Larushka Ivan-Zadeh writes about Coup 53 in the Saturday Review for the Times: “August 19 is not a significant date in the UK calendar, but for many Iranians it marks an unbearable national tragedy — for which the British government has blood on its hands. This date is the anniversary of a 1953 CIA/MI6-led coup that toppled Iran’s first democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, a leader who dared to nationalise the lucrative Anglo-Iranian oil industry — which was rebranded, post-coup, as British Petroleum (BP).
“If you want to understand this crazy, volatile, toxic relationship that Iran has with the West, particularly Britain and America, you don’t go back to the 1979 hostage crisis, you go back to 1953,” explains the irrepressible Iranian film-maker Taghi Amirani, who is about to release an incendiary documentary on the subject, entitled Coup 53. “Everything stems from that. It shaped the Middle East, it totally destroyed Iran’s hope for democracy and we are living with the consequences of that now.””