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Imshallah:

The Capture of Tehran, 1983

Part 13

By Chris Oakley

 

 

Summary:

In the previous twelve chapters of this series we remembered the circumstances leading to the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War; the course of the war itself; the breakdown in Iraq’s relations with its coalition allies and with the United States in the war’s aftermath; the chain of events leading to the Gulf War; the start of the Gulf War itself; Saddam Hussein’s desperate efforts to maintain power as his military forces disintegrated in the face of coalition military pressure during Desert Storm; the ultimate collapse of his regime in the final days of the war; the manhunt for the fallen tyrant; Saddam’s trial and eventual execution; and the political and social problems that confronted Iran’s people in the early years of the post-Gulf War era. In this installment we’ll look at the Islamic Revival Party’s controversial stance towards Iran’s ethnic minorities during the late 1990s and the role of the Mousavi government in providing sanctuary for thousands of political refugees during the “Syrian Spring” of the year 2000

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******

In December of 1995, Bill Clinton made history as the first sitting U.S. President to visit Tehran since the overthrow of the Shah in 1979. When Air Force One touched down at Tehran International Airport amid all the pomp and circumstance that the Mousavi government could muster, it marked the opening of a new chapter in U.S.-Iranian relations; although the United States and Iran had resumed full diplomatic ties in 1993, neither country’s head of state had visited the other until this moment(although the Iranian foreign minister had met with Clinton’s Secretary of State Warren Christopher in March of 1994 at a conference on combating
global terrorism).

Predictably, the Islamic Revival Party protested Clinton’s visit-- and not simply because he happened to represent what the late Ayatollah Khomeini had once called “the Great Satan”. Just before he left Washington, the commander-in-chief had told the White House press corps he intended to bring up the issue of women’s rights in Iran with Mousavi; this was a major affront to the Revival Party’s staunchly patriarchal mindset, as was the substantial and highly public role of First Lady Hillary Clinton in helping to set the agenda for the first day of her husband’s summit with Mousavi. When the President and the First Lady stepped off the plane and boarded the limo that was waiting to take them Mousavi’s official residence they were the target of an especially loud, raucous chorus of boos from a group of Revival Party
agitators waving anti-American signs and making crude remarks about Mrs. Clinton’s sexuality.

Of course, Mrs. Clinton wasn’t the only target of the Revival Party’s wrath that year...merely the most visible. The party also took it upon itself to try enforcing religious conformity as though it were still the heyday of Ayatollah Khomeini’s reign instead of twelve years after the Islamic Republic’s collapse. The day after the IRP’s protest of the First Lady’s arrival in Tehran, a group of IRP zealots went to Isfahan and crashed a Hanukkah gathering of Iranian Jews in that city with the specific and sole purpose of breaking it up and forcing those in attendance to either convert to Islam or leave Iran permanently. To no one’s surprise(except possibly the gatecrashers’), the participants refused to do either and the troublemakers were then summarily thrown out on their collective ear.

The incident sorely tested Iran’s recently restored diplomatic relations with Israel; then-Israeli foreign minister Ehud Barak was sufficiently upset by the affair to warn the Iranian ambassador in Tel Aviv that the Israeli government might seriously rethink the economic pact it had signed with Tehran just a few months earlier. It took some rhetorical tap-dancing and a few gentle hints from the visiting U.S. president and first lady to persuade Barak and Israel’s prime minister Shimon Peres to back off from making good on these threats-- and even then there will still some cross words exchanged between Tel Aviv and Tehran before the ruffled feathers were all smoothed out.

Just as that particular fire was being put out, another one was lit by the Revival Party when its official newspaper published a fiery editorial calling for Iran to wage what its author described as“a holy war of vengeance” against Iraq to even the score for Iran’s defeat in the 1980-83 conflict between the two countries. Given the suffering the first war had engendered for the Iranian people, there were few takers for that proposal-- but the Iraqi embassy in Tehran was outraged about it just the same and filed a bitter protest with the Iranian foreign ministry. Back in Baghdad, the Iranian ambassador to Iraq was summoned to the Iraqi foreign minister’s office and given an earful about the inflammatory article.

