“Nationalism Turned Inside Out”
Fred Halliday conducted this interview in London in May 1982.
Women’s Organizations in Ethiopia
One of the more positive political themes that the exiled students brought back from their studies was a special emphasis on the need for the emancipation of women. A Women’s Committee operated within POMOA. As late as 1977, official state documents were stressing the double oppression of women, as workers and women. This was in contrast to the more orthodox theory of the Eastern European countries that became official policy in 1978. In the countryside, moreover, the establishment of peasant associations went together with the setting up of local women’s associations. Nearly all women had been integrated into these structures by 1980, and women appear to have participated quite widely in the peasant associations.
Mengistu and the Standing Committee
By the end of 1979, Mengistu Haile-Mariam, “the Chairman,” was being projected through the official media in a strong authoritarian light. He derived from his earlier years an exceptional acquaintance with the regional diversity of Ethiopia. Born in an Oromo area between 1940 and 1942, of mixed Amhara and shankala (a caste of blacks who were traditionally slaves) origin, he traveled as a child to different areas while his father was soldiering and then serving as a houseguard. Mengistu gained access to the Holeta military academy, where he was trained as an ordnance officer. He twice visited the United States for training purposes. There is no public evidence of his radicalism prior to the constitution of the Derg in 1974.
Ethiopia’s Revolution from Above
With hindsight it is possible to see in the course of the Ethiopian revolution a process of radicalization and post-revolutionary consolidation through which the Provisional Military Administration Committee (PMAC, or the Derg) established a stable new order on the ruins of the old. The direction of political and social change was by no means this clear during the first years after 1974. The pattern of revolutionary transformation involved a deep paradox, namely the conflict between the military leadership at the top and the various radical civilian forces below. At each stage of the revolution, the PMAC, aware of its own political weaknesses, sought to establish alliances with these civilian forces. Indeed it put into practice much of what the civilians were themselves demanding.
War Crisis Escalates
Political developments in Africa have lately slipped out of the headlines, but the confrontations brewing there could dwarf earlier conflicts in both military fury and political complexity. The US-backed regimes in Somalia and Sudan each face the possibility of sudden coups d’etat or civil wars. The Soviet-supported Ethiopian government is losing another in a long sequence of campaigns to stamp out nationalist guerrillas in the former Italian colony of Eritrea. Addis Ababa also faces ongoing revolts by three minority nationalities who are increasingly linking up with one another to topple the military authorities.
From the Editors (June 1982)
It is nearly three years since we devoted an issue to the Horn of Africa. As Dan Connell notes in his introductory overview, the dizzying geopolitical realignments of the regimes there only make more dangerous the internal, structural crises of national unity, political repression and overwhelming mass poverty. The recent publication of The Ethiopian Revolution by Fred Halliday and Maxine Molyneux provides an excellent opportunity to scrutinize some of these developments. We present, in condensed form, their account of events inside Ethiopia since 1974. This article, along with Patrick Gilkes’ contribution, provide some sympathetic comprehension of the revolutionary turbulence that has beset that country. Our interview with I. M.
From the Editors (May 1982)
Professor Menachem Milson, the Israeli “Arabist” who heads the West Bank occupation forces, compares the intensity and seriousness of the recent unrest there with the war of 1948. The Begin government, determined to root out all assertions of Palestinian nationalism, is trying to destroy those institutions that articulate the Palestinian national identity under occupation. These are the elected municipal councils and mayors, and institutions of higher learning such as Birzeit University. The mayors, representing major social and political forces, embody the support of the vast majority of the population for the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Letter
To the Editors: I would like to give a correct version of the interview I had with Fred Halliday in March 1980, published in MERIP Reports 98 (July-August 1981). Our conversation was not recorded. Halliday occasionally took notes, and errors and inaccuracies have therefore crept into the interview as published.
“The Only Serious Obstacle Is Khomeini Himself”
I conducted this interview with Manuchehr Hezarkani after his departure from Iran in October 1981. He is a medical doctor trained in France, and has been among the founders of three important Iranian political forces: the Confederation of Iranian Students, which led the opposition in Europe to the Shah in the 1960s and 1970s, the Writers’ Association of Iran, and the National Democratic Front, an independent socialist coalition established immediately after the revolution and driven underground in August 1979 after organizing protests against the imposition of censorship. Since this interview was given, the NDF has officially associated itself with the National Council of Resistance set up by Bani-Sadr and the Mojahedin.
—Fred Halliday
“We Are Living Between Two Tides”
Shokrallah Paknejad, one of the most prominent and far-sighted of modern Iranian socialists, was executed in Evin prison, Tehran, during December 1981. Although his death was not officially announced, his family was given a number for his grave in the cemetery of Behesht-e Zahra, and the prison authorities confirmed the news early in the following month. His death, like that of the Mojahedin leader Mohammad Reza Saadati, and of the Fedayi (Minority) leader Said Sultanpour, came after Paknejad had spent several months in jail without trial or formal charges. He was held as a political hostage and shot in retaliation for opposition activities.
