We had just sent our February issue on the Gulf off to the printer when Jimmy Carter, in his State of the Union message of January 23, announced that any challenge to the historic US sphere of influence in the Gulf region would provoke US military intervention. In this issue we document and analyze developments since then, as the US gears up its military capacity for such a move. In an accompanying roundup of US military relations with the states of the region, we give special attention to the US-Egyptian relationship as it has evolved since 1974.
To the Editors: Your issue on the left forces in Iran (MERIP Reports 86) was interesting and informative, albeit somewhat dated. I found Ervand Abrahamian’s essay to be an altogether good description of the origins and development of the guerrilla movement in Iran. While I disagree with the important role he has relegated to the Guruhe Munsheb, and am somewhat surprised that he should use the class-less term “Islamic Revolution,” this letter focuses of his discussion of the Fedayi’s theory and practice of armed struggle. His article left out the important fact that there were two positions on armed struggle within the organization: those of Masoud Ahmadzadeh and Bijan Jazani, respectively.
Fred Halliday, Iran: Dictatorship and Development (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979).
The Iranian revolution of 1978-1979 was a momentous historical event. It probably involved a greater proportion of any country’s population in direct insurrectionary action than has any previous revolution. In the late fall of 1978 anti-regime demonstrations were absorbing virtually the whole active populations of Iran’s major and not-so-major towns — tens of millions out of a population of some 35 million. This disciplined but unarmed populace virtually dissolved the supposedly loyal, well-disciplined and certainly well-armed forces of a brutal, repressive dictatorship with the firing of hardly a shot.
The following speech, written by Ayatollah Khomeini on the eve of the Iranian New Year, is his most comprehensive summary of his political philosophy and world outlook. Here Khomeini lays out not only his concept of revolutionary Islam — an aspect of his thought well-known in the West — but also two other equally important aspects of his thought not so well known, especially among the left.
The workers of the Foster Wheeler-Tehran Jonub Company, part of the Ahvaz Steel Industry Contractors Company, today ended their 56-day strike following a meeting with Hojjat-ol-Islam Jannati and Engineer Gharavi, governor of Khuzestan. Dr. Sheybani, member of the board of directors for the National Iranian Steel Company, promised that the workers’ salaries for the strike period, as well as their new year bonuses, will be paid.
Commenting on the strike, Hojjat-ol-lslam Jannati explained that the decision to pay the workers for the strike period was based on the fact that these workers were the victims of a plot.
A shroud of silence seems to have enveloped Iran’s oil industry since last fall when the top oil official Hassan Nazih was dismissed under charges of treason, allegedly for failing to purge non-Islamic elements from the ranks of the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC). Even production and export figures have become state secrets. Reports of difficulties in maintaining the officially sanctioned production level of 3.5 million barrels a day are almost impossible to confirm.
This interview is with an Iranian woman active on the left who had lived in the US for seven years before returning to Iran in January 7979. She visited MERIP in Boston in early February 1980.
Could you tell us what your impressions were when you returned to Iran a year ago?
I had been away about seven years. When I arrived, the Shah had just left. The feeling of solidarity was tremendous, with everyone cooperating and organizing massive demonstrations.
Do you feel that sense of unity and solidarity is still there?
During July and August 1979 I visited a number of Iranian factories. There I held discussions and interviews with militants and activists of different political hues, and with ordinary working people, about the workers’ councils that have appeared in Iranian factories since the February 1979 revolution. My distinct impression is that large numbers of Iranian industrial workers have been through an extraordinary experience, which no outsider, even the most sympathetic, can record or convey. As far as I can gather, there has been little effort to institutionalize this experience, to generalize from it, or to coordinate activities among the councils of different factories.
A year after the overthrow of the Pahlavi regime, the Iranian revolution is still going through a tumultuous and uncertain period, the end of which is by no means in sight. To evaluate the long-term import of this revolution now is therefore, in any serious sense, impossible: It would be like trying to assess the course of the French revolution in 1791, of the Mexican revolution in 1915, or the Russian in the summer of 1917. This is not meant to imply that the Iranian revolution will necessarily take a more radical form before a stable post-revolutionary system emerges. But it does emphasize that it is only possible to assess the overall trajectory of a revolution, including its earlier passages, once some established post-revolutionary state has emerged.
