Ahmadinejad to demand damages from UN for World War II Allied invasion
By JPOST.COM STAFF
Teheran will seek reparations from the UN for damage done to Iran's economy during the Allied invasion of the country in 1941, Press TV reported on Saturday.
According to the report, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said during a Friday press conference in Copenhagen that he would write a letter to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon "asking for Iran to be compensated" for suffering caused to its people during the war and for the usage of its resources by Allied powers.
"Not only was Iran deprived of any compensation for World War II, but 10 years later, the Americans even went as far as arranging a coup to reverse a popular uprising that had led to the nationalization of oil," the Iranian president was quoted as saying.
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BIG OIL drives American policy in Iran and has been doing so since WW II.
From Wikipedia:
"The 1953 Iranian coup d’état deposed the democratically elected government of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq.
The United States' Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) overthrew the government of the popular Prime Minister Mosaddeq at the request of, and with support from the British government. In what the CIA called Operation Ajax, the U.S. enabled Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to become an authoritarian monarch, who went on to rule Iran for 26 years until he was overthrown in 1979.
Two years earlier, in 1951, Mosaddeq, backed by his nationalist supporters in the Iranian parliament and throughout Iran, had angered Britain with his argument that Iran should begin profiting from its vast oil reserves instead of allowing profits to continue to flow to Britain. In 1951, Iran's Parliament, the Majlis, nationalized Iran's oil industry and then elected Mosaddeq to be prime minster. Since 1913, the oil industry in Iran had been controlled exclusively by the British government-controlled Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the UK's single largest overseas investment. The ejection of the British staff of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) from the nationalized refineries in Iran triggered a crisis at Abadan, the world's largest refinery, in what came to be called the Abadan Crisis. Britain accused Mosaddeq of violating the legal rights of the AIOC and mobilized a worldwide boycott of Iran's oil that plunged Iran into financial crisis. "After Iran nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company May 2, 1951, Britain assembled an armada made up of its Navy, Air Force and army to seize the island of Abadan in order to reclaim control of the oil refinery but Prime Minister Clement Attlee declined to attack, choosing instead to enforce the economic boycott against Iran. The British government, headed by Winston Churchill, tried to enlist the United States in planning a coup, but President Harry S. Truman refused. Under his successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, however, the CIA embarked on its first covert operation to overthrow a foreign government.
The economic and political crisis in Iran that began in early 1952 with the British-organized worldwide boycott of Iranian oil, ended with the signing of the Consortium Agreement of 1954. Pahlavi signed the agreement with the result that, for the first time, United States oil companies shared in the control of Iranian oil, with the U.S. and UK evenly splitting 80% and the remainder divided between French and Dutch interests. Iran was allocated 50% of the revenues, which was an increase from 16% in the original agreement. However, from Iran's perspective, the Consortium Agreement of 1954 was far less favorable than conditions set forth several months earlier in the joint 'Winston Churchill-Dwight D. Eisenhower' proposal to Mosaddegh. The Consortium Agreement of 1954 ended the crisis that led to the coup, and stayed in effect until it was modified in 1957 and 1973 and then ended in 1979 when the Iranian Revolution deposed the monarch.
US support and funding continued after the coup, with the CIA training the Shah's secret police, SAVAK. Originally, the Eisenhower Administration considered Operation Ajax a "successful secret war", but, given its blowback, that assessment is no longer generally held, because of the coup's "haunting and terrible legacy". The coup d’état was a "a critical event in post-war world history" that replaced Iran’s native, and secular parliamentary democracy with an authoritarian monarchy. The coup is widely believed to have significantly contributed to the 1979 Iranian Revolution, which deposed the Shah and replaced the pro-Western monarchy with the anti-Western Islamic Republic of Iran."
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