The hidden agenda of Khomeini’s revolution

The truth about Black Friday or the Slaughter of Jaleh Place

On the 8 September 1978, on Jaleh Place, shots rang out with no obvious reason and demonstrators were shot fatally and felt down.

According to the official version of the regime of Khomeini, the imperial army in which most soldiers came from poor class and were great believers opened fire. Israeli officers helped it out by shooting from helicopters ! Such argument that would make some people get hopping mad nowadays didn’t cause any disturbance in 1978. Not only facts and arguments didn’t disturb journalists or even historians of live events but also the French philosopher Michel Foucault, Le Nouvel Obs’ official journalist, announced some 2,000 and then 3,000 deaths right before he reported the figure of 4,000 deaths and announced that demonstrators weren’t afraid of dyeing and thus implied that some bitter battle took place. Facts appeared to be very different from this Peplum version.

Jaleh Place entered in international imagination as a proof of the dreadful nature of the Shah’s regime and of its brutality. Nevertheless those who were killed on this place weren’t victim of the bullets Iranian soldiers shot. This day this was Russian bullets that killed Iranians who demonstrated on this small place of Tehran that can welcome no more than 700 people.

Nowadays we assist in an explosion of violence in Iraq. Al Zarkawi’s men who are supported and equipped by Syrian regime are sowing terror in Iraq by carrying out murderous raids against Shiites. They kill Shiites who are close to Iran, with the mullahs’ regime consent. The objective is to deepen Iraqi crisis, to make Iraq turn like Lebanon in order to destabilize any “democratic” vague desire and make the situation more Islamist. Whether Shiites kill Sunnis or conversely, on long term political Islam will be on stage and will supplant laic parties. On short term, such situation will be convenient for Al Qaeda and the mullahs.

Such policy of terrorist means that would be used to modify the order of things is not new. It’s nowadays implemented in Iraq by people who used to be part of the Hezbollah and who were trained in Libyan or Palestinian camps in the 70’s. The use of terrorism against allied targets was inaugurated in Iran shortly before the Islamic revolution. Much before they take the power, the mullahs became convinced with the efficiency of such practice which consists in making a bomb attack and make people believe it was perpetrated by the enemy itself. This is also the thesis of Thierry Meyssan, Larijani’s friend, who stated that American planned the 11 September’s attack in order to discredit Muslim people.

This argument -much popular in France- didn’t convince owing to its links with the “Jewish plot”. In 1978 in Iran, this approach didn’t catch the people and the power off guard because it was hard to imagine that Jaleh Place’s slaughter wasn’t the result of some police blunder. There were death people, an army and an avalanche of articles in the international press which damned the regime, the Shah’s one. A regime that succeeded the exploit to make Giscard and Jean Daniel come on agreement. In 1978, the cause was all right and nobody thought of verifying details.

We wish to do it today in order to unveil some particular aspect of the mullahs’ regime : the “false attack” against its own camp so to discredit the adversary. Since the accession of the mullahs’ regime, Iran confessed several of those false-attacks that made the regime able to implement targeted repressions against the presumed authors of those attacks. Sometimes former accomplices -Radjavi- were concerned and sometimes ethnic minorities -Sunnis, Jews…

Nowadays, except from the people who are close to the power, every Iranian know that Jaleh Place’s dead people felt down under the bullets of mercenaries who were sent in Iran by the greatest Arab ally of the mullahs and the first distinguished guest of the Islamic Republic : Yasser Arafat. Iranian universities accept for free children of the PLO Fedayin and Iranian hospitals treat them even without demanding the same astronomical sums they demand to Iranians. It’s because the mullahs’ regime owes a life-long debt to the PLO and Yasser Arafat, a debt that the latter reminded them endlessly. Without the PLO’s contribution, the revolution would have never been successful !

Except from the people who are close to the power, no Iranian have doubt on the Jaleh Place’s events on which people came to demonstrate in favour of Khomeini and felt down as they were riddled with bullets, victims of the submachine guns of the of the mercenaries Khomeini himself paid. An above suspicion crime that discredited the Shah’s regime and cut every link that existed between the power and the street. A fact that made any reconciliation impossible to get.

