refused to accept the all too familiar role of victims. Like the
Founders of the Faith before them, they took moral charge of the great
issue between them and their adversaries. It was they, not revolutionary
courts or revolutionary guards, who quickly set the terms of the
encounter, and this extraordinary achievement affected not only the hearts
but the minds of those who observed the situation from outside the Baha'i
Faith. The persecuted community neither attacked its oppressors, nor
sought political advantage from the crisis. Nor did its Baha'i defenders
in other lands call for the dismantling of the Iranian constitution, much
less for revenge. All demanded only justice --the recognition of the rights
guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, endorsed by the
community of nations, ratified by the Iranian government, and many of them
embodied even in clauses of the Islamic constitution.

The crisis roused the Baha'i world to extraordinary feats of achievement.
National Spiritual Assemblies who had little or no experience in
developing a working relationship with officials of their countries'
governments were called on to solicit government support for resolutions
at various levels of the international human rights system, and did so
with outstanding success. Year after year, for twenty uninterrupted years,
the case of the Iranian Baha'is proceeded through the international human
rights system, gathering support in successive resolutions, ensuring
attention to Baha'i grievances in the missions of rapporteurs appointed by
the United Nations Human Rights Commission and consolidating these gains
through decisions of the Third Committee of the United Nations General
Assembly. Every attempt by the Iranian regime to escape international
condemnation of its treatment of its Baha'i citizens failed to shake the
support the Baha'i issue attracted from a persistent majority of
sympathetic nations represented on the Commission. The achievement was all
the more remarkable in the context of the Commission's constantly changing
membership and a demanding agenda that included human rights abuses in
other countries that affected millions of victims.

At the same time as direct pressure was being exerted on the Iranian
government, the case was attracting unprecedented publicity around the
world in newspapers, magazines and the broadcast media. Newspapers such as
_The_ _New York Times_, _Le Monde _and _Frankfurter Allgemein