Mandela has never indulged in racism. At his trial he called for freedom regardless of color, and on his release he refused to stir up racial tensions. As president (1994–9) he included representatives of all ethnic groups in his multi-party government. He established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate human rights abuses. The Madiba—the honorific tribal name by which South Africans know him—shared the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize with de Klerk. His one embarrassment was the violent gangsterism of his wife Winnie, whom he divorced. He later married the widow of President Machel of Mozambique. Mandela has recognized that during his presidency he did not do enough to combat the AIDS epidemic. In retirement he has taken every step to redress his mistake. With characteristic honesty, Mandela has since admitted that his own 1960s militancy, no less than apartheid, violated human rights and he has refused to let his followers suppress this fact.
“My life is the struggle,” said Mandela.
THE SHAH OF IRAN
1919–80
My advisers built a wall between myself and my people. I didn’t realize what was happening. When I woke up, I had lost my people.
Muhammad Reza Pahlavi
Always known simply as the shah, or king, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi was for almost forty years the ruler of Iran, the nation that, along with Egypt, is usually the most important country in the Near East. A Western ally, an Iranian nationalist, an absolutist king, a revolutionary modernizer, he gradually emerged as the key potentate in the region as he became the effective dictator of a country made vastly rich by oil revenues. He enjoyed great successes in his reforms and modernization, his intentions were admirable—yet he was a flawed authoritarian, limited by his personality, and by the corruption and repression of his regime. His achievements were overshadowed by his downfall.
His family had risen from literally nothing to the imperial throne itself. Muhammad was the eldest son of Reza Shah, a low-born Persian army officer who climbed to the rank of general in a Cossack regiment trained for the Qajar shahs of Iran by Russian officers. The father was ramrod straight, tall, harsh and ambitious but scarcely educated. However the last shahs of the Qajar dynasty of kings had lost control of their country, which was dominated by court intrigues, tribal rebellions, economic chaos, rampant warlordism, ethnic strife, democratic revolutions, Communism, separatism and foreign interference—especially by Britain and Russia, the two dominant imperial powers. Finally in 1921, the general marched his Cossacks into Teheran and seized power, first as minister of war. By 1923 he was ruling Iran and in 1925, as the last Qajar shah left for exile, the Cossack general raised himself to shah of the Imperial State of Iran, founding the Pahlavi dynasty.
An admirer of Atatürk, Reza Shah ruled harshly and energetically, modernizing the country, persecuting any opposition, reuniting the separatist provinces and diminishing the power of Shiite clergy whenever possible. The crown prince was educated at La Rosey in Switzerland, where he embraced Western culture and skiing. But in 1941, as he tried to chart a course between Nazi Germany and the Allies, Britain and Soviet Russia, Reza Shah disastrously miscalculated the security of his own position. The Allies could not risk the loss of Iran and its oil to Nazi Germany so they invaded the country, partitioned it and sent Reza Shah into exile in South Africa, where he died. However, unsure what regime to install, they allowed Reza to abdicate in favor of his young son Muhammad, whose reign would last for thirty-seven years.
During the war, the young Shah had little choice but to bow before Russian and British interests but from the very beginning he started to try to impose his own will on government. When the Allies finally withdrew from Iran after the war, he became to assert himself politically. Throughout his long career, he faced Western intervention based on oil interests, Soviet Russian intrigue, communist subversion, and the threat of the Shiite clergy. Growing up paranoid and trusting very few, the shah generally feared Anglo-American intrigue and the communist threat more than the Shiite Ayatollahs. He faced repeated coup attempts from all sides, his prime ministers and ministers were assassinated and he himself survived several attempts to take his life with great courage.
Overall, despite the catastrophic end of his career, his ability to survive and constantly increase his power and influence were signs of not just persistence but also political cunning. Yet his personality was a strange mixture of timidity and shyness, overweening arrogance and delusion, ruthless realpolitik, driving ambition and sensual hedonism. His judgment of personalities was often dire, his protection of corrupt relations and aides notorious, and his methods of clandestine espionage and secret police repression ultimately counterproductive. His will to power was strong, yet at times of crisis, he was often timid and indecisive, lacking confidence.
