PBS News Hour - Full Show - How Iran's 'Stolen Revolution' failed to live up to its promise

Episode Date: June 12, 2026

Many supporters of Iran's revolution believed some form of democracy should govern the country. But over the decades, the Islamic Republic's radical religious rulers have launched brutal crackdowns on social justice and political freedom. Compass Points moderator Nick Schifrin discusses how the 1979 revolution failed to live up to its promise with Yeganeh Torbati and Bozorgmehr Sharafedin. PBS News is supported by - https://www.pbs.org/newshour/about/funders. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy

From revolution to absolute rule. Across nearly five decades, the Islamic Republic of Iran's radical religious rulers have launched brutal crackdowns on demonstrators searching for social justice and political freedom. Tonight, we examine the hopes that have sparked generations of protesters and the repeated repression that silenced them. From the promise of the 1979 revolution to the conflict today, coming up on Compass Points. Hello and welcome to Compass Points. Most Americans associate Iran in the year 1970, with the hostage crisis, when more than 50 U.S. diplomats and embassy employees in Tehran were captured

and held for 444 days by the supporters of the country's new leader, Ayatollah Khomey. But 10 months before, millions of Iranians demanding a better future swept aside a corrupt and repressive monarchy and the Ayatollah swept into power. But many of the 1979 revolution supporters believe the country should be governed

by some form of democracy. And across the decade since, Iranians have demanded justice and freedom. But today, Iran is still not a democracy, and its clerical leadership has only become more rigid and more authoritarian. How the 1979 Revolution failed to live up to its promise and why generations of Iranians have maintained their willingness to protest is the focus of a new book by Bozagmere Chavadin,

the head of digital at Iran International, a Persian-language news station based outside of Iran. And Yegana Torbati, the New York Times-Iraqqqqqqqqqqqq, They co-wrote, Stolen Revolution, Betrayal and Hope in Modern Iran, and they join me now. Thank you very much, both of you, for being here. Thank you. The core of your book seems to me the gap between the promise of the 1979 revolution and the policies of the government that it created.

You detailed the breadth of the people who in 1979 helped overthrow the Shah from Muhammad Razapalavi from moderate liberals to right-wing Islamist, secular and intellectuals, leftist guerrilla groups, and you conclude, quote, a revolution that was launched with egalitarian ideas and immense hopes had resulted in a mafia state, a criminal enterprise that benefits a few, protected by a brutal, repressive apparatus. Egana, how did that happen? I think what we found is that when the revolutionaries were trying to take power, led by Khomeini, they had a very expansive view. They wanted to bring in lots of different groups,

in order to strengthen their movement and eventually topple the Shah. But once they were actually in power, that kind of leading clerical Islamist faction, which was the most organized and the most powerful, they pretty quickly started to first exclude their former allies from power and then turned to outright persecuting them. What kind of was a constant, however,

is that the meaning of the revolution has basically been contested since the beginning, 1979 and those groups that they excluded they didn't completely disappear they reemerged years later trying to seek a different like a redefinition of what the revolution actually was with more emphasis on kind of the justice and freedom aspects of it and over and over that impulse has reemerged in the last 47 years and bojama we'll go over that but i mean through you know 45 plus years of history you see that tension you see that balance right whether it's in the leaders or among the protesters,

the people who, as we're going to go over for 45 years, were willing to go out in the streets to protest for a different version of the 1979 revolution. Yeah, I think what we see in Iran is a transformation. The transformation of the state, it definitely didn't live up to the promises it gave. It promised to form an egalitarian society, but it turned to its exact opposite.

It turned into a mafia. At the beginning, it promised to distribute wealth among the poor, but now we see a ruling elites, a minority that has the control of the wealth of the society. And the nation is suffering economically and also politically. They don't have the freedom that they were promised. So we see in the last 47 years this constant challenge and tension between the people and the state, and they try to redefine their power. One of the people who personifies that tension, that redefinition of power, is Medi Karubi,

a leading cleric, one of Homene's followers. And we've got a photo of him here. That's him. One of the many times he was imprisoned under the Shah. And you write his path more than anyone else illustrated the stolen promise, as you put it, of the 1979 Revolution. Why? He's a fascinating character. He's a staunch supporter of Khomeini and really believed in this project of an Islamic government. However, he also believes in it because he thought it would bring about social justice in the country. And he has this sort of humanitarian essence. He thrives after the revolution in the first decade.