This is an incredible version but the most incredible is that this version is nowadays accepted in Iran. If Europeans still believe nowadays that the regime of the Shah spilled blood to remain on power, Iranians think on the contrary that it was overthrown exactly because it refused to make Iranian blood run.

Iranians think most certainly that the Shah was overthrown because he refused to use force to subdue fundamentalists. Those both opinions are radically opposed and irreconcilable. As well they suppose different conclusions.

Actually everything is based on Jaleh Place’s slaughter. French people know the first version that Le Nouvel Observateur reported. But Iranians had access to new elements that were published afterwards notably by a certain Emad-Eddin Baghi who was jailed because of an article that referred to this affair and more generally to the crimes perpetrated by the “terrible secret police of the Shah, the Savak”. We are going to expose Baghi’s works.

Baghi became nowadays the protégé of the newspaper Le Monde which refrains from alluding to the works that sent him to jail, works that refer to the number of people who were killed under the Shah’s regime. This is due to the fact this figure -much inferior to the one that is commonly admitted- and the number of Jaleh Place’s deaths is the epicentre of a hurricane. This hurricane modified from top to bottom Iranians’ opinion of the Shah’s regime, of its brutality and this may call into question every preconceived view that the European press repeats as if it would be willing to justify its support in favour of Khomeini.

The truth about Jaleh Place’s slaughter will call into question the integrity of Jean Daniel and his journalists who worked for this weekly newspaper and who used to cover events in Iran.

Our country was sacrificed on the altar of personal convictions of some people who spread deliberately false news and who still repeat the same lies in order to avoid confessing that they mistaken.

Iranians who live everyday with the mullahs tried to look behind appearances and they know the truth about this sordid affair that unveiled the mullahs’ true nature. The problem is that French people never had any access to those elements because those elements prove the former regime innocent and contradict the first version that was published in the French press. All in all, French people are meant to ignore the truth about Jaleh Place’s slaughter because the journalists and the newspaper which recounted those events refuse to confess they mistaken.

The revelations of Ehmad-Eddin Baghi : 2,000 ; 3,000 ; 5,000 and finally 9,000 deaths haunted Jaleh Place. A place that could welcome only 700 people. The rumours the architects of the Islamic Revolution peddled were finally denied inside the regime itself by Ehmad-Eddin Baghi.

The latter caused in 1997 a cataclysm even at the deciding summits of the mullahs’ regime and of the Shiite high clergy by publishing the results of his investigations about the number of victims under the Shah’s regime from 1963 to 1979. Those investigations were ordered by Khomeini in 1979 -1963 is the date of Khomeini’s first revolt against women liberation and against the agricultural reforms of the White Revolution ; see hereafter.

The agricultural reforms required land distribution among farmers who used to live until then under nearly serfdom. The agricultural reforms put an end to the combined powers of feudal lords and clergy who used to rule the assembly and make their mark the most constitutionally possible. Without the royal edict, women emancipation and agricultural reforms would not have been conceivable.

Right after the Shah’s fall, Khomeini, the clergy and feudal lords’ avenger, ordered the creation of a “Martyr Foundation” whose purpose was to identify every victim of the former regime -named on this occasion martyr. This foundation which became a holding finances the Hamas. It was supposed to bring some financial support to the families that were victims of the Shah -nothing related to the Hamas and the budget that was necessary for the implementation of the fatwa against Rushdie. For years, this Foundation collected names -of potential victims- and carried out cross-checks as well as classifying according to age, sex, education, occupation and address criteria.

The files remained secret until 1997 and at that time, Emad-Eddin Baghi was investigator and redactor at the Foundation’s newspaper : “Yad-e Yaran” -Remember the Comrades. It’s at that time he finalized his works and it was announced that the results would remain secret and would never be published.

