Exclusive: World still remembers 1953 Iran coup, says ex-Mauritius president

By Syed Zafar Mehdi

The world still remembers the 1953 military coup that overthrew Iran’s then-Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, says the former president of Mauritius, noting that it’s important to reflect on what the event meant for not only Iran but the whole world.

In an exclusive interview with the Press TV website, Ameenah Gurib-Fakim, who served as the sixth president of Mauritius from 2015 to 2018, said the word “democracy” has been increasingly “hallowed out.”

“It has been, in my opinion, a turning point when a democratically-elected PM was forcibly removed because his visions did not align with those of the superpowers, especially when it came to the exploitation of its own resources for its own benefits,” she stated.

This week marks the 70^th anniversary of the military coup engineered by the American and British spy agencies, CIA and MI6, to topple Iran's then-Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh.

The violent coup that took place on August 19, 1953, resulted in scores of civilian deaths and restored Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's West-backed monarchial rule.

It wasn’t the first time that foreign spy agencies, in particular the CIA, were involved in military coups overseas to overthrow “unfriendly” governments and install “friendly” dictatorial regimes.

“The CIA has acknowledged coups that have deposed many leaders in countries in the Global South, including Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Congo in 1960, etc,” Gurib-Fakim told the Press TV website.

“I think Iran was the first country to have been victim to the then recently-established CIA and this was at the behest of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.”

She hastened to add that behind all these military coups are “economic interests for American corporates” while pointing to recent development in Niger.

“It’s either for a drone base or for uranium and geostrategic location in the Sahel. Double standards? No doubt,” the former president and biodiversity scientist said.

On the sanctions regime against the Islamic Republic of Iran, which intensified after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Gurib-Fakim said sanctions are “crimes” as they affect the “vulnerable components of the population, often the poor, who cannot access food or medicine or both.”

“One can never forget the 500,000 children who died in Iraq because of such sanctions.”

The former Mauritius president said we are living in “interesting geopolitical times”, referring to the transition from a US-dominated unipolar to multipolar world order.

“On the one hand we are seeing the consolidation and expansion of the Global South through the BRICS membership and soon their collective GDP will exceed 50 percent of the global output and their population size already is around 40 percent of the world,” she remarked.

“Inevitably, we are living in a multipolar world, whether it will be more fractious, only time will tell but tensions are arising everywhere already. Events are proving Francis Fukuyama wrong. We do not yet have the ‘End of History’.”

Press TV’s website can also be accessed at the following alternate addresses:

www.presstv.co.uk