Demila Rouseff calls her
impeachment a coup d’état. Many academics and political experts agree
that the old guard and corrupt capitalist elite in Brazil have overthrown the
president, despite the fact that all the legal procedures for her impeachment
have been observed. As one pro-Rouseff Brazilian protester remarked, this is a
‘civilian coup – capitalism doesn’t need guns and soldiers; it is enough to
have an anti-democratic judicial system’.
Ive/AP/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.Now go back 35 years to
Iran. The 1979 Iranian Revolution is less than two-and-a-half years old.
The clergy have, gradually, monopolized the state. The aim is, as the head
of the Islamic Republic Party (Ayatollah Beheshti) has stated, to establish a
‘despotism of the pious’. The only remaining obstacle to the total
monopolization of power is the office of the recently elected president,
Abolhassan Banisadr. He insists upon defending the democratic goals of the
revolution despite being offered increased powers to reject them, therefore he writes to Khomeini:
“I joined you because I saw
you as a man of belief and action. I accepted the post of presidency in order
to serve the people according to my belief and spend all my power in defending
the principles. However, it has become obvious that you do not want a man of
belief and action, but a lackey. The title of presidency is not a status to
violate my principles and belief for them. If I am not able to serve I
have no attraction to such titles. If you are looking for a lackey, there are
so many lackeys, do not expect such a thing from me. The Shah was not
overthrown to be replaced with a worse system.”
So refuses to bow to
Ayatollah Khomeini’s threats and warns people to resist the coup he sees is in
motion.
While Banisadr is still
president, the head of the Revolutionary Courts (Ayatollah Gillani) issues a
fatwa for his execution seven times over. Army generals suggest that Banisadr
might conduct his own coup against the clergy but he refuses on two grounds.
First, he opposes military
intervention into politics; second, he does not want to weaken the forces
defending Iran against the Iraqi army, which still holds some Iranian territory
under its control. The clergy are not so concerned; as Khomeini’s grandson,
(Syed Hussein) later revealed, the leaders of Islamic Republic Party –
Ayatollah Beheshti, Hashemi Rafsanjani and Ali Khamenei – would prefer to lose
half of Iran’s territory than for Banisadr win the war with Iraq. “I have
debated with them [the IRP]”, he said.
“and they told me that even if we lose
Khusezestan and even half of Iran, it is better than Banisadr winning this
war”. They bring Revolutionary Guard units from the warfront to Tehran in order
to carry out their coup.
At this point, president
Banisadr goes underground and sends a message to the Iranian people. He says:
“What is important is not
the elimination of the president, but the fact that the demon of despotism and
oppression once again wants to impose itself upon you, the people, and to make
the precious blood shed for Islam and freedom, worthless”.
His house is bombed, the presidential office is attacked, and many members of
his staff are arrested. Some of them are executed: Manuchehr Masudi, the
advisor to the president on human rights who exposed the widespread use of
torture in prisons; Navab Safavi, a journalist and presidential advisor of the
president; Rashid-Sadr-Alhefaazi, whose detailed investigation showed that
Khomeini and Reagan had made a clandestine agreement to postpone the release of
over 52 American hostages in Iran to increase Reagan’s election chance (over
Democratic candidate) Jimmy Carter.
This agreement later became
known as the “October Surprise”. During this time, the Offices of Cooperation
of the People with the President, the only political organizations to have
emerged democratically and horizontally across the country are relentlessly
attacked. Thousands of people are arrested, and many are tortured and
executed. Other people who shelter the president while he is underground
are arrested and executed.
Ayatollah Beheshti then
tries to remove the president through the Supreme Court on the ground that he
has violated the country’s constitution. The judges, who until this point have
maintained their independence (unlike Brazil’s ‘anti-democratic judicial
system’), resist and argue that there are no constitutional grounds for
removing the president. Later, Ayatollah Musavi Ardebili, the country’s public
prosecutor, revealed why the attempt to remove Banisadr through the Supreme
Court failed. He said:
“the court in the Judiciary
in those days was not ready; the judges were not cleansed yet and of those who
were like minded to the president and supporters of liberalism and small
organizations [goroohakhaa, a derogatory term for organizations like the
Mojaheddin and Marxist Fedaeeyaan organization] were in top jobs in courts…”.
Once again, Ayatollah
Khomeini intervenes. In direct violation of the constitution, he orders the
head of parliament, Rafsanjani, to start a process of removing the president
through the parliament. Instead of pointing out that this demand is in
violation of the constitution, Rafsanjani enthusiastically starts the process
and in less than 2 hours gathers 120 signatures of ministers of parliament to
debate the removal of the president on grounds of incompetency through numerous
and repeated violations of the constitution.
MP Ahamd Ghazanfar-pour
dares to read a message from the president in parliament. In it, Banisadr
informs people that the Iraqi government has agreed to a peace deal which is
advantageous to Iran, as Saddam Hussein had agreed to remove his troops
out of Iran’s occupied land and pay a hefty compensation. (It should also be
noted that had the process of overthrowing the president been postponed by even
one week, a peace deal with Saddam Hussein would have been signed.) Attempts
are made to assassinate Ghazanfar-pour and his colleague as they left the
Parliament, but they are able to dodge the bullets.
