THE VELAYAT FAQIH IS AN ILLEGAL FORM OF GOVERNMENT
By Borzou Daragah
BAGHDAD 6 Aug (THE WASHINGTON TIMES-IPS) In a second interview with foreign media, Hojjatoleslam Hoseyn Khoeini, the grandson of the late Ayatollah Roohollah Khomeini said his countrymen would accept U.S. military intervention to liberate their nation.
It is a strange twist of history to listen to the younger Khomeini, who aims at teaching in Najaf, the very holy city from where his Grandfather launched the Islamic revolution that booted out the Americans from Iran in 1979, welcoming the "Great Satan" back to his native country.
The United States has accused the clerical regime in Tehran of harbouring terrorists, trying to build nuclear weapons and oppressing its own people.
During the 1979 Iranian revolution, followers of the young Mr. Khomeini's grandfather stormed the American Embassy and kept employees hostage for more than a year.
"In Iran the people really need freedom, and freedom must come about. Freedom is more important than bread", the younger Khomeini, 45, a midlevel cleric who has taken up temporary residence in Iraq, told The Washington Times.
"But if there's no way for freedom in Iran other than American intervention, I think the people would accept that. I would accept it, too, because it's in accord with my faith", he said.
Mr. Khomeini — here ostensibly on a religious pilgrimage to Shi'ite holy sites in Najaf, Karbala and Baghdad — also praised the U.S. takeover of Iraq, saying Iraqis saw American forces as liberators rather than occupiers.
"I see day by day that the country is on the path to improvement", he said. "I see that there's security, that the people are happy, that they've been released from suffering".
These days the United States and its Iraqi allies also accuse Iran of attempting to subvert postwar Iraq by allowing militants to enter the country and using its pull with Shi'ite clerics, such as Moqtada al Sadr, to shake the Iraqi government.
Mr. Khomeini crossed the Iranian border into occupied Iraq about a month ago for a visit of the Shi’ites holly shrines in Iraq.
Iran and Iraq fought a war from 1980 to 1988 that left a million dead and ruined the two neighbours economies. Now, nearly 25 years later, the grandson has returned to Iraq and begun speaking out against the legacy of that revolution.
A long time reformist silenced and shut out of Iran's hard-line inner circle of power, Mr. Khomeini in the interview laced his sentences with religious references and spoke in the roundabout manner of Shi'ite clerics.
"A religious government can come to power only once the 12th Shi'ite imam, Mahdi, who disappeared in the ninth century, returns", he pointed out.
In an earlier interview with a NCR Handelsblad of Amsterdam, he had said if his grandfather would be alive, he would have join Iranian protesters against the present regime, one thaqt he would have also changed.
Mr. Khomeini condemned Saddam Hoseyn's regime in the most strident terms, criticising those countries opposed to the war against his Ba'athist government as ignorant of the conditions under which Iraqis suffered.
"The people here were subject to crimes unprecedented in world history", he said.
He praised the late Ayatollah Abdol Majid al Kho’i, the American-backed moderate Shi'ite cleric killed in the first days after the war, as "freedom loving" and honest. "He was the first martyr on the path to freedom in our region", Mr. Khomeini said.
Nationalism has no basis in religious doctrine, he said, and freedom is more important than independence from foreign rule. "Freedom is a basic right. It supercedes all", Mr. Khomeini said.
"America is nothing special", he said. "It's just another superpower like Russia or China. The important issue is freedom".
The pudgy, chain-smoking Mr. Khomeini also said that he is considering starting a Shi'ite seminary in the holy city of Karbala to spread his reformist theology, and that he expects Najaf to regain its status as the most important place of Shi'ite learning in the world. ENDS HOSEYN KHOMEINI INTERVIEW 6803
Editor’s note: The Washington Time published the above article on its 5 August issue.
Some editorial work, phonetisation of names and highlights are by IPS