Abolhassan Banisadr, the first president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, has died

Abolhassan Banisadr, Iran’s first president after the 1979 Islamic revolution, who fled Tehran after being indicted for challenging the growing power of clerics as the nation became a theocracy, died this Saturday in Paris. He was 88 years old.

Among a sea of ​​Shiite clerics in black robes, Banisadr stood out for his Western cut suits and such French luggage what was in the philosopher Jean paul Sartre whom he trusted in his belief that he would be Iran’s first president some 15 years before that happened.

These differences isolated him when he attempted to implement a Socialist-style economy in Iran supported by the deep Shiite faith instilled by his religious father.

Banisadr never consolidated his control over a government he allegedly led amid events beyond his control, such as the hostage-taking in the American embassy and the invasion of Iraq, which added to the tumult following the Revolution.

The real power has remained firmly in the hands of the supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, with whom Banisadr worked during his exile in France and whom he followed to Tehran in the midst of a revolution. Corn Khomeini ousted Banisadr after just 16 months in power, forcing him to flee to Paris, where he would stay for several decades..

“It was as if a child watched his father slowly turn into an alcoholic,” Banisadr later said of Khomeini. “The drugs this time were power.”

Banisadr’s family said in a statement on Saturday that the former president died in a Paris hospital after a long illness.

Born March 22, 1933 in Hamadán (Iran), Banisadr grew up in a religious family. His father, Nasrollah Banisadr, was an Ayatollah, a high-ranking Shia cleric, who opposed the policies of the Shah’s father, Reza Shah.

“Even in my mother’s womb, I was a revolutionary”Banisadr once boasted.

As a young man, he protested against the shah and was imprisoned twice. Support for Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, who nationalized the Iranian oil industry and was later overthrown in a CIA-backed coup in 1953. During the riots of 1963, Banisadr was injured and fled to France.

He studied economics and finance at the Sorbonne University, in Paris, and later taught there. He was author of books and treatises on socialism and Islamideas that will guide him later after entering Khomeini’s inner circle.

After leaving Iran, Banisadr and Masud Rajavi formed the National Council of Resistance of Iran. Banisadr retired from the council in 1984 after the Mujahideen-e-Khalq sided with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran.

He will remain outside Paris all his life, under police surveillance after having been target of suspected Iranian assassins.

Banisadr gained notoriety again after stating in a book, without proof, that Ronald Reagan’s campaign has colluded with Iranian leaders to delay hostage release, which ruined the re-election of then President Jimmy Carter. This gave rise to the idea of “October surprise” in American politics: a deliberately programmed event powerful enough to affect an election.

US Senate investigators later say, in 1992, that “the great weight of evidence is that there was no such deal.” However, after Reagan’s inauguration in 1981, American arms began to flow into Iran via Israel in what would become the Iran-Contra scandal.

“The clergy used you as a tool to get rid of democratic forces,” Banisadr told a former hostage in 1991 while touring the United States. “The night they took you hostage, I went to see Khomeini and told him that he had acted against Islam, against democracy.”.

(With AP information)

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