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Iran
Index
Mehdi Bazargan became the first prime minister of the
revolutionary regime in February 1979. Bazargan, however, headed a
government that controlled neither the country nor even its own
bureaucratic apparatus. Central authority had broken down. Hundreds
of semi-independent revolutionary committees, not answerable to
central authority, were performing a variety of functions in major
cities and towns across the country. Factory workers, civil
servants, white-collar employees, and students were often in
control, demanding a say in running their organizations and
choosing their chiefs. Governors, military commanders, and other
officials appointed by the prime minister were frequently rejected
by the lower ranks or local inhabitants. A range of political
groups, from the far left to the far right, from secular to
ultra-Islamic, were vying for political power, pushing rival
agendas, and demanding immediate action from the prime minister.
Clerics led by Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti established the Islamic
Republican Party (IRP). The party emerged as the organ of the
clerics around Khomeini and the major political organization in the
country. Not to be outdone, followers of more moderate senior
cleric Shariatmadari established the Islamic People's Republican
Party (IPRP) in 1979, which had a base in Azarbaijan,
Shariatmadari's home province.
Moreover, multiple centers of authority emerged within the
government. As the supreme leader, Khomeini did not consider
himself bound by the government. He made policy pronouncements,
named personal representatives to key government organizations,
established new institutions, and announced decisions without
consulting his prime minister. The prime minister found he had to
share power with the Revolutionary Council, which Khomeini had
established in January 1979 and which initially was composed of
clerics close to Khomeini, secular political leaders identified
with Bazargan, and two representatives of the armed forces. With
the establishment of the provisional government, Bazargan and his
colleagues left the council to form the cabinet. They were replaced
by Khomeini aides from the Paris period, such as Abolhassan Bani
Sadr and Sadeq Qotbzadeh, and by protégés of Khomeini's clerical
associates. The cabinet was to serve as the executive authority.
But the Revolutionary Council was to wield supreme decision- making
and legislative authority.
Differences quickly emerged between the cabinet and the council
over appointments, the role of the revolutionary courts and other
revolutionary organizations, foreign policy, and the general
direction of the Revolution. Bazargan and his cabinet colleagues
were eager for a return to normalcy and rapid reassertion of
central authority. Clerics of the Revolutionary Council, more
responsive to the Islamic and popular temper of the mass of their
followers, generally favored more radical economic and social
measures. They also proved more willing and able to mobilize and to
use the street crowd and the revolutionary organizations to achieve
their ends.
In July 1979, Bazargan obtained Khomeini's approval for an
arrangement he hoped would permit closer cooperation between the
Revolutionary Council and the cabinet. Four clerical members of the
council joined the government, one as minister of interior and
three others as undersecretaries of interior, education, and
defense, while Bazargan and three cabinet colleagues joined the
council. (All eight continued in their original positions as well.)
Nevertheless, tensions persisted.
Even while attempting to put in place the institutions of the
new order, the revolutionaries turned their attention to bringing
to trial and punishing members of the former regime whom they
considered responsible for carrying out political repression,
plundering the country's wealth, implementing damaging economic
policies, and allowing foreign exploitation of Iran. A
revolutionary court set to work almost immediately in the school
building in Tehran where Khomeini had set up his headquarters.
Revolutionary courts were established in provincial centers shortly
thereafter. The Tehran court passed death sentences on four of the
shah's generals on February 16, 1979; all four were executed by
firing squad on the roof of the building housing Khomeini's
headquarters. More executions, of military and police officers,
SAVAK agents, cabinet ministers, Majlis deputies, and officials of
the shah's regime, followed on an almost daily basis.
The activities of the revolutionary courts became a focus of
intense controversy. On the one hand, left-wing political groups
and populist clerics pressed hard for "revolutionary justice" for
miscreants of the former regime. On the other hand, lawyers' and
human rights' groups protested the arbitrary nature of the
revolutionary courts, the vagueness of charges, and the absence of
defense lawyers. Bazargan, too, was critical of the courts'
activities. At the prime minister's insistence, the revolutionary
courts suspended their activities on March 14, 1979. On April 5,
new regulations governing the courts were promulgated. The courts
were to be established at the discretion of the Revolutionary
Council and with Khomeini's permission. They were authorized to try
a variety of broadly defined crimes, such as "sowing corruption on
earth," "crimes against the people," and "crimes against the
Revolution." The courts resumed their work on April 6. On the
following day, despite international pleas for clemency, Hoveyda,
the shah's prime minister for twelve years, was put to death.
