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February 18, 1994

Meeting between Head of Department 2 [Joachim Bitterlich] and Iranian Ambassador Mousavian on 17 February 1994

Bitterlich and Mousavian review the state of bilateral relations and the importance of debt rescheduling for Iran. Bitterlich requests a more constructive Iranian role in the search for peace in the Middle East. Both discuss schemes for regional security and the CSCE process as a role model for the establishment of new multilateral security institutions in the Middle East.

October 8, 1992

State Minister Schmidbauer's Meeting with Iran’s Vice Foreign Minister Abbas Maleki on 8 October 1992 at the Chancellor’s Office

Schmidbauer and Maleki review chances for the expansion of cooperation between Germany, Iran and the Islamic states of the former Soviet Union. Moreover, they debate the Hezbollah's involvement in the recent assassination of four Kurdish policymakers in Berlin.

June 2, 1992

One-on-one talks between Minister of State Schmidbauer and Minister of Security Fallahian

Schmidbauer and Fallahian review possibilities for increasing bilateral cooperation in the intelligence field. Schmidbauer does not see any chances to assist Iran in the completion of the Bushehr nuclear power plant. He requests Iran's assistance in the release of German hostages in Lebanon.

March 5, 1991

The Chancellor’s [Helmut Kohl's] Telephone Conversation with Iran’s President Rafsanjani on Tuesday, 5 March 1991

Kohl and Rafsandjani talk about plans for the emergence of a new security system in the Middle East after the end of the Gulf War. They emphasize the importance of maintaining Iraq's territorial integrity. 

February 25, 1991

The Chancellor’s [Helmut Kohl's] Meeting with Iran’s Foreign Minister Velayati on Monday, 18 February 1991, 16.00 - 17.00 hours

Kohl and Velayati debate the future of security and defense issues in the Middle East after the end of the Gulf War. They exchange thoughts on the emergence of a new security order and the participation of the EC, the Soviet Union and the United States.

February 20, 1991

The Chancellor’s [Helmut Kohl's] Telephone Conversation with U.S. President Bush on 18 February 1991

Kohl and Bush discuss the Gulf War. Kohl reports on his meeting with Iran's Foreign Minister Velayati and his recent telephone conversation with Gorbachev.

January 31, 1991

The Chancellor's [Helmut Kohl's] Telephone Conversation with the American President George Bush on 28 January 1991

Kohl and Bush review the situation in the Gulf and discuss Germany's financial contribution to the costs of the war. In terms of numbers, Bush has in mind one billion dollar as a contribution to the previous costs for the "desert shield" campaign and another five billion dollars to help cover the first three months of the war.

February 18, 1991

Memorandum of Telephone Conversation: Telcon with Chancellor Kohl of Germany, February 18, 1991, 12:04-12:32 p.m.

Kohl briefs Bush on a conversation he recently had with Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati concerning the Gulf War. Bush and Kohl also discuss Soviet views on the conflict, as also recent exchanges between France and Germany on GATT negotiations.

January 28, 1991

Memorandum of Telephone Conversation: Telcon with Chancellor Kohl of Germany, January 28, 1991, 11:08-11:28 a.m.

On a phone call, Bush and Kohl discuss the Gulf War, including the evacuation of Iraqi planes to Iran, Saddam Hussein's state of mind, the role of Turkey, and German's financial contribution.

February 1, 1979

Imam Khomeini, 'Declaration Upon Arrival at Tehran'

February 1, 1979, is a key date in the history of modern Iran in general and of the Iranian revolution in particular. On that day, two weeks after Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (1919-1980) left Iran, Sayyid Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini (1900-1989) returned after 14 years in exile—part of a life told in Vanessa Martin’s Creating an Islamic State: Khomeini and the Making of a New Iran (2014).

On that day, the Shi‘i Ayatollah whom many called Imam assumed Iran’s leadership, as shown in the below speech he gave upon deplaning in Tehran. But that day was not a cut; it was not simply the end of the shah and of the revolution and the start of Khomeini’s rule. Rather, it was a day suspended in mid-air. It was a day where the just-past overthrow of the shah touched the uncertain future of the revolution: a liminality and vulnerability that shines through Khomeini’s speech.

It is for that reason that I have chosen this text, not simply because Khomeini here as in virtually all his pronouncements stressed the need to rid Iran of foreign agents led by the United States. Yes: the revolution had an ultimately clear end, the Islamic Republic, which became official following a referendum in December 1979. And yes: Khomeini was an influential maker of this hybrid theocratic-republican governmental system that came out of the revolution. First emerging in 1963 in the clerical city of Qom as an outspoken critic of the shah surrounding a raft of social reforms, he doubled down on his critique over the US-Iranian status of force agreement of late 1964. As a result, the shah had him expelled to Turkey, from where he in 1965 was able to move to a transnational Shi’i clerical center: the Iraqi city of Najaf. There, he by the early 1970s expanded his critique of the shah’s person to a critique of the very institution of the Iranian monarchy, and began to talk of a clerically led government.

This was a far-reaching change in Shi‘i religious thought, as Hamid Dabashi showed in Theology of Discontent: The Ideological Foundations of the Islamic Republic of Iran (1993). However, those ideas took their final form not before but during and in interaction with the revolution, when Khomeini resided in Najaf until October 1978, then in Neauphle-le-Château, near Paris, and from February 1979 in Tehran. Moreover, Dabashi’s work showed how other intellectuals shaped the revolution, too. And Khomeini adapted certain Third-World leftist populist ideas and terms—a process analyzed in Ervand Abrahamian’s Khomeinism, which exemplified secular scholars’ emphasis on how non-clerical ideas and groups like the Mujahedin-e Khalq or Fada’iyin-e Khalq helped bring about and shape the revolution.

Finally, recent works that open a new generational-historiographic chapter, like Arang Keshavarzian and Ali Mirsepassi’s edited volume Global 1979: Geographies and Histories of the Iranian Revolution (2021) and Naghmeh Sohrabi’s “The ‘problem space’ of the historiography of the 1979 Iranian Revolution” (2018), are moving beyond a scholarly focus on revolutionary causes and outcomes and on distinctive actors and their failure and success. Instead, they probe the fundamental imprevisibility and contingency of an unfolding revolution; they stress overlaps and contacts between actors and ideas; and they tease out transnational relationships and global contexts without creating a clear a priori distinction between the domestic and the global, perhaps especially regarding the question of the place and role of Iran’s 1970s in the longer arch of decolonization.

Pagination