Faced with powerful prime ministers often imposed by foreign powers, the shah patiently bided his time, waiting for the chance to destroy these overmighty rivals. He carefully husbanded his powers to dismiss ministers and to command the army. By the late 1940s, he faced a new challenge from his prime minister, Dr. Muhammad Mossadeq, a wealthy and aged feudal landowner, famous for wearing pajamas during the day, a habit that shocked Western leaders, and for his demagogic nationalism that demanded the nationalization of Western oil interests. The shah hated Mossadeq, who was also alarming Britain and America. In 1952, the shah planned to dismiss Mossadeq and appoint a new prime minister, General Fazlolah Zahedi, but the coup, backed by the British and American secret services, particularly CIA operative Kermit Roosevelt, initially stalled. The shah fled to Iraq and then Italy, returning once General Zahedi had overthrown Mossadeq.
Now the shah worked to rid himself of Zahedi too. By the late 1950s, the shah had become totally dominant in Iran, a dominance that became an enlightened royal dictatorship. American President J.F. Kennedy was skeptical of the shah, regarding him as a dictator but gradually US leaders came to see him as an ally. The shah never lost his paranoia about American and British troublemaking, always maintaining good relations with the Soviets as a threat and insurance policy.
He now launched his White Revolution, a modernizing program of high technology, land reform, female rights and suffrage, diminishing of Shiite clerical control, education, and industrialization. When the Shiite ayotollahs resisted this program in a series of riots between 1961 and 1962, the shah appointed his closest ally Asodollah Alam prime minister and allowed him to use the army to suppress the rebellion. This success over the clergy gave the shah and his top aides the illusion that they had triumphed over the ayatollahs.
Meanwhile he built up a formidable military machine, funded by America, to become the self-appointed guardian of the Gulf and a Near Eastern military great power. At home, he used his secret police, SAVAK, to keep the communists, nationalists and the clergy under control but human rights abuse and routine torture, made the regime unpopular. Worse, the rise in the oil price had given the shah endless revenues to pursue grandiose schemes and buy more American arms, even starting a nuclear program. The oil riches brought rampant corruption and ostentatious decadence. The Shah himself dominated every decision and every part of Iranian life but the imperial family were notorious for their corruption.
As a young man he had married Princess Fawzia, sister of Farouk, last king of Egypt, but this had ended in divorce. He then married a young Iranian-German girl named Soraya who was perhaps the true love of his life but she was unable to have children. Thirdly and happily the Shah married Farah Diba, a pretty Iranian student with whom he had a son and heir as well as several daughters. But his own secret love life became notorious. As the diaries of his minister of court (and sometime prime minister) Alam reveal, he regarded his sexual adventures as essential to his well-being under great stress: he was never without an array of mistresses and the beautiful courtesans of the Madame Claude agency of Paris were regularly flown in for his pleasure.
But the Alam diaries also reveal his increasing megalomaniacal delusions as he was spoiled by international success, domestic flattery and
oil wealth. In 1971, in a £100 million folly of imperial hubris and French catering, he chose to celebrate not the Persian relationship with Islam but the 2500th anniversary of the Iranian empire founded by Cyrus the Great: these Persepolis parties damaged his reputation further. However the shah—now at the point of his greatest power and success—was actually secretly suffering from cancer. Furthermore, the very success of his reforms—in education, in the economy, in land reform—had planted the seeds of his destruction: a poverty-stricken middle class with educational pretensions but resentment of imperial cronies and their corruption; students and liberals tortured by SAVAK; thousands of ex-peasants who had moved to Teheran to enjoy the new boom only to be forgotten in vast slums, where they were co-opted and cared for by Islamic preachers and organizations; and a determined and organized movement of Islamic Shiite fundamentalism under the control of the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini. The inept Jimmy Carter undermined the shah further with his comments on human rights in Iran. When the riots and protests intensified in late 1978, the Shah was oddly listless and distracted, lacking the will to order a full crackdown: he simply did not wish to shed any more blood. In early 1979, as he lost control of the streets, the shah flew away “on holiday,” never to return. Pursued by the new Iranian regime, betrayed by the Americans and forced to move from country to country as he died of cancer, his end was a Shakespearean tragedy. The shah had appeared magnificently powerful and secure. His rule was clearly flawed both in his personality and his repression but his intentions were good and compared with the monstrous brutality of the Islamic Republic that came after him, he was a paragon.
