I'm Writing You From Tehran by Delphine Minoui & Emma Ramadan

Author:Delphine Minoui & Emma Ramadan [Minoui, Delphine & Ramadan, Emma]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0374175225
Amazon: B07D6N8DNZ
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2019-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

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For a long time, I kept thinking about these stories. No narrative had ever explained so well your compatriots’ propensity for feeling like victims, and their extreme protectionism in the face of the major powers. It made me wonder whether the Iranian nuclear program wasn’t, to a certain extent, the legacy of the chemical gassing perpetrated by Iraq against the backdrop of complete international indifference.

At the end of the war, in 1988, the Islamic Republic did indeed draw two lessons from Sardasht’s tragedy: no matter what, avoid finding yourself in a vulnerable position and never again trust in international treaties and conventions. Haunted by paranoia, the authorities wanted at all costs to equip themselves with the means to prevent future danger. “The use of biological weapons may well be inhumane, but we still have to consider developing them for our defense,” declared Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, then chairman of Parliament, adding, “The war has taught us that international laws are nothing but ink on paper.”

In the eyes of the West, the Islamic Republic is often perceived as a threatening power, ready to export Islamic revolution, to support terrorism, to strike Israel with its missiles, and to manufacture nuclear weapons. But after several years in your country, I gradually learned that, for Iranians, their contemporary history was, by contrast, a succession of conspiracies often carried out by the West. In 1906, when Iran’s monarch Mohammad Ali Shah crushed the constitutional revolution, it was with the aid of the British and the Russians, who were in a hurry to put an end to an unprecedented democratic experiment in the Middle East. In 1953, the coup d’état against Prime Minister Mossadegh, champion of nationalizing Iran’s oil industry and of the country’s independence, would not have taken place without the intervention of the Americans. When the 1979 revolution mobilized the masses, it was in part because it carried with it the promise of liberating the country from foreign control.

Years later, in 2005, the specter of foreign conspiracies would be skillfully exploited for political ends by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In the guise of fighting a foreign enemy, and playing on Iranians’ nationalist fervor, he set about strengthening his hold on society while accelerating the nuclear program, which had been suspended during negotiations between Khatami and the West in 2003. But we weren’t quite there yet.

In the winter of 2002, the United States turned to Iraq, accusing it (far too late!) of possessing weapons of mass destruction—weapons that, paradoxically, had ceased to exist fifteen years after the attack against Sardasht.

In Tehran, those in power started to tremble. In his war on terror, Bush had first targeted Afghanistan. This time, it was Iraq, the other main neighbor of the Islamic Republic. Iranians asked themselves: When will our turn come? At the sound of combat boots in Baghdad, Iran started to retreat further into itself. In a new surge of protectionism, the authorities in Tehran decided to attack the first target within reach: the Western media.

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