The reason they exposed is that the results were in contradiction with the figures Khomeini and his successors have always declared. Those figures put forward a balance of at least 60,000 deaths, victims of the Shah, between 1963 and 1979. During the hostage-taking at the American embassy in Tehran, at a Parliament debate, we even heard a deputy stating that it was irrelevant to release the hostages in order to not offend the memory of the 70,000 deaths and 100,000 wounded people of the Shah’s pro-American regime.

By continuing to declare such a great number of victims, the regime gave the right to violate every law and thus it gave some legitimacy to its own excesses. The mullahs, who are not short of assets, even hired an interlope person Fereydun Sahebjam, who was living in France and who introduced himself as a journalist. He stated that in 2004, during the latest years of the Shah’s reign, around ten opponents were killed or hanged everyday. Sahebjam didn’t find anything better than this incredible statement to reach the figure of 60,000 deaths hat was declared. Baghi’s works didn’t come within the scope of those arithmetic and scientist manipulations.

In 1997, Emad-Eddin Baghi left the “Martyr Foundation” and he wrote two books in which he blamed the power and the authorities for not disclosing the results. Thus he troubled the public opinion. However officials and the French press continued to rap their rough figures out in order to justify their past actions.

Baghi was persuaded that history should be based on objective and verifiable facts and not on rumours that emanated from the collective hysteria of the anti-Shah demonstrations that took place in 1978-79. Baghi’s work sent him to jail. Finally he went out of jail and today he doesn’t tell anymore about the incredibly low number of the victims of the Shah’s regime. He cares about a non-profit organization that helps prisoners and he avoids being involved into political life.

Baghi’s investigation revealed that there were between 1963 and 1979 exactly 3,164 victims among which 2,781 died during the revolution and who were described then as “victims of the armed riots of 1978-79”. The figure appears surprisingly close to the one that appears in an article of L’Express -N°1483 dated of the 14 December 1979. We read that the opponents blamed the Shah’s regime for having arrested 3,164 people from 1968 to 1979.

Baghi cannot be suspected of fellow feeling for the Shah. Thus there’s no point we can have doubts about such figures. Baghi admitted that there could be a difference of around ten names or more in the total figure. If according to the clandestine publication that was printed in Iran the regime would have made until 1977 the same number of victims than from 1963 to 1979, it’s obvious we have reasons to be doubtful of the existence of the 2,781 victims of 1978-79’s urban guerrilla. Anyways we will discover the truth in the archives of the Martyr Foundation after the fall of the mullahs, those great amateurs of red colouring that imitates martyrs’ blood and of coffins that appear empty or filled with throat-cut sheep in order to incriminate the regime and arouse the passions of the crowds.

But let’s go back to the figures of the Martyr Foundation in order to dispel any doubt on our approach. 3,164-2,781=… Thus from 1963 to 1978, there were around 383 victims if we don’t count Siakhal assault.

We should remember Wiaz’s caricatures that were published in the magazine of Jean Daniel -New Obs- that attributed to this period of 1963-1968 a figure of 100,000 deaths ; some were tortured or killed by the Shah himself according to this weekly newspaper that published anything without verifying its sources.

Among the 383 deaths made by the “Terrible Savak “, the pet hate of the French left party, there were according to Emad-Eddin Baghi : 341 in 1971 linked with the attack of the guerrilla’s training camp who became famous with the attack of a police station in Siakhal small city. The guerrilla attacked Siakhal’s police officers and slaughtered soldiers who were doing their military service and didn’t know they were on war with their own compatriots. Siakhal is a black page of Iranian history : fundamentalists who were paid and armed by foreign powers -Libya, USSR, China- used to attack at night and kill other Iranians !

Obviously Siakhal appears to be a great moment of revolutionary heroism for the supporters of this kind of action. The army finally found the camp and attacked it. There were 177 killed on the battlefield -probably as many killed people among army’s soldiers. 91 guerrilla people were arrested and sentenced to death for terrorism and anti-Iranian activities, 42 of them died before their execution as the result of their wounds or during their questioning. Baghi also counted 7 who committed suicide and 9 who were killed as they attempted to escape.

