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Jamshid Chalangi:
In tonight’s program of Behind the Headlines we will look into the reasons for Khomeini’s opposition to the Shah’s reforms, and who benefits from Ali Khamenei’s threat of annihilating Israel, while the Jewish state’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is touring the EU to raise alarm about the Iranian regime’s threats against his country and the world peace.
Our guests to discuss these topics tonight are Hassan Etemadi and Hassan Hashemian.
Hassan Etemadi:
The former regime’s reform program was precisely at the time when Iran was preparing itself to join the advanced industrial nations of the world. As such it needed to progress in every social and economic field. The literacy and health corps to educate the rural populations and provide health service to them was in that direction.
At the same time women were given the right to vote and a major land reform was launched. These were fundamental social changes for the progress of Iran and the first people to oppose them were the clerics.
Other political groups such as the National Front also opposed these reforms but the leadership of all these opposition movements fell under Khomeini and his supporters.
In the later disclosed secret documents we come across the names of people like Bijan Jazani who was politically close to the Tudeh Party as the individual who was behind organizing the students’ movement against the Shah and his reforms.
The leftwing students who were anti-American and anti-capitalism aligned themselves with the clerics at that historic juncture and this alliance continued until 1979 and resulted in the revolution.
Hassan Hashemian:
I believe Khomeini never had any links with the democracy and freedom movements of Iran that had emerged since the Constitutional Revolution of 1905. There is absolutely no evidence or document to suggest that he was ever associated with any of the many such movements in his life, but sadly he became the leader of them in circumstances that led to the fall of the previous regime in Iran. He was even an isolated figure within Iran’s religious establishment and many of the grand ayatollahs did not accept him among their ranks.
However, it was the Freedom Movement and the likes of Ebrahim Yazdi who gave Khomeini a prominence.
Hassan Etemadi:
All those groups and individuals that helped Khomeini secure his political power were later purged and they never had a chance to prove if they had any commitment to the establishment of democracy in Iran which was their slogan in their opposition to the Shah’s regime.
Hassan Hashemian:
I believe freedom can be interpreted in many different ways and all these groups had their own version of it. As such I doubt if Iran would have achieved freedom under the rule of any one of them. However, at the end, as it happened, they all contributed to the establishment of the barbaric and bloody dictatorship of Khomeini in Iran.
