Word: ruhollah
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Iran, which has been working to improve relations with Moscow since the death of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini last year, seemed embarrassed by the turmoil. In fact, Khomeini's successor, Hashemi Rafsanjani, may have inadvertently fueled the rise of ethnic nationalism in Soviet Azerbaijan when he stopped off there last June after visiting Moscow. He told large crowds in Baku that bilateral agreements he had just signed would lead to increased tourism and trade between the two Azerbaijani regions...
...glimpse of flexibility: Iran's new President, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, offered to "help" find a solution to the hostage problem, thus raising the hope that Bush will not be boxed in by the implacable hostility of Iran as his predecessors were during the reign of the late Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini...
...death of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini earlier this month put pressure on Iran to make some kind of move to break out of the diplomatic isolation into which it had become sealed during his decade-long xenophobic rule. The main question was which direction Tehran would look in first. Last week Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the powerful Speaker of Iran's parliament, provided the answer. Interrupting his observance of a 40-day period of national mourning for the late Imam, Rafsanjani arrived in Moscow to an elaborate reception. The visit was the beginning of a thaw between neighbors whose relations...
...gentle into that good night. The funeral of the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini ignited an emotional outpouring from his fanatical followers that Westerners found as bizarre, frightening -- and ultimately incomprehensible -- as the passions he stirred during ten turbulent years as leader of Iran. Even after his burial, Khomeini excoriated his enemies in the outside world, raging in his will against "the atheist East" and "the infidel West," branding Jordan's King Hussein a "criminal tramp," accusing the leaders of Egypt and Morocco of "treason," and denouncing the U.S. as an "inborn terrorist" organization...
...when Tehran Radio announced early this week that the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran's revolutionary zealot, was dead at 89, millions of his countrymen mourned the loss. They did so even though the movement he led plunged them into a devastating war with Iraq and left a legacy of turbulence at home and terrorism abroad. To his people, the patriarch with the baleful dark eyes and white beard had been the heart and sword of their revolution, the icon of implacable opposition -- first to the dictatorship of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi and then to the U.S., which the Ayatullah relentlessly...