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Many experts enumerated similarities with the French and even the Russian revolutions. They told us revolutions "eat their own children". They discerned "Thermidorian" and "Jacobine" periods in Khomeini's doings. It is true that the Russian and the Iranian revolutions were both "ideological" : Marxism for the former and Islam for the latter. Moreover, both imposed strict authoritarian rule. But if after almost one century we know a lot about Lenin and Stalin, we remain at sea about the Iranians' motives: they overthrew one dictatorship to bow immediately to a harsher one!
The American Revolution, for instance, involved colonies of the British crown while the French one concerned a national state. The French were fighting against absolutism and in favor of citizen's rights. The Americans already enjoyed some of the rights embodied in documents such as the Magna Carta ( 1215) and the English Bill of Rights (1628). Their goal was independence from the colonial power while the French aimed at overthrowing the absolute monarchy and demanding individuals rights and civil liberties. Be this as it may, I often recall what our history professors used to tell about the last years of the French monarchy and the storming of the Bastille. The Declaration of the Rights of Man struck me particularly. This was quite normal as my class mates and I dreamt of the day when people of the Third World, including Iranians, would enjoy similar rights and freedoms. (Alas this has not happened up to now). In high school we also learned about the American revolution, but our model remained the French uprising. My early encounter with the ideas of human rights and civil liberties left a deep imprint in my mind. It was as if a hidden voice was guiding me in that direction. Indeed after I joined the Iranian Foreign Ministry in 1945, one of my first and most significant jobs was my participation in the finalization of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the UN in the autumn of 1948. I was assigned as a young diplomat to the Third Committee which was in charge of the draft declaration. Our senior delegate had to quit and for reasons which would be too long to state here, he was not replaced. As a result I found myself in the seat of Iran, rising all of a sudden from simple secretary to the status of plain delegate! In that UN Committee, one of my law professors, the late René Cassin, represented France. He enrolled me in a private group he had formed with the late Eleanor Roosevelt in order to sort out the numerous amendments and sub-amendments. I would feel remiss if I do not underline here that without the untiring efforts of Mrs Roosevelt and professor Cassin the Universal Declaration of Human Rights would have never been adopted. Since 1948, human rights, in one form or another, remained linked to my career both as a national and international civil servant. Thus, when, in 1952, I joined the secretariat of UNESCO, I was assigned to a division called : "Free Flow of Information ". For more than a decade I was involved in freedom of information programs in developing countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America. I returned to the service of Iran in 1965 and found myself almost immediately immersed in the negotiations concerning the two covenants on human rights that were adopted by the United Nations in 1966. In 1968, I was responsible for the organization of an international conference which was held in Tehran under the aegis of the United Nations in order to mark the 20th anniversary of the Universal Declaration. In 1993, I represented some non-governmental organizations at the Vienna Conference on the occasion of the 45th anniversary of the Declaration... I shall never forget my 1948 involvement in the adoption of the Declaration. I signed the document on behalf of our foreign minister and I am probably the only survivor among the signatories who all were much older than me (I was only 24 at that time!). But more than that, what still bewilders me today is a discussion with the head of our delegation and other senior representatives at the Third session of the UN General Assembly in Paris. I just had obtained my doctorate in law from the Sorbonne and studied seriously the text of the draft Declaration. In the first staff meeting of our delegation, I stated that Iranian laws and practices were in contradiction with each article of the Declaration. The foreign minister shrugged his shoulders : "Never mind! The Americans want it and we need Washington's help. So vote like Mrs Roosevelt." Then the old diplomat added: " In any case this is a General Assembly resolution. It is not binding. It is just a piece of paper. It won't have practical consequences. In a year or two everybody would forget about it." The minister died a few years later and did not see the ever expanding worldwide influence of this "piece of paper". If he had lived long enough, he would have seen, for example, in 1978, the Iranian intellectuals and journalists brandishing it against a beleaguered and shaky Shah. For years the Iranian monarch had brushed aside the protests of human rights non-governmental organizations. When he finally woke up to the uproar, it was too late. Now, repeating the mistake of their predecessor, Tehran's governing mollas hide under their turbans and mantles, rejecting the protests against their gross violations of citizens' rights. At any rate, in 1993, in the Vienna Conference marking the 45th anniversary of the Universal Declaration, there were more than 1,000 human rights non-governmental organizations represented. Amnesty International, since its inception, is campaigning everywhere against abuses and has become a thorn in the flesh of all authoritarian governments. Over the years, since I am now living in the United States, I pondered on the American Constitution, its Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence All these documents bear resemblance to similar documents of other democracies. But, I found in the preamble to the American Declaration of Independence a separate, addition idea which attracted me. Indeed, among inalienable human rights, this Declaration mentions the "pursuit of happiness".
A decade or so back in Manhattan, I listened to a very interesting talk given by V.S. Naipaul (this year's Nobel prize in literature) about what he dubbed the "Universal Civilization". He concluded his remarks with an apology of the idea of "pursuit of happiness". I wrote down some of his comments which I offer here as a conclusion to this short paper:
To me, it also reflects the profound meaning of our mythical Simorgh. At the end of their perilous trek, the thirty birds find out that they are themselves a single Simorgh. Instead of looking for an elusive "parental " archetype, Iranians should rather understand that they are themselves the real and only source of authority. They do not need somebody to lead them. They should choose their leader for a limited period of time. After that, they should engage in the pursuit of happiness! Author Fereydoun Hoveyda was Iran's ambassador to the United Nations from 1971 to 1978. To learn more about the Hoveydas, visit their web site.
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I,
for one, discard comparisons between historical events. One can only compare what
is comparable.
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