The opening of that Plan coincided with the recrudescence of
savage persecution of the Baha'i community in Iran, a deliberate effort to
eliminate the Cause of God from the land of its birth.
The heroic steadfastness of the Persian
friends has been the mainspring of tremendous international attention focused
on the Cause, eventually bringing it to the agenda of the General Assembly of
the United Nations, and, together with world-wide publicity in all the media,
accomplishing its emergence from the obscurity which characterized and
sheltered the first period of its life.
This dramatic process impelled the Universal House of Justice to address
a Statement on Peace to the Peoples of the World and arrange for its delivery
to Heads of State and the generality of the rulers. - The Universal House of
Justice (Ridvan 1986 message to the Baha’is of the World; ‘Messages from the
Universal House of Justice 1963-1986’)
