Abolhassan Banisadr
Politician who became Iran’s first president after the revolution but fell foul of the hardline clerics
ABOLHASSAN BANISADR, who has died aged 88, was the first president of Iran following the 1979 revolution, but as a liberal he lasted only 16 months before being impeached in a power struggle with the country’s radical clerics; by then he was already on the run, and he was smuggled aboard a plane and flown to France, where he spent the rest of his life.
Sayyid Abolhassan Banisadr was born on March 22 1933 in Hamadan, thought to be one of the world’s oldest cities, in the north-west of the country. His father was a cleric who was close to a fellow ayatollah, Ruhollah Khomeini.
Abolhassan studied law, theology and sociology at Tehran University and joined the resistance movement against the Shah. He was twice imprisoned, and fled to France, where he studied finance and economics at the Sorbonne.
In 1972 his father died, and at the funeral he met Khomeini for the first time, becoming one of his inner circle. When the revolution erupted, he returned to Tehran with his boss, and in February 1979 was appointed deputy minister of finance and a member of the revolutionary council.
He was soon promoted to finance minister, adding foreign affairs to his duties the following November, and in January 1980 Banisadr was elected to a four-year term as president, though ultimately power remained with Khomeini, as Supreme Leader.
Banisadr’s great hope was that the overthrow of the Shah would usher in a new age of democracy and human rights, and he believed that the government should be free of clerics. But as revolutionary fervour began to congeal into the authoritarianism of theocracy, he found himself in direct opposition to the fundamentalists.
When a group of students occupied the US Embassy in November 1979 he urged them to give up, telling them: “You think you have taken America hostage. What a delusion! In fact, you have made Iran the hostage of the Americans.”
Though he worked hard to bring an element of stability to a country in turmoil – exacerbated by the Iran-iraq war – his liberal instincts increasingly counted against him, and in August and September 1980 he survived two helicopter crashes near the border between the two countries.
“I was like a child watching my father slowly turn into an alcoholic,” Banisadr would later say of Khomeini. “The drug this time was power.”
In June 1981 the crackdown began. Banisadr went into hiding, the Revolutionary Guard seized the presidential residence and jailed journalists thought to be allied to him; several of his friends and associates were executed. On June 21 the Majlis, the Iranian parliament, impeached him in his absence “for opposing the Islamic Republic”.
He tried to organise an alliance of anti-khomeini factions, alongside Massoud Rajavi, leader of the Left-wing militant group Mujahideen-e Khalq, but they soon concluded that they would have to flee the country.
On 29 July Banisadr disguised himself by shaving off his moustache – and, according to a government spokesman, donning a skirt – and with Rajavi was smuggled aboard an Iranian Air Force Boeing 707 flown by a sympathetic pilot who deviated from his intended route and took them to Paris.
A couple of months after arriving in France Banisadr and Rajavi joined forces with the Kurdish Democratic Party to set up the National Council of Resistance of Iran, and Banisadr’s daughter Firoozeh married Rajavi to seal the alliance.
But the two men fell out, Banisadr accusing his former comrade of authoritarian tendencies and favouring armed conflict, and he withdrew from the Council of Resistance in 1984 when in the midst of the war with Iraq the Mujahideen-e Khalq set up an alliance with Saddam Hussein. Firoozeh and Rajavi were divorced in short order.
For the rest of his life Banisadr lived with his family in or around Paris, latterly under heavy armed guard in Versailles following death threats from Iranian hardliners. He remained steadfastly opposed to the regime back in Iran.
In 1991, in his book My Turn to Speak: Iran, the Revolution and Secret Deals With the US, he made several sensational claims, including the allegation that Ronald’s Reagan’s US presidential campaign had conspired with Tehran to prolong the hostage crisis until Reagan was in the White House, and that Henry Kissinger had plotted to set up a Palestinian state within Iran.
In 2009, interviewed by the Voice of America to mark the 29th anniversary of the revolution, he insisted that Khomeini had been directly responsible for the violence that had emanated from the Muslim world and that the promises his former mentor had made in exile were broken once he was in power. The present government, meanwhile, was “holding on to power solely by means of violence and terror”.
Abolhassan Banisadr was married and had three children.
Abolhassan Banisadr, born March 22 1933, died October 9 2021