Titans of History (73 page)

The privileged son of a Tembu chieftain of royal descent, Mandela grew up in rural Transkei and had a boarding-school education that exposed him to little of the discrimination that most of South Africa's black population faced. Before Mandela fled his home to avoid an arranged marriage, his most significant experience of oppression had been his naming as Nelson by a primary-school teacher who found his African name too difficult to pronounce.

But on arrival in Johannesburg the young lawyer began to live up to his birth name: Rolihlahla or troublemaker. Mandela became one of the first freedom fighters for the African National Congress (ANC). He was repeatedly arrested and imprisoned for his nonviolent protests throughout the 1950s. When the ANC was outlawed, Mandela—the “Black Pimpernel”—went on the run, drumming up overseas support and military training for the organization. In 1961 he became the leader of the ANC terrorist wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), planning violence against military/government targets. He regarded terror as a last resort to be used only when peaceful methods seemed hopeless, but he later confessed that the increasingly violent ANC terror and guerrilla campaigns also abused human rights. After being arrested and jailed in 1962 for leaving the country, in the Rivonia Trial of 1964 Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Mandela's speech from the dock echoed through the townships from the Cape to the Paarl. It helped to politicize a people who had had every opportunity for education, advancement and independence taken away from them by the apartheid policies of the Afrikaner Nationalist government, which had crushed their rights and dignity. His words gave them hope.

Mandela is a man of awesome obduracy. Sentenced to hard labor in a stone quarry on Robben Island, Mandela transformed his prison camp into the “Island University,” assigning instructors to educate the teams of inmates as they toiled at their back-breaking work. He put on plays and distributed books to fill the hours. After twenty-seven years' waiting, Mandela delayed his final departure from prison by one more day: “They are going to release me the way I want to be released,” he explained, “not the way they want me to be released.”

As Mandela's stature grew across the world, the apartheid government, under hardliners like P.W. Botha, tried to do deals with this prisoner who had become their Achilles' heel. They offered to release him if he would denounce the ANC; Mandela refused: “Until my people are free, I can never be free.” Peace takes men of vision and courage on both sides, and in 1989 the new South African president, F.W. de Klerk, was courageous enough to take the necessary risks. In 1990 he lifted the ban on the ANC just days before he released Mandela. And once free, Mandela almost immediately renounced violent action, thus making the vow he had refused to undertake while imprisoned.

Mandela has never indulged in racism. At his trial he called for freedom regardless of color, and on his release he refused to stir up racial tensions. As president (1994–9) he included representatives of all ethnic groups in his multi-party government. He established the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate human rights abuses. The Madiba—the honorific tribal name
by which South Africans know him—shared the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize with de Klerk. His one embarrassment was the violent gangsterism of his wife Winnie, whom he divorced. He later married the widow of President Machel of Mozambique. Mandela has recognized that during his presidency he did not do enough to combat the AIDS epidemic. In retirement he has taken every step to redress his mistake. With characteristic honesty, Mandela has since admitted that his own 1960s militancy, no less than apartheid, violated human rights and he has refused to let his followers suppress this fact.

“My life is the struggle,” said Mandela.

1919–80

My advisers built a wall between myself and my people. I didn't realize what was happening. When I woke up, I had lost my people
.

Muhammad Reza Pahlavi

Always known simply as the shah, or king, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi was for almost forty years the ruler of Iran, the nation that, along with Egypt, is usually the most important country in the Near East. A Western ally, an Iranian nationalist, an absolutist king, a revolutionary modernizer, he gradually emerged as the key potentate in the region as he became the effective dictator of a country made vastly rich by oil revenues. He enjoyed great successes in his reforms and modernization, his intentions were
admirable—yet he was a flawed authoritarian, limited by his personality, and by the corruption and repression of his regime. His achievements were overshadowed by his downfall.

