Word: banisadre
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Ganging up on Banisadr...
They were howling in the streets of Tehran in January 1980, during the revolution that placed him in office, and last This week the time, mobs were however, on the President march again. Abolhassan Banisadr was the target of their wrath. While demonstrators cried, "Death to the second Shah!" the Iranian parliament, dominated by Muslim fundamentalists, voted by an overwhelming majority to impeach Banisadr for "incompetence." His fate is now up to the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini. Meanwhile, as his own supporters met the mobs in bloody combat, Banisadr dropped out of sight, and border and airport police were...
Sensing the mullahs' vulnerability, Banisadr followed up with the sensational charge that his political foes had twice plotted to murder him. One group of would-be assassins, he said, had planned to shoot him on Nov. 19 during a speech at Ahwaz; another band of plotters had intended to attack his car with rocket-launched grenades. By these allegations, Banisadr dramatically amplified his oft-repeated charge that the I.R.P. power brokers would stop at nothing to consolidate their position. Whether by force or otherwise, the mullahs clearly would have preferred to eliminate Banisadr as a political leader after sweeping...
...support of the revolutionary patriarch, Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, who still has a large popular following despite his diminished role as day-to-day leader. Until recently, Khomeini tended to side with the I.R.P. Now, says an insider of the clerical establishment, he is "gingerly shifting toward the Banisadr camp." The Ayatullah has publicly barred the mullahs from interfering in military affairs, thereby undercutting their ability to criticize and frustrate Banisadr's handling...
...challenge from the far left, whose various factions have thousands of trained guerrillas under arms. The best organized of the leftist groupings are the pro-Moscow Communists, led by the Tudeh Party and including a faction of the guerrilla organization Fadayan-e-Khalq. So far, these groups have opposed Banisadr, whom they suspect of being pro-Western. Instead, they have pretended to support the mullahs, whose bungling feeds the popular discontent necessary for an eventual Communist takeover. Former Foreign Minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh told TIME last week...