TEHRAN — For Iranians, fervor over the 1979 U.S. Embassy takeover — a central event in their stormy Islamic Revolution — has faded. If the country’s new president participated, he would be one of many former hostage-takers who entered politics.
Many of the organizers of the embassy seizure are now leading advocates of democratic reform and closer ties with the United States.
In fact, the election of hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad marks the end of an era in which former hostage-takers held key positions in the government and parliament. Most of them have already lost their posts in the backlash by Iran’s clerical regime or will leave with the outgoing pro-reform president.
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The official Iranian media outlets were silent yesterday about U.S. demands that the new president explain his role in the embassy seizure. Six former hostages, after seeing Mr. Ahmadinejad in photos or on television, said they believe he was among the hostage-takers.
Mr. Ahmadinejad’s aides have denied he had a role.
The students who carried out the embassy takeover said Mr. Ahmadinejad didn’t participate in the taking or holding of 52 American hostages for 444 days.
If he had been involved, Mr. Ahmadinejad likely would have played it up in his presidential campaign to increase his appeal to hard-liners, the only ones who might still be impressed, said Abbas Abdi, one of the student leaders.
“If he had played any sort of role in any part of it, he would have used that 1,000 times in the past 25 years to take advantage of it,” Mr. Abdi said yesterday.
While a traumatic event for Americans, the embassy seizure and the revolution that surrounded it were, for Iranians, similar to the 1960s in the U.S. and Europe: a turbulent period that forged today’s leaders.
And, like many post-baby boomers in the United States sick of hearing about the 1960s, many young Iranians have little interest in the capture of the “den of spies,” as the revolutionaries called the U.S. Embassy.
“I was a little kid when the embassy seizure happened,” said Reza Hosseinpour, a Tehran shopkeeper in his late 20s. “I don’t want to hear about it anymore. It’s part of the past history. There has been enough hostility between Iran and America.”
In past years, the annual celebrations to mark the Nov. 4, 1979 seizure of the embassy have attracted crowds only in the hundreds — many of them children bused in for the event.
The students who carried out the takeover were vehement supporters of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Shi’ite theologian who became Iran’s supreme leader and imposed an Islamic government. The students seized the embassy to protest the U.S. refusal to hand over Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Iranian leader who had been ousted from power that year.
Over the past decade, many of the students formed the core of the Iranian reform movement that sought the loosening of the theocracy’s hold on power and contacts with the United States.
Many, like Mr. Abdi, are members of the Islamic Iran Participation Front, the largest reformist party, which helped bring outgoing pro-reform President Mohammad Khatami to power in 1997.
Mr. Khatami’s brother, Mohammad Reza Khatami, was also a hostage-taker but now leads the party and was vice speaker of parliament after his brother took office.
Mr. Abdi was jailed in November 2002 after conducting a poll showing strong public support for dialogue with the United States. He was sentenced to eight years in prison but freed in May after the Supreme Court overturned his conviction.
At least two former hostage-takers will be leaving office with Mr. Khatami’s government: Energy Minister Habibollah Bitaraf and Vice President Masumeh Ebtekar, the highest woman in the Iranian leadership.
Miss Ebtekar was the 19-year-old spokeswoman for the students who seized the embassy.
Known sarcastically among the American captives as “Sister Mary,” she learned English as a child in Philadelphia and became a fixture on American television. On an almost nightly basis, she vigorously defended the embassy takeover and the Iranian Revolution.
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