Bani Sadr predicts desperate act by Khomeiny regime

Press, 6 March 1984, Page 21

Bani Sadr predicts desperate act by Khomeiny regime

From

ROBIN SMYTH

in Auvers-sur-Oise

Bani Sadr, the exiled former President of Iran and once the right-hand man of Ayatollah Khomeiny, believes that the final and most violent phase of Iranian terrorism is at hand.

“The Khomeiny regime has reached a dead end,” he says, “Khomeiny can’t give up the war with Iraq because that would mean defeat But to continue the war means abandoning hope of an end to the ecomonic crisis.” Bani Sadr warns that there is now a real danger of some spectacular terrorist adventure, such as a Kamikaze attack by a small aircraft on the White House or 10 Downing Street Meanwhile, he lives as the most heavily-guarded person in France, after President Mitterrand. Burglar alarms tick beside his windows. Barbed wire surrounds his stockade. Gendarmes armed with submachine guns keep watch from glass sentry boxes on the barge traffic down the peaceful river Oise. An iron barrier, designed to withstand a Kamikaze truck, has Ijeen installed besideji a neighbour’s

garden of ornamental pines. Assassins whom he. sees as operating on orders from the Khomeiny regime in Teheran are claiming new victims on the streets of Paris. Gunmen marked the fifth anniversary of the Shah’s overthrow by shooting General Gholan All Oveissi and his brother Hossein as they walked along a crowded Paris pavement

The next day gunmen shot the Ambassador of the United Arab Emirates, Khalifa Al-Mourbarak, outside his Paris apartment

The police watch on Arab diplomats, airports, and railway stations has been intensified. The Arab embassies have made a concerted request to the Government to be better protected. Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy ruefully admitted after the murders that the search for gunmen, who were only briefly in the country, was going to be difficult | -

The Muslim Jihand movement has claimed responsibility for the killings of General Oveissi and his brother but it is not clear whether the Ambassador’s murder was Iranian-inspired. An alternative theory is that it was by the Abou Nidal dissident Palestinian terrorist group. Bani Sadr, however, sees the Ambassador’s murder as undoubtedly a piece of Iranian intimidation against the Gulf States for financing Iraq’s war efforts. If the result is to drive the Gulf States in panic towards Washington, that is also part of the Iranian plan. “The Khomeiny regime seeks above all to justify itself,” he says. “For that it wants to get the enemy involved and bring it up close.”

I last saw Bani Sadr five years ago when I went to Neauphle-le-Chateau, a village not far from Auvers. to see the |xiled Ayatollah

Khomeniny. Bani Sadr was then acting as the Imam’s chief aide, arranging his press interviews. They made a triumphant return to Iran as the Shah’s power crumbled. The next year, on January 28,1980, Bani Sadr was elected President of the new Islamic Republic. “I am the first elected representative of Iran in its whole history,” Bani Sadr says. “I represent another sovereignty. There is a reason for getting rid of me.” His appearance has not changed much in all the upheavals. With horn-rimmed spectacles, small, drooping moustache, open-necked sweatshirt, and a quiet, discursive manner, he looks more like a professor giving a tutorial than a national leader. But he believes that he is still a vital element in Iran’s affairs. At Auvers, he is working out a formula for “national reconciliation,” to take shape after the collapse of the present dictatorship. He feels it should be possible to include everyone except the royalists and the Communists. — Observer Service.