Milinary Affairs
I wrote the first The Return of the ... One True King twenty seven months ago. In it I wrote
Around all these swirls a vast sea of names, dates, places, acronyms -- Sheik Fazlollah Nuri, Muhamad Hossain Naini, dozens of Pahlavis, Mossadeqq, Kermit Roosevelt, Zahedi, Tudeh, the Fedaiin Majority and Minority, UIC, Pekar, Mojahedin, PKD, the Siahkal Incident, and Ayatollahs and clerics, some good, some simply murderers.I knew I'd mentioned the Siahkal Incident. It isn't possible to think sensibly about Iranian politics without that anchor. The Organisation of Fadai' Guerrillas of Iran initiated the guerrilla war by attacking a police station in Siahkal, in the Caspian province, on February 8th, 1970. The attack team was promptly hunted down and wiped out.
Which makes this bit of text incomprehensible:
The MEK was founded in 1965 after a split in a Marxist-Leninist movement that had waged a guerrilla action in northern Iran.
Amir Taheri wrote that, and the sartorial farce that appeared in the National Post on Friday and has bobbleheads nodding from Ottawa to Mars. What M-L orglet waged armed struggle in Iran five years prior to the Fadai' raid? What M-L orglets existed, with or without armed struggle in Iran in 1965?
Could he mean the Tudah? They had a split in 1965, their second, and the split was over armed struggle, in theory, and its hard to be more "M-L" than the Communist Party of Iran. Did he mean Bijan Jazani and his colleagues, who split off from Tudah in April 1963? Did he mean the group lead by Masoud Ahmadzade and Amir Parviz Pouyan, that formed in 1967? Did he mean the Cherik-ha (Guerillas) Fadiian?
Everything else, GAMA, YEKA, Palestine, all formed years later, circa 1970.
- Ancheh yek enqelabi bayad bedanad (What a revolutionary must know), Iran: July 1970, 78 pp. Written by Aliakbar Safaii Farahani (1940-70) leading member of the Cherik-ha fadaii khalqin the "Siyahkal" current.
- Mobarez-e mosalehan-e ham strategi ham taktik (Armed struggle is both a strategy and a tactic), Iran: 1970, 169 pp. Written by Masoud Ahmadzadeh (1944-72) leading member of the Cherik-ha fadaii khalq.
- Rad-e teori-ye baqa va lozoum-e mobarezeh-ye mosalehaneh (The rejection of the theory of survival and the necessity of armed struggle), Iran: 1970, 141 pp. Written by Amir Parviz Pouyan (1944-72) leading member of the Cherik-ha fadaii khalq.
- Mohre-eii bar safeh-ye shateranj (A marble on the chess board). Iran: l970, 11 pp. Written by Bijan Jazani (1940-74) leading member of the Cherik-ha fadaii khalq.
Masoud Ahmad-Zadeh's Armed Struggle: both a strategy and a tactic is available on-line, as is Amir Parviz Pouyan's Rejection of Survival Theory (also available here).
For the life of me, figurative, since SAVAK executed every person I've named here in 1972, I can't figure out why someone who makes a living writing on Iranian politics puts the MEK formation in the same vague context as the Fadai's, when a decade later is the obvious correct answer, or uses "Marxist-Leninist" to label the Rajavi cult.
The fragment quoted is from the second of two pieces Amir Taheri wrote for the WSJ, "France Tries to Score Points With Iran" published June 20, 2003 and "Islamist, Marxist, Terrorist" published June 23, 2003, and oddly, there is a MEK cultist who makes some of the same points here.
We have it on Mr. Taheri's authority however, that milinary affairs are afoot in the Islamic Republic. Oddly timed milinary affairs, given the amount of ink being spilt over uranium enrichment.
The deadline is the 14th, then the GC has ten days to winnow out the unfit (there may be 100 filings) and the election takes place on the 17th. IRNA text follows.