Attempts by Bazargan to have the revolutionary courts placed under
the judiciary and to secure protection for potential victims
through amnesties issued by Khomeini also failed. Beginning in
August 1979, the courts tried and passed death sentences on members
of ethnic minorities involved in antigovernment movements. Some 550
persons had been executed by the time Bazargan resigned in November
1979. Bazargan had also attempted, but failed, to bring the
revolutionary committees under his control. The committees, whose
members were armed, performed a variety of duties. They policed
neighborhoods in urban areas, guarded prisons and government
buildings, made arrests, and served as the execution squads of the
revolutionary tribunals. The committees often served the interests
of powerful individual clerics, revolutionary personalities, and
political groups, however. They made unauthorized arrests,
intervened in labor-management disputes, and seized property.
Despite these abuses, members of the Revolutionary Council wanted
to bring the committees under their own control, rather than
eliminate them. With this in mind, in February 1979 they appointed
Ayatollah Mohammad Reza Mahdavi-Kani head of the Tehran
revolutionary committee and charged him with supervising the
committees countrywide. Mahdavi-Kani dissolved many committees,
consolidated others, and sent thousands of committeemen home. But
the committees, like the revolutionary courts, endured, serving as
one of the coercive arms of the revolutionary government.
In May 1979 Khomeini authorized the establishment of the
Pasdaran (Pasdaran-e Enghelab-e Islami, Islamic Revolutionary Guard
Corps or Revolutionary Guards--see
Special and Irregular Armed Forces
, ch. 5).
The Pasdaran was conceived by the men around
Khomeini as a military force loyal to the Revolution and the
clerical leaders, as a counterbalance for the regular army, and as
a force to use against the guerrilla organizations of the left,
which were also arming. Disturbances among the ethnic minorities
accelerated the expansion of the Pasdaran.
Two other important organizations were established in this
formative period. In March Khomeini established the Foundation for
the Disinherited (Bonyad-e Mostazafin--see
Treatment of Veterans and Widows
, ch. 5).
The organization was to take charge of the
assets of the Pahlavi Foundation and to use the proceeds to assist
low-income groups. The new foundation in time came to be one of the
largest conglomerates in the country, controlling hundreds of
expropriated and nationalized factories, trading firms, farms, and
apartment and office buildings, as well as two large newspaper
chains. The Crusade for Reconstruction (Jihad-e Sazandegi or
Jihad), established in June, recruited young people for
construction of clinics, local roads, schools, and similar
facilities in villages and rural areas. The organization also grew
rapidly, assuming functions in rural areas that had previously been
handled by the Planning and Budget Organization (which replaced the
Plan Organization in 1973) and the Ministry of Agriculture.
Trouble broke out among the Turkomans, the Kurds, and the
Arabic-speaking population of Khuzestan in March 1979
(see Peoples and Languages
, ch. 2). The disputes in the Turkoman region of
Gorgan were over land rather than claims for Turkoman cultural
identity or autonomy. Representatives of left-wing movements,
active in the region, were encouraging agricultural workers to
seize land from the large landlords. These disturbances were put
down, but not without violence. Meanwhile, in Khuzestan, the center
of Iran's oil industry, members of the Arabic-speaking population
organized and demanded a larger share of oil revenues for the
region, more jobs for local inhabitants, the use of Arabic as a
semi-official language, and a larger degree of local autonomy.
Because Arab states, including Iraq, had in the past laid claim to
Khuzestan as part of the "Arab homeland," the government was bound
to regard an indigenous movement among the Arabic-speaking
population with suspicion. The government also suspected that
scattered instances of sabotage in the oil fields were occurring
with Iraqi connivance. In May 1979, government forces responded to
these disturbances by firing on Arab demonstrators in Khorramshahr.
