Word: baraheni
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...Crowned Cannibals, a collection of essays and poems on Iran, is part of that effort. Baraheni writes of the repression of Iranian national minorities, of the repression of Iranian women, of the repression of Iranian intellectuals by the Shah and his secret service. He writes with a poet's eye, relying less on figures and statistics than on the impact of accumulated images, of individuals caught in a cycle of brutality...
...month. Amnesty International reported in 1975 that "the Shah of Iran retains his benevolent image despite the highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system of civilian courts and a history of torture which is beyond belief." But the figures alone do not convey the horror; Baraheni puts them in human terms, in the context of Iran. "Imagine tens of thousands of educated men and women in prison while 75 per cent of the whole nation is illiterate," he writes. "Imagine hundreds of doctors in prison when every 50 villages in the country have only one doctor...
...first decades of this century and who abdicated in 1941 because he was found to have collaborated with the Nazis. Following his abdication, a constitutionally-elected, reform-minded government came into power--until 1953, when the CIA sponsored the coup that put the present Shah in power. Baraheni does not go into the reasons for the CIA's support for the monarchy, but one sentence gives it away: the democratically-elected government had nationalized Iran's rich oil deposits...
...writer and an intellectual, Baraheni focuses primarily on the effect of these efforts on the educated men and women of Iran, leaving the reader to imagine for himself the effect on the rest of the people. The Shah's agents--many of them trained by the United States and equipped with techniques and weapons developed in the U.S.--are everywhere in Iran; many of them operate overseas, giving SAVAK a global reach...
...present Shah's father, who was arguably even more brutal than his son. University spokesmen contend that the presence of free-speaking Americans in the institutions with which Harvard is involved will help Iranian students come into contact with ideas that would otherwise be banned in Iran. But Baraheni argues convincingly that Harvard's presence merely lends the regime respectability without altering its repressive nature. SAVAK's agents do not stop outside the classroom door simply because the professor is American; Iranian participants in Harvard's Iranian projects are as liable to harrassment as the rest of their countrymen...