Dariush Forouhar
Dariush Forouhar , in German texts Dariusch Foruhar ( Persian داریوش فروهر[ dɔːriˈuːʃ foruːˈɦær ]; * December 28, 1928 in Isfahan ; † November 21, 1998 in Tehran ) was Iran's labor minister and later a leading Iranian opposition activist. He fell victim to an assassination attempt by the Iranian secret service.
Life
Dariusch Foruhar was born into a patriotic family. His father, a general in the Iranian Army, was taken prisoner of war during the Anglo-Soviet invasion of 1941 during the Second World War .
Foruhar began his political activities at the age of sixteen. In 1948 he enrolled in law at the University of Tehran and joined the " Pan-Iranism Party ". In the 16th round of parliamentary elections, he campaigned strongly for Mohammad Mossadegh and his political supporters, the “ National Front ”. In 1950 he was elected political spokesman for students at Tehran University. He gave a moving speech on the nationalization of the oil industry on the historically significant Baharestan Square in Tehran . He was then arrested for the first time.
His wife Parwaneh Foruhar (1938–1998) was born on March 20, 1939 in Tehran. She came from a politically democratic family. Her origins and the moving time of Mossadegh's political struggle for the nationalization of Iran's oil industry prompted her to deal with politics early on. She studied social sciences and education at the University of Tehran and later taught history and sociology. At times she worked in a sociological research center.
The coup against the Mossadegh government
In 1951, Dariusch Foruhar separated from the "Pan-Iranism Party" due to significant differences of opinion and founded the " Hezb-e Mellat-e Iran " (Iranian National Party). 1951 was the year of the trip from Mossadegh to The Hague and at the same time the year of the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry, for which Foruhar was convinced. He was arrested again. Dariush Foruhar played a crucial role in supporting Mossadegh within the July 21st Movement. On August 15, 1953, Prime Minister Mossadegh was overthrown in a coup that went down in history as Operation Ajax . Foruhar was seriously injured in the argument and was taken to hospital. To avoid arrest, his party friends smuggled him out of the building that night.
Resistance to the Shah's regime
After the coup, Foruhar and his companions launched an organized underground resistance. A few days after the coup , this party office made its position against the coup plotters public with the help of leaflets . The coup committee then offered a reward for extraditing Forouhar, dead or alive. On December 31st, he was arrested again and detained in a military prison. Two years later Forouhar was exiled from this prison to Kish , an island in the Persian Gulf. Motivated by explosive political changes, he fled his exile to Tehran and took over the organization of the “National Resistance Movement”. He organized unannounced demonstrations and was arrested again. After his release from prison in 1956, he resumed his activities. After the parliamentary elections, he charged the government with election rigging, which is why he was detained again. Hardly released, he was arrested again in 1959. After eighteen months in prison, Colonel General Hedayat visited him in prison, who advised him to leave the country forever. Foruhar replied that he preferred life imprisonment to life in exile.
In 1960 the "Second National Front" was founded and Foruhar was elected to its Central Council. He was arrested again in connection with the parliamentary elections for which the "National Front" had put him up. In December 1960, Parwaneh Foruhar gave a speech at the university indicting the government of murdering opposition students who were killed in the classroom. A student organization was founded in which she played a leading role. In 1961 Foruhar was released. Parwaneh and Dariusch, who had known each other for several years, got married that year. In July, Foruhar was arrested again at a memorial service for the "Martyrs of July 21" at their grave.
In 1962 the first congress of the "National Front" took place, at which Parwaneh Foruhar and Homa Darabi were elected as spokespersons for the women. Homa Darabi publicly burned himself to death in Iran in 1994 in protest against the Islamic government.
In 1963, when Mossadegh was expelled, the “Third National Front” was formed, Foruhar was elected to the Central Council and then sentenced to three years in prison. During these years Parwaneh participated intensively in political responsibility for party work and activities in the resistance.
In 1966 Mossadegh dies after three years of arrest in his house ordered by the Shah. In 1970 the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi renounced old Persian claims to Bahrain and recognized Bahrain as a sovereign state.
Foruhar was at large from 1974 to 1976 and was able to pursue his profession as a lawyer . In 1977 a group of three, consisting of Dariusch Foruhar, Karim Sandschabi and Shapur Bakhtiar , who was murdered in Paris in 1991, wrote an open letter to the Shah in which they explained the failure of the monarchical regime. Forouhar was seriously injured during a political event that was attacked and stormed by government forces. In 1978 the Forouhars' apartment was bombed, but this did not prevent the two of them from continuing their political work. As a result, Dariush Foruhar and Sandjabi were arrested during a press conference. Parwaneh Foruhar played an important role during this time as the editor of the opposition underground newspaper “Nationale Front”.
