The Long Career of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani
From revolutionary to establishment power-broker
Iran's former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani arrives to vote in the Iranian presidential election, north of Tehran June 12, 2009.
HALEH ESFANDIARI AND SHAUL BAKHASH
JAN 8, 2017
Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, who died in Tehran from a heart attack Sunday, was one of the dominant and enduring leaders of the Iranian revolution and the Islamic Republic: a fiery revolutionary, a member of parliament, a shaper of the Islamic Republic’s governing structure, and a moderate president who favored economic reform over religious dictates.
As a young cleric in the 1960s and 1970s, Rafsanjani supported Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the revolutionary movement that would ultimately overthrow the shah and establish the Islamic Republic in 1979—activities that got him imprisoned before the shah fell. Following the revolution, he won Khomeini’s confidence, securing a place on the Revolutionary Council, a key policy body and power center. In the revolution’s early years of bitter, often murderous in-fighting between moderates and radicals, both within the clerical community and among the clerics and civilians of the new government, Rafsanjani most often stood on the side of the radicals. He was a founding member of the Islamic Republican Party, Iran’s major clerical political organization after the revolution. He also helped shape the constitution, a document that vested power in the clergy and supreme authority in the person of a clerical supreme leader who, under the constitutional theory of the Islamic Republic, was to serve as a kind of vice-regent to the Prophet Muhammad. He also served as Khomeini’s go-between with Iran’s military forces in the later phases Iran’s eight-year war with Iraq.
Rafsanjani's Impact
But Rafsanjani’s more pragmatic streak began to emerge when he served as speaker of the Majlis, or parliament, for eight years. He sought Khomeini’s help to mediate sharp difference between a parliament committed to radical economic redistribution, and a constitutional watch-dog body, the Guardian Council, that insisted on a conservative interpretation of Islamic law. In the mid-1980s, he was the critical player on the Iranian side in the Iran-Contra affair, when the United States, under President Ronald Reagan, agreed to provide Iran with anti-tank and surface-to-surface missiles in exchange for the release of American hostages held by Iranian surrogates in Lebanon.
During the Iran-Iraq war, some argue that Rafsanjani emerged as a clear voice for peace. After a series of dramatic offensives in 1982, Iranian forces had succeeded in pushing Iraq back across the border. Khomeini’s inner circle debated over whether to continue the war on Iraqi territory in order to take Baghdad and punish the then-leader of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, or to end the war, having resecured Iran’s borders; the former camp won out. That decision proved disastrous: The war dragged on another six years, with terrible human costs. While Rafsanjani’s role in ending the war remains the subject of great debate in Iran to this today, he is believed to have stood with the peace party, and is credited with finally persuading to end the war Khomeini in 1988. Rafsanjani, the pragmatist, realized Iran was exhausted and the war could not be won. On the other hand, there is no indication that he opposed the bloody massacre of thousands of members of left-wing opposition groups already in Iranian prisons near the end of the war.
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