Several demonstrators were killed; others were shot on orders of
the local revolutionary court. The government subsequently quietly
transferred the religious leader of the Khuzestan Arabs, Ayatollah
Mohammad Taher Shubayr al Khaqani, to Qom, where he was kept under
house arrest. These measures ended further protests.
The Kurdish uprising proved more deep-rooted, serious, and
durable. The Kurdish leaders were disappointed that the Revolution
had not brought them the local autonomy they had long desired.
Scattered fighting began in March 1979 between government and
Kurdish forces and continued after a brief cease-fire; attempts at
negotiation proved abortive. One faction, led by Ahmad Muftizadeh,
the Friday prayer leader in Sanandaj, was ready to accept the
limited concessions offered by the government, but the Kurdish
Democratic Party, led by Abdol-Rahman Qasemlu, and a more radical
group led by Shaykh Ezz ad Din Husaini issued demands that the
authorities in Tehran did not feel they could accept. These
included the enlargement of the Kordestan region to include all
Kurdish-speaking areas in Iran, a specified share of the national
revenue for expenditure in the province, and complete autonomy in
provincial administration. Kurdish was to be recognized as an
official language for local use and for correspondence with the
central government. Kurds were to fill all local government posts
and to be in charge of local security forces. The central
government would remain responsible for national defense, foreign
affairs, and central banking functions. Similar autonomy would be
granted other ethnic minorities in the country. With the rejection
of these demands, serious fighting broke out in August 1979.
Khomeini, invoking his powers as commander in chief, used the army
against other Iranians for the first time since the Revolution. No
settlement was reached with the Kurds during Bazargan's prime
ministership.
Because the Bazargan government lacked the necessary security
forces to control the streets, such control passed gradually into
the hands of clerics in the Revolutionary Council and the IRP, who
ran the revolutionary courts and had influence with the Pasdaran,
the revolutionary committees, and the club-wielding
hezbollahis (see Glossary),
or "partisans of the party of
God." The clerics deployed these forces to curb rival political
organizations. In June the Revolutionary Council promulgated a new
press law and began a crackdown against the proliferating political
press. On August 8, 1979, the revolutionary prosecutor banned the
leading left-wing newspaper, Ayandegan. Five days later
hezbollahis broke up a Tehran rally called by the National
Democratic Front, a newly organized left-of-center political
movement, to protest the Ayandegan closing. The
Revolutionary Council then proscribed the front itself and issued
a warrant for the arrest of its leader. Hezbollahis also
attacked the headquarters of the Fadayan organization and forced
the Mojahedin to evacuate their headquarters. On August 20,
forty-one opposition papers were proscribed. On September 8, the
two largest newspaper chains in the country, Kayhan and Ettelaat,
were expropriated and transferred to the Foundation for the
Disinherited.
In June and July 1979, the Revolutionary Council also passed a
number of major economic measures, whose effect was to transfer
considerable private sector assets to the state. It nationalized
banks, insurance companies, major industries, and certain
categories of urban land; expropriated the wealth of leading
business and industrial families; and appointed state managers to
many private industries and companies.
Data as of December 1987
Bazargan and the Provisional Government
Mehdi Bazargan became the first prime minister of the
revolutionary regime in February 1979. Bazargan, however, headed a
government that controlled neither the country nor even its own
bureaucratic apparatus. Central authority had broken down. Hundreds
of semi-independent revolutionary committees, not answerable to
central authority, were performing a variety of functions in major
cities and towns across the country. Factory workers, civil
servants, white-collar employees, and students were often in
control, demanding a say in running their organizations and
choosing their chiefs. Governors, military commanders, and other
officials appointed by the prime minister were frequently rejected
by the lower ranks or local inhabitants. A range of political
groups, from the far left to the far right, from secular to
ultra-Islamic, were vying for political power, pushing rival
agendas, and demanding immediate action from the prime minister.
Clerics led by Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti established the Islamic
Republican Party (IRP). The party emerged as the organ of the
clerics around Khomeini and the major political organization in the
country. Not to be outdone, followers of more moderate senior
cleric Shariatmadari established the Islamic People's Republican
Party (IPRP) in 1979, which had a base in Azarbaijan,
Shariatmadari's home province.