After the Iranian Revolution
In 1979 a revolution took place in Iran . Foruhar acted as labor minister in the newly formed revolutionary cabinet . During his tenure, he managed to achieve the following goals of his comprehensive reform program:
- The establishment of a public credit fund for the workers.
- The establishment of a state unemployment insurance.
- Alignment of workers' leave with that of employees.
- The increase in minimum wages for workers by 30 percent.
However, despite intensive efforts and fundamentally good prospects of success, he was unable to realize his great desire to resolve the conflict over Kurdistan peacefully. The government put too many obstacles in his way. As a result, Foruhar resigned from office in 1980.
Parwaneh Foruhar worked during this time for the party newspaper and denounced the procedures of the fundamentalist movement, which was gaining more and more influence. After the fundamentalists came to power , the two Foruhars have once again come out in public as the opposition. The government banned Parwaneh Foruhar from working as a journalist. Dariusch Foruhar had to go underground again at times, but he was arrested again and detained for a few months.
assassination
Dariusch and Parwaneh Foruhar continued to fight steadfastly for their beliefs. Despite all threats and reprisals from the government, they gave many interviews in the last few years of their lives in which they outlined the goals of the democratic movement in Iran. They stood for the separation of state and religion. The abolition of the death penalty was also a goal that the two openly advocated.
On November 21, 1998, Dariusch and Parwaneh were murdered in their home in southern Tehran. Dariush died of 11 stab wounds and his wife suffered 24. The Iranian public was shocked by the brutality of the double homicide and there were suspicions that the murders were politically motivated. Thousands of people demonstrated at the funeral of the two and international attention was drawn to the chain killings in Iran.
process
In December 1998, President Mohammad Chātami ordered an investigation into the circumstances of the murder. Just a few weeks later, government officials declared in seldom frankness that the murders had been carried out by a group of intelligence officials. The main suspect was the former deputy secret service minister Said Emami , who later died under unexplained circumstances in Tehran's Evin prison (according to official information, he committed suicide). In addition to Emami, 17 other accused were tried behind closed doors (“for reasons of national security”). Only three of the accused were publicly named. They were former senior officials at the Ministry of Intelligence. The lawyer for the relatives was Shirin Ebadi , Iran's first female judge and later winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Parastou Forouhar , the daughter of the murdered living in Germany, documented the harassment and humiliation of the trial in a satirical book of drawings. According to the daughter's statements, the relatives only had ten days to inspect the tens of thousands of pages of the special court's files, some of which had been manipulated. Because according to a law of 1980 in Iran a woman's life is only worth half the life of a man, the judge in this process only demanded half of the so-called blood money for the mother's murderer , because the alleged murderer is a man and the victim was a woman. The clients in the ministry and the secret service are largely known, but have remained unmolested to this day.
During the trial, Schirin Ebadi and her daughter inspected the trial documents. According to both statements, it contained orders from the then head of the secret service and later Friday preacher in Arak , Ghorbanali Dorri-Najafabadi , on contract killings. Shirin Ebadi was named as the next person to be murdered.
literature
- Parastou Forouhar : The country where my parents were killed - declaration of love to Iran . Herder, Freiburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-451-30467-5 .
- Christopher de Bellaigue: In the rose garden of the martyrs. A portrait of Iran. From the English by Sigrid Langhaeuser, Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2006 (English original edition: London 2004), pp. 257–268 and 277 f.
Movie
Death in Tehran - contract murder in the name of God by Thomas Giefer (Con Voi Film 2004 for ARD): Thomas Giefer met the Foruhars shortly before their murder and recorded the last interview with them ... The film reconstructs the hair-raising details of this politically and religiously motivated murder, accompanies Parastou Forouhar in her search for truth and justice and traces the traces of the crime to the power center of the Islamic state of God ... An interior view of religious fanaticism and state terror - but at the same time a film about love, death and the eternal dream of freedom. (Excerpt from WDR press release)
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Sarah Fowler: Iran's Chain Murders: A wave of killings that shook a nation. BBC News, December 2, 2018, accessed December 2, 2018 .
- ^ Sarah Fowler: Three held in Iran murder trial. BBC News, December 23, 2000, accessed December 2, 2018 .
- ↑ a b c d e Sabine Jainski, Ilona Kalmbach: Shirin Ebadi. My life ( memento of the original from February 3, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Arte series Mein Leben , 43 min., First broadcast on Sunday, July 21, 2013.
- ↑ iran-press-service.com, December 2000, (last changed November 6, 2007 12:18:56): Ganji identified Fallahian as the "Master Key" in Chain Murders
- ↑ Death in Tehran , ARD documentation by Thomas Giefer , 2004.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Forouhar, Dariush |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Foruhar, Dariusch; داریوش فروهر (Persian) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Iranian opposition activist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | December 28, 1928 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Isfahan , Iran |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 21, 1998 |
| Place of death | Tehran |