Mullah Power

Ganging up on Banisadr

They were howling in the streets of Tehran in January 1980, during the revolution that placed him in office, and last This week the time, mobs were however, on the President march again. Abolhassan Banisadr was the target of their wrath. While demonstrators cried, "Death to the second Shah!" the Iranian parliament, dominated by Muslim fundamentalists, voted by an overwhelming majority to impeach Banisadr for "incompetence." His fate is now up to the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini. Meanwhile, as his own supporters met the mobs in bloody combat, Banisadr dropped out of sight, and border and airport police were on the alert to prevent him from fleeing.

The attack on Banisadr marked a new stage in the mullahs' campaign to crush moderate opposition. By exploiting their control of the cabinet, parliament and the judiciary, the mullahs had been chipping away at Banisadr's sources of power. They succeeded in shutting down his newspaper, ousting his sympathizers from government posts and finally getting him dismissed two weeks ago as commander in chief of the armed forces. The owlish, 48-year-old economist had launched a belated bid to shore up his presidency by soliciting support from generals who applauded his frequent front line tours in the war with Iraq. But the military, wary of the risks of political involvement, chose to remain neutral.

Banisadr's special ties with the army hardened the suspicions of his fundamentalist foes, who already distrusted his "Western ideas," gleaned during his 16 years of exile in Paris. They convinced Khomeini that such close bonds between the President and the military could lead a counterrevolutionary coup. Vowing that he would "cut everybody's hands off" who threatened Islam, Khomeini fired Banisadr as commander in chief. He then issued a stern warning to military officers: "Politics in the army is worse than heroin. It destroys the army from inside."

Khomeini suggested that Banisadr could retain the presidency if he apologized for urging the Islamic country to "resist the dictatorship" of Islamic hardliners. "I am sorry that [he and his supporters] have dug their own graves," Khomeini told clergymen massed near his home in north Tehran. "I did not want it to happen this way. I want them now to say that they have been wrong so far in inviting people to revolt." Banisadr's reply, though respectful, fell short of contrition. "However angry you are, my honesty toward you will not be diminished. I think your treatment of me is not fair. I have not had a bad thought toward you and the country."

In part, Banisador had himself to blame for his fall from power. Elected President in January 1980 with 15% of the vote, he failed to mobilize a political base among his disparate backers that could match the ruthless efficiency of the mullahs' Islamic Republican Party. He confused supporters by exhorting them to battle against fanatical clergy while simultaneously displaying unflinching fealty to Khomeini. Banisadr's hope was to forge a loose alliance linking the armed forces, intellectuals and some 100,000 urban guerrillas known as the Mujahedine Khalq (People's Crusaders), a socialist Islamic faction disaffected with the rigid fundamentalists. But the main problem, scoffs an embittered Iranian civil servant, is that "the linchpin of this unachieved coalition, Banisadr himself, is made of jelly." With the moderates apparently swept from power and the military preoccupied with a possible Iraqi offensive, Iran's mullahs now need only eliminate subversive opposition from the left to fulfill their dream of turning Iran into a theocratic Muslim state.

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