Ali Akbar Velayati

1945 -

Foreign minister of Iran, 1981 - 1997.

Born in Tehran in 1945, Ali Akbar Velayati received a doctorate in pediatrics from Tehran University in 1971. After completing postgraduate work, he left for further studies in the United States, where he joined the Organization of Iranian Moslem Students. Returning home, he taught at his alma mater and was appointed deputy health minister in the first government appointed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979. He also served in the first parliament in 1980.

Before the Iranian revolution, Velayati was a member of the Hojjatieh group, an anti-Bahai conservative group that eventually challenged the dominance of the Islamic Republican Party (IRP). He left the group in 1983 when Khomeini denounced its activities, and he joined the Jamʿiat Motalefeh Islami (Islamic Society, or JME), a group very close to the conservative ulama and bazaari merchants. In 1980 the IRP and JME unsuccessfully had pressed Iran's current president, Abolhasan Bani Sadr, to appoint Velayati as a foreign minister. In 1981 President Hojatoleslam Seyed Ali Khamenehi nominated Velayati for premier but could not win support from the parliament. Khamenehi accepted the parliament's choice of Mir Hossein Mousavi as prime minister if Velayati were appointed as foreign minister - a position Velayati held for more than sixteen years and through four administrations until 1997.

Velayati is a conservative pragmatist who helped to move Iran out of its revolutionary isolation and temper its adventurist foreign policies of the early 1980s. However, he opposed ties with the United States as an archenemy of the Islamic Republic and regards Israel as an illegitimate state in the heart-land of Islam. He helped Iran to join international organizations and favored developing ties with Europe and developing countries.

Internally, his tenure in the foreign ministry has been criticized for putting more emphasis on loyalty than on professional qualifications. He is regarded as a nonclerical protégé of the religious elite who owes his long presence in Iranian politics to his loyalty to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenehi. In 1997 he was named by a German court as a member of the Special Operations Committee that approved the 1992 assassinations of three Kurdish Democratic Party leaders in the Mykonos Restaurant in Berlin.

Since his departure from the foreign ministry, Velayati has been a member of the Expediency Council, serves as an adviser on international affairs to Ayatollah Khamenehi and conducts foreign policy assignments, and continues to teach in the university and write articles and books on the history of Iran and the Iranian revolution for government publication. He also serves as the secretary-general of the Ahlul Bayt World Assembly - a religious institution named after the descendants of the prophet Muhammad and established to advance the Shiʿite cause around the world.

Bibliography

Moslem, Mehdi. Factional Politics in Post-Khomeini Iran. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002.

— ALI AKBAR MAHDI