Ali-Reza Nobari, Iran Erupts (Iran-American Documentation Group, Stanford University, December 1978).
Sepehr Zabih, Iran’s Revolutionary Upheaval: An Interpretive Essay (San Francisco: Alchemy Books, 1979).
Excerpts from an interview with Tudeh Party Secretary General Nureddin Kianuri by Elevtherotipia (Athens), November 27 and 28, 1979.
Since it is a timely issue, I would like to begin with the occupation of the US Embassy. What is your party’s position on this issue?
From the very beginning, our party supported the action of the young students who are following Khomeini’s line. Our party has recognized that it was an anti-imperialist action which has given an opportunity to the youth and the people of Iran to understand that the US Embassy was indeed a center of conspiracy against the Islamic Revolution….
The following interview with Abbas Zamani (Abu Sharif), operations commander of the Revolutionary Guard, appeared in al-Safir (Beirut), December 1, 1979. The interview took place at the Guards’ operations command north of Tehran, in the complex that served as SAVAK headquarters under the Shah.
What are the tasks of the Guard and what has it been able to achieve in terms of consolidating the new authority in Iran?
The western road from Tehran to the northern province of Gilan runs for about 270 miles up over the Elborz mountains till it reaches the Caspian port of Enzeli. Leaving Tehran on a clear Saturday morning, the first day of the week, the way is flanked by vendors — melon sellers and men offering an array of car seat covers which lie along the roadside like distended carpets. Before clearing Tehran the road runs past an enormous abandoned housing site, a mass of grey skeletons that run for over half a mile down to Mehrabad airport and which were under construction by the Bank Omran, a subsidiary of the Shah’s Pahlavi Foundation. Like almost all other building sites in Tehran, this one is now empty and silent.
Excerpted from Iran: Dictatorship and Democracy (1979), pp. 227-234:
The Tudeh Party was, in contrast to the National Front, an organized political party, indeed, the most organized political force ever seen in Iranian politics. The earlier Communist Party (founded 1921) had been crushed by Reza Khan, and under a 1931 law it became illegal for any organization to profess communist, or ‘collectivist,’ views. Hence when it became possible to form a party again after the Allied invasion in 1941, it was decided to call the party the Masses (Tudeh) Party; the Tudeh was, however, in practice the orthodox pro-Russian Iranian communist party and remains so to this day.
Since the overthrow of the Shah, over 150 distinct political groups have declared their existence in Iran. Of these, the majority are probably groups adhering to some version of revolutionary socialism, and few have as yet a substantial following in the country. Perhaps the largest left-wing group judged in terms of membership and ability to influence events is the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran, whose influence is predominant in the Kurdish mountains and towns.
One crisp morning in the winter of 1971, thirteen young Iranians armed with rifles, machine guns and hand grenades, attacked the gendarmerie post in the village of Siakal on the edge of the Caspian forests. Killing three gendarmes, they tried to release two colleagues who had been detained a few days earlier, and, failing to find the prisoners in the gendarmerie post, escaped into the rugged mountains of Gilan. Unknown both to the participants and to the outside world, this famous “Siakal incident” sparked eight years of intense guerrilla activity and inspired many other radicals, Islamic as well as Marxist, to take up arms against the Pahlavi regime.
In July 1979, the Union of Jordanian Engineers held a forum in Amman on the “Economic and Technical Consequences of the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Accord.” The participants expressed the fragile hope that the meeting would lead to similar activities in the future, for Amman is a city bare, not only of green grass, but also of political discussion and activity.
Feroz Ahmad, author of The Turkish Experiment in Democracy, visited Turkey for a month in the summer of 1979, after an absence of two years. On November 12, 1979, MERIP editors Philip Khoury and Joe Stork spoke with him at his home in Boston about recent political developments in Turkey.
One feature said to characterize Turkish politics over the last few years is the rise of a “proto-fascist” movement.
Feroz Ahmad, The Turkish Experiment in Democracy, 1950-1975 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1977).