JOHN PAUL II
1920–2005
His name became part of our history, his thoughts will be an always present inspiration to build … a more peaceful world for all of us.
Chilean president Ricardo Lagos, on the death of John Paul II
In 1978 the Polish cardinal Karol Wojtyla became Pope John Paul II. He was the first non-Italian pontiff for 455 years. During his long tenure, he became a hero of the struggle for freedom over tyranny. He was a champion of liberty in eastern Europe, particularly in his native Poland, and a supporter of oppressed people all over the world.
A tireless traveler and a master of modern media, John Paul II was a relentless critic of totalitarian tyranny and of the inequalities created by materialism. He strove to build bridges between the Catholic Church and the Jewish and Islamic peoples. And in old age he battled bravely against illness and frailty, dying a truly iconic spiritual leader for people throughout the world.
As a young man in Poland, Wojtyla knew the harsh reality of totalitarian rule. After the Nazis invaded his country in 1939, he was forced to take on menial work, such as laboring in a limestone quarry. It was a time when the Vatican under Pope Pius XII failed to show moral leadership and equivocated over Nazi oppression in Poland and elsewhere in occupied Europe. Wojtyla put his life at risk to smuggle Jews out of Poland and was placed on a Nazi death list. Fortunately he escaped detection during a Gestapo raid on the Archbishop of Kraków’s house in 1944 and survived the Second World War.
In 1946 Wojtyla was ordained as a priest. He rose rapidly through the Church ranks to become archbishop of Kraków in 1963 and a cardinal in 1967. By this time he was established as one of the most important religious figures in Poland, where he was frequently at odds with the communist authorities. He was no unthinking firebrand, but he was more than willing to stand up to the authorities, as when he supported industrial workers in Nowa Huta in their efforts to build a new church.
Wojtyla’s profile increased rapidly at the Vatican, where he was a trusted adviser to Paul VI. So when Paul and his successor, John Paul I, both died in 1978, it was he who won a tight ballot of the cardinals. At the age of just fifty-eight he became pope.
International attention was lavished upon the first non-Italian pope for nearly half a millennium. This suited John Paul II, who set about spreading a global message of freedom for those in need. On his first foreign trip, to Mexico, he spoke up for the unemployed and oppressed, though he held back from advocating political regime change.
After bringing great pressure to bear on the authorities, in 1979 John Paul was permitted to return to Poland, becoming the first reigning pope to visit a communist country. Announcing his arrival as a “pilgrim,” he was given a rapturous welcome that was broadcast around the communist world. The sight of crowds chanting “We want God” caused an international sensation. Having shaken up the communist authorities, John Paul then visited a number of countries on the other side of the Iron Curtain. In Ireland he denounced sectarian violence and terrorism, and in America he spoke passionately against the selfishness of consumerism and capitalism.
In 1981 John Paul was shot at close range in Rome by a Turkish gunman, Mehmet Ali Ağca. The pope had fiercely criticized communism, and it later emerged that the gunman had connections to the Bulgarian secret police, and therefore to the Soviet KGB. The bullets missed his vital organs by millimeters, which he took as a sign from God to continue his work. He publicly forgave his attacker.
Throughout the 1980s John Paul continued his spiritual opposition to communism. After the peaceful revolution of 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev—who admitted that without John Paul II there would have been no such speedy end to communism—paid a humble visit to the pontiff in Rome, opening diplomatic relations between most of the former Soviet capitals and the Vatican.