******

Right across Iraq’s western border, a political crisis of an even more serious nature was brewing in Saddam’s former ally Syria. After seeing the political renaissance that had transformed Iraq and Iran, the Syrian people started to become restless for their own taste of political freedom, a fact which alarmed the despotic government of Hafez el-Assad. The Assad regime relied on brute force as well as a ruthlessly efficient secret police network to enforce its grip on one- party rule in Damascus; anything that even vaguely challenged this status quo was regarded by Assad and his cronies as a mortal threat, something which had to be crushed at all costs. This was so when it came to the nascent secular opposition movement that began forming in Syria in the early 1990s, and it went double for the Islamic revival factions which started coalescing in the Syrian hinterlands around late 1995 and early 1996.         But as any student of history could have predicted, however, the Syrian Baathists’ attempts to stifle these insurrections proved counterproductive. If anything pro-democracy sentiment inside Syria only got stronger as the ‘90s drew to a close; by the end of 1999 at least 200 political opposition groups were operating inside Syria in defiance of the Assad regime’s crackdowns on dissent. Damascus alone witnessed dozens of anti-government rallies during the late ‘90s and in 2000 would be the nucleus of what has since become known as “the Syrian Spring”. Perhaps the most infamous of the Assad government’s pre-Syrian Spring onslaughts against its opponents was the horrific Ramadan Massacre of 1999, when Syrian government troops gunned down 300 protestors during a pro-democracy rally in the port of Latakia; at least a third of those killed were women and children. Political science analysts and Middle East scholars have suggested the Ramadan Massacre may have been the match which lit the fuse for the Syrian Spring and the chain of events eventually leading to the collapse of Syria’s Baathist dictatorship.

Certainly the tragedy at Latakia served to further inflame anti-government sentiment in Syria; in spite of the best efforts by Damascus to keep the reality of the massacre under wraps, word got out in bits and pieces via clandestine messengers and videos smuggled to Western media outlets. One such tape, showing a six-year-old boy getting shot by government security forces, was broadcast at length on the BBC and as a result increased support abroad for the dissident movement. The “Omar S.” tape, as it became known after it was re-aired in the United States on CBS’ 60 Minutes, had the same visceral impact on opponents of the Assad regime as the video clips of Chinese troops attacking pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing’s Tienanmen Square had had for foes of China’s Communist oligarchy a decade earlier. Ex- Texas governor and future President of the United States George W. Bush, in his first Middle East policy statement as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, blasted Assad and his Baathist cronies as “latter-day Khomeinis”, “thugs”, and “servants of evil”. Democratic contender and former Vice-President Al Gore wasn’t that much kinder to Assad, labeling him “the worst tyrant the Middle East has seen in the last twenty years”.

That video also had a visceral impact on the Mousavi government of Iran, which since assuming office had viewed the Assad regime with a mixture of contempt and alarm-- and an abundant dose of mistrust to boot. In spite of Hafez Assad’s frequent assurances after the Gulf War that Syria wanted friendship with the Iranian people, Iran’s president and his cabinet found it hard if not impossible to believe him on that score; some of the more cynical types among Mousavi’s chief security advisors were certain Assad was actively sponsoring anti-Iranian acts of terrorism both within and outside Iran’s borders. Furthermore, the video reminded Mousavi of the horrific atrocities Saddam’s forces had perpetrated against Iranian civilians during the Iraqi occupation of Iran. Before he’d even finished watching the “Omar S.” tape, Mousavi had started to what options might be open to him as far as supporting the pro-democracy movement was concerned.

******

That question gained additional urgency for Tehran as Syrian- Iranian relations continued to deteriorate in the early months of the year 2000. There seemed to be no end to the war of words between the Mousavi administration and the Assad dictatorship; a growing number of Syrian pro-democracy activists began thinking that Mousavi might be an answer to their prayers for getting foreign backing for their cause. With that in mind, a delegation of five Syrian dissidents visited the Iranian embassy in Damascus in March of 2000 to petition the Iranian ambassador to Syria to present their case for throwing Iran’s weight behind the Syrian pro-democracy movement. The ambassador in turn flew home to Tehran for consultations with the Iranian foreign minister on what the pros and cons were of directly supporting the dissidents in their quest to end Syria’s Baathist tyranny.

