By Miguel Murado

The Regime of the ayatollahs routinely refers to the US as the “Great Satan”. But in the Iranian street these days you hear less about Great Satan than about “Little Satan”; that is: Britain.

Great or small is just a matter of size here, for Iran’s relations with the UK had been historically far worse than even those with the US. The bad blood goes back at least a century, when the British forcibly took Afghanistan from Persia in 1858. Most of all, the English thorn in Iran’s flesh is the memory of London’s manoeuvres against Muhammad Mossadeq in 1953, when the then Persian PM nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (currently known as BP). First, Britain made Iran endure a harsh blockade and then, with the connivance of the Shah, MI-6 overthrew the popular Mossadeq and his elected government by means of a military coup. The repression that followed against the democratic, socialist and secular elements within Persian society cleared the way for the religious extremists like, for example, ayatollah Khomeini, and, it could be argued, set the foundations for the now much regretted 1979 Islamic revolution.

Ironically, Mossadeq was precisely the sort of moderate democratic leader the West is desperately searching for in the Islamic world (little before his downfall, Time magazine had named him “Man of the Year”, in competition with none others than Eisenhower and McArthur). A few years ago former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright went as far as to publicly lament CIA’s role in that coup and the fact that it had actually taken place.

Too late for apologies: The “Mossadeq affair” looms very large in Iran’s collective memory and that is why the crisis of the captured sailors is being fought in the realm of self-pride rather than in that of politics. The tens of thousands of football fans who were shouting in the stadium of Teheran “Death to the English” during a match last week, alternated that rather unimaginative slogan with Mossadeq`s name.

As if all this were not enough, there is the issue of Shatt el-Arab. Even calling the area where the British sailors were captured that way enrages the Iranians, for whom this estuary is the Arvandrud (Shatt el-Arab is the Iraqi name; it means “River of the Arabs”). It was in order to take the whole of the Arvandrud/Shatt el-Arab) that Sadam launched his ferocious 1980 war against Iran, a conflict which caused half a million deaths. Most of the battles were fought right there, in the mouth of the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, a place where the Bible unconvincingly locates Paradise…

Thus, those are the two axis of the problem. Teheran wants a formal apology from London so that they can rub it in the face of the British. Incidentally, this will also strengthen recognition of Iran’s sovereignty on the Arvandrud and diminish the pressure from the Royal Navy in the area. In the face of it, London seems bent on playing the legal card, a move that might prove mistaken. UN’s mandate only provides for enforcing an arms embargo (the captured boat was searching for smuggled cars). Besides, the 1975 Algiers agreement, which regulates the border in the estuary, says nothing about open sea, where both sides agree the incident took place. In that case, the principle of equidistance may apply, and that would back Iran’s claims since, even according to the coordinates provided by the Royal Navy, the British boat was closer to the Iranian coast that to that of Iraq. If London sticks to its line the whole situation could escalate into a crisis similar to that of the American hostages of 1979, and that one was won by Iran. The current Iranian PM, Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad knows that for a fact: back then, as a young student of twenty three, many believe he was one of the hostage takers…

(Miguel Murado is a former Middle East correspondent and current political analyst for the Spanish newspaper La Voz de Galicia)

Miguel Murado
La Voz de Galicia, 01-04-2007