Robert Fisk - The Great War for Civilisation - The Conquest of the Middle East

There would be no counter-coups in this revolution, no ‘Operation Ajax’, no CIA men operating from within the US embassy to buy up the bazaaris . Indeed, very soon there would be no US embassy. The demands for the return of the Shah were being made not for his restoration but in order to put him on trial. Only when the head of the snake had been cut off would the revolution feel safe. Just as the Americans believed twenty-four years later that only the capture of Saddam Hussein would bring them tranquillity in Iraq, so Khomeini and his retinue were convinced that only the death of the Shah – preferably hanged as a criminal in Iran for ‘crimes against God’ – would free Iran from its corrupt past. *In reality, the Shah was already dying from cancer. Many Iranians saw in his pathetic exile the true justice of God, his cancer the ultimate divine vengeance against one who had ‘sinned on earth’. The Shah’s gruesome odyssey through the hospitals of central America, New York City and, eventually, Cairo gave grim satisfaction to the mullahs who had already ordered his assassination.

Not long after his departure, I had sat at the feet of Hojatolislam Khalkhali, the ‘hanging judge’, as he listed those of the Shah’s family who had been sentenced to death in absentia . Around him sat a score or so of Revolutionary Guards who had been maimed in the revolutionary war against the Kurds of north-western Iran, each of them clacking his newly fitted artificial metal fingers, hands and feet as the prelate outlined the fate that so surely awaited his aristocratic enemies. Khalkhali it was who had sentenced a fourteen-year-old boy to death, who had approved of the stoning to death of women in Kermanshah, who earlier, in a mental asylum, would strangle cats in his prison cell. Gorbeh, the ‘Cat’, was what he was called. ‘The Shah will be strung up – he will be cut down and smashed,’ the Cat told me. ‘He is an instrument of Satan.’

In fact, the Shah was a poor substitute for the Devil, scarcely even the equal of Faustus; for he sold himself for the promise of worldly military power and seemingly everlasting American support. The chorus of harpies that pursued the Shah halfway around the world were the bickering, greedy surgeons, doctors and nurses who bombarded the dying man with pills, blood platelets and false hope, agents of darkness who only too well represented the technology of the world to whom the Shah had long ago sold his soul. His erstwhile friends from that world – King Hussein of Jordan, King Khaled of Saudi Arabia, King Hassan of Morocco, the Swiss, the Austrians, President Carter and Margaret Thatcher – either terminated his residence, turned him away or broke their promise to accept him when they realised the political cost. It was sobering to reflect that his only true friend – the only potentate to honour his word to Carter when the Americans wanted the old man to leave New York – was President Sadat of Egypt. President Torrijos of Panama – who gave temporary refuge to the Shah and who wanted to seduce Queen Farah but was swiftly given the brush-off by the Shahbanou – produced the pithiest obituary of the ‘Light of the Aryans’. ‘This is what happensto a man squeezed by the great nations,’ he said. ‘After all the juice is gone, they throw him away.’

In the event, the Shah died in Cairo on 27 July 1980 and was lowered into a modest tomb in the al-Rifai mosque. Six years later, in the heat of summer, I went with an Iranian friend to look at his tomb. It was midday and there was only one guardian in the mosque, an old, silver-haired man who, for a pittance, promised to take us into the last resting place of the man who thought he was the spiritual descendant of Cyrus the Great. There was a single marble slab and, resting upon it, a handwritten poem declaring eternal faith in the Shah from a member of the Javidan guards. A spray of withered roses lay on the tomb. The old guardian wandered up to us and muttered ‘Baksheesh’ . He settled for 50 piastres. In the end, it cost the equivalent of 40 cents to sit at the feet of the King of Kings.

The Islamic revolutionaries who now emerged behind Ayatollah Khomeini were oddly middle-class. Men like Sadeq Qotbzadeh, the head of the television service, later foreign minister – and later still, executed for allegedly plotting against the Ayatollah – were graduates of American universities. They spoke English with American accents, which meant that they could appear surprisingly at ease on the US television networks. Many, like the new deputy prime minister Amir Abbas Entezam, flaunted their un-proletarian origins. ‘I am proud that this has been a middle-class revolution,’ Entezam announced to me one day. He leaned forward in his chair and tapped his chest. ‘I’m proud of that,’ he repeated. By ministerial standards, his was a modest office with only two desks, a sofa, a clutter of chairs and a telephone that purred unanswered in the corner. It would have been difficult to find anyone more middle-class than Entezam, with his American education and well-travelled career as an engineer. Yet in his way, he was telling the truth. For while the physical power behind the revolution lay in those colossal street demonstrations by the urban poor and the Islamic revivalists, it was the middle class from the bazaar, the tens of thousands of merchants from the Middle East’s largest souk whom the Shah tried to tame with a system of guilds, that provided the economic backing for Khomeini’s return. It was this merchant class and its alliance with the mullahs that emerged as the critical combination of secular and religious opposition.

That is why Iran’s revolution had until now generally avoided the more traditional path of such events, the looting of the homes and property of the rich. That is why you could still take a taxi across Tehran and drive into the northern suburbs beneath the mountains to find that the luxury apartments and opulent town houses with their tree-shaded verandas and goldfish ponds had been left untouched. Accumulated wealth had not been appropriated by the state. By late March of 1979, however, this had begun to change. In the north of Iran, around the Caspian, factories were being taken over by workers – leftists had led the revolution east of Kurdistan and the mosque had never held sway there – and property was confiscated. The interim government appointed by Khomeini was receiving reports of further confiscations near Mashad and the pattern was beginning to spread to Tehran.

Just over a week earlier, Faribourz Attapour, one of the city’s most prolific and outspoken journalists, was told that his father had been arrested. It turned out that Attapour Senior, who owned a small estate on the Caspian coast, had walked into his local Tehran bank to cash a cheque and had been detained by the cashier, who thought that if his customer looked rich then he must indeed be wealthy – and that if he was indeed wealthy, then he must also be corrupt. Old Mr Attapour, who had been a soldier in the Imperial army but retired from military service twenty-seven years earlier, was seventy years old and deeply in debt. Nonetheless, he was collected from the bank by a heavily armed revolutionary komiteh and freighted off to the Qasr prison. At least, that is where Faribourz Attapour thought his father was being held.

No official statement had been issued by the komiteh and even the government could not gain access to the jail. There were now an estimated 8,000 prisoners inside – there had been around 2,000 at the time of the Shah – and it took the Red Cross several weeks to gain admission. So it was not surprising that Attapour was angry. ‘This revolution has deteriorated into petty vengeance and tyranny,’ he said. ‘It can only be compared to the Jacobin Terror of the French revolution. The merchants in the bazaar have more money than my father but they do not care about his fate. Nor do the so-called religious leaders. I spoke on the telephone to the local ayatollah from our area of the Caspian and he said that my father must be corrupt because he was rich. He would not even let me answer his accusation on the telephone. He just hung up.’