His family had risen from literally nothing to the imperial throne itself. Muhammad was the eldest son of Reza Shah, a low-born Persian army officer who climbed to the rank of general in a Cossack regiment trained for the Qajar shahs of Iran by Russian officers. The father was ramrod straight, tall, harsh and ambitious but scarcely educated. However the last shahs of the Qajar dynasty of kings had lost control of their country, which was dominated by court intrigues, tribal rebellions, economic chaos, rampant warlordism, ethnic strife, democratic revolutions, Communism, separatism and foreign interference—especially by Britain and Russia, the two dominant imperial powers. Finally in 1921, the general marched his Cossacks into Teheran and seized power, first as minister of war. By 1923 he was ruling Iran and in 1925, as the last Qajar shah left for exile, the Cossack general raised himself to shah of the Imperial State of Iran, founding the Pahlavi dynasty.

An admirer of Atatürk, Reza Shah ruled harshly and energetically, modernizing the country, persecuting any opposition, reuniting the separatist provinces and diminishing the power of Shiite clergy whenever possible. The crown prince was educated at La Rosey in Switzerland, where he embraced Western culture and skiing. But in 1941, as he tried to chart a course between Nazi Germany and the Allies, Britain and Soviet Russia, Reza Shah disastrously miscalculated the security of his own position. The Allies could not risk the loss of Iran and its oil to Nazi Germany so they invaded the country, partitioned it and sent Reza Shah into exile in South Africa, where he died. However, unsure what regime to install, they allowed Reza to abdicate in favor of his young son Muhammad, whose reign would last for thirty-seven years.

During the war, the young Shah had little choice but to bow before Russian and British interests but from the very beginning he started to try to impose his own will on government. When the Allies finally withdrew from Iran after the war, he became to assert himself politically. Throughout his long career, he faced Western intervention based on oil interests, Soviet Russian intrigue, communist subversion, and the threat of the Shiite clergy. Growing up paranoid and trusting very few, the shah generally feared Anglo-American intrigue and the communist threat more than the Shiite Ayatollahs. He faced repeated coup attempts from all sides, his prime ministers and ministers were assassinated and he himself survived several attempts to take his life with great courage.

Overall, despite the catastrophic end of his career, his ability to survive and constantly increase his power and influence were signs of not just persistence but also political cunning. Yet his personality was a strange mixture of timidity and shyness, overweening arrogance and delusion, ruthless realpolitik, driving ambition and sensual hedonism. His judgment of personalities was often dire, his protection of corrupt relations and aides notorious, and his methods of clandestine espionage and secret police repression ultimately counterproductive. His will to power was strong, yet at times of crisis, he was often timid and indecisive, lacking confidence.

Faced with powerful prime ministers often imposed by foreign powers, the shah patiently bided his time, waiting for the chance to destroy these overmighty rivals. He carefully husbanded his powers to dismiss ministers and to command the army. By the late 1940s, he faced a new challenge from his prime minister, Dr. Muhammad Mossadeq, a wealthy and aged feudal landowner, famous for wearing pajamas during the day, a habit that shocked Western leaders, and for his demagogic nationalism that demanded
the nationalization of Western oil interests. The shah hated Mossadeq, who was also alarming Britain and America. In 1952, the shah planned to dismiss Mossadeq and appoint a new prime minister, General Fazlolah Zahedi, but the coup, backed by the British and American secret services, particularly CIA operative Kermit Roosevelt, initially stalled. The shah fled to Iraq and then Italy, returning once General Zahedi had overthrown Mossadeq.

Now the shah worked to rid himself of Zahedi too. By the late 1950s, the shah had become totally dominant in Iran, a dominance that became an enlightened royal dictatorship. American President J.F. Kennedy was skeptical of the shah, regarding him as a dictator but gradually US leaders came to see him as an ally. The shah never lost his paranoia about American and British troublemaking, always maintaining good relations with the Soviets as a threat and insurance policy.

He now launched his White Revolution, a modernizing program of high technology, land reform, female rights and suffrage, diminishing of Shiite clerical control, education, and industrialization. When the Shiite ayotollahs resisted this program in a series of riots between 1961 and 1962, the shah appointed his closest ally Asodollah Alam prime minister and allowed him to use the army to suppress the rebellion. This success over the clergy gave the shah and his top aides the illusion that they had triumphed over the ayatollahs.

