the long dead Persian empire. By the end of the 1970's, he had made enemies in much of Iran's political spectrum-Islamists, Leftists, and Liberals.
In January 1978, a state-owned newspaper published an article defaming Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, accusing him of being (among other things) a homosexual. Though only a mid-ranking cleric, Khomeini was very charismatic and had been one of the better-known opponents of the Shah's regime since 1964, when he gave a widely-distributed sermon denouncing an agreement between the Shah and the US which gave diplomatic immunity to all US personel in Iran. Khomeini declared that the Shah had made himself "lower than an American dog" because (according to Khomeini) if the Shah ran over an American dog, he could be charged with a crime, but an American who ran over the Shah couldn't. The Shah had exiled him, and at the time he lived in Najaf, Iraq (later in 1978, the Shah convinced Saddam to exile Khomeini to France, hoping to further distance him from Iran. It didn't work).
The article resulted in the first set of protests against the Shah, which intensified throughout 1978. The Shah responded by ordering the army to shoot demonstrators in the streets. However, in Shia Islam, a mourning ceremony is required 40 days after a person's death. The protestors turned the mourning ceremonies for their slain comrades into protests, which typically resulted in even more deaths at the hands of the Shah's army, which resulted in another mourning ceremony 40 days later. The Shah's army ruthlessly mowed down protesters in the streets, but every 40 days, the protests grew bigger, swelling to tens of thousands by the later half of 1978.
The Shah's attempts to crush the protests with force failed. People in the streets chanted "Brothers in the army, why are you killing your brothers?" as the Shah's forces fired into crowds of peaceful demonstrators. On September 8th, 1978, over 80 participants in a peaceful protest were murdered in Tehran by the army, a day which would go down in Iran history as Black Friday. As 1978 wore on, many soldiers deserted or defected to the protesters, often stealing weapons and bringing them over.
Disgusted by the Shah's actions and convinced that he was a ruthless tyrant who needed to be removed, the majority of government workers went on strike, which soon spread to the oil industy (a crucial source of income for the government) and most parts of Iran's economy. By the end of 1978, large sections of Iran's economy and government administration had been paralyzed, and Tehran began experiencing power flickers because most utility workers were striking. In the streets, the Shah's increasingly demoralized army battled crowds of protesters, which had by now grown to hundreds of thousands or even millions, many of whom were ex-soldiers or armed. The Shah realized he'd lost control of the situation and went on an "extended vacation" in January 1979. He never came back.
The next few years of the revolution were equally chaotic. The initial revolutionary government included Communists, leftists, and liberals in addition to Khomeinists, but the latter turned against the other groups and eliminated them one by one, ending with the Tudeh, the Iranian communist party, in 1982. The Khomeinists were helped by the embassy hostage crisis and the Iran-Iraq war, which helped unite the population against foreign threats and allowed Khomeini to help portray his enemies as traitors. Khomeini and his supporters executed thousands, both immediately after the revolution and during a massacre of political prisoners in 1988 (the latter covered in depth here).
Its quite possible that violent repression of the protests could provoke the sort of intensification which led to the Shah's downfall. Violence seems to be the government's choice method-today, an aide to Supreme Leader Khameini said that opposition leaders were "enemies of God" who should be executed, and Ali Larijani, the speaker of Iran's Parliament, said a few days ago that the protesters were "insulting religion", which I believe is also a capital crime in Iran. Its not the sot of statement that a government wishing for any sort of compromise would make.
The overthrow of the regime by street protests cannot be called a good solution-the "Islamic Republic's" (it has ceased to deserve either name in my opinion) Basij and Revolutionary Guard would likely murder thousands or tens of thousands of people in a desperate attempt to hold onto power, and the Green movement still doesn't have a unifying ideology about what sort of alternative it wants. Its also important to remember that Iran is only slightly more than 50% Persian, the rest being a range of ethnicities-Azeris, Kurds, Balouchis, Luris, and others. There are currently active Kurd and Balouchi separtist groups, though the other ethnicities are much more integrated into the national fabric (Supreme Leader Khameini is half-Azeri, Mir-Hossain Mousavi is full Azeri, and Karroubi is Luri. Their ethnicities haven't been any sort of issue that I can tell, which leads me to believe fears of non-Kurdish or non-Balouchi separatism are overstated).
The alternative to a successful Green Revolution, however, is a government of pseudo-religious thugs who have shown themselves willing to engage in murder, torture, and rape (see the article I linked above for 1988 massacres, and here, here and here for reports of prison abuses and rape of protesters in 2009). The coming years in Iran will have much tragedy-either mixed with the exhileration of a new beginning, of the people of Iran finally taking their destiny into their hands, or of the bitterness of freedom denied, of the halls of power being occupied by people who should instead be in the halls of prison for their crimes.
Pray for Iran. Pray for a wonderful country, a wonderful nation full of some of the nicest people I have met (in the US-I haven't been). Pray for dignity, pray for justice.
Pray for hope.