Emmanuel Razavi: “The Iran of the mullahs is an Islamic state that comes from the Nazi regime and the Corleone family”
Emmanuel Razavi is a journalist and senior reporter, specializing in the Middle East. Author of several documentaries and works on sectors linked to Islamism, he has just published with Editions du Cerf a new opus entitled:
The hidden face of the mullahs: the black book of the Islamic Republic of Iran
. Born from a long and in-depth journalistic investigation, the work attempts to lift the veil on the mafia and criminal dimension of the Tehran regime. These pages talk about a parallel economy based on trafficking in arms, drugs, women and money laundering, involving the Iranian leaders and their henchmen. Interview with the author.
“The hidden face of the mullahs”, by Emmanuel Razavi. © Editions du Cerf
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: How was the idea for this survey born and how did you work
?
Emmanuel Razavi
:
The idea for this report was born from the fact that since the beginning of the women's movement in
Iran
, I received a certain amount of information from people who were inside Iran and who told me transmitted compromising documents for the regime. These included people who had collaborated with the Revolutionary Guards or who were close to the Supreme Guide's office. These people understood, I believe, that something was happening in Iran with the revolution initiated by women a year and a half ago. As we receive a lot of false information, I started by cross-checking the data with specialists, particularly intelligence people. It was normal for me because I am above all a journalist and not an activist journalist because I think the two are not compatible. That said, morality and common sense dictate that we denounce totalitarianism in general. As each of us is committed to democracy, we cannot tolerate people being tortured and massacred. We all know what happens in Iranian prisons, torture, rape, the practice of rape being almost systematic. So I wanted to investigate these things, but always by cross-checking information. I never took what I was told at face value. I have always checked by consulting several sources to ensure that the information is reliable before releasing it. Regarding my latest investigation, I provide some documents in the appended book, because it also seemed important to me to provide evidence to support my assertions. These documents confirm what I say in the book about corruption and the mafia-like underbelly of the Tehran regime.
We could divide your work into three large parts: a first part where you return to the origins of the Islamic revolution, the establishment of the mullahs' regime in the second part and finally how the regime became the first criminal organization in the world and a real mafia. While for the general public, it was the forced modernization initiated by the last Shah which would have accelerated the revolutionary process, for you, as you recount in the first historical part of the work, it is the agrarian reform of shah which is also called the “white revolution” which, by dissatisfying the clergy, had ignited the powder. What was the White Revolution and how did it lead to the overthrow of the regime?
Many works that have been published on Iran in general, and in particular on the Iranian revolution, say that the revolution happened because the shah had first been a dictator and because he had modernized extremely quickly the Iranian society. I wanted to look further, taking the time to deconstruct a certain number of representations that had been made since the 1979 revolution. I actually went to work on this famous “White Revolution”, which began in 1963, when the Shah of Iran Mohammed Reza Pahlavi decides to initiate a certain number of reforms. These reforms are linked to the modernization of the country: he created schools, universities and he also launched, at the same time, an agrarian reform which consisted of redistributing part of the lands, a certain number of which were in the hands of the Iranian clergy. When we analyze this period of history, we realize that the protest led by Ayatollah Khomeini, who at the time was not yet an "ayatollah", came from this because, obviously, the clergy owns a lot of land. Concretely, in the rural provinces of Iran, the fact of owning land gives the clergy a certain number of prerogatives, a certain ascendancy over the rural populations. And seeing their lands confiscated, the mullahs fear seeing these prerogatives taken away from them. And this is how the challenge to Ayatollah Khomeini emerged. It seemed important to me to say it. Because systematically bringing the story back to the fact that the shah was a dictator seemed a little short to me. In reality, the Shah contributed enormously to liberalizing Iran. Certainly, we can criticize him for having been extremely harsh, particularly with the communist opposition, that is obvious. But he also initiated major reforms, notably on the condition of women and on education, both in terms of schools and universities. I wanted to reestablish this historical truth because in France intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre or Michel Foucault who, through their position of anti-imperialist struggle, have shortened the reality a little on the true foundations of the Islamic Revolution.
What do Iranian historians say about the White Revolution
?
Historians tell us that when the Shah decided to carry out the White Revolution, a certain number of Iranians actually supported the idea, at the same time as others contested it because once again, they were afraid of losing. I'm talking about the mullahs, their prerogatives. But yes, overall, she is fairly well supported. We realize that part of the population still found it interesting. Except that it was perhaps done too quickly, it perhaps lacked methodology. And so, it will sometimes be done in a somewhat chaotic manner, in a somewhat disorderly manner and this will cause real incomprehension among part of the population, who will end up finding what they want from it. Overall, the idea is quite good because it once again involves modernizing and liberalizing Iran. However, I am not saying that the Shah had the project of building a democracy. He was once again a dictator, but also a modernizer. It's important to remember this. I think it's important to distance ourselves from the thought patterns that have been imposed on us for around forty years and which are not always very accurate. This is what my investigation showed me. I looked in the texts, I interviewed people who participated in these reforms.
