DICTATORSHIP AND REVOLUTION: Iran - A Contemporary History

Dictatorship and Revolution

Copyright © 2023 The International Committee in Search of Justice

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First published in February 2023

The International Committee in Search of Justice (ISJ)

ISBN-10: 94-6475-224-6 (Hardcover)

ISBN- 978-94-6475-224-3 (Hardcover)

ISBN-10: 94-6475-225-4 (Paperback)

ISBN-13: 978-94-6475-225-0 (Paperback)

ISBN-10: 94-6475-223-8 (eBook)

ISBN-13: 978-94-6475-223-6 (eBook)

Printed by The International Committee in Search of Justice (ISJ)

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You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police ... yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts: words spoken abroad, thoughts stirring at home -- all the more powerful because forbidden -- terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic.

- Winston S. Churchill

‘Blood, Sweat and Tears’

This book is dedicated to all those who have strived for freedom and democracy in Iran for the past 120 years. We hope that they achieve their dream very soon.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My great thanks to Ambassador Lincoln Bloomfield Jr. and to Senator Giulio Terzi, for their friendship, wisdom, and support during the preparation of this book. Also, to my great friend of many decades Alejo Vidal Quadras, President of the ISJ. My gratitude, in addition, to the NCRI and PMOI/MEK, who fulfilled all my requests for documents, information and research materials, without any political consideration, in furtherance of my goal in writing this book.

Struan Stevenson

Chair In Search of Justice (ISJ) Committee on the Protection of Political Freedoms in Iran

Coordinator of the Campaign for Iran Change (CIC)

Glasgow, Scotland, January 2023

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

HOW A COSSACK COLONEL ROSE TO BE A PERSIAN KING

MOHAMMAD REZA SHAH PAHLAVI

THE ADVENT OF A DICTATORSHIP

HIJACKING THE REVOLUTION

KHOMEINI’S REIGN OF TERROR

PRESIDENTS OF THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN

UNMASKING THE MONARCHISTS

NATIONAL COUNCIL OF RESISTANCE OF IRAN (NCRI)

THE EXPORT OF TERROR

GUNBOAT DIPLOMACY

IRAN’S MEDIEVAL PRISONS

ASHRAF 3

THE TATTERED NUCLEAR DEAL

POVERTY AND UNREST

THE PLIGHT OF WOMEN IN IRAN

THE PLIGHT OF CHILDREN IN IRAN

DESTROYING THE ENVIRONMENT

THE DOOR IS CLOSING FOR THE MULLAHS

THE APEX APPEASERS

DEMONIZING THE OPPOSITION

IRAN’S MULLAHS TURN TO CYBERWARS

THE TIPPING POINT

A BRIGHT FUTURE BECKONS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1 - Reza Khan

Figure 2 - The autocratic Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi

Figure 3 - Mohammad Mosaddegh

Figure 4 - SAVAK SECRET POLICE emblem

Figure 5 - Ebrat Prison is today a museum

Figure 6 - Mohammad Hanifnejad, Ali-Asghar Badizadegan, Saied Mohsen

Figure 7 - Massoud Rajavi

Figure 8 – Regime founder - Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini

Figure 9 - Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri

Figure 10 - Abolhassan Banisadr – First President of Iran

Figure 11 - Mohammad-Ali Rajai was president for only 28 days

Figure 12 - Ali Khamenei, supreme leader of theocratic regime in Iran

Figure 13 - Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani

Figure 14 - Mohammad Khatami

Figure 15 - Holocaust denier - President Mahmud Ahmadinejad

Figure 16 - The wolf in sheep’s clothing – President Hassan Rouhani

Figure 17 - Ebrahim Raisi – ‘The Butcher of Tehran’

Figure 18 - Reza Pahlavi – self-proclaimed Crown Prince of Iran

Figure 19 - Mrs Maryam Rajavi – President-elect of the NCRI

Figure 20 - Assadollah Assadi – the Iranian ‘diplomat’ terrorist

Figure 21 - The arch appeaser Josep Borrell meeting Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif in Tehran