Among those 341 people, Baghi countted 172 Fedayin, 73 Mujahidin People, 38 revolutionary communists, 30 Marxist Mujahidin and 28 Islamists. He counted also 15 guerrilla people we couldn’t find and who don’t appear among shot people. He classified them as missing people [1].

To those 341 people of 1971, he added 5 other names, 4 who were executed by a Military Court for the assassination of the Prime Minister Mansour in 1965 and another one, member of the Imperial Guard, who opened fire on the Shah’s car, again in 1965.

Let’s make a morbid but necessary calculation :
383 – 341 - 5 = 37 guerrilla people who died in Iran between the arrests of Khomeini on the 5 June 1963 because of armed uprising against the Shah’s reforms and the 8 September 1968. Most of the remaining 37 victims died in Tehran or in its suburbs on the occasion of fire exchange with Police Forces during bank attacks, hostage-takings or attacks against foreign nationals who were living in Iran. 99% were males.

Iran seemed to be a laboratory of alliances between pro-Soviet communists and Islamists. Both worked for more than 15 years to shoot down an unclassifiable regime that managed to transform a country that was under Islam’s burden and metamorphose it despite the mullahs’ seizure on this country’s society and whose national still attract you nowadays thanks to their modernity and open-mindedness.

During those years in which it was necessary to impose secularity to uproot the veil and mould a new youth, Stalinist communists of Tudeh, Islamists and leftist Islamists as well as so-called socialist believers lead by Mossadegh’s disciples didn’t support any reform and conspired so to help Khomeini.

From 1963 to 1978 : 37 terrorists who worked to impose some Islamist or Islamist-Marxist regime used to be apprehended and executed. This caused the death of many anonymous soldiers whose names were forgotten by the history. 91 others were shot after Siakhal’s slaughter.

Much officially, 128 people were killed by the “Terrible Savak”. 128 deaths on guerrilla situations, 128 ersatz of Al Qaeda or Hamas fighters, and not 100,000 defenders of Human Rights who were tortured by the Shah’s hand. If the truth about Jaleh Place’s event find difficult to reach the ears of French people, it’s because journalists have diabolized the Shah’s regime and cannot confess they exaggerated the facts for purely ideological reasons without knowing anything about the history of Iran, Islam, Shiite or Iranian society which suffers from the mullahs’ burden !

They must confess they did anything to erase a monarchy which was thanks to its programme much closer to them than to the American dream. Iran wasn’t a democracy but despite an impressive network of mosques and mullahs, the Shah tried to prepare a society which would be freed from the Islam of mosques, an educated and prosperous society in order to be able to pass on to his son a kingdom that would be populated with educated persons who would be able to assimilate democratic freedoms and who wouldn’t vote for some Hamas ersatz !

Iraq’s events, the SIF and Hamas victories gave him a posthumous credibility. We cannot mix up elections and democracy. The Shah knew he was condemned by a cancer and he wanted to open even more universities in order to prepare this country to the challenges of the 21st century. If Iran would have had the time to get over the hump of emancipation from Islam via education, with a population that would be more and more educated and more and more pro-Western, the Islamic revolution would have never been successful.

Actually, thanks to the courage of Emad-Eddin Baghi who published the results of the Martyr Foundation’s investigations, the Shah and even the Savak were rehabilitated. Baghi cleared the conscience of Iranian people who regret the blessed time of Pahlavi’s prosperous Iran. At this time, civil servants were allowed to retire early at the age of 45 and they used to receive a decent pension. At this time, workers were the shareholders of public industries as it’s the case of CEO in France.

At this time, young people were doing their military service as teacher or nurse and agronomist engineers in order to help the farmers who freed from feudality and from clergy’s yoke by teaching them how to read, write, treat and cultivate their fields. At this time, schools were mixed and boys and girls of Iran learnt how to live together. At this blessed time, children used to eat biscuits and drink fresh milk for free at 10 am in order to make poor people able to study without starving. This regime wasn’t criminal and it knew how to preserve Iran from Islamism and Stalinism by making as few victims as it could among those who dreamt to make it fall, to cut the throat of intellectuals, to submit woman and mostly… to seize this country and its oil weapon in order to bring Europe to heel.

