IRANIANS CELEBRATED THE FALL OF SADDAM HOSEYN
TEHRAN 9 Apr. (IPS) As the statues of Saddam Hoseyn were toppled across the
country, some, like in the huge one in "Ferdaws" (Paradise) Place in
Baghdad with the help of American tanks, Iranians, in their great majority,
celebrated Wednesday the joining of the Iraqi tyrant in the endless
"dustbin of history" with other world’s dictators, highlighting the
enormous gap separating the people with a regime they hope would also join the
one which ruled the neighbouring nation for the last 35 years.
Contrary to the reaction of the Arab world to the disgraceful disintegration of the Iraqi Ba’thist regime, the historic event did not surprised the Iranians but some high-ranking clerical officials like Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the Islamic Republic’s most powerful man after the leader who, in his last Friday sermon, would assure the few worshippers that Baghdad would become American’s "quagmire".
"Though no one here would doubt about the outcome of this war, yet no one was expecting such a so-called Hollywood-like happy end. This also explains why Mr. Hashemi Rafsanjani, the Iranian Goebbels, had to cancel in extremis both a scheduled press conference and an interview with the Arabic-language television "al-Aalam" (The World, run by the official Iranian Radio and Television Organisation, reported to have attracted large audience in Iraq), one journalist in Tehran explained to Iran Press Service.
"The images we saw, coming direct from Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq, about the collapse of the Iraqi regime, the evaporation of Saddam’s Republican Guard and his Feda’iyn, forces and men given as the best equipped and loyal, ready to fight to the last of their blood, the disappearing of the high-ranking officials, both civilians and military, the tearing down Saddam’s statues, burning and stamping on his posters etc. were all too familiar to those of us who witnessed the fall of the late Shah", he observed, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"There is no sign showing that our leaders have come up with factual developments in international, regional and internal situations. As an example, ever since the start of the war until today that Saddam’s regime has collapsed, the way our Radio and Television and our senior officials have reacted is that of the one who is more Catholic than the Pope. They seem to have forgot that Saddam has imposed a war on us, killed more than half a million of our people, that we have hundreds of thousand disabled, some of them chemically wounded", noted Mr. Mohsen Sazegara, a veteran dissident journalist and politician.
Nevertheless, Iranian officials had to put up with the facts. In a recent press conference, Foreign Affairs Minister Kamal Kharrazi said the Islamic Republic could accommodate with a future Iraqi government "provided it is democratic and pluralistic, comprising all the major components of the Iraqi population", an indirect but clear reference to the Iran-backed and Tehran-based Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Republic of Iraq (SAIRI), one of the six Iraqi opposition groups that have formed a provisory committee to rule Iraq in a transition post-Saddam period.
The Iranians are afraid that with Mr. Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the Washington-backed Iraqi National Congress (INC) – a prominent banker of Shi’a faith -- already "parachuted" by the Americans in the southern city of Nasseriyeh in the one hand and Hojjatoleslam Abdolmajid Kho’i, a senior Shi’a cleric already in the holly city of Najaf on the other, their protégé, Ayatollah Mohammad Baqer al-Hakim would be seated at a backbench in the future Iraqi Administration in Baghdad. ENDS IRAN POST SADDAM IRAQ 9403