Nazenin Ansari: Remembering Iran's revolution
[Nazenin Ansari is diplomatic editor of Kayhan (London), a weekly Persian-language newspaper, and president of the Foreign Press Association.]
Life for me as I had come to understand it ended on 15 November 1977. Standing next to a group of young elementary school children from one of Washington DC's inner-city schools on the Ellipse facing the South Lawn of the White House, I was one of a thousand greeting the visit of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi and his Queen to the United States. The children were waving the US flag and I, a university student, the lion and sun flag of Iran.
Within seconds of the 21-gun salute sounding, hundreds of white-hooded and masked protestors viciously charged into us with brandishing sticks with nails that used to hold their placards and shouting "Khomeini come back" and "Down with Imperialism". The streets around the area turned into a bloody battleground with club wielding anti-shah protestors felling peaceful demonstrators. Tear gas and smoke from burning garbage transformed the Indian summer day into a hazy and mordant one. By the end of the clashes, more than 120 people had been injured.
Although this was a taste of what was to unfold for the ensuing 30 years in Iran, no one could have imagined the degree of brutality and tragic consequences of the revolution which ousted the monarchy and established the theocracy in Iran. Along with millions of Iranians, I became a refugee.
Our ranks included technocrats, military personnel, entrepreneurs, artists, writers and bankers. When the revolution turned against its own children we were joined by socialist and liberal elements comprising large number of professionals, intellectuals and academics, young men who fled military service during the Iran-Iraq war and young women and families who were stifled by the harsh Islamic laws enacted in Iran. Our numbers further swelled following the crackdown on the student movement, the weakening of the reformist faction and the worsening of the economic situation.
The Islamic revolution, which promised to bring democracy and prosperity to Iran, instead built its foundations on the rubble of chronic repression, poverty, mismanagement and corruption. Images of the corpses of hundreds of thousands of young boys strewn across the deserts of southern Iran holding plastic keys "to open the gates of heaven", men and women hanging from cranes, dissidents assassinated abroad, intellectuals murdered at home, razed mosques belonging to clerics advocating separation of mosque from state, drug addicts languishing on the streets, underage girls smuggled for prostitution to neighbouring states by gangs, ethnic minorities being gunned down, burnt-out university dorms and the scars of torture on the bodies of those who dared to object: these shall forever symbolise the reactionary, brutish yet inept rule of those in charge of the revolution and the Islamic Republic.
The cause that fired the revolution in Iran fed off the fortunes and opportunities of ordinary Iranians. However, 30 years later the theocracy can no longer afford to stoke the revolutionary zeal of its followers...
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
Life for me as I had come to understand it ended on 15 November 1977. Standing next to a group of young elementary school children from one of Washington DC's inner-city schools on the Ellipse facing the South Lawn of the White House, I was one of a thousand greeting the visit of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi and his Queen to the United States. The children were waving the US flag and I, a university student, the lion and sun flag of Iran.
Within seconds of the 21-gun salute sounding, hundreds of white-hooded and masked protestors viciously charged into us with brandishing sticks with nails that used to hold their placards and shouting "Khomeini come back" and "Down with Imperialism". The streets around the area turned into a bloody battleground with club wielding anti-shah protestors felling peaceful demonstrators. Tear gas and smoke from burning garbage transformed the Indian summer day into a hazy and mordant one. By the end of the clashes, more than 120 people had been injured.
Although this was a taste of what was to unfold for the ensuing 30 years in Iran, no one could have imagined the degree of brutality and tragic consequences of the revolution which ousted the monarchy and established the theocracy in Iran. Along with millions of Iranians, I became a refugee.
Our ranks included technocrats, military personnel, entrepreneurs, artists, writers and bankers. When the revolution turned against its own children we were joined by socialist and liberal elements comprising large number of professionals, intellectuals and academics, young men who fled military service during the Iran-Iraq war and young women and families who were stifled by the harsh Islamic laws enacted in Iran. Our numbers further swelled following the crackdown on the student movement, the weakening of the reformist faction and the worsening of the economic situation.
The Islamic revolution, which promised to bring democracy and prosperity to Iran, instead built its foundations on the rubble of chronic repression, poverty, mismanagement and corruption. Images of the corpses of hundreds of thousands of young boys strewn across the deserts of southern Iran holding plastic keys "to open the gates of heaven", men and women hanging from cranes, dissidents assassinated abroad, intellectuals murdered at home, razed mosques belonging to clerics advocating separation of mosque from state, drug addicts languishing on the streets, underage girls smuggled for prostitution to neighbouring states by gangs, ethnic minorities being gunned down, burnt-out university dorms and the scars of torture on the bodies of those who dared to object: these shall forever symbolise the reactionary, brutish yet inept rule of those in charge of the revolution and the Islamic Republic.
The cause that fired the revolution in Iran fed off the fortunes and opportunities of ordinary Iranians. However, 30 years later the theocracy can no longer afford to stoke the revolutionary zeal of its followers...