This is such ingratitude from Europe, ally and model of the Pahlavi. Nowadays, Europe pays a high price for it… If we continue to hush up Jaleh Place’s slaughter, it’s because Jaleh Place was a cruel slaughter and its perpetrator should be subject to hatred…

And French press decided it once and for all ; the perpetrator is the Shah’s regime, its soldiers and the Shah himself. Baghi also restored the truth about the number of deaths in this horrendous crime that was perpetrated by Khomeini’s allies in order to discredit the Shah’s regime that was popular among the poorest people thanks to the reforms we quoted before.

Let’s come to Jaleh Place matter. Baghi specifies that the number of killed people who were not Muslim is too insignificant to be mentioned. Actually those non-Muslims were mercenaries in the PLO’s pay. Anyways this is what emanates from the Savak’s archives but also from Baghi’s investigations.

The 8 September was the official date of the beginning of the curfew that was decided by the power : such a coincidence ! The curfew was decided the day before by groups that were armed with stones and truncheons and that hurtled down mosques as they broke shop and bank windows, set fire to cars and attack shopkeepers. The truth is that army was in the streets since summer because imperial Iran and its police didn’t dispose of any anti-riot troop !

The army was there and received the order to not react to any provocation. The Shah was then trying to find a compromise and form a centre-leftist government in order to preserve the social peace and appear attentive to the needs of Iran’s political liberation even if finally events proved that the revolt’s leaders didn’t wish for any accelerated democratization but for an Islamic republic. The army’s passivity became an obstacle to those who were looking for a conflict and wanted to assist in the failure of any attempt of liberation from the regime and of any progressive or accelerated shift toward a democratic society.

Such accelerated transformation used to be the wish of some people such as Bakhtiar who acknowledged a much unrealistic fact of Iranian society and who didn’t understand that Iran didn’t reach yet the step in which laic people would appear more numerous than believers and most specifically the step in which laic believers would be able to counter the mullahs as well as their capacity to preach violence. The Iranian society itself has showed that it didn’t reach the step that is necessary to assimilate democracy and this revolution proved the Shah right as for his prognostic and observation of the Iranian society’s evolution.

Nowadays Iranians confess they mistaken and they have regrets. It’s besides one of the reasons of the split among the young people who were born after the Revolution and their parents’ generation that participated as walk-on parts in this revolution Khomeini and his followers wanted. Iranians of my generation who participated in this revolution wish nowadays to acknowledge they were manipulated by the Iranian left party and the mullahs. Besides they have sincere regrets. And it’s because they confess it that they find it difficult to forgive those who don’t admit their mistake and don’t assume their share of responsibility in the coming of the Islamic Republic and its ravages avalanche in Iran and in the world.

It’s the reason why they don’t give any credence to repentant revolutionaries, reformers or any others. It’s because Iranians themselves accepted to shoulder their share of responsibility that they cannot imagine that French journalists, who devoted their pen to this revolution’s success, continue to spread lies solely for the purpose of avoiding to confess that they “mistaken” or were even ”fooled” ! But the truth lays somewhere else : we cannot tell the truth to French people about what happened on this 8 September on a small place of Tehran. Such truth would have repercussions even beyond Iran, until France as far as it concerns respectable people.

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On the 4 September : in order to celebrate the end of Ramadan, the supporters of Khomeini organized in Tehran great demonstrations and ten of thousands people demonstrated. Two days later, any “unauthorized gathering” was prohibited but the day after, there was a peaceful great demonstration against the Shah in Tehran. Under the pressure of the army’s heads, the king approved the proclamation of a state of siege in the night of the 7 to the 8 September. Nevertheless, many people who ignored this decree demonstrated on the same day, on Jaleh Place in the centre of Tehran. [2]

On the 7 September, hundreds of thousands Iranians walked in the streets and among them appeared some pro-revolution people. By the end of the day, one sole slogan was spread : “tomorrow, everybody on Jaleh Place” ! The place was renamed “Martyr Place” one week before the events by a mullah of whom no trace was found after the revolution and whose name was Allamed Nuri. He was the head of the mosque of this suburb and from this place, he coordinated every operations.