Figure 22 - IRGC – the theocratic regime’s Gestapo

Figure 23 - Nouri al-Maliki, the brutal dictator of Iraq

Figure 24 - The terrorist Quds Force Commander – General Qassem Soleimani

Figure 25 - The holed Kokuka Courageous in the Gulf of Oman

Figure 26 - Evin Prison, Tehran

Figure 27 - Ashraf 3 – Albania – the birth of a new city

Figure 28 - The Joint Commission overseeing the JCPOA nuclear deal in Vienna

Figure 29 - Mike Pompeo – US Secretary of State under President Donald Trump

Figure 30 - Poverty and despair in Iran

Figure 31 - Mass protests in Iran

Figure 32 - The desiccation of the Zayandeh Rud River

Figure 33 - Roberta Metsola – President of the European Parliament

Figure 34 - Children in poverty in Iran

Figure 35 - Farmers of Varzaneh protest for their right to water

Figure 36 - Hamid Noury, convicted of involvement in 1988 Massacre

Figure 37 - Crowds welcome the life sentence for Hamid Noury in Stockholm

Figure 39 - MOIS Agents Massoud Khodabandeh and his British wife Anne Singleton

Figure 40 - Mahsa Amini – killed by the ‘morality police’ in September 2022, for not wearing her hijab properly

Figure 41 - Women protesting in the nationwide uprising in Iran

Figure 42 - Former US Vice President Mike Pence

Figure 43 - PMOI/MEK supporters in the West call for Iran freedom

Figure 44 - Struan Stevenson

FOREWORD

As the world receives disturbing glimpses of the popular uprising gripping Iran, which has only intensified since the brutal September 2022 detention and killing of a 22-year-old woman by morality police over the positioning of her headscarf, many in the West seem at a loss to grasp the import of this momentous episode. Should not governments be focused on seeking agreement with the Tehran regime to curb its nuclear program in return for lifting economic sanctions? Should not diplomats be urging Iran and its neighbours to build on channels of dialogue and reconcile their differences? Are not the protestors’ calls for an end to clerical rule a recipe for chaos, as other countries in the Middle East have experienced after their regimes have fallen? Is it not the case that there is no viable alternative to the fundamentalist Islamic dictatorship in Iran?

In this richly insightful and informative review of Iran’s political history since the start of the 20th century, Struan Stevenson brings into painfully sharp focus the moral and geopolitical perils resulting from Western political circles detached from the reality of Iran. While it should not require intellectual gymnastics to see that Iran’s leaders have forfeited any pretence of a mandate to govern when security forces are beating and firing upon young women and even schoolgirls demanding relief from tyranny in over 300 cities, confusion endures. Hasn’t Iran always had internal turmoil, from the 1953 coup against Mosaddegh to the 1979 revolution and the 2009 Green Movement protests? Hasn’t the clerical regime always restored order when faced with protests over the past 44 years? As for who might try to restore calm and chart a future political course if the regime ever did fall from power, would not the late Shah’s son Reza Pahlavi provide a more palatable option than, for example, the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) and its umbrella organization, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), which for decades has been labelled a Marxist, terrorist, cult-like organization?

For anyone who does not instantly recognize the righteous sarcasm in these questions, this book is a much-needed antidote, and a superb primer on Iran’s turbulent contemporary political history. For not only does Stevenson distil the relevant facts surrounding the country’s most consequential political figures and civic challenges, but he illuminates the defining curse that for generations has thwarted the Iranian people’s democratic aspirations, namely the corrupt and brutal alliance, tacit or explicit, of Iran’s monarchists and clerics. It clearly needed illuminating, given the mulish reluctance of Western politicians and reporters to shoulder the duties imposed on them by an irredeemably malign global actor.

A member of the Scottish Conservative Party who for 15 years represented Scotland in the European Parliament, Struan Stevenson is the embodiment of democratic principles. His focus for many years on human rights abuses in the Middle East, principally Iraq and Iran, and his first-hand familiarity with the true nature and history of the MEK and NCRI, lend a depth of expertise on the subject matter and a moral gravitas that has made Stevenson a leading international critic of Iran’s religious fascism, and an unimpeachable witness to the true nature and goals of Iran’s organized resistance, the NCRI, led by Maryam Rajavi. The NCRI is, notwithstanding decades of regime-promoted propaganda to the contrary, a women-led, non-violent resistance movement dedicated to popular sovereignty, separation of religion and state, equal gender rights, an end to the death penalty, political legitimacy through the ballot box, commitment to international norms, and a non-nuclear Iran. No member has ever engaged in terrorism.

