MB Civic

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http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/100806F.shtml

In 1945, my father was born in Gonbad-e Kavus, Iran. After the second World War drew to a close, Iran’s democratically-elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh was overthrown in 1953 by the CIA. The CIA then installed a monarchist regime because the previously secular Iranian government was nationalizing the oil industry (thus cutting off a key profit opportunity for Western oil corporations). After the American-supported Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his new prime minister, Fazlollah Zahedi (who had previously been exiled due to his Nazi sympathies), took power with the support of the White House, they scrapped nationalization plans and began to again do business with American and European oil corporations. In order to distract the Iranian public from what they were doing economically and politically, the supposedly secular Shah worked to heighten religious consciousness among ordinary people and turn public sentiment against a small peace-oriented religious minority called Baha’i’s.

My father, being Baha’i, suffered firsthand the results of the propagandistic clerical broadcasts on state radio, which encouraged discrimination and even violence against Baha’i’s. The US-supported regime imprisoned and executed dozens of Iranian Baha’i’s during this period, while mobs killed others independently. For his part, my father was only beaten by his classmates and teacher, but state-encouraged activities such as this were occurring all over the country. At one point, my father’s family and other local Baha’i’s gathered sticks and baseball bats and began patrolling the neighborhood to guard against the mobs – and the Iranian police themselves.

As a result of a repressive US-installed regime, which lasted more than twenty-five years, Iranians eventually rebelled and overthrew the monarchist government. Unfortunately the revolution, which originally began as a secular movement, was hijacked by religious extremists, and a radical Islamic government came to power. In the span of fifty years, Iran had gone from a British-supported monarchy to democracy, to a repressive US-supported monarchy, to a radical Islamic quasi-democracy, which was more repressive still.

Under the new regime, repression of Baha’i’s (which had been encouraged by the American-supported government) only increased further. My grandfather, a prominent and respected Baha’i leader, was put on a list of people to be executed, and eventually had to flee his home and go underground.

Somehow we have to wake people up to the destructive effects of our foreign policy and shameful legacy throughout the developing world.
-MAB