He's an ally of Khomeini and he's given quite a lot of power. He goes on this mission to basically redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor. he makes some decisions in that era that I think would later come back to haunt him. He had good intentions of redistributing this money, of sort of helping the people who had supported them, but took a lot of decisions that gave power to pretty unaccountable institutions. And later on in his career, when he kind of reemerges as an advocate for reform, he finds that this state that he helped to build really has become too important. powerful and has no respect for transparency, accountability, rule of law, human rights,

all of these things that he had come to believe were so important. And he suffers a great deal as a result. He, you know, tries to sort of implement changes and defend human rights. But ultimately, he, you know, his journey takes him into the real edges of sort of the political wilderness. And he ends up under house arrest for many years. We'll follow, we'll trace his trajectory throughout this. Take us to 1979. How did Khomeini squeeze out all the other groups? And how did the revolution establish the framework for one man to consolidate so much power?

Exactly what you were saying, Bozegov, the very thing that they were actually protesting against. Yeah, so look, Khyr is a good example that, again, he portrays this exclusion. So when he was young, why did he fall in love with the message of Ayatollah Khomeini? It was because he promised to form an Islamic society. For people like him who were coming from religious families, that was the fascinating part, because they were quite annoyed about the westernized culture promoted by the Shah, so they wanted to create an Islamic society.

As you showed the photo, he was jailed, over and over, and it was in jail that he got to know other prisoners who were fighting against the Shah for another reason. They were mainly communist and socialists. And he realized that, okay, there are other forms of revolution. Other people who wanted a new version of Iran, wanted a post-Shah Iran that had more social justice than Islam. Absolutely.

And they borrowed these Islam. borrowed some concepts from the left and from the communists, that they suddenly, they merged this Islamist ideology with ideas of justice and the distribution of wealth, which is quite a communist idea. So when they, but when the revolution succeeded by this combination of forces, we see that first the communist and leftists are excluded,

But that wasn't it. As we come forward, we see that this exclusionary approach even comes within the ruling elites. And then we see that clerics start to exclude other clerics, and Caribby is one of the victims. And it was baked in, right as the 1979 revolution succeeded, Khomeini sent a very specific message to any woodbees dissenters. This is not an ordinary government, he said. It is a government based on Sharia, revolt against God's government, is a revolt against God.

Revolt against God is blasphemy. It was a logic that could justify any brutality in response to dissent. And again, authoritarian clerical rule was embedded in the Constitution. And that is a theme that we see throughout, right? Absolutely. I mean, when they took power,

when the Shah fell, it was this faction of clerics that were the most powerful and the most organized. And that's in part due to the repression that the Shah had carried out in the years leading up to the 1979 revolution. in terms of, you know, the communists themselves,

liberal nationalist, secularists. It was the clerics through their mosques and their kind of existing organization that could still maintain some kind of opposition. So when the revolution did occur, they were the most organized and they were the ones that were able to push their ideas about what the next government should be.

And Khomeini had a very specific idea of that, which is that we need a government led by a cleric to sort of be the representative of God on Earth. And, you know, if you accept that logic, if you oppose that government, then you're anti-Islam, you're anti-God. And that was the way that they were able to delegitimize their opponents. And of course, I'll go ahead, sir. No, no.

They also kind of have this very anti-Western stance, this anti-Kine, kind of U.S. imperialist stance, and so they could also paint their opponents as lackeys of the U.S. This is something they did in the 80s to the leftists and to the secularists, and then as time goes on to even their form. former clerical allies. All right, so let's try and go through a lot of history in a little bit of time. Of course, the second Supreme Leader after Khomeini's death was Ayatollah Hamene, 1989. He takes over, and he was killed by Israel in 2006.

So very long time in power. And you explained in the book how Iranians became so economically dependent on him, and essentially he made his leadership essential for Iran's survival. How did he do that? So when Khomeini came to power, he realized that his power doesn't, his power doesn't match the power of Khomeini. He didn't have the charisma. He didn't have the following, the religious authority. So he had to compensate for that.

What did he do? First of all, he created a very sophisticated office for himself. Like if you go to Khomeini, his office. was very simple. It was him and his son. And that is the structure of office of all the Ayatollahs. It's usually the son, the eldest son, that runs their fur. First, if someone wants to meet the Ayatollah, they come and talk to the son, and he arranges the meetings. But Khomeini, he formed a sophisticated office that is now run by thousands of people. The bureaucracy there is as sophisticated as the government. And he also started investing in the economy. So while Khomeini was not that much drawn into economic activities, Chaminé, in opposite, the foundations under his supervision started economic activities, and by doing that, he gained a lot of economic leverage and as well.

