Cease-Fire Takes Effect in 8-Year Iran-Iraq War
By ALAN COWELL, Special to the New York Times
Published: August 21, 1988
After almost eight years of a war that has claimed an estimated one million lives, a cease-fire between Iran and Iraq was reported holding tonight.
The truce, arranged by the United Nations, went into effect today at 7 A.M. local time. By nightfall, there were no reports of violations.
”I really think both countries are serious,” the United Nations Secretary General, Javier Perez de Cuellar, told reporters in London, where he was on his way to formal peace talks between the two nations in Geneva starting Thursday. ”They are committed to the cease-fire.”
A team of 350 United Nations observers spread out along the 740-mile border between the combatants.
“They are on the ground in large numbers from north to south, and the cease-fire is holding,” Col. William Phillips, the Irish operations chief of the 24-nation Iran-Iraq Military Observer Group said.
The war - fought on land and in the air, in the oil lanes of the Persian Gulf and with missile and chemical weapons attacks - produced no major territorial gains for either side.
Yet Iraq, which invaded Iran on Sept. 22, 1980, has proclaimed victory. Motorists and demonstrators poured onto the streets of Baghdad overnight, blowing horns, beating tambourines and spraying water.
The response in Teheran, the capital of Iran - which accepted United Nations peace terms last month after delaying for a year - was more cautious. It reflected the uncertainties provoked by an Iranian about-face described by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Iranian leader, as deadlier than poison.
”We will abide by the cease-fire completely, and there will be no shooting,” the Iranian President, Hojatolislam Ali Khamenei, reportedly told Iranian soldiers.
Hojatolislam Hashemi Rafsanjani, Speaker of the Iranian Parliament, said on the Teheran radio, ”There should be no violations on the front, and God forbid not one unauthorized bullet should be fired.”
But he cautioned: ”We have not yet arrived at peace. God willing, if we reach that day, we will declare it ourselves.”
Mr. Rafsanjani, Iran’s newly appointed military commander, is widely held to have pressed the cause of peace in Teheran.
- Entire article found here.
From Bahman jalali’s “Days of Blood, Days of Fire (Tehran 1978-1979)” series, which chronicles the Iranian Revolution of 1979.
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“Beautiful stories happen in Japan that are less likely to happen elsewhere. There is still a generation of people there that don’t exist anywhere else. Let me tell you a story that explains. The professor’s flat you see in the film was built by a Japanese set designer. The details were so beautiful, I felt frustrated I could not show them all in the film. Now do you remember at the end of the film, when we refer to a book by Kierkegaard one that he had written by hand? I would say the set designer hand-wrote the set.
When the movie was finished, I told the set decorator I was sorry to not have been able to show his work extensively. His response: ” I did not expect you to show it.” He opened the kitchen cupboard and took a coffee box from it. ‘See this coffee,’ he said. “You cannot find this coffee in Tokyo anywhere. I am sure the professor would be the kind of man who would buy this coffee.” It came from Kyoto, and yet we never see this coffee. It stays in the box.”
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”I am Lebanese … I love garlic and I eat it shamelessly … I speak to my mother on the phone an average of four times a day … when I say inshallah in response to a request, it probably means no … I think taxi drivers are the best source of national news … I’m loud … I love unconditionally this memory, idea and sensibility we call Palestine … I am Lebanese”
On Being Lebanese, Mashalla blog.
