Remembering Abolhassan Bani Sadr

For more insight into the original Iranian Revolution, which the present protests are an attempt to reverse, here is the posting that I wrote in 2022, after the death of Abolhassan Bani Sadr. It is also about the nature of revolutions in general.

For another perspective on the revolution, there is also the section of the compound posting "Investigations", December 2018, 16) THE ENDURING MYSTERY OF THE CINEMA REX.

Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the first president of Iran following the 1979 revolution, died recently in Paris.

Bani-Sadr had been part of Ayatollah Khomeini's inner circle while the two were in exile in Paris, plotting the downfall of the Shah of Iran and his increasingly unpopular government. Bani-Sadr had been in Paris, exiled for protesting the Shah's government, long before Khomeini arrived.

For anyone who remembers the news of 1979-81 the three most prominent names in Iran during the early days of it's revolution and the holding of the U.S. Embassy staff as hostages was Khomeini, Bani-Sadr and, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, who would later become Iran's foreign minister.

Bani-Sadr was an economist and politician, not an Islamic cleric. Although his father had been an ayatollah, and friend of Khomeini during their youth. After the Shah had been overthrown Khomeini and his retinue had returned to Iran and took power. Bani-Sadr had been foreign minister but had been removed from that position. But he was very popular and won the Iranian presidency with nearly 80% of the vote.

By the way Bani Sadr agreed with the scenario that I wrote about in the posting on this blog, "Jimmy Carter And The Iran Hostage Crisis", January 2025. This is the idea that the release of the U.S. hostages had purposely been delayed until after the presidential inauguration of Reagan.

But revolutions can be treacherous. As the revolution grows and develops the early revolutionaries often fall out of favor. Many are the revolutionaries that have become victims of their own revolutions.

Few revolutions end up just as their founders envisioned. According to Abolhassan Bani-Sadr the intention of the revolution was for Iran to be a democracy, with clerics like Khomeini being spiritual guides but not actively involved in running the country. Bani-Sadr would end up, as President of Iran, trying to counter the ever-growing power of the clerics. He visited the U.S. Embassy and asked the militants to release the hostages that were being held there, but was ignored.

Abolhassan Bani-Sadr would ultimately be impeached as President and would go back to exile in Paris. So he went into Paris exile for criticizing the Shah's government. He was part of the group which overthrew that government and was overwhelmingly elected as President of Iran. But he fell out of favor for trying to resist the power of the clerics in the Iranian Revolution, and ended up back in his Paris exile.

Bani-Sadr would be a prominent critic of the Iranian Revolution, and how it had turned out. He insisted that the plan, while the revolutionaries were in exile in Paris, was for Iran to be a more-or-less secular democracy, with the clerics only "advising" the nation, but then Khomeini had become intoxicated with power. Bani-Sadr would ultimately end up dying, as an elderly man, in the hospital next to the Sorbonne, the University of Paris, where he had earlier studied and then taught.

We have seen how important the Iranian Revolution was, in generally turning the world back toward religion from secularism, in the posting on this blog, "The Great Revolution Of Our Time" January 2017. But the career of Bani-Sadr shows that it was also a harbinger of the future of democracy. Most countries profess to be democracies but it is too easy to just "go through the motions", with regard to democracy, and democracy today is definitely on the decline in the world.

The mystery of Bani-Sadr, as I see it, is why his name does not seem to have been connected to the Hafte Tir Bombing. On June 21, 1981, Bani-Sadr was impeached as President by the Iranian Government, for resisting the growing power of the clerics. He was already in hiding but was still in the country.

Exactly a week later a very powerful bomb exploded during a meeting of party leaders at the headquarters of the Islamic Republic Party. 74 of the most important people in the Iranian Revolution were killed, although Ayatollah Khomeini was not among them. It is actually a credit to the Iranian Revolution that it survived this blast. My understanding is that a sound technician brought the bomb in, hidden in a cart, while setting up speakers for the meeting.

What intrigues me is the possible connection between Bani-Sadr and this bombing, but I have never seen his name connected with it. He commented on all else that went on in the Iranian Revolution, but I cannot see that he ever commented on this bombing which was one of the most traumatic events of the revolution. About a month after the bombing Bani-Sadr fled the country with the leader of the Mujahedin e Khalq, which is widely believed to have been responsible for the bombing.

The third prominent name from the early days of the Iranian Revolution, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, would also fall out of favor and would be executed for allegedly plotting the overthrow of Khomeini.