And then the third one, we can say that was the Revolutionary Guards. Revolutionary guards was, it was formed by Khomeini to protect the revolution, but Khomeini somehow expanded their power. He allowed them to enter into economic activities, to have their own intelligence department, so they became the most powerful force in the country. I told you I'm going to go through a lot of history. So let's go into the 90s. And one of the fundamental themes that we briefly mentioned before from the book,

book, is this push and pull between the Supreme Leader and the reformers. And by the late 1990s, you write this. Over the previous 18 years, the ruling clerics had crushed their opponents, narrowed the margins of acceptable debate, and imposed a strict vision of Islamic law that interfered with every aspect of Iranians' lives. But the popular patients with state repression was growing thin. They saw Khatami as someone who could loosen the restrictions on their daily lives. And Khatami is Mohamed Khatami, who became Iran's first.

fifth president beginning in 1997. So, Yagana, how did his reforms provide an alternative vision, an alternative version for the Islamic Republic, what you write at one point transforming Iranians from subjects to citizens? Right. So Khatami and Qadrubi, they were both from kind of this Islamic leftist faction that after Khomeini's death was sort of expunged from power. So, you know, Khomeini and the president at the time, Rafsanjani, were on the right, and they wanted to get rid of leftist clerics, and they sort of push them out of power.

They kind of go into a bit of a political exile for a few years, but over time, there's sort of an opening. There's rivalries between their political enemies on the right, and they see an opening for them to kind of reenter the scene. At the same time, there's this huge population of young people. There had been a baby boom during the 80s. These were folks who had no living memory of the revolution. It was something that they had inherited,

and they were hungry for new freedoms. Lots of people were entering university. There was kind of this organic social change that was happening. So with that pressure from below and this sort of political opening at the top, these radical leftists, some of whom had been some of the most ardent revolutionaries, some of the hostage takers of 1979,

they both see kind of a strategic opening for themselves to appeal to kind of this group of young people. And then also, I think a lot of them had begun to rethink some of their ideals and some of their practices, eventually drawing them even closer to people that they had disdained in the 80s, the kind of secularists and the liberals.

And so these two things kind of combine to form Khatami's candidacy. Kadrubee actually suggests that he run. And Khatami runs, they thought maybe they would get a few million votes, maybe it gives them a base for the next round of elections. And to their great surprise, Iranians are hungry for someone,

for someone like Khatami. He really emphasizes this idea of civil society, of citizenship, of kind of a social contract that the state should have with its people. And he and others start to kind of almost cherry-pick some of Khomeini's statements, you know, focusing on the people and the people's rights and kind of reframing Khomeini and his ideals

as something that could be compatible with the idea of democracy, an Islamic democracy. Obviously, there's a lot of criticisms of that, and I think we argue and show in the book that many of the things that Khomeini did laid the groundwork for what Chaminet was able to do, for sure. But this was their attempt to kind of reframe that and see if there could be an opening in Iran's political system. And yet the rubber band goes back, and we get President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 2000s. Of course, buffoon, bombastic, his signature cheap jacket right there, also denied the Holocaust. And then you get the 2009 election, by all accounts, rigged, sparked what we now call the Green Movement or the Green Revolution, what you call a demonstration of hope, might, unity, and profound political maturity.

And of the more than 3 million people who came out on the street, you write one vision of many had triumphed after the 1979 revolution, and the people on the street there were daring to rest back its meaning. How so? Yeah, I think if we go a little bit back with the election of, of Khatami, what happened. I just remember those days, everybody was in shock, the losers and the winners. And how did it happen?

