In October 1978 Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini visited the Paris flat of Abolhassan Banisadr and the two protagonists of the coming Iranian revolution cut a deal. The thoughtful, neatly moustachioed Banisadr, who exuded a slightly fey intellectualism, and the imposing, heavily bearded Ayatollah reached an accord that would change the destiny of their homeland.
The hardline Shia cleric, who would confirm the overthrow of the British and American-backed Shah of Iran some six months later, needed the technocratic heft of the western-educated Banisadr to build the machinery of a modern and effective state. Khomeini promised that the new order would be a democracy, protecting freedom of speech; the moral integrity of the country would be underpinned by the powerful clerics.
With Khomeini’s support, Banisadr, an exiled opponent of the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, helped to draft a constitution that he hoped would prevent Iran from falling into theocratic dictatorship. He accompanied the Ayatollah’s triumphant return to Tehran in February 1979 and was elected president on January 25, 1980 after gaining a remarkable 75 per cent of the votes in a contest with nine other presidential candidates.
The partnership barely lasted 18 months before Banisadr was impeached and forced into hiding as Khomeini’s model of velayat-e faqih (“governorship of the Islamist jurist”) took hold. It had become clear that on a number of issues Banisadr was at odds with the more vociferous elements in the clergy-dominated Islamic Republican Party (IRP), which in March 1980 won the elections to the Majlis, or parliament.
The new constitution was not sufficiently clear on the powers of the legislature and head of state, leaving the way open for a struggle between president and parliament. Ayatollah Khomeini, who as supreme leader had the power to dismiss presidents at will, was increasingly inclined to listen to the hardliners of the IRP in the Majlis who advocated violent suppression of political opponents and strict censorship.
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The tide began to flow against Banisadr, with charges from IRP leaders that he had mismanaged the war with Iraq after the opportunistic invasion by Saddam Hussein in September 1980. In an atmosphere of growing zealotry, Banisadr was portrayed as a figure of moderation and compromise who had, for example, strongly doubted the wisdom of seizing the US embassy hostages in November 1979. Indeed, he tried to persuade the occupiers of the embassy to release the Americans. “You think you have taken America hostage,” he told them. “What a delusion! In fact, you have made Iran the hostage of the Americans.”
A three-man commission appointed by Khomeini to adjudicate between Banisadr and the IRP found in April 1981 that the president had exceeded his powers by refusing to confirm ministerial appointments made by the IRP-backed prime minister, Mohammad Ali Rajai.
Banisadr’s newspaper, Islamic Revolution, was closed down. After he was twice involved in “helicopter crashes”, he left Tehran to go underground and on June 22 that year he was stripped by Khomeini of his powers as president.
If Banisadr viewed his election as a mandate to rescue Iran from the tyranny of a “fistful of fascist clerics” by fusing Shia Islam with democratic socialism, he failed.
He escaped to France for the second time in his life, where he remained an articulate critic of the Islamic Republic.
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The son of a cleric, Abolhassan Banisadr was born in 1933 to a wealthy religious, land-owning family in the city of Hamadan in central-western Iran, or Persia as it was known until 1935. His father, Nasrollah (who had been at school with Khomeini), urged his son to enter the Faiziyyeh seminary in Qom. Abolhassan chose instead to study theology, law and economics at the University of Tehran. This was a time when nationalist forces, led by the prime minister Mohammad Mossadeq, were on the march and Banisadr played an active part in the Islamic branch of Mossadeq’s National Front movement.
The prime minister was involved in a power struggle with the shah, who had been installed as monarch by Britain after the removal of his pro-Axis father in 1941. Mossadeq’s overthrow in a coup backed by British and US intelligence in 1953 was a bitter blow for Banisadr, who supported the prime minister’s policies of nationalising the oil industry (which was dominated by the British-owned Anglo-Iranian oil company).
