THE INDEPENDENT: Patrick Cockburn, who reported from Iran during the 1979 revolution, reflects on the fall of the Shah and explains why the current uprising is very different
At first sight, what is happening in Tehran today looks very like the extraordinary events of the Islamic Revolution 30 years ago. But how deep do the similarities go? On 2 December 1978, two million Iranians filled the streets of central Tehran to demand an end to the rule of the Shah and the return of Ayatollah Khomeini. It was the most popular revolution in history. At night, people gathered on rooftops to chant "Allahu Akbar – God is Great". In the daytime, mass rallies commemorated as martyrs the protesters who had been killed by the security forces.
The methods of protest are very similar. This is hardly surprising because the demonstrators seeking to get rid of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad understandably hope the type of unarmed mass protest that worked against the Shah will succeed again. Mass rally and public martyrdom are part of the Iranian revolutionary tradition, just as the barricade is part of the tradition in France. A difference between 1978-9 and today is that the Iranian government has no intention of letting history repeat itself.
Nor is it likely to do so. The Iranian revolution was carried out by a broad coalition from right to left which had religious conservatives at one end and Marxist revolutionaries at the other. The Shah and his regime had a unique ability to alienate simultaneously different parts of the Iranian population which had nothing in common. His cruel but poorly informed Savak security men convinced themselves that communists and revolutionary leftists were the danger to the throne and not the Shia clergy. They were not alone in their delusion. President Jimmy Carter recalls an August 1978 CIA memo, drafted five months before the Shah took flight, firmly concluding that Iran "is not in a revolutionary or even a pre-revolutionary situation".
Crucially, the Iranian revolution had a messianic leader in Ayatollah Khomeini who was a visible alternative to the Shah, a leader whose claims to legitimacy were compromised even before he came to the throne: his father Reza Shah, an army general who seized power in the 1920s, was deposed by British and Soviet troops in 1941. His son was forced to flee in 1953 when Mohammed Mossadeq was elected prime minister, only to be restored by a CIA-run coup for which President Barack Obama has apologised. >>> Patrick Cockburn | Friday, june 19, 2009