Because until then, the society was very much in line with the Supreme Leader. People could guess which candidate is the favorite candidate of Khomeini, and they would go and vote for him. And that happened to Hashemir al-Sanjani as well. Like, people would go and vote for him. This was the first time that, So the society decided to vote for a candidate independently,

regardless of the preference of the Supreme Leader. And in fact, even after the Supreme Leader pushed, right, the reformists to back down from claims that the 2009 election was stolen, they pushed back. And that was a major moment where the Supreme Leader wasn't able to achieve that, right? Yeah, so if the leadership lost the 1990, election because of a surprise, they decided that, okay, that loophole should be closed. So we see that in the election in 2005 and 2009, that despite the election campaigns,

people felt that the election results have been decided and they don't have a say in the electoral system. I'm going to fast forward to the Women Life Freedom Movement, because, again, the ideas that came out of the Green, evolution, the idea you could resist the supreme leader, the idea that you could question all of society, I think, accelerated. And then we get the women life freedom movement. So of course, 2022, reminder, young Kurdish woman named Masa Amani was on vacation with her family, arrested by the morality police who were enforcing a strict version of the law that requires women to wear a headscarf. She was beaten and died of her injuries, launching what we've seen there, widespread protest led by women, many of whom were throwing off their headscarf.

And you write, the woman life freedom movement was sparked by outrage against the government's violent repression of women, but the protests soon grew to encompass 43 years of unfulfilled promises and injustices, a failing economy, political oppression, institutionalized corruption, suffocating social control, environmental destruction, and rampant hypocrisy, all in the name of a holy government. Why did all of that come from the death of one young Kurdish woman? You know, there's these moments where I think in doing the reporting back, we sense that that summer, 2022, there was, everyone was kind of waiting for a spark to happen. There had been all this sort of unresolved. These demands for change, I mean, going back to 2009, at that point, people were asking, where is my vote?

They were very much operating within the structure of the Islamic Republic. They were not challenging, at least at first, that whole government. They just wanted their votes to be counted. It took them several weeks, months into those protests to even call for the death of the Supreme Leader. We saw in the protests that happened in 2017, 2018, 2019, immediately people voiced those kinds of chants. And I think that kind of shows you the change

in how people viewed their government, that, okay, we can protest peacefully and you still won't even respect our basic votes. And so by the time we get to 2022, Two, all of these unresolved demands, I mean, nothing had been solved. Economic issues, there have been several rounds of economic protests. Things just seemed to be getting worse. The idea that, you know, all these environmental protests over the lack of water, over use of water resources.

Women protesting, women, you know, being thrown into jail for how they're dressed. All of these things kind of were there. And then people see this young girl, this young woman, she's not an activist. she was dressed actually quite conservatively, and she's treated in this brutal way, and millions of women had been detained for how they were dressed or hassled, or millions of men had known their mothers, their sisters, their daughters,

who had gone through the same thing. This could have been any of them. And all of this kind of came to the fore, and people were just outraged that something like this had happened. And that connects, I think. I mean, we had a brutal repression to that, but fast forward to late 2025, early 2026, you get protests that in some ways this year were the largest

in the sense that you had a combination of rural and urban, poor and rich Iranians coming together, and that made them unique, but they were sparked by some of the same demands of what you guys have been talking about, and that's the through line through all these protests. Yes, so I think exactly that you said it very nicely because this was the combination of all the previous protests,

because we had some political protests before that. We had some Arabian protests during the Green Movement. And then we had some economic protests among the suburban societies, unemployed. But as we move forward, they see that how these rivers combine and join forces, and they become a very powerful movement in Iran that is not seeking reform anymore.

The agenda is very clear. They want fundamental change. And that's why as they evolve, the oppressive system of the Islamic Republic also evolves. And you see that how they get equipped with modern technologies by Russia and China and how they become quite brutal in the oppression of these movements. And the last one in January 26, tens of thousands of people were killed, which is somehow unprecedented in the history of Iran. I can say in the history of modern world.

And is there an irony then, as we look at today, that these currents that we've been following, these demands for freedoms, have ended up with a war in which Mujahibha, right? The new supreme leader is the son of Ali Khanne. I mean, again, in the minute or so we have left, what does that say about this fight for democracy, this fight for freedoms today?

Where's the hope? I think what we found is that even in Iran's darkest moments, history doesn't end there. And the Iranian people's demands remain, and they find ways to express those demands. And right now, I think, is a difficult moment for the opposition in Iran, for people who want a different future. It feels right now that the government is more powerful and confident than ever and more willing to use brutality to stay in power. But what we learned throughout the course of reporting this is those, the Iranian populace is always going to be contesting whatever they're handed. And I'd expect that that will continue. And that is the history that you track, right?

The willingness to, in 1979, overthrow the Shah and the willingness to fight for those democracy and freedom that will continue, presumably. Bozogmar-Yaganah, thank you so much to all of you. That's all the time we have left with you. And thank you for joining us. I'm Nick Schiffran. We'll see you here again next week. I'm Compass Points.