Abbas Amir-Entezam
1933 -
An Iranian political activist.
Abbas Amir-Entezam was born in Tehran into a bazaar carpet-manufacturing family. As a student at Tehran University in the early 1950s he became politically active, eventually joining the National Resistance Movement, a clandestine group formed by religious nationalists following the 1953 coup d'état against the government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. The National Resistance Movement was a forerunner to the Freedom Movement, of which Amir-Entezam became a founding member in 1961. From 1964 to 1969 he lived in the United States, where he obtained a master's degree in engineering from the University of California at Berkeley (1966) and was active in the Muslim Student Association and the Confederation of Iranian Students. Upon returning to Iran, he resumed his participation in the Freedom Movement. In 1977, the party selected him to be a contact with the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Freedom Movement leader Mehdi Bazargan chose Amir-Entezam to be his deputy prime minister in the provisional government he formed in February 1979 to rule Iran in the wake of the Iranian Revolution. Later that year he went to Stockholm to serve as Iranian ambassador to the Scandinavian countries.
After Iranian students seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran (November 1979), they found documents indicating several meetings between Amir-Entezam and U.S. diplomatic personnel. Although Bazargan insisted that Amir-Entezam had met with the Americans at the behest of the government, he was recalled to Iran, where a revolutionary court charged him with being a spy. Amir-Entezam was convicted of espionage in 1980 and sentenced to life imprisonment. Beginning in 1996, however, he was permitted to have periodic weekend home visits. In December 1997, prison authorities failed to pick him up at the end of one such visit, but he was rearrested in September 1998 after criticizing his former prison warden in a radio interview. He was released on bail in early 2002 but rearrested again in April 2003, a few days after faxing to national and international media outlets an appeal for a referendum on the country's political system. AmirEntezam is believed to be modern Iran's longest-serving political prisoner.
Bibliography
Chehabi, H. E. Iranian Politics and Religious Modernism: The Liberation Movement of Iran under the Shah and Khomeini. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.
— NEGUIN YAVARI UPDATED BY ERIC HOOGLUND