Meanwhile he built up a formidable military machine, funded by America, to become the self-appointed guardian of the Gulf and a Near Eastern military great power. At home, he used his secret police, SAVAK, to keep the communists, nationalists and the clergy under control but human rights abuse and routine torture, made the regime unpopular. Worse, the rise in the oil price had given the shah endless revenues to pursue grandiose schemes and buy more American arms, even starting a nuclear
program. The oil riches brought rampant corruption and ostentatious decadence. The Shah himself dominated every decision and every part of Iranian life but the imperial family were notorious for their corruption.

As a young man he had married Princess Fawzia, sister of Farouk, last king of Egypt, but this had ended in divorce. He then married a young Iranian-German girl named Soraya who was perhaps the true love of his life but she was unable to have children. Thirdly and happily the Shah married Farah Diba, a pretty Iranian student with whom he had a son and heir as well as several daughters. But his own secret love life became notorious. As the diaries of his minister of court (and sometime prime minister) Alam reveal, he regarded his sexual adventures as essential to his well-being under great stress: he was never without an array of mistresses and the beautiful courtesans of the Madame Claude agency of Paris were regularly flown in for his pleasure.

But the Alam diaries also reveal his increasing megalomaniacal delusions as he was spoiled by international success, domestic flattery and oil wealth. In 1971, in a £100 million folly of imperial hubris and French catering, he chose to celebrate not the Persian relationship with Islam but the 2500th anniversary of the Iranian empire founded by Cyrus the Great: these Persepolis parties damaged his reputation further. However the shah—now at the point of his greatest power and success—was actually secretly suffering from cancer. Furthermore, the very success of his reforms—in education, in the economy, in land reform—had planted the seeds of his destruction: a poverty-stricken middle class with educational pretensions but resentment of imperial cronies and their corruption; students and liberals tortured by SAVAK; thousands of ex-peasants who had moved to Teheran to enjoy the new boom only to be forgotten in vast slums, where they were co-opted and cared for by Islamic
preachers and organizations; and a determined and organized movement of Islamic Shiite fundamentalism under the control of the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini. The inept Jimmy Carter undermined the shah further with his comments on human rights in Iran. When the riots and protests intensified in late 1978, the Shah was oddly listless and distracted, lacking the will to order a full crackdown: he simply did not wish to shed any more blood. In early 1979, as he lost control of the streets, the shah flew away “on holiday,” never to return. Pursued by the new Iranian regime, betrayed by the Americans and forced to move from country to country as he died of cancer, his end was a Shakespearean tragedy. The shah had appeared magnificently powerful and secure. His rule was clearly flawed both in his personality and his repression but his intentions were good and compared with the monstrous brutality of the Islamic Republic that came after him, he was a paragon.

1920–2005

His name became part of our history, his thoughts will be an always present inspiration to build … a more peaceful world for all of us
.

Chilean president Ricardo Lagos, on the death of John Paul II

In 1978 the Polish cardinal Karol Wojtyla became Pope John Paul II. He was the first non-Italian pontiff for 455 years. During his long tenure, he became a hero of the struggle for freedom over
tyranny. He was a champion of liberty in eastern Europe, particularly in his native Poland, and a supporter of oppressed people all over the world.

A tireless traveler and a master of modern media, John Paul II was a relentless critic of totalitarian tyranny and of the inequalities created by materialism. He strove to build bridges between the Catholic Church and the Jewish and Islamic peoples. And in old age he battled bravely against illness and frailty, dying a truly iconic spiritual leader for people throughout the world.

As a young man in Poland, Wojtyla knew the harsh reality of totalitarian rule. After the Nazis invaded his country in 1939, he was forced to take on menial work, such as laboring in a limestone quarry. It was a time when the Vatican under Pope Pius XII failed to show moral leadership and equivocated over Nazi oppression in Poland and elsewhere in occupied Europe. Wojtyla put his life at risk to smuggle Jews out of Poland and was placed on a Nazi death list. Fortunately he escaped detection during a Gestapo raid on the Archbishop of Kraków's house in 1944 and survived the Second World War.