Abolhassan Banisadr

Early life and education

Banisadr was born on 22 March 1933 in Baghcheh, a small village north of Hamedan. His father, Nasrollah, was a Shia cleric who had originally migrated to the area from Bijar, Kurdistan. Banisadr studied law, theology, and sociology at the University of Tehran. He participated in the anti-Shah student movement during the early 1960s, which led to his being imprisoned twice and wounded during the 1963 demonstrations. Due to his political activities, Banisadr soon fled from Iran to France, where he studied finance and economics at the Sorbonne. In France, he also wrote a book about Islamic finance, Eghtesad Tohidi, which roughly translates as "The Economics of Monotheism".

In 1972, Banisadr's father died. It was at the funeral in Iraq that Banisadr met Ruhollah Khomeini, and thereafter joined the latter's Islamic resistance group, becoming an advisor. Prior to the Iranian Revolution, Banisadr was affiliated with the pro-Mossadeq National Front (Iran). During his youth in Paris, he assumed leadership of the Islamic faction within the National Front, then recognized as the Islamic Association of Students. Banisadr later returned to Iran with Khomeini on 1 February 1979, as the Iranian Revolution neared completion.

Career

Upon the establishment of a post-revolutionary Interim Government, Banisadr was named Deputy Minister of Finance. At Khomeini's direction, he also became a member of the Council of the Islamic Revolution, taking the seat vacated by Mehdi Bazargan, who had left to become the prime minister. On 12 November 1979, following the dissolution of the Interim Government in response to the Iran hostage crisis. Banisadr replaced Ebrahim Yazdi as Minister of Foreign Affairs. That same month, on 17 November, Banisadr was promoted to Minister of Finance. He openly criticized the hostage crisis, arguing that the ordeal was isolating Iran from the Third World and forming "a state within a state."

In January 1980, Banisadr registered to become a candidate for Iran's newly formed presidency. Though he lacked religious credentials, he remained protected by Khomeini, who had insisted that members of the clergy not run for office. On 25 January 1980, the election was held and Banisadr received 75.6 percent of the vote, winning a four-year term as president. Inaugural ceremonies took place on 4 February at a hospital where Khomeini was recuperating from a heart ailment.

Between August and September 1980, Banisadr survived two helicopter crashes near the Iran–Iraq border. Prior to the beginning of the Iran–Iraq War, he was made commander-in-chief by Khomeini.

Impeachment

By early 1981, Iran was experiencing difficulty on the frontline, a sharp reduction in human rights, stricter media censorship, increased corruption, and heavy social upheaval. Banisadr, engaged in a power struggle with religious hardliners, called for a new referendum on democratic governance, pointing out that while he had won over 10 million votes in the presidential election, the theocratic-aligned Islamic Republican Party (IRP) received less than 4 million in the parliamentary elections. The message became a rallying point "for all doubters and dissidents" of the new regime, including the militant left-wing Mojahedin-e Khalq organization (MEK).

On 10 June 1981, amid a worsening political climate, Khomeini stripped Banisadr of his title as commander-in-chief. A week later, on 17 June, the Islamic Consultative Assembly debated Banisadr's ousting for his opposition to the theocratic establishment ruling Iran; only one legislator, Salaheddin Bayani, spoke in Banisadr's favor during the proceedings. Legislators filed articles of impeachment against Banisadr on 21 June, which Khomeini signed off on the next day, showing endorsement for the decision. Hussein-Ali Montazeri, second in line to the supreme leader, was among the most prominent of clerics who remained in support of Banisadr, but he later had his authority stripped.[[File:Banisadr namaz.jpg|left|thumb|Banisadr praying in military uniform, 1979]] In the days before his removal from office, Banisadr had gone into hiding in Tehran as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) seized presidential buildings and imprisoned writers at a newspaper closely tied to him. Street violence soon escalated as both Hezbollah mobs and the IRGC attacked "counterrevolutionary" demonstrators at a large pro-Banisadr rally, killing 50, wounding 300, and arresting nearly a thousand. Over the summer of 1981, several of Banisadr's closest friends and advisors were executed, in addition to hundreds of revolutionaries deemed unsympathetic to the Islamic regime.

