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Iran
Index
Bani Sadr's program as president was to reestablish central
authority, gradually to phase out the Pasdaran and the
revolutionary courts and committees and to absorb them into other
government organizations, to reduce the influence of the clerical
hierarchy, and to launch a program for economic reform and
development. Against the wishes of the IRP, Khomeini allowed Bani
Sadr to be sworn in as president in January 1980, before the
convening of the Majlis. Khomeini further bolstered Bani Sadr's
position by appointing him chairman of the Revolutionary Council
and delegating to the president his own powers as commander in
chief of the armed forces. On the eve of the Iranian New Year, on
March 20, Khomeini issued a message to the nation designating the
coming year as "the year of order and security" and outlining a
program reflecting Bani Sadr's own priorities.
Nevertheless, the problem of multiple centers of power and of
revolutionary organizations not subject to central control
persisted to plague Bani Sadr. Like Bazargan, Bani Sadr found he
was competing for primacy with the clerics and activists of the
IRP. The struggle between the president and the IRP dominated the
political life of the country during Bani Sadr's presidency. Bani
Sadr failed to secure the dissolution of the Pasdaran and the
revolutionary courts and committees. He also failed to establish
control over the judiciary or the radio and television networks.
Khomeini himself appointed IRP members Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti
as chief justice and member Ayatollah Abdol-Karim Musavi-Ardabili
as prosecutor general (also seen as attorney general). Bani Sadr's
appointees to head the state broadcasting services and the Pasdaran
were forced to resign within weeks of their appointments.
Parliamentary elections were held in two stages in March and
May 1980, amid charges of fraud. The official results gave the IRP
and its supporters 130 of 241 seats decided (elections were not
completed in all 270 constituencies). Candidates associated with
Bani Sadr and with Bazargan's IFM each won a handful of seats;
other left-of-center secular parties fared no better. Candidates of
the radical left-wing parties, including the Mojahedin, the
Fadayan, and the Tudeh, won no seats at all. IRP dominance of the
Majlis was reinforced when the credentials of a number of deputies
representing the National Front and the Kurdish-speaking areas, or
standing as independents, were rejected. The consequences of this
distribution of voting power soon became evident. The Majlis began
its deliberations in June 1980. Hojjatoleslam Ali Akbar
Hashemi-Rafsanjani, a cleric and founding member of the IRP, was
elected Majlis speaker. After a two-month deadlock between the
president and the Majlis over the selection of the prime minister,
Bani Sadr was forced to accept the IRP candidate, Mohammad Ali
Rajai. Rajai, a former street peddler and schoolteacher, was a
Beheshti protégé. The designation of cabinet ministers was delayed
because Bani Sadr refused to confirm cabinet lists submitted by
Rajai. In September 1980, Bani Sadr finally confirmed fourteen of
a list of twenty-one ministers proposed by the prime minister. Some
key cabinet posts, including the ministries of foreign affairs,
labor, commerce, and finance, were filled only gradually over the
next six months. The differences between president and prime
minister over cabinet appointments remained unresolved until May
1981, when the Majlis passed a law allowing the prime minister to
appoint caretakers to ministries still lacking a minister.
The president's inability to control the revolutionary courts
and the persistence of revolutionary temper were demonstrated in
May 1980, when executions, which had become rare in the previous
few months, began again on a large scale. Some 900 executions were
carried out, most of them between May and September 1980, before
Bani Sadr left office in June 1981. In September the chief justice
finally restricted the authority of the courts to impose death
sentences. Meanwhile a remark by Khomeini in June 1980 that
"royalists" were still to be found in government offices led to a
resumption of widespread purges. Within days of Khomeini's remarks
some 130 unofficial purge committees were operating in government
offices. Before the wave of purges could be stopped, some 4,000
civil servants and between 2,000 and 4,000 military officers lost
their jobs. Around 8,000 military officers had been dismissed or
retired in previous purges.
The Kurdish problem also proved intractable. The rebellion
continued, and the Kurdish leadership refused to compromise on its
demands for local autonomy. Fighting broke out again in April 1980,
followed by another cease-fire on April 29. Kurdish leaders and the
government negotiated both in Mahabad and in Tehran, but, although
Bani Sadr announced he was prepared to accept the Kurdish demands
with "modifications," the discussions broke down and fighting
resumed. The United States hostage crisis was another problem that
weighed heavily on Bani Sadr. The "students of the Imam's line" and
their IRP supporters holding the hostages were using the hostage
issue and documents found in the embassy to radicalize the public
temper, to challenge the authority of the president, and to
undermine the reputations of moderate politicians and public
figures. The crisis was exacerbating relations with the United
States and West European countries. President Carter had ordered
several billion dollars of Iranian assets held by American banks in
the United States and abroad to be frozen. Bani Sadr's various
attempts to resolve the crisis proved abortive. He arranged for the
UN secretary general to appoint a commission to investigate Iranian
grievances against the United States, with the understanding that
the hostages would be turned over to the Revolutionary Council as
a preliminary step to their final release. The plan broke down
when, on February 23, 1980, the eve of the commission's arrival in
Tehran, Khomeini declared that only the Majlis, whose election was
still several months away, could decide the fate of the hostages.
