Iran is an extraordinary country with a genuinely lovely put-upon people, cursed by oil, plunder and history. Such an old place too. This, after all, was Persia, a deeply rooted ancient civilisation. I was there 26 years ago; in Tehran, beautiful Isfahan, as well as beautiful Shiraz. Totally seduced.
A group of us Irish were visiting and soon it was clear they liked us. We had taken on “Little Satan” (UK). The US is “Big Satan”. In Tehran, a local man insisted I accompany him to see Bobby Sands Street, which runs alongside the British Embassy compound.
They hate the British and Americans, who deposed their democratically elected government in 1953, when it tried to nationalise the oil industry, and installed a puppet, the Shah. His palace was turned into a museum with two six-metre high bronze boots outside.
My local friend explained they were the remnants of a massive 20-metre bronze statue erected there by the Shah to himself. It was melted down “for bullets” he said, while the boots were “all he left to Iran”.
RM Block
Recent slaughter of its people by mad clerics, Israelis and Americans, brought much of this back, as well as a book, Caviar for Breakfast: Misadventures of an Irish Diplomatic Wife in Revolutionary Iran.
By Felicity Heathcote, wife of Dr Niall Holohan, Chargé d’Affaires at the Irish Embassy in Tehran from 1981 to 1986, it is an engaging account of their years in that benighted country.
Then, as now, executions were regular, while “the Revolutionary Guard sniffed under women’s armpits to check that they were not using deodorant and roughly wiped their victims’ faces clean of any makeup”.
Early in the posting, she recalled how, “still reeling from the downtown massacre on Saturday”, they “had to get on with the mundane task of fixing the embassy”. The old oven wasn’t working. They set off looking for a new cooker and dishwasher, but got caught in traffic close to the massacre scene, when “two truckloads of Hezbollah suddenly drove up, shouting and shooting...”.
Who would be a diplomat, or his wife, in that situation? Read all about it on Amazon.
Pity the Iranian people caught between a barbarous regime at home, an administration in Washington intent on plunder and an Israel bent on elimination once again.
Iran, from Middle Persian Ērān for “land of the Iranians”.