During the next decade John Paul took on the task of extending the hand of peace to the Jewish and Islamic peoples. He allowed the first mosque to be built in the Vatican, and in 1993 he signed an agreement to open relations with Israel. In 2000 he made a high-profile trip to the Holy Land and visited a Holocaust memorial. He also promoted many cardinals from the developing world.
Throughout his long pontificate John Paul stood up for freedom with unwavering resolve. His inspiring voice carried huge authority. His condemnation of Paraguay’s dictator Alfredo Stroessner helped to bring down the latter’s regime, while a speech opposing the death penalty led to its abolition in Guatemala. An appearance on Italian television led to a Mafia don surrendering himself.
Pope John Paul II was generally inflexible over doctrine, remaining doggedly conservative in matters such as the ordination of women and the use of contraception, even in the face of Africa’s AIDS epidemic. Nevertheless, he will be remembered as one of the most outstanding popes in history. To the end he was an inveterate opponent of oppression and inequality. This man of peace used his position nobly and made the papacy relevant again—even for non-Christians. The first steps have been taken to canonizing John Paul.
SAKHAROV
1921–1989
The party apparatus of government … cling tenaciously to their open and secret privileges and are profoundly indifferent to the infringement of human rights, the interests of progress, security, and the future of mankind.
Andrei Sakharov, memorandum to Leonid Brezhnev (March 5, 1971)
Andrei Sakharov, the physicist who was once called the Father of the Soviet H-bomb, became the most prominent political dissident in the world, protesting against the evils and contradictions of Soviet totalitarianism. He represents both the peaks of Russian science and intellectual achievement and the courage of an individual to stand up to rampant tyranny. That stand led to rejection, maltreatment, exile and hardship. Yet, unlike most dissidents, Sakharov survived to see his efforts bear fruit.
Andrei Sakharov was an intelligent child who was able to read by the age of four. His father encouraged his interest in physics experiments, which Andrei later called “miracles I could understand.” At Moscow University in the 1940s he was recognized as one of the brightest young minds of his generation. In 1948 he was recruited to join a nuclear research team under the personal control of Stalin’s ruthless henchman Lavrenti Beria, and he spent much of the next decade involved in top secret projects in Turkmenistan.
The
project in which Sakharov played the pivotal role was the creation of a hydrogen bomb—a weapon much more powerful than the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The Americans tested their first H-bomb in 1952; the Soviets followed in 1953. As the Cold War arms race between America and the Soviet Union accelerated, Sakharov believed that his work was contributing to world peace by helping to maintain a balance of power. But as the years passed, he began to have doubts about “the huge material, intellectual and nervous resources of thousands of people” which were being “poured into the creation of a means of total destruction, capable of annihilating all human civilization.”
In 1961 Sakharov, now in a very prominent position as his country’s preeminent nuclear scientist, urged the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to stop atmospheric nuclear tests, believing that the radioactive fallout could ultimately lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. After agreeing to look into the matter, Khrushchev simply ignored him. From this point onwards, Sakharov grew more critical of the Soviet regime. Despite a US–Soviet agreement in 1963 to refrain from detonating nuclear devices in space, underwater or in the atmosphere, there was little political commitment to nonproliferation, let alone disarmament.
The arguments about nuclear weapons led Sakharov on to broader political questions. In 1966 he urged the new Soviet leadership, under Leonid Brezhnev, to turn away from rehabilitating the reputation of Stalin. He was rebuffed—though Stalin was not in fact fully rehabilitated.
The Soviet leadership could not ignore Sakharov’s next move. In 1968 he wrote a book entitled Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom, which denounced the oppressive Soviet regime and argued for closer links with the West. It caused a storm in Moscow’s dissident circles, and an even greater reaction when it was read abroad. Sakharov was a marked man. But he was not cowed and continued to protest—against the persecution of the dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in favor of the rights of national minorities, and against the mistreatment of political prisoners. In 1975 he won the Nobel Peace Prize, but he was forbidden to leave the country to collect it. His second wife, Yelena Bonner, herself a courageous dissident, collected it on his behalf.