The true face of Iran
The letter is interesting for several reasons. First, it states that Rouhani is not responsible for the “house arrest” decision and is regarded as no more than a channel for transmitting the letter to real, anonymous decision-makers. This means that Rouhani is basically an actor playing the role of president and that, in effect, Iran lacks a government in the normal sense of the term. Secondly, Karrubi’s letter is designed to transform his image as a radical activist of long-standing into a new convert to reform and moderation, if not actual democratization.
Throughout the 1980s and much of the 1990s, however, Karrubi belonged to the hard-line faction of the Khomeinist establishment. In 1993 he even led Iran’s delegation to the so-called Islamic Peoples’ Congress, hosted by the late Hassan Al-Turabi in the Sudanese capital Khartoum. There, the gathering of Islamist militants from more than 70 countries elected him as a member of the nine-man Leadership Council with the mission to spread their ideology across the globe. Members of the council included such luminaries as Al-Turabi himself, Algeria’s Abbassi Madani and Osama bin Laden.
However, it is the third reason why Karrubi’s letter is of particular interests to us. Here Karrubi tries to present the reign of the late Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini, or “Imam” as his supporters like to call him, as a golden age in which no one could suffer arbitrary arrest let alone being put under house arrest without charge.
In his decade as a despot, Khomeini presided over tens of thousands of illegal executions, ordered the massacre of thousands of ethnic minorities, sent more than 1.2 million Iranians to jail for short, medium and long periods and drove an estimated 4.5 million into exile. Khomeini was even bad news for the mullahs. Under Khomeini, on the average, relative to the size of their community, the number of clerics, including students of theology, who were in prison, was higher than that of any other social stratum.
Khomeini set up a special Clerical Court to deal with mullahs and students of theology who dared defy his arbitrary rule. The so-called court, still in existence, had no legal or theological basis and was answerable to no one, a state within the state. It sentenced dozens of mullahs to death. Many clerics suffered torture in Khomeini’s prisons. Among them were Ayatollahs Razi Golpayegani, Jalili Kermanshahi, Mahdi Haste’i, Ali Maqsudi, Reza Sadr and Morteza Shirazi. Khomeini also did something no other Shiite ruler of Iran had done in 500 years: Defrocking senior clerics on spurious charges. The best estimates put the number of mullahs defrocked by Khomeini at over 80.
When unable to put his hands on mullahs he didn’t like or was jealous because they were outside Iran, Khomeini ordered their defrocking or sent hit squads to assassinate them abroad. In some cases, he ordered that the family of a mullah in exile be taken hostage to force him to return to Iran. One notorious case was that of Ayatollah Muhammad-Hassan Tehrani who had managed to flee to Germany but agreed to return to Tehran after his family was held hostage by Khomeini. Soon after his return he was executed with a single shot in the head after suffering torture in prison.
Karrubi may see Khomeini’s reign as a “golden age”. But he forgets the late ayatollah’s almost childish meanness and cruelty. When Ayatollah Muhammad-Hussein Alawi Borujerdi was told by his doctors that he needed to go to Europe for medical treatment Khomeini refused him a passport. The “Imam” was taking revenge for real or imagined humiliation that, as a young man, he had suffered in the entourage of Grand Ayatollah Muhammad-Hussein Borujerdi (Alawi was a son-in-law of Borujerdi).
Khomeini is also suspected, though without concrete evidence so far, of having ordered the “quiet murder” by poison of Ayatollah Muhammad-Reza Shirazi, settling his score with the Shirazis of Karbala, a prominent clan of Shiite clerics who accused the self-styled” Imam” of initiating a “bidah,” (innovation) which is regarded as a theological sin.
Karrubi’s letter pretends that putting mullahs under house arrest did not exist in Khomeini’s “golden age.” That, too, is false. Khomeini’s own designated heir Grand Ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri died under house arrest, as did Grand Ayatollah Hassan Qomi-Tabatabai who had the street where his house was located in Mashhad closed with a wall and an iron gate guarded by Revolutionary Guards.
Karrubi’s presentation of Khomeini’s decade as a “golden age” is disingenuous to say the least. In all those years, Karrubi and many like him either remained silent or justified the crimes committed by the “Imam.” Compared to what would have happened to him under Khomeini, the treatment that Karrubi has received could be regarded as cordon bleu. This does not mean that one should approve of Karrubi’s house arrest, which is illegal, inhuman and mean.
What is important is to remember that if you are silent, let alone approving, when someone is subjected to injustice, the same could one day also happen to you.
Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not necessarily reflect Arab News' point of view
