When I was serving my compulsory military service in the Imperial Army of Mohammad Reza Shah before the Revolution, one day I had a close encounter with General Gholam Ali Oveissi. I was in a line up in front of our regiment for him to review us and send us off to the Baluchistan Province. He was walking with our regiment’s colonel and other officers when all of a sudden he stopped in from of me, only a couple of inches from my face, and engaged in a conversation with the officers about our move to Baluchistan. At that point I had this uncontrollable urge to spit on his face. There were anti monarchy sentiment all over the country back then and I was no immune to it. We, some people, considered all members of Imperial Military to be traitors of the country. This is when I knew as much as jack shit about politics. I had heard some of Darush Eghbali’s songs, a couple of books from Samad Behrangi, I had heard that Golsorkhi had balls, and some stories about of how SAVAK (Severely Asinine and Violent Asshole Killers) was torturing revolutionaries, and that was enough for me to have this convulsive urge to spit on him.
Fortunately for me, or him, they didn’t stay in front of me for too long and moved on to review the rest of the regiment, and we marched, and he saluted, and we relocated to Baluchistan, eventually. But the thought of having a chance to spit on a big shot man never skipped my mind for the next few years. That day, and a few other days in my life, I also contemplated killing him at that moment, beside spitting of him. I plotted it in my mind several times, before I knew better. A few days before his visit, I would steal some bullets, load up my riffle, wait for him and shoot him while I had a chance. After all, he eventually become to be infamously known as “…the Butcher of Tehran for a 1978 incident in which he ordered his troops to fire into a vast crowd of anti-Shah demonstrators, killing, by one count, more that 4,000 men, woman and children…” That alone would justify killing him ahead of time, would it not? If you had a chance to kill Adolf Hitler in 1920 would you do it? Not that Oveissi was in the same rant as Hitler, but we all know what Hitler ended up doing, killing millions of people by the time he was done with this world. If you had a chance before he became a mass murderer would you kill him? Well, back in 1920 Hitler was just a soldier who had survived the First World War and there was no reason to kill him then, but who would’ve known what he would have become, back then! Later, when it was known what he was capable of doing, there were seventeen planned assassination attempts on his life from 1939 to 1945, all of them unsuccessful, the most famous one was the unsuccessfull attempt by Claus Von Stauffenberg.
Well, as for Oveissi, after Shah lost his throne, he attempted to organize “…a professional army of Iranian counter-revolutionaries on the Iran-Turkey frontier, for eventual deployment in the a “liberation drive”…this force consisted of officers and men form elite divisions of the late Shah’s military and was quartered in 22 makeshift barracks in eight Turkish villages and at five clandestine bases inside Iran.” Unfortunately for Oveissi, or for Iran, he died “…of a gunshot wound; in Paris. Oveissi was strolling along the fashionable Rue de Passy with his brother and a family friend when a lone gunman walked up behind the men and fired a 9-mm pistol at pointblank range. Both Oveissis died instantly… Two groups, the Islamic Jihad and the Revolutionary Organization for liberation and Reform, claimed responsibility for the killing…”
On Saturday, an interim Friday Prayer Imam in the Iranian province of Kurdistan, in the city of Sanandaj was assassinated by three unidentified gunman. Some people are ecstatic; some people denounce all kinds of violence. I, myself, am so glad I didn’t spit on, or kill, Oveissi.
Let’s pray to God that this Imam was an Adolf Hitler in the making, otherwise another man has died again without a court, without a jury, without a sentence, without an appeal. His death is final.
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Footnote: Blog Image, IRAN. Sanandaj. March 1979. A man presumed to be supporter of the Khomeni regime, is taken away for questionning by kurdish militants in open revolt against the new Islamist government.