“Tomorrow everybody on Jaleh Place” ! Obviously few demonstrators of the 7 September followed such watchword because they knew Tehran, this place’s size, the existence in its middle of a flower bed and of some high metallic fence. There was little available space and little visibility. They guessed it would be a kind of small gathering and there would be probably no personality for such a small demonstration on a place that has no prestige due neither to its location nor to its size. Besides if slogans and invitations appeared insisting so to pull a great number of demonstrators on the Friday 8 September to this tiny place, the courageous early birds who came there didn’t see any left personality and any mullah.

Besides it was acknowledged that no revolutionary personality died on this 8 September in Tehran. The place was a trap set by Khomeini’s tactical team which chose this place because of its urban configuration, of its little available space and of its uneasy clearing. It was a perfect place to shoot on people as if they were rabbits and to kill a maximum of them.

The 8 September 1968. On Jaleh Place, shots were heard with no apparent reason and demonstrators who were fatally hit felt on the ground. We still ignore today why the soldiers didn’t shoot in the air or use tear gas to disperse the crowd…

However that may be, the Television that was mostly leftist was on strike and due to this it couldn’t cover this small demonstration. But it broadcasted right after a movie that was then acknowledged as a sequence editing that displayed a “military intervention” without any visual link wit Jaleh Place’s urbanism. We could notice lots of smoke, soldiers with unknown kaki uniforms who shot toward invisible targets, other inactive smiling Iranian soldier with a gun lying at their feet. This was a kind of editing movie that was made with some few bits and that mixed up several archive images and no identifiable urban element. We could see shots and we could mostly hear them.

Khomeini and his team declared that the army opened fire on demonstrators and did more than 4,000 deaths. The Shah’s regime firstly declared some 64 deaths among demonstrators and around 50 among soldiers and peacekeepers. It also stated that the ballistic test revealed that the cases they found on the place were Russian -despite the fact that Iranian guns were at that time made in USA. This was such a scandal, such a stupor : the regime killed thousands of people and published fanciful figures !

The matter got worse when Le Nouvel Observateur stated that the journalists who were there confirmed a very important number of victims. Figures went crescendo and Foucault even told there were some 9,000 deaths ! According to historians and every political observer, this was a turning point in the riots that lead to the Islamic Revolution. There again Baghi surprises because he discloses figures that were inflated and he managed to count only 64 deaths and among them 2 women as well as an insignificant number of non-Iranians. Those figures appear much closer to those that were declared by the police which counted 86 deaths and 205 wounded people. Most of them were peacekeepers or soldiers who had to look after the place.

The Fedayin mercenaries of Yasser Arafat [3] took their place on the terrace roofs of the buildings that surround Jaleh Place and some of them were in the crowd with casual suits and false uniforms. The Fedayin who stayed on the roofs opened fire on Khomeini’s demonstrators and also on policemen and soldiers. Shots came from the crowd ; from the buildings’ roofs, other invisible but terribly efficient Fedayin shot bullets on the crowd.

As per policemen and soldiers, they tried to disperse the crowd by shooting in the air. Maybe they found the time to retaliate against assailants. Some Fedayin were killed, maybe by friendly bullets or maybe by soldiers. As per demonstrators and journalists who assisted in the event, they linked the shots solely to armed people, i.e. to those who wore uniforms, to policemen and soldiers, and they didn’t suspect the existence of attacks emanating from the Fedayin who were on the roofs and from those who wore false uniforms.

However no journalist was killed or wounded. Mercenaries solely aimed at soldiers who maybe understood quickly what the subterfuge was and they also aimed at civilian people in order to make maximum victims. We know it. They killed 86 people and wounded 205. Much strangely, the present journalists didn’t report those events and they didn’t specify that among wounded people and dead people, there were many soldiers and peacekeepers. Were they really on Jaleh Place on the 8 September 1978 ?