During an ensuing two-day
debate about Banisadr’s presidential competence, the parliament is surrounded
and occupied by hezbollahis threatening to kill whoever dares
to speak in favour of the president, chanting “Banisadr, anti-God, should be
executed” (Banisadr zedo-allah-edaam bayaad gardad). Later, Rafsanjani
(head of the parliament) praised this terrorisation of the pro-president MPs, stating:
“and now the real force, which was Hezbollah,
had entered the front, the real force of Imam’s line. There were these hezbollahiswho
surrounded the parliament and inflicted so much suffering on [the opposition]
MPs.”
Thus, while 10 MPs had
enrolled to talk in support the president, half of them are so terrorised that
they absent themselves and three switch sides to demand the removal of the
president. Just one, Ali-Akbar Moin-Far, openly defends the president.
Significantly, he ends his defence with a verse from the Koran which is
always spoken at the time of death: “To Allah we belong and to Him/Her we shall return”, as
he had readied himself to die at the hands of the mob.
Those
MPs in favour of removing the president fail to present any evidence to
demonstrate that the president has violated the constitution. The most
important reasons given for his incompetency are:
1) his opposition
to the occupation of American embassy;
2) his opposition
to torture and the execution of prisoners;
3) his opposition
to the doctrine of Velayat-e Faqih (the rule of jurist);
4) his
advocacy
of human rights and democracy; and
5)
his
opposition
to creating a cult of personality around Khomeini. Moinfar argues that the
reasons introduced for Banisadr’s incompetency are in fact cases for his
competence in trying to uphold the constitution, and that he should be praised for it.
Why 35 years of silence?
The
removal of Abolhassan Banisadr as president of Iran in June 1981
drastically altered the outcome of the Iranian Revolution and
post-revolutionary Iranian politics, in particular, closing its democratic path
and institutionalizing its dictatorial trajectory.
The
question is why, after 35 years, does the academic community still fail to
recognize these events as a coup d’état and continue to endorse the official
narrative of the president’s removal, describing it in terms of ‘dismissal’, ‘impeachment, ‘ousting,’ and his being ‘thrown out’?
In response to an article I
attempted to publish about this case in a reputable academic journal, for
example, one reviewer argued that the “legal process was carefully drawn up and
constitutional shortcomings … were bridged using legislation”. Why, in 35
years, has no research been done to interrogate the nature of such an
historical event, with so many documents and testimonies clearly pointing
towards a coup being ignored and left to dust?
It is understandable that
those in Iran’s ruling regime, both conservative and reformist, have every
interest in portraying Banisadr’s removal as legal and constitutional: they all
actively participated in the coup, and recognizing the events as a coup would
render all the subsequent governments as unconstitutional.
However, this does not
explain why many experts in the field who are working in the west passively or
even actively support this official line, even at the cost of academic freedom
and critical thinking, particularly as they do not have to tiptoe around the
regime. Why, instead of providing space for counter-narratives, are they are
doing their best to snuff them out the critical exploration of an
historical event whose reinterpretation could fundamentally transform our
understanding of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and current Iranian politics?
Apart from the political
and ideological forces which clearly bear on this debate, maybe such unbending
resistance to the entrance of this narrative into the literature can be
understood in terms of the discourse which needs to make such an event
invisible. After all, as Michael Foucault has illustrated, one of the main functions of discourse in regimes of truth is to
make anything outside as other, unthinkable and unsayable. Maybe an
alteration of the broader discourse framing these events would undermine the
foundation of existing scholarly work.
Once, Albert Einstein asked
fellow physicist Niels Bohr whether he believed that “the moon does not exist
if nobody is looking at it”. Bohr replied: “he would not be able to prove that
it does”.
And once the philosopher
George Berkley asked, “If
a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound”?
The answer is no, since in order to hear a sound there should be a listener.
The question is, if a thing takes place within social reality and is observed,
but the ones who guard the borders of “what is permissible knowledge” refuse to
acknowledge them, what happens to this experience?
Foucault was interested in
what he called ‘subjugated knowledges’, which he described in two forms: first,
‘historical contents that have been buried or masked in functional coherences
or formal systematizations’, and second, ‘knowledges that have been
disqualified as nonconceptual knowledges, as insufficiently elaborated
knowledges: naïve knowledges, hierarchically inferior knowleges, knowleges that
are below the required level of eruditio or scientificity’.
The question is how to
bring such knowledge to the fore. Foucault argued that archaeological and
geneological methods of critique can ‘desubjugate’ these historical knowledges
in order to ‘to set them free, or in other words to enable them to oppose and
struggle against the coercion of a unitary, formal and scientific theoretical
discourse’.
Thomas Kuhn, in his
ground-breaking analysis
of paradigm shifts in scientific knowledge, demonstrated that shifts in
scholarly consensus of this sort emerge from continuous struggle as the beliefs
and institutions of ‘normal science’ depend on the consensus for their
survival.
It seems that such
determination is also needed to challenge the consensus within political and
academic discourse. The battle to crack the consensus on the nature of
president Banisadr’s removal in 1981 can be fought by exposing the anomolies
between the existing historical consensus and the alternative interpretations.
We can fundamentally
transform our understanding of the Iranian revolution by letting the untold
stories to be told.