Parviz Nikkhah

Parviz Nikkhah ( Persian پرویز نیک‌خواه Parwiz Nikchah , born April 1939 in Tehran; † March 13, 1979 in Tehran ) was one of the most important leaders of the Confederation of Iranian Students (CIS), the most important group of the Iranian opposition to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in Europe and the USA. In Germany, the CIS worked closely with the Socialist German Student Union (SDS) .

Early years

Parviz Nikkhah was born in Tehran in April 1939. His older sister Parvin was an active member of the already communist Tudeh party. It was she who got her brother Parviz enthusiastic about the youth organization of the Tudeh party. There he received his first lessons in Marxism-Leninism and learned how to move underground as a member of a party that was banned after an attack on the Shah. He was already in high school when his sister married Gholam-Ali Seyf. Gholam-Ali was also a Tudeh activist and had already spent several years in prison, which made him a hero in the Nikkhah house. Soon Parviz Nikkhah's childhood home had become a meeting place for young Tudeh activists.

After graduating from high school, Parviz bought a ticket on a TBT bus, drove to the UK, and enrolled at Manchester University. With the opening of the bus service between Iran and Europe, which made travel to Europe affordable even for the less well-off, a new generation of students came to Europe. Up until now it was mainly the sons of wealthy families who were sent by plane to study in Europe or the USA, but now the buses came more from middle-class children who, mostly on a well-paid state scholarship, came to European countries Universities enrolled. And while the children of rich families abroad tended to indulge in an apolitical student life, the students of the Iranian middle class took part in the political discussions in the mostly left-wing student groups in their host countries and soon founded their own student organization, the Confederation of Iranian Students.

The Confederation of Iranian Students

Parviz Nikkhah studied physics and graduated after four years. During this time he had risen to become the undisputed leader of Iranian students abroad. He was the star at the 2nd Congress of the Confederation of Iranian Students in London in 1961 and at the 3rd Congress of the Confederation in Paris in 1962. In the meantime, ideologically, he had broken away from the leadership of the Tudeh party. He became a member of the newly founded "Revolutionary Organization of the Tudeh Party in Iran", a Maoist group that rejected the " revisionist course " of the Soviet Union . The aim of the group was to carry the "armed struggle" (Jang-e mosallahaneh) into Iran and to organize a peasant uprising in Iran based on the Chinese model. In 1964 Parviz Nikkhah was one of the first to declare himself ready to return to Iran and "lead the masses in the revolutionary struggle against the Shah regime". Previously, Parviz Nikkhah had accepted an invitation to the People's Republic of China for ideological schooling and training in guerrilla warfare.

According to Nikkhah and his comrades, Iran was "ripe for a revolution" in the 1960s. If it were possible to forge an alliance between workers and peasants led by a revolutionary party, it could be possible to overthrow the Shah and found a Maoist “People's Republic of Iran”, the young revolutionaries thought. Back in Iran, Parviz Nikkhah took a position as a physics lecturer at the Amir Kabir University in Tehran and began his underground work as a revolutionary parallel to his teaching activities. He recruited students for his "Revolutionary Organization of the Tudeh Party", sent them to China for further training and discussed the planned popular uprising with workers and peasants. After a few months he wrote a report for his comrades in Europe on the foundations of the revolutionary struggle in Iran. The reality looked completely different from what the revolutionaries had imagined in their plans. The peasants wanted nothing to do with the "armed struggle" and the workers were also not very enthusiastic about the prospects of a Maoist people's republic. In his report to his friends from the Confederation , the physicist Parviz Nikkhah spoke of a paradigm shift that had to be carried out, which roughly meant that the "armed struggle" was canceled for the time being.

On April 10, 1965, Parviz Nikkhah committed an assassination attempt on Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi with serious consequences . Nikkhah was arrested along with several other members of his "Revolutionary Organization" and brought to justice. There was no concrete evidence that Parviz Nikkhah's group was involved in the attack, but it turned out that the SAVAK had been monitoring Parviz Nikkhah's group for a long time and had sufficient documents to identify him as a member to be able to charge a terrorist organization.

