Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani
Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was president of Iran from 1989 to 1997, the cleric from the pistachio country of Rafsanjan who had been Khomeini's closest lieutenant, the speaker of the parliament for the whole of the 1980s, the commander of the war against Iraq in its last year who persuaded Khomeini to drink the cup of poison and accept the ceasefire of 1988. When Khomeini died in June 1989, he arranged in a day for Khamenei, a middle-ranking cleric, to be supreme leader and for himself to be president with the powers of the abolished prime ministership, on the understanding that he would run the country, which for eight years he did. There was the reconstruction of the war's ruins, the dams and roads and steel, and the free-trade zones on the Gulf islands. There was the birth control programme that halved the birth rate, the return of the technocrats, and the foreign borrowing that brought a debt crisis in 1993. There were the Iran-Contra dealings of the 1980s that had been his, and the assassinations abroad, of the Kurdish leaders in Vienna in 1989 and Berlin in 1992, for which a German court named him in 1997. There was the bombing of the Jewish centre in Buenos Aires in 1994, for which Argentina sought his arrest. He was born in 1934 into a family of pistachio farmers, studied in Qom under Khomeini, and was jailed by the Shah's police repeatedly. After 1979 he was the interior minister, the founder of the Islamic Republican Party, the speaker from 1980, and the man the Kurds, the Mojahedin and the Iraqis all tried to kill. The wealth his family made in pistachios, construction, the airline and the copper mines gave him the name Akbar Shah, and the Shark for his beardless face. After the presidency he chaired the Expediency Council for the rest of his life and the Assembly of Experts from 2007 to 2011. He lost the presidential election of 2005 to Ahmadinejad in the run-off and was barred from that of 2013 by the Guardian Council at seventy-eight. He backed Rouhani and the nuclear deal. He became in his last years the patron of the reformists he had once jailed and the critic of the leader he had made, with his daughter Faezeh in prison and his son Mehdi in prison for corruption. He died of a heart attack in a Tehran swimming pool in January 2017, and the crowd at his funeral, the largest since Khomeini's, chanted against the leader. The republic's founding generation lost with him its last man who could talk to both sides.
- Lived: 1934 CE – 2017 CE
- Nationality: Iranian
- Roles: president, cleric, politician