Khomeini, as an opponent of the Shah of Iran, had been exiled in 1964 to Turkey. He later moved to the Iraqi Shiite holy city of Najaf, where he taught and wrote. In late 1978, as he became more popular back home, the Shah put pressure on Iraq and supportive Iranian exiles rented a house for him in Neauphle le Chateau, a village that is almost close enough to Paris to be considered a suburb.

It was during the more than three months that he spent there that the budding revolution really took form. Khomeini directed the revolution back in Iran by telephone and his sermons were distributed extensively on cassette tapes.

Press conferences, with the global media, took place on a regular basis in front of the house. This photo was taken in the autumn of 1978. Image from the Wikipedia article "Ruhollah Khomeini". Khomeini is in the center of the photo. The clean-shaven man immediately to Khomeini's left looks like Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, who would become Iranian Foreign Minister before being executed. In the background are two men, talking below the window shutters, the one on the left looks like Abolhassan Bani-Sadr.

THE HAFT E TIR BOMBING 

Here is more about the Haft e Tir Bombing, of 1981.

The Iranian Revolution had begun three years before. The hostage crisis, where the staff of the U.S. Embassy had been held captive for 444 days had ended six months before. Iran had been at war with neighboring Iraq for nearly a year. The Iranian Revolution was still working itself out. President Abolhassan Bani Sadr, one of the founders of the revolution, had been removed and gone off into exile.

On June 1981 a meeting took place with most of the top members of Iran's revolutionary government. A massive bomb exploded, killing more than 70 people including most of the government. Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the revolution, was not there. 

According to what I have read in the news a sound engineer, who set up the microphone and speakers, had brought the bomb in. One account was that it was hidden in a cart that was used to move speakers around. Another account was that it was hidden in a trash can.

It has never been established with certainty who was responsible for the bombing. The socialist Mujahedeen e Khalq had been against the former government of the Shah, who had been overthrown by the revolution. But by this point the Mujahedeen had turned against the new revolutionary government of Khomeini. It is they who are most widely believed to be behind the bombing.

The Mujahedeen e Khalq were later supported by Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War. Former president Abolhassan Bani Sadr is believed to have joined forces with the Mujahedeen. From exile in France, Bani Sadr was an outspoken critic of the revolution. Ironically he lived not far from where he had supported Khomeini during the four months that he spent in exile in Neauphle Le Chateau. I find it interesting that Bani Sadr seems to have commented about everything else regarding the revolution but I can't find that he had anything to say about this bombing, which took place not long after he was removed as president.

It is honestly a great credit to Iran's revolution that it survived this bombing. A lot of observers at the time didn't think it would.

There is a persistent story that Israel's Mossad was behind the bombing. However I don't think that it was.

Iran and Iraq were at war, but both were hostile toward Israel. I am sure that the Israeli leadership was more concerned about Iraq, simply because it was geographically closer. The Haft e Tir Bombing came three weeks after Israel had destroyed the Iraqi Osirak Nuclear Reactor in a surprise air raid.

In the compound posting "Investigations", December 2018, we saw in section 2) THE REAL STORY OF OSIRAK, that while the bombing was to stop Saddam Hussein from getting a nuclear bomb, it was also a message to Iran, which had previously unsuccessfully bombed the reactor but had launched a brilliant air raid on the air base known as H3, on the far other side of Iraq.

In section 51) EXPLAINING THE VELA INCIDENT, in the same compound posting, we saw the test of a neutron bomb, just after Saddam Hussein came to power in 1979, as evidence that Israel was more concerned about Iraq than about Iran. If anything Iran was inadvertently helping Israel by keeping Iraq occupied and wearing down it's military.

If Israel wasn't behind the Haft e Tir Bombing there is another story that it at least supplied the bomb to the Mujahedeen e Khalq. It is interesting that the bombing happened three weeks after the Israeli air raid on the Iraqi reactor. But what if the bombing caused the collapse of the Iranian Government, it's revolution, and it's war with Iraq? Then the Iraqi military would be free to turn it's attention to Israel.

Isn't it more likely that Iraq supplied the bomb? After initial Iraqi gains, Iran was starting to gain the upper hand in the war. If the bombing caused the collapse of the Iranian Revolution that would be great. But if not it would look as if Israel was behind it and it would prompt Iranian military action against Israel, taking some pressure off Iraq.

Israel or it's Mossad has never denied being behind the bombing, although I don't think it was. The Mossad likes to show that it can conduct operations inside Iran. The message being "Don't forget the Haft e Tir Bombing because it could happen again".