Ayatollah, Calling Britain Enemy No. 1, Taps Into Deep Distrust Rooted in History
LONDON — When Ayatollah Ali Khamenei used his speech at Friday Prayer in Tehran to denounce Britain as “the most evil” of Iran’s enemies, he was striking a chord with a deep resonance in the psyche of Iranians, the legacy of a long history of British imperial intrusions into their country’s affairs.
Singling out Britain, and not the “great Satan” of the United States, so often the bugaboo for Iran’s leadership since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, might seem an odd choice for Iran’s supreme leader, when the government he leads faces its greatest crisis in 30 years.
But British scholars on Iran said Ayatollah Khamenei’s attack on Britain was characteristic of a Tehran leadership that resorts under pressure to a mix of crude stereotypes that play well at home. They said it might also reflect a concern not to slam the door opened by President Obama, who is offering a new dialogue in his search for a diplomatic solution to the impasse over Iran’s nuclear program.
If that were the calculation, Ayatollah Khamenei may have correctly concluded that going after Britain would cost Iran little, judging by the carefully hedged response to the Tehran speech by Britain’s prime minister, Gordon Brown. At a European summit meeting in Brussels, Mr. Brown noted the ayatollah’s speech, but offered only a modest sharpening of Britain’s previous admonitions to Tehran’s leaders over their handling of the election crisis.
Like Mr. Obama, Mr. Brown seemed determined not to give the Iranian leadership the excuse of foreign meddling to justify a crackdown on the protesters filling the streets of Iranian cities.
“What we want is to have a good relationship with Iran in the future, but that depends on Iran being able to show to the world that its elections have been conducted fairly and that there is no unfair suppression of rights or individuals,” Mr. Brown said.
In focusing on Britain, the experts said, Mr. Khamenei was playing to popular resentment of Britain’s long history of intervention in Iran, and perhaps avoiding confronting, at least for now, the renewed appeal America holds among many Iranians with Mr. Obama in the White House.
Still, Mr. Khamenei’s attack on Britain surprised some scholars. Ali Ansari, a professor of Iranian history at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, said the attack suggested that Mr. Khamenei might be more beholden to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the official winner of the presidential election, than many Iran experts had thought. Animosity toward Britain is strongest among the working class and agrarian Iranians — Mr. Ahmadinejad’s political base, he said.
“I think it just reflects the really quite bizarre view that Ahmadinejad and his supporters have,” said Professor Ansari, whose father was an Iranian diplomat under the monarch ousted in 1979, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. He added, “Britain has always been a bogeyman, but going back to that now, resorting to the villain of choice, if they really believe it, just shows how out of touch they really are.”
Iranian popular culture has kept alive suspicions dating to the 18th century, when Britain, protecting its empire in India, began competing with Russia for influence in Iran. Britain’s strategic interest deepened with the development of Iran’s oil fields.
Antipathies sharpened when Britain invaded Iran in 1941 and exiled the Iranian ruler, Reza Shah Pahlavi, suspected of pro-German sympathies. In 1953, British secret services worked with the Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow Mohammed Mossadegh, the nationalist prime minister. The issue then was the Mossadegh government’s nationalization of Iran’s oil fields, ending the monopoly of the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.
More recently, Britain’s relations with Tehran were strained by the confrontation over the author Salman Rushdie. His novel “The Satanic Verses” prompted Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of the Islamic Revolution, to issue a call in 1989 for Muslims to kill Mr. Rushdie for what the ayatollah deemed to be the book’s blasphemy. That led to a lengthy freeze in diplomatic relations, and to years in which Mr. Rushdie, a British citizen, lived in hiding under police protection.
But perhaps the sharpest thorn in Tehran’s side has been the BBC’s Persian-language services, by radio since the early 1940s, and by a recently established television channel. Millions of Iranians have come to rely on the BBC’s reporting on Iran, regarding it, Professor Ansari said, as the “most trustworthy” account of what is happening in their country.
On Friday, the BBC said it had decided to use two extra satellites to combat intensive jamming efforts by Iran, a step likely to be seen by Tehran as a direct challenge, given its assertions in recent days that foreign broadcasters — and Web services like Facebook and Twitter — are being used to foment unrest over the disputed election.
But Rosemary Hollis, a professor of Middle East studies at City University London, said Mr. Khamenei’s attack on Britain may have been prompted by something more basic to the Iranian psyche, an old shibboleth in which Britain remains the dark force behind American power. “Strange as it seems, they’re convinced that the British are the clever ones, manipulating things behind the scenes,” she said.
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