Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, Former Iranian President, Dies at 88

Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, who as the first president of the Islamic Republic of Iran tried and failed to resist the currents of religious radicalism, died on Saturday at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris. He was 88.

His death came after a long illness, his family said on Mr. Bani-Sadr’s official website.

Mr. Bani-Sadr was president when the newborn Islamic Republic went through two of its greatest traumas. Militants stormed the United States embassy in Tehran on Nov. 4, 1979. Ten months later, Saddam Hussein’s army invaded Iran, setting off the horrific Iran-Iraq war.

The revolution’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, used these two episodes to purge secularists, nationalists and other moderates from Iran’s government. Mr. Bani-Sadr was the most prominent victim.

Soon after American diplomats were taken hostage at the U.S. embassy, Mr. Bani-Sadr visited the occupiers and urged them to withdraw.

“You think you have taken America hostage,” he told them. “What a delusion! In fact, you have made Iran the hostage of the Americans.”

Several months later, Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, Mansour Farhang, resigned in protest of his government’s failure to end the crisis and wrote a long article condemning the takeover. A newspaper connected to Mr. Bani-Sadr was the only one in Iran to publish it.

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