TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/70s/70iran

Text File | 1992-09-25 | 11KB | 208 lines

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                                                        Iran Hostages


  [Still another dictatorship fell at the end of the 1970s. This
one was also that of a good friend and client state of the U.S.
Instead of democracy or Marxism, the successor regime to the
Shah of Shahs in this case was an Islamic theocracy.]


(September 18, 1978)

  Day after day they marched, tens of thousands strong, defiant
chanting demonstrators surging through the streets of Tehran,
a capital unaccustomed to the shouts and echoes of dissent. The
subject of their protest was the policies of Iran's supreme
ruler, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Some carried signs demanding
his ouster. Others called for a return of long denied civil and
political liberties and the enforcement of Islamic laws. The
crowd, at times numbering more than 100,000, was a colorful,
sometimes incongruous cross section of Iranian society:
dissident students in jeans; women shrouded in the black chador,
the traditional head-to-foot veil; peasants and merchants; and
most important the bearded, black-robed Muslim mullahs, the
religious leaders of the Shi'ite branch of Islam, which
commands the allegiance of 93% of Iran's 34.4 million people.

  The challenge to his leadership stunned the Shah and outraged
his generals, who argued that the demonstrations were surely
eroding his authority--and in turn the army's--and must be
stopped. A lengthy late-night Cabinet meeting followed, and on
the morning after, Premier Jaafar Sharif-Emami proclaimed a
curfew and martial law for six months. Not in a quarter-century
had Tehran been under the rule of troops.

  Next day the demonstrations began again and this time ended
in fatal, fiery riots. Many marchers apparently had not heard
the martial-law proclamation over Radio Iran or else they chose
to defy it. Jaleh Square in downtown Tehran was packed with
thousands of protesters. A local religious leader appealed to
them to disperse. They refused. A cavalcade of motorcycles,
followed by groups of women and young children, began to proceed
toward squads of armed soldiers. After repeated warnings, the
soldiers lobbed canisters of tear gas into the crowd, then shot
into the air. As the throngs advanced, the troops lowered their
guns and fired. At nightfall, after the bodies of the victims
had been loaded into army trucks and carried away, the
government announced that 86 people, mostly women and children,
had died, and 205 others were wounded.


(January 29, 1979)

  In Tehran, the throngs were filling the streets to begin once
more their daily demonstrations. If the protesters had looked
upward, they would have seen a blue and white Boeing 727 swing
over the city, circle once and turn away. The pilot of that
plane was Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, taking a long, perhaps
last look at the capital of his realm. For years he had lived
under the illusion that he was a monarch beloved by his 34
million subjects; for years he had harbored the conviction that
his leadership was bringing all the benefits of national wealth
and well-being to a backward nation. In the end, it had come to
this: he departed hated, vilified, denounced. After 37 years on
the Peacock Throne, he had been ignominiously driven out of
Iran. The public face he put upon it was that he was simply
taken a leave. But in all likelihood, his departure means the
end of monarchy in a land ruled by kings for more than 2,500
years.


(February 12, 1979)

  The chartered Air France 747 circled over the city and past
the nearby Elburz Mountains three times before settling down
gently on the tarmac of Tehran's Mehrabad Airport. As aides and
reporters milled about, the frail old man, wearing a black
turban and ankle-length robes, stepped out of the aircraft's
door into the chill February morning. His back hunched, he
clutched the arm of an Air France purser as he walked down the
portable ramp to touch Iranian soil. After 15 years in exile,
Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, 78, spiritual leader of a
revolution that has been building to a frightening climax, had
come home at last. The moment was, conceivably, the start of a
new era for a country that has seemed dangerously out of
control.

  After all the demonstrations of anger and mourning that have
punctuated the year-long crisis, Iran went wild with joy. From
all across the country, millions of people thronged into the
capital; they lined the 20-mile route out to Behesht-Zahra
Cemetery, where many of the martyrs of the revolution are
buried, to catch a glimpse of the Ayatullah. "The holy one has
come!" they shouted triumphantly. "He is the light of our
lives!" So heavy was the crush of people that Khomeini had to
be lifted from his motorcade and flown the last mile to the
cemetery by helicopter. There, in Lot 17, he prayed and
delivered a funeral oration for the dead. "Is it human rights,"
he asked in a bitter if oblique reference to President Carter,
"when we say we want to name a government and we get a cemetery
full of people?"


  [After a brief stay in Egypt, the deposed Shah obtained
permission to enter the U.S. for medical treatment (he was
actually dying of cancer). His arrival touched off a violent,
visceral reaction against the U.S. and all things American.]