No longer can Western politicians – or correspondents, academics, and think-tank ‘experts ‘for that matter – afford to remain detached from the reality of Iran. Given a quiz to test their knowledge of the 100 most salient facts in these pages on Iran’s political evolution, most would fail miserably. In producing this stellar volume, Struan Stevenson has left them with no excuse.

Ambassador Lincoln Bloomfield Jr

Assistant Secretary of State-Political-Military Affairs (2001-2005)

Alexandria, VA, January 2023

PREFACE

When dictatorship is a fact, revolution is a duty! Pascal Mercier

This book is not a comprehensive history of Iran nor of its modern era. Rather the focus is on how two anachronistic institutions of Iranian society, namely the monarchy and the clergy, sometimes in collusion, sometimes in rivalry, have held Iranian society back from its full development and progress in the modern age and have led to dictatorship of one kind or the other. Their shared quality and ideology always stem from authoritarianism, either claiming to be the Shadow of God or the Viceregent of God on earth, and the denial of political, economic, and civil liberties to citizens that form the bedrock of a free and democratic society based on rule of law.

Since the mid-1800s, the awakening of Iranians and their determined drive to join the modern era began with attempted reforms to industrialize and modernize the country by Amir Kabir (Mirza Taghi Khan-e Farahani) which was thwarted by the Qajar absolute monarch and his corrupt court at the behest of the British empire.

Iranians decried the monarchy’s vast and enslaving concessions to foreign interests and engaged in a rule of law revolution (Constitutional Revolution of 1906) to limit the absolute power of the monarchy and establish oversight of a legislative branch (Majlis). The revolution was thwarted by Tsarist Russian intervention, the onset of the Great War, and subsequent British interference to restore absolute monarchy.

The oil nationalization project of the democratic government of Mohammad Mosaddegh in the 1950s pushed back the monarchy to make Iranians masters of their own country but was illegally overthrown by a foreign instigated coup d’état supported by the reactionary clerics and their mobs to again restore absolute monarchy.

When the Shah engaged in reforms from the top to push Iran to industrialize and expand oil production, all the while denying awakened Iranians their inalienable right to political, economic, and civil liberties, Iranians sought to reclaim their rights, but were faced with a brutal police-military crackdown led by the Shah’s secret police (SAVAK). The Shah went so far as to establish one-party rule and called on all Iranians opposed to his authoritarianism to either leave Iran or endure prison.¹ And so it was that the 1979 revolution took shape. With democratically inclined leaders and intellectuals all imprisoned or executed by the monarchy, the clergy rode the anti-monarchy wave in society to victory and usurped the leadership of that momentous revolution.

Now, after 44 years, the absolute religious rule of the clergy with theoretical claims to Islam, albeit opposed by intellectuals and laymen of faith, has revealed itself as another incarnation of that same impediment to democratic development of Iranian society: ruthless dictatorship, and disregard of the rule of law based on universal human rights.

As this book was being written in the summer of 2022, Iran was rapidly gripped with another cataclysmic uprising in September. The refrain this time it is different could be heard from every corner of Iranian society and intelligentsia and even from foreign observers and students of Iranian affairs. The regime lacks any legitimacy, has lost cohesion at the top and among its security establishment and forces, and is engaged in criminal negligence and corruption in the management of Iran’s economy. The mullahs’ regime is facing widespread and unprecedented dissent among the populace and is confronted by unwavering and uncompromising calls for its overthrow. Abroad too, the policy of appeasing this regime is rapidly losing traction as the European Parliament called overwhelmingly for Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) to be blacklisted as a terrorist organisation in Europe as the book was going to press in late January.

Iran is once again in a revolutionary situation. In times past, Iranians have been robbed of experiencing democracy and becoming a true republic of the people, for the people, and by the people, by various foreign interventions, coups, and monarchist and clerical machinations. This time around, a viable democratic alternative with no vestiges of the monarchy or the clergy, has grown in opposition to both. A vision presented by Maryam Rajavi and her Ten Point Plan for the future of Iran, together with the international and domestic solidarity assembled by the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), heralds new hope that authoritarian outcomes can be averted, and a truly