Abolhassan Banisadr, 88, the first president of postrevolutionary Iran, died in Paris after a long illness, his family announced on Saturday.

He served in various roles in Iran's government after the 1979 revolution, including as president, foreign minister, economics minister, and on Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's Revolutionary Council. The two men had an acrimonious political split.

Banisadr, the son of a cleric, had been instrumental in the rise of Khomeini before and upon his return to Iran during the 1979 revolution, but spent the past four decades in exile due to the authoritarian direction of Iran's revolution.

A personal story intertwined with Iranian history

Banisadr's story is intertwined with the history of Iran over the past century. As a young man, he was an activist in the National Front of Iran who supported President Mohammad Mossadegh, later overthrown by the CIA in 1953.

In the '70s, Banisadr provided his apartment in France to Khomeini when the shah forced Khomeini into exile from Iraq in 1978. Banisadr moved his own family out of his apartment to accommodate the man who would become Iran's Supreme Leader.

Banisadr wore Western-style suits in contrast to the clerical garb of other leaders in the Islamic Revolution, in part owing to his background as a repeated exile in France. He once told Jean-Paul Sartre he would become president of Iran some 15 years before he assumed the office.

A supporter of a liberal, socialist Islam, he would be ousted as president in June 1981 owing to his battles with hard-line clerics and his views, which came to dissent from Khomeini's vision of autocratic authoritarianism. This despite being on the same plane that returned Khomeini to Iran in 1979 and serving on his Revolutionary Council.

A few years in the revolutionary Islamist government

His first turn in the revolutionary government came as foreign minister just days after radicalized students seized the US Embassy in Tehran, taking diplomats as hostages.

He later said the hostage-takers had behaved as "dictators who have created a government within a government."

Khomeini pushed Banisadr from the top job at the Foreign Ministry after only 18 days because Banisadr sought a negotiated end to the hostage crisis. He was replaced with a hard-liner.

In early 1980, Banisadr won three-quarters of the vote and became president following a decree from Khomeini that said a cleric should not be president. His inaugural address was filled with zeal and optimism.

"Our revolution will not win unless it is exported," Banisadr said. "We are going to create a new order in which deprived people will not always be deprived," he added.

After 16 months in office, parliament, with its assembled fundamentalist clerics, voted to impeach him for his disagreements with Khomeini.

Exile from the revolution he helped spawn

He later described watching the liberal Islamist revolution he worked for turn illiberal as "like a child watching my father slowly turn into an alcoholic." He said: "The drug this time was power."

One month after Banisadr's removal from office, he fled to France aboard a hijacked military aircraft and immediately claimed political asylum, which the French government granted.

Rajavi, the leader of the Mujahideen-el-Khalq, was also aboard the same plane. The two went on to co-found the National Council for the Resistance of Iran (NCRI), an organization Banisadr later left because of the group's alliance with Saddam Hussein of Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War.

Since 1984 Banisadr lived in Versailles outside Paris under police protection.

In exile, he said Khomeini "bears heavy responsibility for the appalling disaster that has befallen the country."

At times, Banisadr had been referred to as "Khomeini's spiritual son."

ar/rc (AFP, AP, Reuters)