During the trial, Parviz Nikkhah made no secret of his rejection of the monarchy, but denied any involvement in the attack. “I'm a Marxist-Leninist, that's why I'm against the Shah. Terrorism is not part of my conviction. "

The Confederation of Iranian Students reacted promptly to Parviz Nikkhah's arrest. She activated her network of famous people who campaigned for Parviz Nikkhah's release. Jean-Paul Sartre , Günter Grass , Harold Pinter and Noam Chomsky wrote letters to the Shah, and the death sentence initially handed down against Nikkhah was reduced to 10 years in prison following a personal conversation between Parviz Nikkhah and the Shah.

The imprisonment made Parviz Nikkhah the idol of the Confederation of Iranian Students. In many rooms of Iranian students, his picture hung next to the posters of other famous revolutionaries. From now on, the confederation began with its protest rallies to increasingly draw attention to “the undemocratic rule of the Shah” and to demand the “release of all political prisoners”. In Germany, a close cooperation developed between the Confederation of Iranian Students and the Socialist German Student Union (SDS), which called for a “review of the Federal Republic's policy towards Iran”. Taking up this demand, students protested in several cities against the Shah's visit to Germany in the summer of 1967. During the demonstration on June 2, 1967 in Berlin , the student Benno Ohnesorg was fatally shot by the police officer and Stasi agent Karl-Heinz Kurras . According to the police version, the officer acted in self-defense. For the SDS the case was different: “The bloody events on June 2nd make it clear what threatens us with the planned emergency laws.” In a press release on June 6th, 1967, the SDS board warned of the acute danger of a renewed “pre-fascist system " in the Federal Republic. Unexpectedly, the protests against the Shah in Iran and the protest movement against the German emergency laws had mutated into a protest against dictatorship and the threat of fascism.

The Confederation of Iranian Students had become the center of the left opposition movement of 60,000 Iranian students abroad at the latest after Benno Ohnesorg's death. Confederation groups had formed at the universities in Berkeley, Cambridge, Munich, Bonn, Berlin, London and Paris. The fact that Parviz Nikkhah had long since broken away from his old ideological ideas during his imprisonment was initially hidden from his friends in the Confederation.

From revolutionary to Shah supporter

While students were demonstrating against the Shah in Germany, Parviz Nikkhah received visits to his prison from his sister, brother-in-law, and brother, who had now completely broken away from the communist Tudeh party and had become supporters of the Shah's politics. They brought him books and magazines on the current political situation in Iran and began long conversations to convince Parviz that it was more important to fight against the exploitation of Iran by the international oil companies together with the Shah than to campaign for the overthrow of the Shah. They had explained to him that the Shah's reform policy had opposed the big landowners and the conservative clergy and that, above all, the ideological ideas that had been developed for other countries could not simply be transferred to Iran. Parviz Nikkhah spoke to the Shah before he went to prison. He hadn't seen a “bloody dictator”, but a man who had taken the time to talk to him personally.

After much discussion with his family, Parviz Nikkhah came to the conclusion that he should contact the Shah directly for a second time to inform him of his new political ideas. He wrote a letter in which he apologized for the mistakes he had made in the past and described his previous ideological position as "absurd". He offered to make his new political views public. Nikkhah wrote an article on the positive effects of the White Revolution land reform that was published uncensored in the Kayhan newspaper.

In a 1968 televised interview, he explained his personal history and why he now believed the views he had held in the past to be wrong. He praised the politics of the Shah and advocated a “united front” against the “enemies of progress” (meaning the conservative clergy). He criticized his previous ideological standpoint and called on the students of the Confederation, instead of fighting the Shah, to use their energies for the construction and development of Iran.

Parviz Nikkhah was released from prison after the television interview. He began to work for the Ministry of Information and later for National Television (NIRT). His former comrades in arms insulted him as a traitor. It was initially believed that Parviz Nikkhah had been brainwashed or tortured by the SAVAK to make political concessions. All suspicions turned out to be unfounded.

His past was no problem for his career at NIRT. Parviz Nikkhah rose to the position of newsroom manager. When an offshoot of Harvard Business School opened in Iran , Parviz Nikkhah enrolled and graduated with a master's degree. For him, the old slogans of the class struggle were clearly a thing of the past. He married Parand, a friend of his sister's, and began a middle-class life with a sixteen-hour workday. The marriage with Parand had two children.

