58. IRAN

On Monday nights Sue and I sometimes watch “Four Corners” on the ABC and I was particularly interested recently when there was a programme about Iran. The focus of this programme was the rise of the young people there against the very conservative old guard and, having travelled to that country several times on separate work-related assignments, I had found the young people whom I met there to be very polite and respectful and very easy to talk to. Being Persian and part of a very old civilisation, people in Iran are generally different from the people in other Middle Eastern countries, having their own identity and language.

Iran (The Islamic Republic of Iran) is a country which has always fascinated me, right from my early visits to that country in 1955 and 1956 and, also, much later, in 1981 and 1984. Being fascinated about a country does not mean, of course, that I really know very much about it. I’m certainly not an expert. I don’t speak the Persian (Fārsī) language, and I have only very limited knowledge about its old and its recent history.

However, I have had some unusual personal experiences in Iran. First, in 1955, in a place called Bandar Shahpour and much later, in 1981, in Iran’s capital, Tehran, when a man whom I had not long before met with, was assassinated some 12 hours later. After that act of violence had taken place, I had to leave the country in a great hurry.  I will write more about that incident in a future post, “Terror in Tehran”. First, I’d like to tell you a little about my early visits.

I was only 19 years old in August 1955 when, on a Dutch-flagged vessel, “m.s. Kota Gede”, I visited three ports in the “Kingdom of Iran”, as the country was then known. The Shah (King) was still on the throne. It was mid-summer and very hot (close to 40 degrees Celsius) and our cabins were not airconditioned. I remember it well.  At night, we slept on stretchers on the very top deck, to escape the heat in our cabins.

One of the Iranian ports, Abadan, was located on the Shatt-Al-Arab river, which flows into the Persian Gulf and which was a major port and oil refining centre. We were allowed to go ashore there and to enjoy the luxury of the facilities, which included a large swimming pool. It was a very welcome change for us to be able to briefly experience how the expatriates living in Abadan spent their time in this challenging environment, so we made the most of it.

From Abadan we moved to Bandar Shahpour, our third and last port in Iran, and it was there that something very unexpected happened. Bandar Shahpour was, at that time, a desolate and lonely place with few buildings, apart from some large storage facilities. The port was important because it was the starting point for a narrow-gauge railway to take cargo, which had arrived by sea, further inland and I understand that this railway had served as a supply line into Russia during the Second World War. Beyond the port itself was the desert. Over a period of 6 days we unloaded our cargo in this isolated place.

To get a short break away from the ship I had gone for a walk in the wharf area, past some gates and barbed wire fences. It was very hot and it was really not a brilliant idea to do this in the middle of the day. There was not much to see, just some sheds and lots of sand. As I walked along, I suddenly heard a voice from the other side of the fence, calling out “Hoi Piet!”. It was, incredible though it sounds, my childhood friend Fransje, who had lived in the same village in Holland as I had as a child.  It turned out that he was a crew member on the only other ship in this port at the time. He had decided to stretch his legs and go for a brief walk at that particular moment, just as I had. We could not believe this strange coincidence, meeting each other, so far from home, in this hot, godforsaken, lonely and out-of-the-way place. We talked for a while and then returned to our ships, shaking our heads in disbelief.

Fransje and I had played together during the war years. He had lived in the street behind our house and had an unusual face, with his lips and mouth being at a slight angle. This did not seem to bother him, and it certainly did not bother me. I remember that we loved reading the popular book, “Pietje Bell”, together, a book for children written by a former schoolteacher. The story in it was about the son of a shoemaker who used to always get himself into some sort of trouble. We read it many times and rolled on the floor with laughter, day after day, reading the same funny bits. He was my very special little friend. Sadly, we lost track of each other when I went to High School and after this unexpected meeting in Bandar Shahpour, I never saw Fransje again.

Iran, when I had visited it in the mid 1950s, was ruled by the Shah (Mohammad-Reza Shah). Its oil industry (with the third-largest oil reserves in the world) had previously been owned by the British. Readers in my age bracket may remember, as I do, the name of “Mossadeq”, Iran’s prime minister, who, in 1951, nationalised the oil industry. This was a big story at the time and was referred to as the “Abadan crisis”. However, two years before our ship arrived, Mossadeq had been removed in a coup orchestrated by the U.S. and for the next 25 years the Iranian oil facilities were administered by international companies and the profit split fifty-fifty with Iran. That was the situation when I first visited the country. It was really all about oil!

Although the oil crisis had been settled, living conditions for the people of Iran were still very difficult. The Shah’s cooperation with the West alienated religious and political groups and riots developed. Strikes and demonstrations became more frequent, guerilla groups formed, large regions of the country revolted, resulting in many casualties, and eventually this led to a revolution in 1979. The Shah left the country and the religious leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, who had been in exile in France, returned and replaced the monarchy with an Islamic republic.

A lot more upheaval happened in Iran after 1979. I’ll mention the Iran hostage crisis and the Iran-Iraq War because they help to provide the background to how I happened to get caught up in the turmoil in 1981.

In 1980, Iran’s neighbour, Iraq, under its leader, Saddam Hussein, took advantage of the instability and attempted to invade the Iranian region of Khuzestan. This was an area with rich oilfields and a significant Arab population. The attack took Iran totally by surprise and it started the Iran-Iraq war which lasted for 8 years.

One incident that made the headlines, and I am sure readers will remember it, was the Iran hostage crisis. In November 1979, fifty-two people in the U.S. embassy were taken hostage by Iranian students and held for 444 days, until January 1981. The American military tried to execute a rescue mission, but it failed.

Within Iran itself the government also faced opposition from the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, a revolutionary organisation determined to try to overthrow Khomeini.

To summarise: In June 1981, when I was asked to go to Iran, the country was at war with neighbouring Iraq. The American hostages had only just been freed a few months earlier and the country was fighting for its survival, extremely suspicious of foreigners and, with justification, paranoid about the Mujahedin. My blog posts about my visit to Iran in 1981 will be published in the coming months, entitled: “Terror in Tehran”.

To conclude this first part of my story, I’ll just quote a few statistics. Iran has a population of 91,714,000, of whom 73% live in urban areas. The median age in Iran is 33.4 years. The young people who I came across in 1981, and who survived the turmoil, are now in their sixties or older. 

A new generation has emerged in Iran! They are people who have no connection to the original revolution and they are longing for a less conservative and a more liberal society. The “Four Corners” program we watched recently on the ABC was timely and showed us how young women are leading the protests.  As some of the commentators asserted: “There is volatility in the air, this is a regime on edge”.  

More to follow later.

O.P.

P.S. My next blog post, on 10 November, will be about someone I greatly admire, Sir Michael Edward Palin, the famous English actor, documentary maker, writer, comedian and TV presenter.