Particularly fascinating are the pages of your book where you show how the Shiite Iranian revolution draws its ideological foundations from the Sunni thought of the Muslim Brotherhood, despite their doctrinaire differences. It is therefore rather Hassan al-Banna and not, as has long been said, the Iranian philosopher Ali Shariati, who according to you is the real inspiration of the Iranian Islamic revolution. How can we explain this doctrinaire influence of Sunni Islam on the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran who professes Shiite Islam
?
It is appropriate here to qualify our remarks. Ali Shariati, who is an intellectual, really played a role. We can say that he is one of the inspirations, but he is not the only inspiration. Because if you like, in the late 1940s, Khomeini was linked to an organization called the Fedayeen of Islam, an Iranian Shiite organization that actually practices terrorism. And its leader is a guy called Navvab Safavi, whose master is a certain Sayyid Qutb, one of the most influential theorists of the Egyptian organization of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is of Sunni obedience. It was Safavi that Khomeini met at the time, who transmitted to him the teachings of the Brotherhood and the future founder of the Islamic Republic was immediately seized by Qutb's political-religious conception of sharia. This is how Khomeini adopted the Brotherhood doctrine. This theory has been questioned. However, while working, we realize that the link between the Fedayeen of Iranian Islam and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood is very deep. The Egyptian Brotherhood publicly supported the Iranian revolution. Later, at the time of the Iran-Iraq War, the Muslim Brotherhood provided particularly humanitarian support to the Iranian regime. So, this link between the Iranian regime and the Muslim Brotherhood is almost constant, even if obviously the Iranians are Shiites and the Muslim Brotherhood are Sunni. The historians I was able to consult recall that in the 1950s, the Fedayins of Islam renamed themselves “the Iranian Muslim Brotherhood organization”, which says a lot about the close proximity of the two organizations.
This story is fascinating because it shows that the separation between Shiites and Sunnis is largely an intellectual construction and does not stand up to the test of facts on the ground.
You are right and that is why when I actually started working on this book on the hidden side of the Iranian regime, I decided to cut myself off from the representations that had been made for 45 years of Islam. in the Middle East to carry out a journalistic investigation and seek out the facts, nothing but the facts. I have constantly noticed that we are often prisoners of our mental structures and that our clichés do not stand up to the test of facts. The facts often go against what historians have told us. We were told, for example, that Sunnis and Shiites do not get along. The reality is different. Even today, we saw it in the Middle East, in Israel, a few months ago, that Iran was behind Hamas. So, if you like, on the ground, the reality is sometimes different. There are sometimes converging interests, they are not constant. This explains why Iran today is behind both Shiite Hezbollah and Sunni Hamas. I recall in passing that Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, of the Muslim Brotherhood Organization.
You begin your book by saying that the Iran of the mullahs is in reality an Islamic state which comes from the Nazi regime and the Corleone family. Could you explain what role did the Revolutionary Guards in Iran, called the IRGC, play in the establishment of this mafia system
?
Let us first recall that the entity of the Revolutionary Guards was created in Paris at the end of 1978. At the time, Ayatollah Khomeini was in exile in France, in Neauphle le Château, in the Paris region. He is joined by a man called Mohsen Sazegara, who will suggest that he create a people's army. Sazegara is completely suspicious of what the Iranian military actually is. He thinks that a second army is needed, a sort of paramilitary militia which will effectively take precedence over the regular army. When Khomeini returned to Iran, he gave Mohsen Sazegara carte blanche to create this people's army. Three months later, it was born under the name of the Revolutionary Guards. Very quickly the war between Iran and Iraq will arrive which will last around eight years, and which will see the revolutionary guards shine on the front. At the end of the war, the guards returned home, crowned with a certain glory. The State grants them financial facilities, in the form of loans and subsidies. They will not take long to get their hands, in fact, on some of the Iranian companies. So much so that today we know that they hold approximately 60% of the economy. And very quickly, they will also begin to rise within political power, notably with the arrival of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005, who appointed the guards to strategic positions in several ministries. And from there, with their financial power, with their political influence, they will invest more and more in different businesses, which are linked to arms trafficking, drug trafficking, human trafficking, prostitution, including child prostitution. They will invest in casinos to launder their money, particularly in Macau, Asia, and Cyprus. They are going to set up a whole system of currency exchange agencies in Turkey to, in reality, launder part of their money. And little by little, this is what Mohsen Sazegara, whom I interviewed at length, told me. For Sazegara, the Revolutionary Guard Corps has in fact become an “octopus” like the mafia octopus.