The shah had meantime made his home in Panama. Bani Sadr and
Foreign Minister Qotbzadeh attempted to arrange for the shah to be
arrested by the Panamanian authorities and extradited to Iran. But
the shah abruptly left Panama for Egypt on March 23, 1980, before
any summons could be served.
In April the United States attempted to rescue the hostages by
secretly landing aircraft and troops near Tabas, along the Dasht-e
Kavir desert in eastern Iran. Two helicopters on the mission
failed, however, and when the mission commander decided to abort
the mission, a helicopter and a C-130 transport aircraft collided,
killing eight United States servicemen.
The failed rescue attempt had negative consequences for the
Iranian military. Radical factions in the IRP and left-wing groups
charged that Iranian officers opposed to the Revolution had
secretly assisted the United States aircraft to escape radar
detection. They renewed their demand for a purge of the military
command. Bani Sadr was able to prevent such a purge, but he was
forced to reshuffle the top military command. In June 1980, the
chief judge of the Army Military Revolutionary Tribunal announced
the discovery of an antigovernment plot centered on the military
base in Piranshahr in Kordestan. Twenty-seven junior and warrant
officers were arrested. In July the authorities announced they had
uncovered a plot centered on the Shahrokhi Air Base in Hamadan. Six
hundred officers and men were implicated. Ten of the alleged
plotters were killed when members of the Pasdaran broke into their
headquarters. Approximately 300 officers, including two generals,
were arrested, and warrants were issued for 300 others. The
government charged the accused with plotting to overthrow the state
and seize power in the name of exiled leader Bakhtiar. Khomeini
ignored Bani Sadr's plea for clemency and said those involved must
be executed. As many as 140 officers were shot on orders of the
military tribunal; wider purges of the armed forces followed.
In September 1980, perhaps believing the hostage crisis could
serve no further diplomatic or political end, the Rajai government
indicated to Washington through a diplomat of the Federal Republic
of Germany (West Germany) that it was ready to negotiate in earnest
for the release of the hostages. Talks opened on September 14 in
West Germany and continued for the next four months, with the
Algerians acting as intermediaries. The hostages were released on
January 20, 1981, concurrently with President Ronald Reagan's
taking the oath of office. The United States in return released
US$11 to US$12 billion in Iranian funds that had been frozen by
presidential order. Iran, however, agreed to repay US$5.1 billion
in syndicated and nonsyndicated loans owed to United States and
foreign banks and to place another US$1 billion in an escrow
account, pending the settlement of claims filed against Iran by
United States firms and citizens. These claims, and Iranian claims
against United States firms, were adjudicated by a special tribunal
of the International Court of Justice at The Hague, established
under the terms of the Algiers Agreement. As of 1987, the court was
still reviewing outstanding cases, of which there were several
thousand.
The hostage settlement served as a further bone of contention
between the Rajai government, which negotiated the terms, and Bani
Sadr. The president and the governor of the Central Bank (Central
Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran--established originally in
1960 as Bank Markazi Iran), a presidential appointee, charged the
Iranian negotiators with accepting terms highly disadvantageous to
Iran.
One incentive to the settling of the hostage crisis had been
that in September 1980 Iran became engaged in full-scale
hostilities with Iraq. The conflict stemmed from Iraqi anxieties
over possible spillover effects of the Iranian Revolution. Iranian
propagandists were spreading the message of the Islamic Revolution
throughout the Gulf, and the Iraqis feared this propaganda would
infect the Shia Muslims who constituted a majority of Iraq's
population.
The friction between Iran and Iraq led to border incidents,
beginning in April 1980. The Iraqi government feared the disturbed
situation in Iran would undo the 1975 Algiers Agreement concluded
with the shah (not to be confused with the 1980 United States-Iran
negotiations). There is also evidence the Iraqis hoped to bring
about the overthrow of the Khomeini regime and to establish a more
moderate government in Iran. On September 17, President Saddam
Husayn of Iraq abrogated the Algiers Agreement. Five days later
Iraqi troops and aircraft began a massive invasion of Iran
(see The Iran-Iraq War
, ch. 5).
The war did nothing to moderate the friction between Bani Sadr
and the Rajai government with its clerical and IRP backers. Bani
Sadr championed the cause of the army; his IRP rivals championed
the cause of the Pasdaran, for which they demanded heavy equipment
and favorable treatment. Bani Sadr accused the Rajai government of
hampering the war effort; the prime minister and his backers
accused the president of planning to use the army to seize power.
