Hazhir Teimourian - Middle East Analyst and Commentator
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Fifty years of the Queen's Persian

The Times Saturday Magazine, January 1991

It was February 1974 and Iraq's strongman, then vice-president, Saddam Hussein, was about to launch the first war of his career, against the Kurds in the north of the country, when I sneaked in from over the mountains in eastern Turkey to see what was happening. But heavy snow blocked most of the valleys of Kurdistan and I could not risk travelling on government-held roads to reach my destination. The next best thing had to be to spend a week or so in a mountain village nearby to become acquainted with the inhabitants and their condition.

One night, as almost the whole of the village gathered around me in the headman's largest room to hear about unemployment pay and other fantastic tales from "Engelistan", news came on Baghdad radio that valiant Iraqi troops had stopped an Iranian incursion into the country, killing 80 of the intruders. Tension built up and we immediately turned to Tehran radio in the expectation of hearing martial music, but only to be baffled by the claim that valiant Iranian border guards had stopped an Iraqi incursion into the country and killed 80 of invaders. To my surprise, no-one in the village hall seemed to be surprised, though they were impatient. They asked me to listen to my colleagues in the Persian Service of the BBC to see whether London had a different version of the clash. A few minutes later I was translating: a herd of sheep had been stolen across the frontier, some 150 miles to the east of us, and in the ensuing clash between the locals, eight people had been wounded. A sigh of relief came over everyone. The war was not yet upon us, and there was time for more wonderful stories from me, about the height of British women, for example.

Two years ago, that village, Darkar, near the town of Zakho, was destroyed with poison gas by Saddam, but the trust that the people of the whole region have learnt to put in the various vernacular services of the BBC is as strong as it has ever been; at critical times such as today, the audience of the Persian service alone, from Istanbul to Kabul and from Soviet Tajikistan to Dubai, may rise to 15 million for some broadcasts. Peasant and president listen in, and draw their future plans accordingly. There is, for example, a poor farmer in a southern Iranian village who has acquired the nickname "Is it Time?" He says that once he was returning to the village with a load of firewood on his back when he asked whether it was time for the Persian Service's main evening news bulletin. On being told that it had already started, he dropped his load of firewood and ran to the remainder of the way home. There is also a provincial newspaper editor who listens to the morning bulletin to help him decide on the priority of the day's main stories. In the year just past, the Service marked its 50th anniversary, and, as one of the grey beards of the Service, I was interviewed about my former membership of it. How did I come across it? What did I think of it now? Which record would I like to be played for my friends and family among the audience?

Founded in the early stages of the Second World War to counter German propaganda about the invincibility of Nazi armies, it acted, more or less, as just another department of the BBC, broadcasting the same news and the same commentaries, even though it was funded by the Foreign Office. Its eagerness to be the first with the news, including when British forces suffered defeats, proved a successful strategy, despite initially puzzling its audience. It has not looked back.

Arguably, the height of the Service's usefulness was the months preceding the Iranian revolution of 1979. For years, its broadcasters - about a dozen full-time men and women - had refused to bow to Iranian pressure to refer to the Shah in adulatory terms, particularly his most frequently-used title of "Light of the Aryans", and they had given coverage to some critical, as well as supportive, accounts of the Shah's conduct. But when turmoil intensified after the expulsion - at the Shah's request - of Ayatollah Khomeini from Iraq to Paris, the Service's news bulletins attracted many more listeners. To make matters worse for the Iranian government, Khomeini was now based in a democratic, neighbouring country, with the gaze of the world's press fixed upon him. At the height of the crisis in January 1979, Khomeini's frequent statements dominated the headlines all over the world and were relayed by the Service to Iran. The country seemed to be planning its eating and sleeping habits around our programmes. This was despite the fact that many of us, including myself, were intensely wary of the Iranian clergy. In fact, during the 37 days when the liberal deputy leader of the opposition, Dr Shahpour Bakhtiar, became the Shah's last prime minister in a desperate bid to stop Khomeini, we interviewed him three times, while Khomeini was only interviewed once during his several months of exile in Paris. Yet, we were subsequently blamed by many Iranians for somehow engineering the revolution for the purposes of British imperialism. With hindsight, perhaps we did allow ourselves to sound excited at the height of the upheaval, and some of us did hope that Khomeini would retire to his former theological school - as he said he would - leaving the government of the land to liberal politicians. After all, my personal friend, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, with whom I had broken over his support for Khomeini, did become president for a year, and Iran did, for a time, become one of the most free states in the world, all manner of groups of the right and the left setting up headquarters at Tehran university.

Today, there are signs that the Service is being forgiven by many listeners. The Islamic government in Tehran is more vehemently opposed to it than the Shah's government ever was, some of its light-hearted programme are even more irreverent about patriarchs than at any time in the past.

Sometimes, when some listeners persist in accusing Britain and the BBC of inciting them to demonstrate against the Shah, they may be reminded of one man among them in the city of Isfahan who has discovered a cure for the unhappiness. "Every morning", he wrote, "I spend ten minutes in front of the mirror insulting myself. I ask myself whether I was hungry or whether I was blind to go on to the streets yelling against the Shah. I suggest that all other listeners do the same. It makes you feel much better, but it must be in front of a mirror, and the person must look himself in the eye".

The Persian Service is also a haven of gentility. Eleven years after I left it, it has still not had the heart to deprive me of my letter tray, and it allows me regularly to practice my Persian on its audience.

Not the least of the achievements of the past 50 years has been to contribute to the development of the Persian language. The people who have manned the Service have come from all the various nationalities of Iran and Afghanistan. The sounds of English and the broadcasters' initial dialects have, I am told, given birth to the most prestigious accent of the language. I have it on good authority that young men stand at street corners in Kabul and imitate our accent to impress the girls. Many happy returns.

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