Hassan Zia-Zarifi - The Ideology of Armed Resistance

The Ideology of Armed Resistance

The brutal crackdown after the 15 Khordad uprising convinced many young critics of the Shah’s government that there was no hope for peaceful reform of the system. Rather, Iranian activists saw the only way forward as revolutionary overthrown of the entire monarchical system, inspired by the recent successes of armed movements in Viet Nam, Cuba, Algeria, and Palestine.

When Hassan Zia-Zarifi completed his military conscription in 1965, he met Bijan Jazani, a noted young leftist activist with a long history in the youth wing of the Tudeh Party. According to Jazani, during meetings in Zia-Zarifi’s house, a small nucleus of like-minded young university graduates came together to discuss how to implement the ideology of armed resistance in Iran. Their analysis was that the monarchy was a fundamentally reactionary form of government but that it could be toppled by a revolution sparked by an armed vanguard. They believed that small armed attacks would shock the system and create space for necessary political action and arouse the masses. They achieved considerable success in critiquing the failures of Iran’s opposition movement, particularly the Tudeh party. Jazani and Zarifi co-authored a theoretical manifesto that forcefully expounded this strategy and formed the ideological bedrock of the movement.

During 1965 and 1966, the small group, which came to be known as the Jazani-Zarifi group, moved beyond the purely theoretical stage and began recruiting members and organizing them in a cell structure, with a larger network dedicated to political action, while a smaller, more committed sub-group, whose identities were not known by the larger membership, prepared for armed insurrection.

By 1966, the Jazani-Zarifi group had begun implementing its theories. The group procured a few small weapons and was planning to attack government banks to “confiscate” funds for their plans.

Notwithstanding their theoretical and analytical abilities, Zarifi and Jazani were ill-prepared for the rigors of actual guerilla activity. Their organization was almost immediately penetrated by the Shah’s draconian secret service, the SAVAK. In early 1968, Jazani was arrested; Zarifi went into hiding and evaded capture for another month until he was betrayed by Abbas Shahriari, a SAVAK double agent who was a high level Tudeh party official. Hassan Zia-Zarifi was arrested on February 14, 1968.