And what role do these Pasdarans play in diplomacy?
You are right to ask the question. This isn't so much me saying this as a number of intelligence specialists I've interviewed on the issue. People who worked on the IRGC. I interviewed former undercover agents who know the system well from the inside and who explained to me that the Revolutionary Guards practice the diplomacy of terrorism, the diplomacy of hostages. That is to say that when the Iranian regime launches into negotiations with the West, and if the latter does not align with the wishes of the regime, then the Pasdaran, in particular via one of their entities which is called the Al-Quds Force, in charge of external operations, threaten to take hostages. The IRGC systematically threatens either to take hostages, or to carry out targeted assassinations on European soil or to carry out large-scale terrorism operations against Western interests. For 46 years, this standoff, represented by the diplomacy of terrorism and hostages, has continued constantly with, between Iran and the West.
This diplomacy of terror is also practiced with the help of what you call “proxies”.
Of course. The Pasdarans have set up a real “proxy arc” in which Hezbollah, created in 1982 in South Lebanon, fits, which is in fact an emanation of the Revolutionary Guard Corps. You of course also have the Houthis in Yemen. We're talking about it a lot at the moment. The regime relies almost systematically, in fact, on these relays to carry out terrorist operations, therefore putting pressure on Western interests, whether American of course or French. We remember the Drakkar attack in particular in 1983, but it is constant pressure and it still continues today, particularly in Gaza through Hamas, a major proxy. Terrorists and Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters have confessed to Israeli security services that they were trained in Iran. The guards travel, from Gaza, through Egypt and then to Syria, to train in artillery, shooting, shooting, sniping, and therefore sniper shooting. We therefore see that there is a direct link between the Revolutionary Guard Corps and its proxies who help them logistically, whom they sometimes finance and whom they train.
If the involvement of the Iranian regime in the events that have occurred since October 7 is proven, as you assert in your book, how can we explain that Israel, which wants to get rid of Iran as much as Iran wants to get rid of Israel, hasn't bombed Tehran yet?
So, I asked the question while I was in Israel, to officers. They tell me: “We can't be everywhere at the same time. Today, we are caught on many fronts. » They are obviously caught in the north of Israel with the daily attacks of Hezbollah. They are caught in the south, obviously with Hamas. They also experience strong tensions with Syria. So today, the Israelis, if you like, are caught, I would say, on all sides. They tell me that they do not have the capacity today for a confrontation with Iran, but that does not mean that it will not come. In fact, today, we are completely in a war which is an asymmetrical war.
You explained that your sources for this book range from domestic opponents of the former IRGC, diplomats, sociologists, presidential advisers, even the exiled son of the last shah of Iran. What lessons have you learned from these conversations about the future of this country from which you come and to which you clearly remain attached
?
Listen, there is one conclusion in any case that I have drawn, which is that today, the regime, I think, is profoundly weakened. Really. If the Iranian oppositions today, to call a spade a spade, still have difficulty coordinating, there is something that is being put in place. I think that, today, the Iranian oppositions, whether they are left-wing or monarchist, it doesn't matter, I think that they all want to move in the direction of establishing a democracy in any case. , or at least as far as monarchists are concerned, of a parliamentary monarchist regime. So there is something happening. There are dialogues which are complicated, obviously, but what we can regret is that the Western powers do not sufficiently support the Iranian opponents. These opponents are heterogeneous, ranging from Kurds to monarchists, including apolitical opponents. We find the latter among the younger generations who just want to get rid of the Islamist regime. And I think that there is a strong awareness today of the threats within the regime and within the intelligence services, as I was able to see by going through and analyzing the documents that I was able to obtain. Leaders are aware that they will have great difficulty going against the generational revolution that awaits them. Let's not forget that the average age of Iranians is 32 years old. Something is changing. So, that doesn't mean that the regime will fall tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. It will take time, certainly. I have the feeling that the West, nevertheless, is not preparing enough for these changes which, sooner or later, will arrive. It might be in a year, in two years, I don't know. But in any case, these changes will happen.
(Comments collected by Tirthankar Chanda)
The hidden face of the mullahs: the black book of the Islamic Republic of Iran
, by Emmanuel Razavi. Éditions du Cerf, 226 pages, 22 euros.
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