Out of that meeting grew the first stages of what would be a high-pressure Iranian diplomatic offensive whose goal was to compel Damascus to end its repressive one-party system. Ironically one of the Mousavi government’s key allies in this campaign was Iran’s old wartime nemesis Iraq; Baghdad shared many of the Mousavi government’s concerns about the Assad regime, and on top of that was understandably anxious regarding the Syrian Baathists’ attempts to incite unrest on the Syria-Iraq border. Last but not least Iraqi intelligence officials were picking up disturbing rumors(which turned out to be inaccurate) that Damascus was using the unrest among its citizens as an excuse to secretly test new types of chemical weapons-- weapons that could just as easily be used against Iraqi soldiers in a future war.

In May of 2000 the security attaché at the Iraqi embassy in Damascus met with his counterpart from the Iranian embassy for an hour-long working lunch to discuss what measures might be taken to guard their countries’ respective diplomatic missions in Syria from attempts by Syrian government security forces to infiltrate those missions. About a half-hour into the meeting, the Iranian attaché glanced out the window beside his table and motioned for the Iraqi attaché to do likewise; when the Iraqi official looked through his side of the window he noticed a large crowd of university students setting up what appeared to be a kind of tent city in the midst of Damascus’ main square. Simultaneously, another group of students had begun erecting banners inscribed with slogans like “Let us have freedom!” and “Down with the Baathist oppressors!” Although the two diplomats didn’t realize it at the time, they had just witnessed the opening act of the Syrian Spring.

******

Within forty-eight hours after the first tents had been set up in the vicinity of Tahrir Square, an enterprising CNN camera crew had broken the news of the tent city’s existence to the rest of the world. Their video footage, smuggled past Baathist security forces inside a box labeled “engine parts”, dealt a severe blow to the Assad regime’s efforts to squash the Syrian Spring movement while that movement was still in its infancy. Assad’s frantic attempts to deny the tent city’s existence were effectively blown to smithereens the minute that video reached CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta. So he switched tactics, trying to paint the demonstrators as an ignorant rabble ginned up by foreign agitators.

This ploy too backfired; many of those involved with the tent city demonstrations were actually well-educated members of Syria’s upper class. One protest organizer, in fact, was a university student who’d spent a year at Columbia on an exchange program and would soon become the tent city’s liaison to the global media(and vice versa.) His familiarity with Western-style political organizing techniques and fluency in English and French made him an outstanding choice to serve as spokesman for the Syrian Spring movement-- and a thorn in the side of Baathist security forces, who if the information recently obtained from declassified Syrian government archives is correct made no less than three separate attempts to assassinate him while Assad’s regime was still in power.

Meanwhile, the line of people at the Iranian embassy in Damascus seeking exit visas grew steadily longer as more people sought to leave Syria and gain asylum in Mousavi’s Iran. Every day so-called “freedom flights” of Iran Air jetliners left Damascus’ main civil airport with batches of refugees heading to Tehran either to put down new roots in Iranian soil or make their way to the West, where the steadily growing Syrian exile community was flexing major political muscle in order to encourage support in the United States and the European Union for the Syrian Spring demonstrators’ cause. By June 1st, not even a month after the Tahrir Square tent city had been established, over 100,000 Syrian refugees had escaped the country to find sanctuary abroad-- and those numbers didn’t look to be diminishing anytime soon...


According to estimates by Amnesty International.

It was so dubbed because ‘Omar S.” was the alias used by the boy’s father when he smuggled the tape to the British embassy in Damascus shortly after the massacre.

The rumors were sparked by a series of incidents in which Baathist security forces used an especially pungent brand of tear gas to disperse pro-democracy marchers.

 

 

To Be Continued

 

Footnotes

[1] The Baghdad rally had inspired students in Basra and Fallujah critical of the Saddam regime to mount their own demonstrations against the Baathist dictatorship.

 

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