The prime minister also fought the president over the control of
foreign and domestic economic policy. In late October 1980, in a
private letter to Khomeini, Bani Sadr asked Khomeini to dismiss the
Rajai government and to give him, as president, wide powers to run
the country during the war emergency. He subsequently also urged
Khomeini to dissolve the Majlis, the Supreme Judicial Council, and
the Council of Guardians so that a new beginning could be made in
structuring the government. In November Bani Sadr charged that
torture was taking place in Iranian prisons and that individuals
were executed "as easily as one takes a drink of water." A
commission Khomeini appointed to investigate the torture charges,
however, claimed it found no evidence of mistreatment of prisoners.
There were others critical of the activities of the IRP, the
revolutionary courts and committees, and the club-wielding
hezbollahis who broke up meetings of opposition groups. In
November and December, a series of rallies critical of the
government was organized by Bani Sadr supporters in Mashhad,
Esfahan, Tehran, and Gilan. In December, merchants of the Tehran
bazaar who were associated with the National Front called for the
resignation of the Rajai government. In February 1981, Bazargan
denounced the government at a mass rally. A group of 133 writers,
journalists, and academics issued a letter protesting the
suppression of basic freedoms. Senior clerics questioned the
legitimacy of the revolutionary courts, widespread property
confiscations, and the power exercised by Khomeini as faqih.
Even Khomeini's son, Ahmad Khomeini, initially spoke on the
president's behalf. The IRP retaliated by using its
hezbollahi gangs to break up Bani Sadr rallies in various
cities and to harass opposition organizations. In November it
arrested Qotbzadeh, the former foreign minister, for an attack on
the IRP. Two weeks later, the offices of Bazargan's paper,
Mizan, were smashed.
Khomeini initially sought to mediate the differences between
Bani Sadr and the IRP to prevent action that would irreparably
weaken the president, the army, or the other institutions of the
state. He ordered the cancellation of a demonstration called for
December 19, 1980, to demand the dismissal of Bani Sadr as
commander in chief. In January 1981, he urged nonexperts to leave
the conduct of the war to the military. The next month he warned
clerics in the revolutionary organizations not to interfere in
areas outside their competence. On March 16, after meeting with and
failing to persuade Bani Sadr, Rajai, and clerical leaders to
resolve their differences, he issued a ten-point declaration
confirming the president in his post as commander in chief and
banning further speeches, newspaper articles, and remarks
contributing to factionalism. He established a three-man committee
to resolve differences between Bani Sadr and his critics and to
ensure that both parties adhered to Khomeini's guidelines. This
arrangement soon broke down. Bani Sadr, lacking other means, once
again took his case to the public in speeches and newspaper
articles. The adherents of the IRP used the revolutionary
organizations, the courts, and the hezbollahi gangs to
undermine the president.
The three-man committee appointed by Khomeini returned a
finding against the president. In May, the Majlis passed measures
to permit the prime minister to appoint caretakers to ministries
still lacking a minister, to deprive the president of his veto
power, and to allow the prime minister rather than the president to
appoint the governor of the Central Bank. Within days the Central
Bank governor was replaced by a Rajai appointee.
By the end of May, Bani Sadr appeared also to be losing
Khomeini's support. On May 27, Khomeini denounced Bani Sadr,
without mentioning him by name, for placing himself above the law
and ignoring the dictates of the Majlis. On June 7, Mizan
and Bani Sadr's newspaper, Enqelab-e Eslami, were banned.
Three days later, Khomeini removed Bani Sadr from his post as the
acting commander in chief of the military. Meanwhile, gangs roamed
the streets calling for Bani Sadr's ouster and death and clashed
with Bani Sadr supporters. On June 10, participants in a Mojahedin
rally at Revolution Square in Tehran clashed with
hezbollahis. On June 12, a motion for the impeachment of the
president was presented by 120 deputies. On June 13 or 14, Bani
Sadr, fearing for his life, went into hiding. The speaker of the
Majlis, after initially blocking the motion, allowed it to go
forward on June 17. The next day, the Mojahedin issued a call for
"revolutionary resistance in all its forms." The government treated
this as a call for rebellion and moved to confront the opposition
on the streets. Twenty-three protesters were executed on June 20
and 21, as the Majlis debated the motion for impeachment. In the
debate, several speakers denounced Bani Sadr; only five spoke in
his favor. On June 21, with 30 deputies absenting themselves from
the house or abstaining, the Majlis decided for impeachment on a
vote of 177 to 1. The revolutionary movement had brought together
a coalition of clerics, middle-class liberals, and secular radicals
against the shah. The impeachment of Bani Sadr represented the
triumph of the clerical party over the other members of this
coalition.
Data as of December 1987
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