The fate of a 77-year old woman who has been a mental patient in Switzerland for almost 60 years has emerged as the latest issue in the power struggle in Tehran.
At issue is a demand that the Islamic Republic assume the cost of keeping the woman in the Swiss clinic. The faction led by newly re-elected President Muhammad Khatami agrees. But a rival faction, led by former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, insists that the woman be brought to Iran and placed in a psychiatric center.
The woman in question is Khadijeh, the youngest and only surviving child of the late Dr. Muhammad Mussadeq, who was Iran’s prime minister on two occasions between 1951 and 1953.
Mussadeq became something of a national hero for leading the movement to nationalize the Iranian oil in 1951. He died in 1967 at the age of 85.
Mussadeq’s forgotten daughter moved to the center of attention in Iran when an Iranian newspaper revealed her tragic existence last spring. It warned that the old lady may be thrown out of her clinic because she was unable to pay the cost of treatment which amounts to $6,000 a month.
For more than a century the cost had been met from the proceeds of property in Iran that Mussadeq had bequeathed for the purpose. One of Iran’s largest landlords, Mussadeq lost much of his property as a result of the 1963 land reform program. Nevertheless, he owned enough property in Tehran to provide for his children, including Khadijeh.
After the Shah was ousted in 1979, Mussadeq was declared an “ enemy”, and the remainder of his property confiscated.
For years after that Mussadeq’s only son Ghulam-Hussein, a doctor of medicine, met the cost of Khadijeh’s treatment in Switzerland. Ghulam-Hussein died five years ago and the new generation of the family, many of them in exile and in dire straits themselves, have found it increasingly difficult to pay the clinic’s bills.
Mahdi Bazargan, an old disciple of Mussadeq who became prime minister in the first year of the Islamic Republic, had persuaded the Cabinet to allocate an annual budget of $11,000 for Khadijeh’s care. That decision was cancelled when Bazargan was forced out in November 1979.
Although Mussadeq’s name is banned and his record regarded as “ a dark chapter in history”, the principal Mussadeqist groups have backed Khatami’s re-election. In exchange, Khatami has referred to Mussadeq’s “positive legacy” without naming him.
In private Khatami speaks of his desire to rehabilitate Mussadeq. For the time being, however, Mussadeq remains a non-person. His home in Ahmad-Abad, west of Tehran, remains under constant surveillance although none of the Mussadeq family have lived there since the 1970s. A plan to turn the house into a museum and library was vetoed by the “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenehi last year.
What will become of Khadijeh? No one knows, and especially not the old lady herself. She thinks that her father is still alive and active in politics.
“How is my father doing?” she asked a recent visitor.
