Abolhasan Bani Sadr

1933 -

First president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, 1980 - 1981.

Abolhasan Bani Sadr was born in Hamadan to a relatively wealthy, religious landowning family. He studied theology and law at Tehran University, where he played an active part in the Islamic branch of the National Front. He left Iran for France in the 1960s to pursue higher education after being exposed to the ideas of Paul Vieille, the French Marxist sociologist with whom he later coauthored a book (Pétrole et violence, Paris, 1974). While in opposition, he became convinced that Iran's only political solution was a return to a (reformed) Islamic ideology.

Bani Sadr met Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1972 while in Iraq for his father's funeral, and the two kept in close contact. They were reunited in Paris in 1978, shortly before Khomeini's triumphant return to Iran.

After the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Bani Sadr served as foreign minister and minister of finance before becoming Iran's first elected president in 1980. The early stages of his presidency were fraught with conflicts with two pivotal members of the Islamic Republican Party (IRP), Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, although Bani Sadr still enjoyed the support of Ayatollah Khomeini. The tension between Bani Sadr and the IRP had become apparent after the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in November 1979 by a radical group of Muslim students, the so-called "Students following the Imam's Line." Bani Sadr opposed the takeover and tried in vain to secure the freedom of the hostages.

Khomeini appointed Bani Sadr commander in chief and chairman of the Revolutionary Council in February 1980. Under his influence the government sought to restore normalcy and order in the country. Bani Sadr's efforts to stabilize the country and curb revolutionary excesses did not bear fruit, however, and his influence was undermined by the IRP's sweeping victory in the first parliamentary election and the subsequent imposition of the IRP candidate, Mohammad Ali Rajaʾi, as prime minister. An attempted coup backed by part of the Iranian military in July 1980 was a further blow to his presidency. The armed forces were purged severely, and Bani Sadr's appointees to several key positions were executed.

After Iraq attacked Iran in September 1980, Bani Sadr was appointed by Khomeini as chairman of the Supreme Defense Council. Spending most of his time at the front and away from Tehran, he failed to exploit the opportunities provided by the war to bolster his power. From September 1980 until its closure by the IRP in June 1981, Bani Sadr used his newspaper, Jomhuri-ye Eslami (Islamic Republic), to criticize the IRP and other hard-line factions in the government. The IRP, for its part, criticized Iran's repeated defeats on the war front and Bani Sadr's policy of favoring the regular armed forces over the Revolutionary Guards in combat.

Further showdowns with the IRP drove Bani Sadr to seek support from various opposition groups active in Iran, including the National Front and the Mojahedin-e Khalq. Bani Sadr was dismissed as acting commander in chief of the armed forces on 10 June 1981. Following repeated failed attempts at reconciliation the parliament, with Ayatollah Khomeini's approval, proceeded to impeach him. Bani Sadr fled the country with the help of the Mojahedin-e Khalq and, once in Paris, joined the leadership of the National Resistance Council alongside Masud Rajavi, the head of the Mojahedin. It was a short-lived union, mainly owing to Rajavi's increasingly dictatorial and cultic personality, and Bani Sadr severed his ties with the National Resistance Council in 1984. In 1997 he was in the limelight once again, when he testified against Iran in a court in Berlin, where the Iranian government was accused of complicity in the murder of four of its opponents, including the leader of the Kurdish Democratic Party. The court ruled that the murder had been approved at the highest echelons of the Iranian government.

As of 2003, Bani Sadr continued to live in Paris, pursuing political activity mostly in the form of lectures and public statements on political developments in Iran, and signing his name always as the "elected President of the people of Iran." His many books include L'espérance trahie (Hope betrayed, 1982), The Fundamental Principles and Precepts of Islamic Government (1981), and My Turn to Speak: Iran, the Revolution, and Secret Deals with the U.S. (1991).

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.

Milani, Mohsen M. The Making of Iran's Islamic Revolution: FromMonarchy to Islamic Republic, 2d edition. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994.

Rouleau, Eric. "The War and the Struggle for the State." In Iran Two Years After, MERIP Report 98 (July - August 1981): 8 - 11.

— NEGUIN YAVARI