Notes to
Truth & justice
Interview with Arash Forouhar
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(1) I wish to thank Ms. Fariba Amini and Dr. Bahram Bahramian of the
Alliance for the Defense of Human Rights in Iran (ADHRI) as well as Mr.
Karimkhani, all of whom helped me to arrange this interview on 3 February
1999. My deepest gratitude goes to Arash Forouhar who epitomizes grace
under pressure.
(2) Chehl-hom derives from the Persian word for the number "forty"
-- chehl. In the Shi`a tradition, family members and friends gather on
the fortieth day after a person's death to commemorate the loss.
(3) Daryoush Forouhar founded the Iran Nation Party during the late
1940s. The party initially espoused a pan-Iranist ideology but became more
mainstream in its orientation, joining the pro-Mossadegh National Front.
The party's membership was consistently limited to a few hundred intellectuals
during the Shah's rule. Since the Islamic Republic's inception, the Iran
Nation Party was illegal but tolerated, with some intellectuals perceiving
it as a symbol of a bygone era of secular Persian nationalism. However,
the Forouhars' reputation transcended the party they had created, as they
criticized the Islamic Republic's mistreatment of secularists and economic
mismanagement.
(4) On 20 July 1988, Ayatollah Khomeini delivered the famous speech
in which he lamented that accepting the UN-sponsored ceasefire resolution
598 was "...more lethal for me than poison." See "Khomeyni
Message on Hajj, UN Resolution 598," Foreign Broadcast Information
Service -- Near East & South Asia (21 July 1988), 50.
(5) On 10 April 1997, a German court convicted five men, four Lebanese
and one Iranian, for the September 1992 killings of three leaders of Iran's
Kurdish Democratic Party and an interpreter at Greek restaurant in Berlin
called Mykonos. The court ruled that the Islamic Republic's clerical leadership
had ordered these murders through its Committee for Special Operations.
This ruling aggravated the Islamic Republic's economic woes and international
isolation, as the European Union withdrew its trade representative from
Iran and condemned the clerics' use of extra-territorial murder as an instrument
of policy.
(6) The Islamic Republic has rejected the request by Maurice Danby Copithorne,
Special Representative of the UN Commission on Human Rights, to visit Iran
and investigate of the Forouhars' and other murders.
(7) Here, Forouhar refers to the US- and British-sponsored military
coup d'etat of August 1953 that toppled Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh
and reinstated the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Iranians of various political
beliefs insist that this event, perhaps more than any other, inspired anti-American
as well as anti-Pahlavi sentiment and, thus, led to the revolution of 1978-79.
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