Iran’s long history of outside interference

Iran is in the news again. This time because the bazaar joined protests against the Islamic Republic of Iran and many protesters have been reported killed and seriously injured.

The bazaar is a microcosm of economic activity by the merchant class mixed with social, political and religious interaction in the market place that traditionally acts as a barometer of the acceptability of government in Iran.

When Liz Truss was forced to resign as British prime minister in 2022, she fell foul of the British equivalent of the bazaar – the markets in the City of London. And so it was in Iran recently when inflation went through the roof and the bazaar joined the protest movement there – a harbinger of regime change in the past.

The participation of the bazaar in the protest movement even excited Reza Pahlavi the 65-year-old son of the former Shah of Iran Mohamed Reza Pahlavi who expressed a wish to return to Iran from the US – and do what exactly?

But it lacked the mass mobilisation necessary for the kind of revolutionary change that forced his father to flee Iran in January 1979. The 1979 revolution in Iran has been compared to the French and Russian Revolutions 1789-92 and October 1917 with one important difference: whereas the revolutions that ousted the Bourbons in France and the Romanovs in Russia were progressive leaps forward away from the ancien regime, the revolutionthat drove out Shah Reza Pahlavi turned out to be a theocratic leap of faith.

And yet the Iranian revolution was not fully theocratic to begin with and the expectation in democratic circles in Iran was that it would replace the repressive regime of the Shah with a kind of constitutional caliphate.

The cleric Ayatollah Khomeini who had become the focal point of the revolution returned to Iran from Paris, and the hope was that his arrival would cement the overthrow of the Shah and that he would then repair to the Holy City of Qom as a constitutional figurehead and act as an apolitical guardian of the revolution.

The autocratic rule of the Pahlavi dynasty had been imposed on Iran by the British early last century to serve British interests instead of the interests of the Iranian people. To safeguard their oil interests in Iran the British installed Reza Khan as Shah in 1921, but he turned pro Nazi in the 1930s and was replaced by his more amenable son Shah Mohammed Reza (the Shah) in 1941.

The true interests of the Iranian people were represented by the aristocrat politician, Mohammad Mosaddegh, who championed nationalisation of the Anglo Iranian Company and changing the autocratic rule of the Shah into a constitutional monarchy that blended the ancient history of Iran and its unique brand of Shia Islam that like the monarchy in Britain would have no political power.

Mosaddegh became prime minister in 1951, and the Shah was not averse to his programme, but he was weak and indecisive and allowed himself to be manipulated by the British foreign intelligence service who persuaded the US Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow the democratically elected government of Mosaddegh in 1953.

The Anglo Americans encouraged and sustained the Shah’s autocratic rule until he and his secret police known as Savak became so repressive the people forced him and his family to flee in the 1979 revolution.

The Shah left Iran ostensibly for medical treatment, but he must have known his position as head of state was doomed. He had agreed to become a constitutional monarch and appointed the government of Shapour Bakhtiar in January 1979, but it was too late.

His regime had lost its grip on power and he flew out in search of medical asylum. Shamefully most western countries that had previously milked Iran’s oil wealth refused him medical asylum until Egypt stepped up and he died there in 1980 a bitter man. 

The exiled cleric Ayatollah Khomeini flew in from Paris at the end of January 1979 seemingly to restore democracy in Iran – though he himself said enigmatically that he felt nothing – hichi – as he arrived. Initially Khomeini appointed Mehdi Bazargan a former minister in the Mosaddegh government of 1951-53 who wanted to set up a democratic Iran, but he resigned in November 1979 and had no say in the drafting of the constitution of the Islamic Republic.

What is interesting about the Constitution of the Islamic Republic is that it has a long preamble that explains how and why the Islamic revolution happened and why it was inspired by religion.

The involvement of British and American intelligence in the removal of Mosaddegh and the Shah’s subservience to their oil interests is specifically blamed in the constitution’s preamble and is consistent with the facts disclosed in Britain and US under freedom of information legislation.

The preamble goes on to claim that the failure of “the anti-despotic movement for constitutional government, and anti-colonialist movement for the nationalisation of petroleum of the Mosaddegh government 1951-53” was because they were not religious.

It is true that the militant clergy were not the vanguard of movement in 1951-53, but it is not true that Mosaddegh failed because his movement was not religious. Mosaddegh failed because Britain and America removed him from power in a coup d’état that he could not defeat with or without the support of religion.

We normally study history in books but sometimes it happens that we experience it professionally as it unfolds. As a young barrister in the UK I represented Iranian refugees in front of tribunals both before and after the revolution of 1979.

Before the revolution I represented Iranians who feared torture from the Shah’s secret police Savak, and after the revolution I represented Iranians who feared torture from the Revolutionary Guards of the Islamic Republic of Iran. But the persecution and suffering they inflicted on the Iranian people were the same. Prime minister Mosaddegh would never have tolerated such inhumanity.