If yes, how could they confuse a hundred deaths with 4,000 or 9,000 deaths ? Until then none of them has called this story into question or has been able to explain how 4,000 people can die on a place that can welcome 700 people only ? And if some heroic battle took place, why did they forget to mention that soldiers died ?... More or less contradiction won’t make any difference. Until then they still shut up in order to not call their political commitment into question because it sacrificed an entire people and threw it into Khomeini’s hands. Until then none of them has quoted Baghi and his works.

There are here many reasons but we, Iranians, take no heed. We don’t care about Arafat’s memory, about the fairness of Palestinian cause, the fascination of the French left party for revolutions and tousled guerrilla people who are guilty of horrendous attacks. We don’t care about Michel Foucault or Jean Daniel. We need to restore the truth about Jaleh Place’s Slaughter, about the lies of Le Nouvel Obs, the truth about the Iran of the Shah and the Iran of Khomeini.

These are the Shah’s presumed “crimes” that would justify the speech according to which Iranians have no regret and assume the Revolution’s heritage. These are the lies about Jaleh Place’s unforgivable slaughter that still keep the debate going. Despite the publication of Baghi’s report, Western press still continue its campaign of disinformation on the fallen regime in order to justify its support to Khomeini’s revolution and its passivity when the mullahs killed the perpetrators of crimes that never took place.

Iranian people want to erase this revolution and won’t manage to do it without the support of international opinion. But this opinion isn’t informed and cannot admit the fact that Iranians would forgive the Shah. This is something illogical to European viewpoint.

These are the figures about the number of opponents who were killed during the Jihad that took place against the Shah’s regime ; it’s the decline of the Iranian society and the truth about Jaleh Place’s events that modified Iranians’ judgement. They admit they want to move on by assuming their share of responsibility. Journalists have published lies and refuse to admit their share of responsibility. Moreover they keep the people away from a vital support, the support of French people.

On the 7 February 1984, General Gholam-Ali Oveyssi [4], Tehran’s military commander at the time of the events, was killed in Paris, in Passy Street. At night the French Television broadcasted a documentary on the butcher of Tehran by using the movie that was edited for the 8 September’s slaughter. We pay homage to the General Gholam-Ali Oveyssi who dedicated his life in defending Iran. He was accused wrongly of this slaughter that was planned and implemented by Khomeini and his acolytes -with the support of Le Nouvel Observateur.

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“In autumn 1978, it was not possible anymore for him to resort to the opposition. If he had to survive, he would have to use force to restore the country’s order. But he became unable to do it and he wouldn’t take initiative anymore. At a given time, in summer or in autumn 1978, Mohammad Reza disengaged from the conflict ; he decided that he wouldn’t let any great bloodshed happen ; no matter what would happen, he would not appear in the history as the initiator of a conflict that would degenerate into a civil war. And he hoped for the unavoidable settlement. At the beginning of November, when Arnaud de Borchgrave who was the correspondent of Newsweek maintained him that some countries would support him if he would use force, he started to cry. He already saw too much violence, he said, and he would not be the one who would spread even more blood.” [5]

The Shah’s hesitations : “When the Iranian crisis reached by the end of 1978 the point of no return, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the adviser of the American National Security, took the habit to make to his partners reports on the revolution’s anatomy. One of the fundamental themes was the existing link between the increasing strength of the revolutionary tide and the firmness of the leading class. As he drew his inspiration from a historian from Harvard, William Langer, Brzezinski observed that on the 19th century, the European revolutionary movements appeared to be successful in countries in which leaders made many concessions and they didn’t survive to their enemies. In the places where leaders took actions to erase revolutionary opposition, revolution failed. Thus he suggested resorting to the same methods in Iran.” [6]

