TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/80/80capts.2

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                                                                                March 24, 1980

IRAN

Banisadr's Jolting Defeat


In a test of wills over the hostages, the militants win


There are, it now appears, two sets of hostages in Tehran. One
consists of the 50 Americans who have been held prisoner at the
U.S. embassy by Iranian student militants for 4 1/2 months. The
other is the fledgling government of President Abolhassan
Banisadr. Ending an intense battle of wills between the
militants and the government over the fate of the hostages, the
ailing spiritual leader of Iran's revolution, Ayatullah Ruhollah
Khomeini, decreed last week that a five-member United Nations
commission could see the American hostages only after it first
published a report on the crimes of the deposed Shah.

Khomeini's decision was a humiliating defeat for Banisadr and
his moderate colleagues; only a few days earlier Foreign
Minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh had all but maneuvered the militants
into turning over their hostages to the ruling Revolutionary
Council as a necessary first step in arranging for their
release. The decision was also a slap in the face of the U.N.
commissioners, who had overstayed their visit to Tehran in the
hope of seeing the hostages. They returned to New York City
last week, their mission officially "suspended."  In Washington,
frustrated officials of the Carter Administration were not only
wondering what to do next, but worried about the physical and
mental health of the hostages. NBC last week aired a film
showing eleven of the captives, who appeared to be listless and
depressed. Reports have reached the State Department that one
hostage had apparently attempted suicide and another had been
severely beaten after trying to escape.

What had gone wrong?  The answer appeared to be that government
officials had violated an informal understanding with the
Ayatullah. In late February, Khomeini ruled that the new
National Assembly, which is being elected this month and will
convene some time in April, would have the final say on the
hostages' future. Meanwhile, Banisadr and the Revolutionary
Council would be in charge. Khomeini, who is recovering from
a heart attack he suffered two months ago, would remain silent;
the government, however, had his backing so long as it did
everything on its own authority and did not involve him directly
in any negotiations.

All went well until Foreign Minister Ghotbzadeh told the
militants two weeks ago that he planned to honor their request
to take charge of the hostages "with the approval of the Imam
[Khomeini] and the Revolutionary Council."  THe militants
immediately called him a liar. Next day the Revolutionary
Council compounded the error by announcing that the Ayatullah
had agreed to let the U.N. commission see all the embassy
prisoners. Khomeini, apparently feeling that his name had been
invoked unnecessarily, finally broke his silence and sided with
the militants. The commission, he said could only
"interrogate" those hostages who had been accused of complicity
in the Shah's crimes.

The commissioners, who had repeatedly been promised a meeting
with the hostages, privately protested this "breach of faith."
Publicly, they said only that they were not in a position to
prepare their report on the spot and were returning to New York.
Ghotbzadeh tried hard to talk them into another postponement,
but the commissioners were adamant. On the way to the airport,
they were actually chased by four bearded militants in a
ramshackle Datsun who were trying to deliver a bundle of embassy
documents which, they said, contained "evidence of U.S.
interference in Iran."  Some of the documents had been
assembled, strip by strip, from a pile of mangled paper that
embassy staffers had fed into a shredding machine as the
students stormed the compound last Nov. 4.

So wild was the chase to the airport that the commissioners
wondered for a while whether they themselves would be the next
kidnap victims. On the runway, the militants caught up with
Algerian Co-Chairman Mohammed Bedjaoui, who refused to accept
the documents. In a fury, an Iranian official lashed out at two
of the militants, shouting: "You should be ashamed of
yourselves!  You think you have accomplished a feat by
sabotaging President Banisadr's efforts. Believe me, you will
regret your actions one day."

Banisadr reacted to the setback with a series of attacks on the
students for their revolutionary theatrics. Day after day last
week he charged that the continued occupation of the embassy
strengthened the hand of the Soviet Union in neighboring
Afghanistan. It also prevented Iran from building up its own
economy, he said, and therefore its ability to resist outside
pressure. Banisadr told merchants in the Tehran bazaar that
while inflation, unemployment, scarcity of basic commodities and
instability threatened the nation, the country's resources were
being wasted on "useless games."  In an interview with the Paris
daily Le Monde, he charged that the militants were being
exploited by "certain pro-Soviet political groups like the
Communist Tudeh Party, which have an interest in isolating
Iran...in order to prevent it from resisting the Soviet push
into Afghanistan."

In an editorial for a paper that Banisadr publishes, The
Islamic Revolution, he warned:  "In our campaign against the
U.S., the hostages are our weakness, not our strength...Our
behavior today is, more than even before, a reflection of our
weakness. We resemble a drowning man who grasps at a straw."
Real independence from the U.S., he continued, requires "far
more than holding a few hostages and wrangling among ourselves
about who should have custody over them. This game is
ridiculous when our economy, our administrative machinery and
our armed forces are still dependent on the West, led by the
U.S."

The main reason Banisadr wants the hostage crisis resolved is
to concentrate his country's attention on Iran's economy, which
is in desperate shape. Oil production, according to Western
experts, is well below the government's official estimate of 2.7
million bbl. per day; construction is at a standstill;
productivity has dropped by 80% in some large plants; tourism
has vanished. Wages have been forced up by as much as 200% as
the result of government decrees and worker militancy. The
newly nationalized banking system is in confusion. Many Iranians
fear their country could soon become little more than an
exporter of oil and an importer of food, with the ruins of the
economic structure the Shah built left to gather dust. Says a
central bank official in Tehran:  "If we do not start an
economic recovery within six months, we shall be in a very
dangerous situation--politically as well as economically."

In the current elections, whose final results will be know in
early April, Banisadr's primary goal is to win a majority of
seats in the new 270-member parliament against his principal
clerical opposition, the Islamic Republic Party of the Ayatullah
Mohammed Beheshti. If he succeeds, a settlement on the hostages
may still be possible reasonably soon. Less extreme in his
demands than the militants, Banisadr reached a tentative
agreement with Washington under which the U.S. would confess to
past offenses in IRan, promise not to interfere again, help Iran
recover the funds removed by the Shah and refrain from opposing
Iran's efforts to force his extradition from Panama.

The Carter Administration gave no serious thought to one
obvious alternative to negotiation, a military rescue effort.
In the view of U.S. officials, the prospects for such an
operation have not changed since November--expect possibly for
the worse. The militants are still armed with automatic rifles
and Uzi submachine guns, and in their four months of prison duty
have received intensive weapons training. As one Carter aide
put it:  "The President is as frustrated as anyone, but he's not
going to lose his temper and pull a Mayaguez."  Banisadr's view
on the military option was similar. He and Ghotbzadeh
considered ordering a surprise seizure of the embassy two weeks
ago, but ruled it out as being prohibitively risky.

Some Congressmen have urged the White House to impose stronger
economic sanctions against Iran. Washington is reluctant to do
so because few of America's allies would go along with an
embargo, and such a move would push Banisadr closer to Moscow.*
As he has made abundantly clear, Iran's new President is no
friend of America's, but he remains the best hope for a stable,
non-aligned government in a country that the U.S. can ill afford
to fall into the Soviet orbit.

* Washington has also taken a somewhat more relaxed view toward
the movement of Iranian nationals than had been expected. It
has allowed most Iranian diplomats to remain in the U.S., and
in the period between last Nov. 14 and March 9, it allowed
11,079 Iranian citizens to enter the U.S. Of these, 5,641 were
tourists and 2,306 were students. (During the same period,
12,697 Iranians left the U.S.) In his press conference last
week, President Carter said that the visitors had been carefully
screened and that permitting their immigration was a humane
act.