Opposition was galvanised into open revolt by the shah’s announcement in 1963 of a “White Revolution”, a sweeping programme of land reform as well as social and economic change, including voting rights for women and allowing non-Muslims to hold office. Banisadr was twice imprisoned during the protests which followed and was wounded in a skirmish with the shah’s security forces. He fled to France.
In Paris, Banisadr resumed his studies at the Sorbonne, where he received a doctorate and later taught. This western education was later to be used against him by obscurantist opponents who regarded all contact with the West as risking contamination by corrupt and Satanic forces at odds with “pure” Islam. At this time, Banisadr was heavily influenced by the French Marxist writer and sociologist, Paul Vieille, with whom he published a book entitled Oil and Violence. The revolutionary atmosphere in 1968 in Paris also convinced Banisadr of the need for a radical upheaval in his homeland, to create a democratic society based on the Islamic ideology.
Banisadr had first met Khomeini in 1972 and they had remained in close touch. When Khomeini arrived in France in October 1978, Banisadr started to advise him on economic matters. After the overthrow of the shah, most of the clergy to whom the leaders of the revolution had fallen had little idea of the mechanics of running a modern state. Banisadr set about reorganising the machinery of government.
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He helped to nationalise the banking system and from August 1979 sat on the “Assembly of Experts”, which, nominally at least, oversaw the activities of the supreme leader. In November 1979 he was made minister of finance, and served briefly as foreign minister before his election as president. His position was consolidated when he was named chairman of the Revolutionary Council and, in February 1980, commander-in-chief of the armed forces.
In the autumn of 1980 Banisadr accused the clergy of reverting to the methods of the shah, including torture and censorship. In this he undoubtedly had the support of many Iranians, including young left-wingers as well as the merchants and middle classes. He also commanded loyalty in the armed forces, especially after the outbreak of war with Iraq, when he took an active role on the front line.
By March 1981 there were street battles between supporters of Banisadr and those of the IRP. By the end of July, however, he had fled to France on an Iranian military aircraft flown by an air force colonel still loyal to him.
After France evacuated its embassy in Tehran, the restrictions on his political activities were relaxed. Banisadr began collaborating with the leader of the Mujahadeen-e-Khalq (MEK), Massoud Rajavi, another long-time opponent of the shah who had fallen foul of the hardline clerics after the revolution and had been smuggled out of Iran with Banisadr. They established the National Resistance Council, dedicated to overthrowing the Khomeini regime.
It was a short-lived union. In 1984 Banisadr broke ties with Rajavi, having tired of his dictatorial manner and fought with him on many issues, including whether there should be armed opposition to the Khomeini regime. For a time he kept a lower profile, living with his wife, Azra Hosseini, whom he married in 1961, and their children, Firouzeh, Zahra and Ali, who all survive him.
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He re-emerged in 1991 when his book My Turn to Speak: Iran, the Revolution and Secret Deals with the US alleged that the Reagan presidential campaign had struck a deal with the Iranian authorities to delay the release of the American hostages in 1980 until President Carter was defeated in the election. In exchange, Iran was to receive arms from a future Reagan administration. Banisadr claimed to have “proof” of contacts between Khomeini and Reagan supporters from early in 1980.
Six years later he testified against the Iranian government at a court in Berlin where it was accused of complicity in the murder of four of its opponents, including the leader of the Kurdish Democratic Party. The court ruled that the killings had indeed been approved at the highest echelons of the Iranian government.
During the political crisis which followed the controversial re-election as president of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009, he made a scathing attack on Khomeini’s successor as supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. Khamenei, he said, had ordered the alleged election fraud and the ensuing bloody crackdown on protesters. He claimed that the Iranian authorities were edging closer to an abyss and were intent on retaining power solely by means of violence and terror. Closely guarded against assassination until the end of his life, Banisadr continued to sign his name “the elected president of the people of Iran”.
Abolhassan Banisadr, former president of Iran, was born on March 22, 1933. He died after a long illness on October 9, 2021, aged 88