The Islamic Revolution

As anti-Shah demonstrations increased in Iran in 1978, Parviz Nikhah's family and friends became concerned about his safety. He refused to leave Iran because he had nothing to blame. In the days of the Islamic Revolution , he sat, as always, in his office in the state television building. He was arrested by a group of armed workers at the station who actively supported the revolution. He was released a few days later, however, as no charges could be found. It would only be a few days before he was arrested a second time. This time, a group of nine gunmen came to his home to arrest him. Among the gunmen was a former comrade of the Tudeh party who now supported the Islamists.

Parviz Nikkhah was charged with authoring an anti-Khomeini article, " Iran and Black and Red Colonialism, " which appeared in the Ettelā'āt newspaper on January 7, 1978 . As in his first trial, he was charged with an act he did not commit. Parviz Nikkhah defended himself, arguing that he could not have written the article, and tried to convince Judge Sadegh Chalkhali that he had considered the Shah's regime to be the best form of government during the establishment of Iran and therefore cooperated with the Shah would have.

As after his first trial, Parviz Nikkhah was sentenced to death. But this time there was no audience and no conversation with a higher authority, there was no conversion of his death sentence into a prison sentence or even a pardon. On March 13, 1979, just over a month after Khomeini returned to Iran, Parviz Nikkhah was executed.

Confederate students who had rushed to Iran in support of the Islamic Revolution soon returned to their universities abroad, disappointed in the direction the revolution had taken, and continued their studies. The Shah they had fought for so long was dead. The monarchy had been replaced by an Islamic republic . The confederation dissolved because its enemy, the Shah, was no longer alive. Mehdi Khanbaba Tehrani, one of the founders of the Confederation, recently stated:

“I think the student movement had gradually moved completely away from Iranian society and its real problems. The movement promoted an image of the poor Iranian peasant who lived on only a few dates, as was perhaps the case in the times of Ahmad Shah or Reza Shah. In our minds, reforms and revolution were incompatible. We believed, for example, that the Shah only granted women in Iran their liberties in order to make them into civil dolls. We thought how can women be free if the Iranian people as a whole were not free? Such considerations led us into an alliance with Khomeini, without thinking that the freedom rights that the Shah had enforced for women were not sufficient but at least an improvement. ... The confederation was an organization based on an absolute rejection (of the existing system) ... The members of the confederation did not belong to a society-rooted opposition movement with theoretically founded revolutionary ideas. They were idealists who opposed social inequality and whose enemy was the person of the Shah ... They ultimately had no in-depth knowledge of Iran and there was a certain fear of seriously discussing the question of the Shah's reforms. It could have been that we would have lost our image of the enemy. "

literature

• Abbas Milani: Eminent Persians. Syracuse University Press, 2008, pp. 254-266.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Gholam Reza Afkhami: The Life and Times of the Shah. University of California Press, 2009, p. 389.
2. ↑ Abbas Milani: Eminent Persians. Syracuse University Press, 2008, p. 255.
3. ↑ Abbas Milani: Eminent Persians. Syracuse University Press, 2008, p. 256.
4. ↑ Bijan Jazani: Mohre-e bar Sahneye Chatranj, Ketab-e Jome, Chordad 1359 (1979), pp. 46-57. Quoted from Abbas Milani: Eminent Persians. Syracuse University Press, 2008, p. 257.
5. ↑ Michael Schmidtke: The departure of the young intelligentsia: the 68s in the Federal Republic and the USA. Campus Verlag 2003, p. 134.
6. ↑ Gholam Reza Afkhami: The Life and Times of the Shah. University of California Press, 2009, p. 390.
7. ↑ Gholam Reza Afkhami: The Life and Times of the Shah. University of California Press, 2009, p. 390.
8. ↑ Abbas Milani: Eminent Persians. Syracuse University Press, 2008, p. 256.
9. ↑ Abbas Milani: Eminent Persians. Syracuse University Press, 2008, p. 260.
10. ↑ Gholam Reza Afkhami: The Life and Times of the Shah. University of California Press, 2009, p. 395