AliAkbarHashemiRafsanjani
Former president of Iran Born: August 25, 1934; Died: January 8, 2017 ALI Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who has died aged 82, was a former president of Iran and a member of its ruling elite for decades. His moderate views were not always welcome but his cunning guided him through revolution, war and the country’s turbulent politics.
His talent for political survival saw him serving as a close aide to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini during the 1979 Islamic Revolution and acting as a go-between in the Iran-Contra deal. He also helped found Iran’s contested nuclear programme, but later backed the accord with world powers to limit it in exchange for sanctions relief.
Rafsanjani served as president from 1989 to 1997, during a period of significant changes in Iran. At the time, the country was struggling to rebuild its economy after a devastating war with Iraq, while also cautiously allowing some wider freedoms. He also oversaw key developments in Iran’s nuclear programme by negotiating deals with Russia to build an energy-producing reactor in Bushehr, which finally went into service in 2011 after long delays. Behind the scenes, he directed the secret purchase of technology and equipment from Pakistan and elsewhere.
The cleric managed to remain within Iran’s ruling theocracy after leaving office, but an attempt to return to the presidency in 2005 was dashed by the electoral victory of the more hardline Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
But after years of waning influence, Rafsanjani was handed an unexpected political resurgence with the 2013 victory of a fellow moderate, Hassan Rouhani, giving him an insider role in efforts that would culminate in the 2015 nuclear agreement.
His image, however, had darker undertones. He was named by prosecutors in Argentina among Iranian officials suspected of links to a 1994 bombing of a Jewish centre in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people. Some Iranian reformers accused him of involvement in the slaying of liberals and dissidents during his presidency — charges that he denied and that were never pursued by Iranian authorities.
Rafsanjani first met Khomeini in the Shiite seminaries of Qom in the 1950s and later became a key figure in the Islamic uprising that toppled the US-backed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979.
He was elected as head of Iran’s parliament in 1980 and served until 1989, when he was elected for the first of two four-year terms as president.
He was also the head of a family-run pistachio business, which grew to become one of Iran’s largest exporters and provided the financial foundation for a business empire that would eventually include construction companies, an auto assembly plant, vast real estate holdings and a private airline.
Rafsanjani was born in 1934 in the village of Bahraman in south-eastern Iran.
He was jailed for several years under the shah. He then helped organise the network of mullahs that became Khomeini’s revolutionary underground. In 1965, he is reputed to have provided the handgun for the assassination of Iran’s prime minister, Hassan Ali Mansoor.
Although Rafsanjani was seen by Washington as a potential ice breaker, his views were far from solidly pro-Western and displayed conflicted positions.
Shortly after becoming president in 1989, he hinted Palestinians should kill Westerners to retaliate for Israeli actions in the occupied territories. “It is not hard to kill Americans or Frenchmen,” he said.
Rafsanjani had been head of the Expediency Council, an advisory body that mediates disputes between the parliament and the Guardian Council, a watchdog group controlled by hardline clerics.
In January 2012, a court sentenced Rafsanjani’s daughter, Faezeh Hashemi, to six months in prison on charges of criticising the ruling system. A court in 2015 sentenced his younger son, Mahdi, to a 10-year prison term over embezzlement and security charges.
Rafsanjani is survived by his wife, Effat Marashi, and five children.