(November 19, 1979)

  On Sunday, Nov. 4, hundreds of protesters gathered in
downtown Tehran outside the U.S. embassy, a 27-acre compound
surrounded by ten-and twelve-foot brick walls and secured with
metal gates. The students, most of whom were unarmed, chanted
anti-American slogans and carried banners: DEATH TO AMERICA IS
A BEAUTIFUL THOUGHT and GIVE US THE SHAH. At the very hour at
which the demonstration was taking place in Tehran, the
Ayatullah Khomeini was telling a student in the holy city of
Qum, some 80 miles to the south, that foreign "enemies" were
plotting against the Iranian revolution. Repeatedly, he charged
that the American embassy in his country's capital was "a nest
of spies" and "a center of intrigue."

  That was all the inspiration the students needed. Just before
11 a.m., someone with a pair of powerful shears managed to break
the chain that held together the gates on Taleghani Street, and
the crowd surged through. Once inside the compound, some headed
for the ambassador's residence, where the servants offered no
resistance (there has been no U.S. ambassador in Tehran since
William Sullivan left in April). Others tried to take over the
chancellery but found it protected with armor plating and
grillwork. Using bullhorns, they shouted at the occupants: "Give
up and you won't be harmed! If you don't give up, you will be
killed!" As the attackers struggled to get inside, other
protesters and a crowd of curiosity seekers clambered over the
embassy walls and swarmed through the compound. Inside the
two-story brick chancellery building, known to Americans as
"Fort Apache" for its special security reinforcements, Marine
guards donned flak jackets and gas masks and ordered everyone
to the top floor.

  Finally, after stalling as long as possible, a Marine opened
the door, and students rushed in, their eyes moist from tear
gas. The students grabbed the masks of the Americans. Said one
attacker: "We had the gas for three hours. You can taste it for
a while." Then they blindfolded the embassy staff, bound their
hands and made them sit on a corridor floor. Soon the students
put one of their prisoners on parade, draping his body with a
Khomeini poster.

  By 4 p.m., the compound was completely in the hands of the
students, who now numbered about 600. Soon afterward the group,
which called itself the "Muslim Students of the Imam Khomeini
Line," issued "Communique No. 1." It announced that the
occupation of "this next of intrigue" was a protest against "the
U.S. officer of asylum to this criminal Shah who was responsible
for the deaths of thousands of Iranians."


(December 3, 1979)

  The rancorous quarrel between the U.S. and Iran darkened and
expanded last week into an ever more perilous confrontation.
From the U.S. came a warning of military force, from Iran an
appeal to mob violence. Such violence broke out from Turkey to
India, most seriously in Pakistan, where the first American
blood was shed. And by this time Iran's fire-eating Ayatullah
Ruhollah Khomeini had become so extreme, so demagogic, so
streaked with irrationality that serious diplomats wondered how
the breach could be repaired. "This is not a struggle between
the United States and Iran," Khomeini declared. "It is a
struggle between Islam and the infidels." He repeatedly
threatened that the 49 American hostages held in the captured
U.S. embassy in Tehran would be tried as spies, and possibly
executed, if the U.S. does not send back the deposed Shah
Mohammed Reza Pahlavi from the hospital in New York City.

  Khomeini's inflammatory rhetoric played a major part in the
wave of Muslim fanaticism and anti-American violence that swept
far beyond Iran. In Saudi Arabia, possessor of the world's
greatest reserves of oil and American dollars, a band of extreme
religious zealots seized the Sacred Mosque in Mecca, the holiest
shrine in all Islam. In Pakistan, a mob enraged by radio reports
claiming that the U.S. had inspired the attack on the Mecca
mosque stormed and set fire to the U.S. embassy. They left the
modernistic, 30-acre compound a gutted ruin. Two Americans were
killed; 90 others were rescued after seven hours of horror.

  For the U.S. the immediate issue remained the 49 hostages in
Tehran. Concern about their fate far overshadowed any relief
about the return of the 13 hostages--five white women and eight
black men--who were freed by their captors and who made it home
for Thanksgiving dinner. As the 13 stepped off the C-135
military jet that brought them into Andrews Air Force Base
outside Washington, dozens of relatives who had been flown there
from all over the country rushed to embrace them. But the
official welcoming could not be jubilant. Said Secretary of
State Cyrus Vance: "Our relief that you are safe is muted by our
concern for your colleagues who remain."


  [Despite intensive negotiations and an abortive rescue
mission mounted in April 1980, the 52 American hostages,
including the three trapped at the Iranian Foreign Ministry,
were not released until noon on January 21, 1981, the moment
when Carter's Administration ended.]