Word: sadegh
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...President Abolhassan Banisadr and hard-lining Ayatullah Seyyed Mohammed Beheshti, the leader of the clergy-dominated Islamic Republic Party. Behind their personal rivalry lay opposed visions of government: Beheshti and his fundamentalist allies seek total power in a single-party theocratic state. Banisadr and fellow moderates like Foreign Minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh want a modern, pragmatic government within an Islamic revolutionary framework; they are especially eager to shore up an economy reeling under 50% inflation, 30% unemployment and drastically declining oil production...
...says something about the conference of Islamic Foreign Ministers in Islamabad last week that one of the more moderate voices heard there was that of Iran's Sadegh Ghotbzadeh. "When we condemn the U.S. for supporting Israel in Palestine and for intervening in Viet Nam," said Ghotbzadeh, who was clearly the star of the six-day meeting, "we should not hesitate for one minute to condemn the Soviet Union for intervening in Afghanistan." Trailed by reporters wherever he went, the tall, dark-haired Iranian Foreign Minister went well beyond rhetorical denunciation of Moscow's "adventurism" in Afghanistan...
...appoint a Prime Minister. Declared Beheshti haughtily: "The difficulty is that once a Prime Minister is approved by the Imam, then the Majlis [National Assembly] won't be able to vote freely on his appointment." Adding to his humiliation, Banisadr last week lost a lesser battle against Ayatullah Sadegh Khalkhali, an Islamic judge who had sentenced more than 100 Kurdish rebels and officials of the Pahlavi regime to death. When Banisadr denied Khalkhali's right to exercise judicial functions as chief narcotics investigator, the cleric openly defied him, forcing the President to back down. Earlier, the headstrong judge...
...remained unmoved. Khomeini, who had previously blamed the London embassy seizure on the CIA, said nothing at all. Banisadr, who had been willing to accept "the martyrdom of our children in England," now declared merely that "the brave resistance of our children" had brought "its sweet fruit." Foreign Minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh insisted, as before, that the London incident was a "terrorist act," while the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran was "a legitimate outcry against 25 years of oppression." Even more bluntly, one of the Revolutionary Council's leading zealots, Ayatullah Seyyed Mohammed Beheshti, told a journalist...
...rage. Their anger has been ripened by the long spectacle of their nation's ineffectuality and the humiliation of the failed rescue raid, by the nightly TV pageant of Iranian mobs pumping their fists in the air and screaming death threats in Farsi, and by the image of Sadegh Ghotbzadeh's cretinous smirk. Dark impulses that normally stay below, like Ahab's harpooners, begin to straggle up on deck...