“The Shah behaved in the same way than the leaders who were swept by the European revolutions. Instead of showing greater authority, he shrunk ; he shilly-shallied and alternated concessions with fierce statements that no action confirmed. This is what appeared to be fatal, mostly because the troubles of the reign’s last years were directly caused by the reforming programme. For instance, the huge money inflow that came with the oil price increase encouraged Mohammad Reza to start an ambitious programme of wealth distribution. In 1976, Iran built council housings ; the Bazar shopkeepers as well as industrials were offered to resort to loans with low interest and a policy of grants took off. This programme failed when the inflation rate outreached the grants’ one. In 1977, the Shah changed his programme as well as his Prime Minister and took vigorous steps against inflation. But one year later, he did a new about-turn with a new government, Sharif-Emani’s one. One more time, expenditures in the public field appeared to be extravagant, pay-rises were conceded, food industry was watered with grants”, wrote Ledeen and Lewis -Collapse, page 48.

Indeed Iran was the ideal country to launch on a large scale Brzezinski’s Green Belt project. If the latter would have started with Turkey, the army would have made short work of Islamists. Brzezinski conceived this project by basing on the Shah’s regime and he wanted to kill two birds with one stone. The second step was Iran’s balkanization in order to isolate the regions that are rich in oil and ore and then convert this old country into vast territories that would be used as USA’s reserves. And the Shah disturbed him because he was the symbol of this country’s historical seniority and the keystone of its territorial integrity.

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One month before Jaleh Place’s Slaughter : in August, with the beginning of Ramadan, violence reached some greater intensity. On the 10 and 11, there were in Esfahan some brutal chocks between demonstrators and the police force in the home itself of a mullah who was close to Khomeini, right after the call he made in favour of the overthrowing of the Pahlavi dynasty and the creation of an Islamic state. The government reacted by sending its tanks inside the town and by declaring the state of siege. However those steps pushed revolutionaries to the limit and fundamentalist riots burst in the entire country. But the state of siege in Esfahan -and one day after in three other cities- was implemented reluctantly which was typical of the Shah’s character. On the 16, the military governor of Esfahan withdrew his tanks. Then on the 18 August, some arsonists set fire to the Rex cinema in Abadan, the city of oilfield workers and executives. 400 people died into this criminal fire and we know today that it was coordinated and executed by the current Supreme Guide, Khamenei. The mullahs made preach in which they stated that the fire was set by the Savak in order to break the links between oilfield workers who benefited from the best wages and the monarchy. This was one more step toward the end of the monarchy. The country was in an uproar and not only because of the increasing boom of violence. The economic situation used to worsen every day in a way that could appear calculated to make the people from the modest class become a revolutionary mass.
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© WWW.IRAN-RESIST.ORG

On the 26 January 1963, the Shah decided to make approved his reforms by a popular referendum because the Parliament in which feudal Lords, politicians who were in their pay and the Clergy’s relatives would have never voted for it. The reforms would cut off the tentacles of a system that had rejected any reform. This Revolution, the Shah named it the White Revolution, a revolution with social overtones and without any bloodshed.

1) Abolition of the connections that linked serfs to land Lords,
2) Nationalisation of the whole country’s forests,
3) Sale of the State’s industrial companies to compensate the loss that reform would cause to land owners,
4) Amendment of electoral laws in order to allow women liberation,
5) Approval of workers’ participation on the benefit of companies,
6) Training of teachers in order to consolidate the effort that was made in favour of the masses’ mandatory education. Educated young people would replace the mullah in villages and try to cut superstition and obscurantism at its root. Those simple and efficient steps touched off a crisis in the summer of 1963 under the command of an obscure clergyman of 63 years old, Khomeini.

In 1978, Khomeini’s supporters won a first step of the Islamic Revolution by stopping the move of the “Reforms of the Shah of Iran” in order to erase the gain of the White Revolution. The war against Islamism started in Iran in 1963 and not the day after the 11 September. This war made 3,164 deaths in the Taleban’s outpost and thousands deaths among the anonymous supporters of the West and of the emancipation from Islam’s yoke. Iranian writers were stabbed to death, journalists were killed, soldiers died in the West’s indifference. The West started to pay interest to us solely in 1978 to support its own enemies.

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