A Khomeini Breaks With His Lineage to Back U.S.
Stephanie Sinclair/Corbi
Sayyid Hussein Khomeini, the grandson of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, says he would accept American intervention in Iran.
NY Times 8.6.2003
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 5 — The grandson of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the strident Iranian cleric who built his Islamic revolution on a platform of attacking all things American, said today that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would allow long-awaited freedoms to flourish throughout the region, and if they did not, United States intervention would be welcomed by most Iranians.
The grandson, Sayyid Hussein Khomeini, also suggested that any Iraqi Shiites calling for an Islamic theocracy here were misguided, probably financed by Iran and lacked the experience or understanding to know how badly the Iranian revolution had failed.
"Iranians insist on freedom, but they are not sure where it will come from," said Mr. Khomeini, 45, whose dark eyes together with the black turban that marks him as a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad evoke his famous forebear.
"If it comes from inside, they will welcome it, but if it was necessary for it to come from abroad, especially from the United States, people will accept it," Mr. Khomeini said. "I as an Iranian would accept it."
The extraordinary remarks came during an interview with a man whose grandfather consistently labeled the United States "the Great Satan," and who exploited the 444-day takeover of the American Embassy in Tehran starting in 1979 to cement clerical rule in Iran.
The subsequent hostile relations between the two countries led Washington to support Mr. Hussein in Iraq's grisly eight-year war against Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini. In recent months the Bush administration has accused the Islamic Republic of developing illegal weapons and has hinted that a change of government in Tehran would be welcome.
The young Mr. Khomeini apparently holds none of his grandfather's animosity toward the United States, correcting a reporter forming a question about the American occupation of Iraq to note that it should be called a "liberation."
The setting for the interview was barely less distinctive than the remarks. Mr. Khomeini has taken up temporary residence in a modest mansion whose expansive lawns and palm grove overlooking the Tigris River were home to Izzat Ibrahim, vice chairman of the deposed Revolutionary Command Council and one of Mr. Hussein's closest confidants. Mr. Ibrahim, the King of Clubs on the list of the most-wanted Baathists, remains at large.
A Rolls-Royce with a golden grill that belonged to Mr. Ibrahim gathers dust in the driveway, but the house has been taken over by an Iraqi cleric who shares Mr. Khomeini's view that religion and state should be separated.
Mr. Khomeini indicated that he could be the vanguard of a considerable number of senior Shiite clerics who are opposed to the way the clergy ruling Iran have used religion as a form of oppression and who will move to Iraq's shrine cities once the violence ebbs. But at present he is little known.
"Naturally if the Hawza is located in a free country," he said, using the common word for the entire Shiite seminary movement, "that will give space for debate, for free discussions and so of course there will be an exodus from Qum." The holy city of Qum is Iran's leading religious center.
"If Qum remains under the same kind of oppressive atmosphere, everyone will come to Najaf," he added, referring to the Iraqi holy city.
Mr. Khomeini's viewpoint has attracted the interest of the Coalition Provisional Authority, with a spokesman noting today that various officials had met with Mr. Khomeini because they found his ideas about the separation of religion and state interesting.
Although Mr. Khomeini does not have a wide following, his remarks could resonate among Shiites because of the respect and devotion commanded by his grandfather. His is the latest voice flowing from the Shiites over how exactly the community, which forms an estimated 60 percent majority among Iraq's 25 million people, should attain a role in running Iraq equal to their numbers.
One militant clergyman, Moktada al-Sadr, has called for opposition to the United States and for a system of clerical rule that mirrors Iran's.
Mr. Khomeini said he believed that Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was financing such calls, although he has no direct knowledge about that. He said he understood why Shiites, newly freed from decades of oppression, might be pressing for an Islamic form of government. But he said he believed that they should learn from the failure of the Islamic revolution.
"People were desperate in the days of the shah to attain freedom, which was the basis of the revolution," he said, his Arabic accent mostly Iraqi with a slight cadence of Persian. "But they didn't get it."
He noted the incongruities separating the seminary cities on opposite sides of the border. In Qum, he said, most religious scholars oppose mixing politics and religion but toe the line in public because that is what the supreme leader demands.
The senior ayatollahs of Najaf, on the other hand, oppose mixing politics and religion but have been making some political remarks — demanding elections over who will write the constitution, for example — because that is what the Iraqi public expects of them.
Rather than religious rule, he suggested that Shiites should overcome their historical persecution complex by pushing for a democratic government that respects their rights.
He grinned at the idea that he was following in the footsteps of other famous revolutionary offspring, like the daughters of Stalin and later Castro, who split with their families and sought refuge with the United States.
Mr. Khomeini said he broke with his grandfather in the early days of the revolution over the killing of people with even minor links to the shah's regime, which he did not believe religious law sanctioned. He has been studying in Qum ever since.
Mr. Khomeini noted that he lived in Najaf from 1965 to 1979, when his grandfather was in exile there plotting the Islamic revolution. Although he has several male cousins, he is the only son of Mustafa Khomeini, a favorite of the late ayatollah's who helped him plot an uprising in 1963 that led to his exile. Mustafa Khomeini died in Najaf 15 months before the Islamic revolution.
Mr. Khomeini said that some Muslims in Iraq were quick to label the Americans as infidels, and that would probably be the case no matter how much the United States acted for the good of Iraq.
"All the countries in the region fear Iraq becoming a free, liberal, democratic state," he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/06/international/middleeast/06KHOM.html