How Kenya handled the Raisi visit damaged its image, needs rethink

President William Ruto with his Iranian counterpart Ebrahim Raisi at State House, Nairobi. [PCS]

Iran is one country that has made lasting contributions to human belief systems.

Its leaders claim biological linkage to Prophet Mohamed who founded Islam to correct ‘errors’ in Judaism, Christianity, and among Zoroaster followers. Prophet Zoroaster, living around 6th Century BCE, advanced the idea of God’s duality in which good and evil were in constant struggle for dominance.

In that struggle, the good side of God, Ahura Mazda, would eventually triumph over the bad side, Ahriman, thereby causing the dead to rise and face judgement. Cyrus the Great spread Zoroastrianism across the Persian Empire. It declined after 651 CE with the Islamic invasion and the subsequent dominance of Shia Islam in modern Iran.

In the 20th Century, Iran remained under heavy British and American geopolitical pressures. The House of Pahlavi monarchy in Iran was a 1921 British creation. In 1941, the allies had deposed Reza Shah Pahlavi and installed his son, Mohamed Reza Shah Pahlavi as the new Iranian king. It is also largely a product of post-World War II Cold War confrontation between the US and the Soviet Union.

Bordering the Soviet Union and having a lot of oil, Iran was a Cold War pod dominated by three men, Mohamed Mossadegh, Mohamed Reza Shah Pahlavi, and Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeni. Mossadegh, a French educated leader of the National Front, and the Shah were involved in power struggle in the early 1950s.

The Shah went to temporary exile, leaving Mossadegh to rule, only for the US and Britain to reinstall him. Khomeini was professor of philosophy at Qom and a member of the Fayedeen-e Islam which resembled Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. The Shah’s domestic atrocities, reform projects, and the ‘White Revolution’, enabled Khomeini to emerge as champion of Islam by condemning the Shah’s activities.

The setting was that of the British Empire in retreat after World War II that needed the US to hold its decline. With empire defender Winston Churchill returning as prime minister in October 1951, Britain tried to confront rising nationalist and anti-colonial agitations in such places as Egypt with Gamal Abdel Nassir, Kenya with the looming Mau Mau War, and Iran with French educated Mossadegh as prime minister. It acquired US support mainly because, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told India’s Jawaharlal Nehru in 1953 when discussing the Mau Mau War, the US had no choice but to support Britain due to Cold War exigencies.

The US also supported Britain in Iran when Mossadegh decided to nationalise the British controlled oil industry. Churchill appealed to US President Dwight D. Eisenhower for help after which the American CIA and the MI6 ganged up to overthrow Mossadegh in August 1953. Thereafter, Mossadegh remained in virtual house arrest till his death in 1967 and even then the Shah would not allow him a burial place. Since news about events in Iran and Kenya became international, it is not surprising that Mau Mau leader Dedan Kimathi reportedly saw himself as Kenya’s Mossadegh, confronting British imperialists. In death, both men’s inspirational stature grew globally even as their remains could not get respectable burials.    

Although Mossadegh became an inspiration, in and out of Iran, he was not the accepted nationalist hero image that became his legend. In the Iranian context, his being a ‘democrat’ and not a religious fanatic made the Shah more acceptable to some top Islamic clergy than the prime minister. His liberal orientation was, though nationalistic, secularist which annoyed various Shia Ayatollahs.

Among religious organs that were unhappy with Mossadegh’s liberal orientation was Fadayeen-e Islam which believed that secularism and atheism threatened Islam. Khomeini, then a mid-level Fedayeen cleric wanted little to do with Mossadegh. Erasing Mossadegh from Iranian story seemed Khomeni’s main agenda. The Shah and Khomeini, for political and religious reasons, disliked Mossadegh and blocked respectable burial the former prime minister.

Khomeini took advantage of the Shah’s atrocities to rally anti-Shah forces and build a political movement. While in exile first in Iraq and then France, he sent mobilising messages and attracted Iranian elite who joined him to oust the Shah in 1979 and helped to establish the Islamic Republic. Unlike in 1953, neither the US nor Britain intervened to save the Shah; he had outlived his usefulness. Khomeini’s new Islamic Republic had little toleration for those with a touch of Mossadegh or did not fit into his Umma thinking that considered the US the great Satan’, the Soviet Union a ‘lesser Satan’, and Israel a ‘little Satan’.

Among the youth who rallied around Khomeini was Ebrahim Raisi who studied Khomeini’s philosophy at Qom and became a protégé of Iran’s current Supreme Leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and a possible successor to Khamenei. Elected president in 2019, he wants to lift Iran out of US-orchestrated international isolation and visiting African countries is one way.

The way Kenya handled the hosting of Raisi damaged its image; it calls for rethinking. It appeared lost partly due to President William Ruto’s lack of finesse in diplomacy and foreign relations. Having started his presidency wrongly over the Sahrawi presence in Kenya’, the logistical mess over Raisi’s visit implies that Ruto has no direction even as he seeks world recognition.

That Raisi is under American-led sanctions is not an issue for it is Kenya’s right to host whoever it wants. The problem is having policymakers and implementers who appear to be poorly prepared or incapable of explaining and defending Kenya when questions arise. Ruto needs to go to conceptual drawing board or watch Kenya lose its niche in the continent and among nations.   

Prof Munene is a scholar of history and international relations