Abolhassan Banisadr

Banisadr was born on 22 March 1933 in Baghcheh, a village north of Hamadan. His father, Nasrollah, was a Shia cleric who was originally from Bijar, Kurdistan. As a member of the National Front, he participated in the anti-Shah student movement during the early 1960s, resulting in his imprisonment on two occasions and his wounding during the 1963 demonstrations. ==Career==

Initial exile Due to his political activities, Banisadr fled Iran for France, where he studied finance and economics at the University of Paris. While there, he also wrote a book on Islamic finance, Eghtesad Tohidi, which roughly translates as "The Economics of Monotheism", and led the Islamic Association of Students, a religious faction affiliated with the National Front. In 1972, Banisadr's father died. On 12 November 1979, following the dissolution of the Interim Government in response to the Iran hostage crisis. Banisadr replaced Ebrahim Yazdi as Minister of Foreign Affairs. That same month, on 17 November, Banisadr was promoted to Minister of Finance. Presidency In January 1980, Banisadr registered to become a candidate for Iran's newly formed presidency. Though he lacked religious credentials, he remained protected by Khomeini, who had insisted that members of the clergy not run for office. On 25 January 1980, the election was held and Banisadr received 75.6 percent of the vote, winning a four-year term as president. Inaugural ceremonies took place on 4 February at a hospital where Khomeini was recuperating from a heart ailment. While in office, Banisadr led Iran's response to the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war in September 1980, during which he survived two helicopter crashes near the border. Additionally, he oversaw the release of the American embassy hostages on 20 January 1981. Impeachment By May 1981, Iran was experiencing difficulties on the front line, a decline in human rights, stricter media censorship, increased corruption, and heavy social upheaval. Banisadr, long engaged in a power struggle with religious hardliners, called for a new referendum, noting that while he had won over 10 million votes in the presidential election, the theocratic Islamic Republican Party (IRP) received less than 4 million in the subsequent parliamentary elections. This message of defiance became a rallying point for many doubters and dissidents of the new regime, including the militant left-wing Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) organization. Amid calls for Banisadr's impeachment over his remarks, Khomeini told him he could retain the presidency if he publicly apologized, but Banisadr refused, instead asking for "resistance" from the public. As a result, on 10 June 1981, Khomeini stripped Banisadr of his title as commander-in-chief. Legislators filed articles of impeachment against Banisadr on 21 June, which Khomeini endorsed and signed off on the next day. in 1980. Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani is directly behind him, while Mohammad Beheshti is to the right. In the days before his removal from office, Banisadr had gone into hiding in Tehran as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) seized presidential buildings and imprisoned writers at newspapers aligned with him. ==Flight and second exile==

On 29 July 1981, Banisadr and Rajavi were smuggled aboard an Iranian Air Force Boeing 707 piloted by sympathetic Army Colonel Behzad Moezi. Banisadr and Rajavi found political asylum in France, conditional on abstaining from anti-Khomeini activities inside the country, a restriction effectively ignored by the two after the French embassy evacuated from Tehran. In the book, Banisadr alleged covert dealings between the Ronald Reagan presidential campaign and leaders in Tehran to prolong the Iran hostage crisis before the 1980 United States presidential election. He also claimed that Henry Kissinger plotted to set up a Palestinian state in the Iranian province of Khuzestan and that Zbigniew Brzezinski conspired with Saddam Hussein to plot Iraq's 1980 invasion of Iran. In a review for Foreign Affairs, William B. Quandt characterized the book as a rambling and self-serving collection of reminiscences, stating that it contains numerous sensational allegations but lacks supporting documentation. Later activities , 2013In a 2008 interview with the Voice of America, Banisadr claimed that Khomeini was both directly responsible for the violence originating from the Muslim world and for breaking the promises he had made while in exile. In July 2009, Banisadr publicly denounced the Iranian government's conduct after the disputed presidential election, alleging that "Ali Khamenei ordered the fraud in the presidential elections and the ensuing crackdown on protesters." ==Personal life and death==

In 1961, Banisadr married Ozra Hosseini. They had two daughters and one son. Beginning in 1981, Banisadr lived with his family in the commune of Auvers-sur-Oise, under close guard by French police, until later moving to Versailles. but the couple divorced in 1984 following Banisadr's withdrawal from the NCRI. After a long illness, Banisadr died at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris on 9 October 2021, at the age of 88. He is buried in Versailles, in the cemetery of Gonards. Hossein Mousavian, Secretary of Iran's National Front, described Banisadr as "a man of principles." Iran analyst Morteza Kazemian stated on Iran International that Banisadr was "an independent nationalist figure, who believed in Iran's territorial integrity and strived to strengthen social movements in Iran and fight clerical despotism." ==Books==

• Touhid Economics, 1980 • My Turn to Speak: Iran, the Revolution and Secret Deals with the U.S. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 1991. . Translation of Le complot des ayatollahs. Paris: La Découverte, 1989 • Dignity in the 21st Century, Doris Schroeder and Abol-Hassan Banisadr, with translation by Mahmood Delkhasteh and Sarah Amsler • Books after 1980 ==References==