In an attempt to regain power, Banisadr sought to organize a collaboration of anti-Khomeini factions, including the MEK, the Kurdistan Democratic Party, and the communist Organization of People's Fedaian Guerrillas, while eschewing any contact with pro-monarchist exile groups. Banisadr met numerous times while in hiding with MEK leader Massoud Rajavi to plan a formal alliance. However, after the 27 July 1981 execution of prominent MEK member Mohammad Reza Saadati, both Banisadr and Rajavi concluded that it was unsafe to remain in Iran.

Flight and exile

On 29 July 1981, Banisadr and Rajavi were smuggled aboard an Iranian Air Force Boeing 707 piloted by sympathetic Army Colonel Behzad Moezi.

Banisadr and Rajavi found political asylum in France, conditional on abstaining from anti-Khomeini activities inside the country, a restriction effectively ignored by the two after the French embassy evacuated from Tehran. By 1984, however, Banisadr had withdrawn from the coalition after a disagreement with Rajavi.

''My Turn to Speak''

In 1991, Banisadr released an English translation of his 1989 text My Turn to Speak: Iran, the Revolution and Secret Deals with the U.S. In the book, Banisadr alleged covert dealings between the Ronald Reagan presidential campaign and leaders in Tehran to prolong the Iran hostage crisis before the 1980 United States presidential election. He also claimed that Henry Kissinger plotted to set up a Palestinian state in the Iranian province of Khuzestan and that Zbigniew Brzezinski conspired with Saddam Hussein to plot Iraq's 1980 invasion of Iran.

Lloyd Grove of The Washington Post described the book as atypical for a bestseller, noting that it was assembled from interviews by French journalist Jean-Charles Deniau and characterized it as often enigmatic and complex rather than straightforward. In a review for Foreign Affairs, William B. Quandt characterized the book as a rambling and self-serving collection of reminiscences, stating that it contains numerous sensational allegations but lacks supporting documentation. Kirkus Reviews called it "an interesting—though frequently incredible and consistently self-serving-memoir," adding that "frequent sensational accusations render [Banisadr's] tale an eccentric, implausible commentary on the tragic folly of the Iranian Revolution."

Later views

In published articles on the 2009 Iranian presidential election protests, Banisadr attributed the unusually open political climate before the election to the government's urgent need to prove its legitimacy, which he said had been lost. He further wrote that the spontaneous uprising had not only cost the government its political legitimacy, but that Khamenei's threats leading to the violent crackdown had also cost the government its religious legitimacy.

Personal life and death

In 1961, Banisadr married Ozra Hosseini. They shared two daughters and one son.

Beginning in 1981, Banisadr lived with his family in the commune of Auvers-sur-Oise, under close guard by French police, until later moving to Versailles. Banisadr's daughter, Firouzé, married Massoud Rajavi in 1982, but the couple divorced in 1984 following Banisadr's withdrawal from the NCRI.

After a long illness, Banisadr died at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris on 9 October 2021, at the age of 88. He is buried in Versailles, in the cemetery of Gonards.

Hossein Mousavian, Secretary of Iran's National Front (Iran), described Banisadr as "a man of principles." Iran analyst Morteza Kazemian stated on Iran International TV that Banisadr was "an independent nationalist figure, who believed in Iran's territorial integrity and strived to strengthen social movements in Iran and fight clerical despotism."

Books

• Touhid Economics, 1980
• My Turn to Speak: Iran, the Revolution and Secret Deals with the U.S. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 1991. . Translation of Le complot des ayatollahs. Paris: La Découverte, 1989
• Le Coran et le pouvoir: principes fondamentaux du Coran, Imago, 1993
• Dignity in the 21st Century, Doris Schroeder and Abol-Hassan Banisadr, with translation by Mahmood Delkhasteh and Sarah Amsler
• Books after 1980

References

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