“All the People Who Are Opposed to Our Solution Must Die”
Sadeq Khalkhali is the representative from Qom in the Majles. Although not himself a leading element in the Islamic Republican Party, he has a small following among the extreme right-wing clergy. He wielded considerable influence within the regime, particularly in its formative period, and consistently criticized successive IRP governments as “too soft” toward “counter-revolutionaries.” He was interviewed by an Iranian journalist in the summer of 1980.
Could you tell us when and where you were born, and what kind of Islamic training you have?
I was born in 1926 in Khalkhal, a small town in northwest Iran and I’ve gained the title of Hojjat-ol-Islam.
“We Started to Feel Cold Sweat on Our Brows”
Ali Reza Nobari studied mathematics in France and was finishing a Ph.D. in operations research at Stanford University in California when the Iranian revolution occurred. He helped to fund the newspaper Enqelab-e Islami and served as governor of Iran's Central Bank during Bani-Sadr’s presidency. Eric Hooglund and Joe Stork spoke with him in Washington, DC in December 1981.
If you could have seen where the revolution stands now, would you have participated in it three and four years ago?
“The Americans Played a Disgusting Role”
Shahpour Bakhtiar served as prime minister in the last weeks of the Shah’s regime. Since escaping from Iran after February 1979 he has been living in exile. Fred Halliday spoke with him in Paris in August 1981.
Mr. Bakhtiar, what is your estimation of the current strength of the Iranian regime?
“We Are the Only Real Threat to Khomeini”
Masoud Rajavi was the only one of the original leadership of the Mojahedin-e Khalq to escape execution by the Shah. Imprisoned from 1971 until December 1978, he emerged to reorganize the Mojahedin. He ran for president in the election of January 1980 but Khomeini declared him ineligible. He escaped from Iran with former president Bani-Sadr on July 28, 1971. He is the prime minister in Bani-Sadr’s government in exile, and is active in the Council of National Resistance. Fred Halliday interviewed him outside Paris in August 1981.
“I Defeated the Ideology of the Regime”
Abol-Hassan Bani-Sadr was elected president of the Islamic Republic of Iran in January 1980, but was subsequently impeached in June 1981. Fred Halliday interviewed him in France in August 1981, several weeks after he escaped from Iran. He has formed a government in exile, and is part of the Council of National Resistance.
You are living here in France to organize opposition to the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini. But Khomeini still has some popular support, and he is prepared to be more repressive than the Shah ever was. Won’t these differences make it very difficult to oust him?
Year Three of the Iranian Revolution
The third year of the Iranian revolution saw the final breakup of the political coalition that initially brought Khomeini to power, and the emergence in exile of an opposition that groups together many of those who played a part in the overthrow of the monarchical dictatorship. On the basis of evidence available, it would seem that the Khomeini regime has been able, through massive repression already greater than that of the Shah, to contain the opposition forces for the time being. The Islamic forces now in power have apparently gained a second breath after the crises of mid-1981. Appearances may, however, be deceptive and the Iranian revolution could be preparing another one of those sudden convulsions which has marked its agonized course to date.
From the Editors (March/April 1982)
When the history of the Iranian revolution is compiled, the third year of the Islamic Republic may stand out as particularly decisive. The alliance of left-leaning lay political elements with the Islamic Republican Party ruptured completely. Iranian forces scored important gains on the battlefield with Iraq. The regime secured its grip on the state apparatus and dominated the political arena through massive repression and widespread executions.
Approaching the Islamic Revolution
Shahrough Akhavi, Religion and Politics in Contemporary Iran: Clergy-State Relations in the Pahlavi Period (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1980).
Michael M. J. Fischer, Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).
Ali Shariati: Ideologue of the Iranian Revolution
Westerners commonly perceive the Iranian Revolution as an atavistic and xenophobic movement that rejects all things modern and non-Muslim, a view reinforced by the present leaders of Iran. They claim that the revolution spearheads the resurgence of Islam, and that the revolutionary movement is an authentic phenomena uncorrupted by any alien ideas and inspired solely by the teachings of the Prophet and the Shi‘i imams. This conventional wisdom, however, ignores the contributions of ‘Ali Shari‘ati, the main ideologue of the Iranian Revolution.
“The Masses Speak the Language of Religion to Express Themselves Politically”
Mohamed Sid Ahmed is an Egyptian journalist and left opposition leader. He is a member of the secretariat of Tagammu‘, the National Progressive Unionist Party, and is a representative of the party’s Marxist component. He was an editorial writer with al-Akhbar from 1965 to 1968 and chief political analyst of al-Ahram through 1976. He is the author of When the Guns Fall Silent (1976J, and other books. He was imprisoned several times between 1959 and 1974, and narrowly escaped arrest in early September 1981. He spoke with MERIP editors Judith Tucker, Joe Stork and Penny Johnson, and with Selma Botman, a friend of MERIP, in Cambridge, Massachusetts on October 19, 1981.