Moreover, multiple centers of authority emerged within the
government. As the supreme leader, Khomeini did not consider
himself bound by the government. He made policy pronouncements,
named personal representatives to key government organizations,
established new institutions, and announced decisions without
consulting his prime minister. The prime minister found he had to
share power with the Revolutionary Council, which Khomeini had
established in January 1979 and which initially was composed of
clerics close to Khomeini, secular political leaders identified
with Bazargan, and two representatives of the armed forces. With
the establishment of the provisional government, Bazargan and his
colleagues left the council to form the cabinet. They were replaced
by Khomeini aides from the Paris period, such as Abolhassan Bani
Sadr and Sadeq Qotbzadeh, and by protégés of Khomeini's clerical
associates. The cabinet was to serve as the executive authority.
But the Revolutionary Council was to wield supreme decision- making
and legislative authority.
Differences quickly emerged between the cabinet and the council
over appointments, the role of the revolutionary courts and other
revolutionary organizations, foreign policy, and the general
direction of the Revolution. Bazargan and his cabinet colleagues
were eager for a return to normalcy and rapid reassertion of
central authority. Clerics of the Revolutionary Council, more
responsive to the Islamic and popular temper of the mass of their
followers, generally favored more radical economic and social
measures. They also proved more willing and able to mobilize and to
use the street crowd and the revolutionary organizations to achieve
their ends.
In July 1979, Bazargan obtained Khomeini's approval for an
arrangement he hoped would permit closer cooperation between the
Revolutionary Council and the cabinet. Four clerical members of the
council joined the government, one as minister of interior and
three others as undersecretaries of interior, education, and
defense, while Bazargan and three cabinet colleagues joined the
council. (All eight continued in their original positions as well.)
Nevertheless, tensions persisted.
Even while attempting to put in place the institutions of the
new order, the revolutionaries turned their attention to bringing
to trial and punishing members of the former regime whom they
considered responsible for carrying out political repression,
plundering the country's wealth, implementing damaging economic
policies, and allowing foreign exploitation of Iran. A
revolutionary court set to work almost immediately in the school
building in Tehran where Khomeini had set up his headquarters.
Revolutionary courts were established in provincial centers shortly
thereafter. The Tehran court passed death sentences on four of the
shah's generals on February 16, 1979; all four were executed by
firing squad on the roof of the building housing Khomeini's
headquarters. More executions, of military and police officers,
SAVAK agents, cabinet ministers, Majlis deputies, and officials of
the shah's regime, followed on an almost daily basis.
The activities of the revolutionary courts became a focus of
intense controversy. On the one hand, left-wing political groups
and populist clerics pressed hard for "revolutionary justice" for
miscreants of the former regime. On the other hand, lawyers' and
human rights' groups protested the arbitrary nature of the
revolutionary courts, the vagueness of charges, and the absence of
defense lawyers. Bazargan, too, was critical of the courts'
activities. At the prime minister's insistence, the revolutionary
courts suspended their activities on March 14, 1979. On April 5,
new regulations governing the courts were promulgated. The courts
were to be established at the discretion of the Revolutionary
Council and with Khomeini's permission. They were authorized to try
a variety of broadly defined crimes, such as "sowing corruption on
earth," "crimes against the people," and "crimes against the
Revolution." The courts resumed their work on April 6. On the
following day, despite international pleas for clemency, Hoveyda,
the shah's prime minister for twelve years, was put to death.
Attempts by Bazargan to have the revolutionary courts placed under
the judiciary and to secure protection for potential victims
through amnesties issued by Khomeini also failed. Beginning in
August 1979, the courts tried and passed death sentences on members
of ethnic minorities involved in antigovernment movements. Some 550
persons had been executed by the time Bazargan resigned in November
1979. Bazargan had also attempted, but failed, to bring the
revolutionary committees under his control. The committees, whose
members were armed, performed a variety of duties. They policed
neighborhoods in urban areas, guarded prisons and government
buildings, made arrests, and served as the execution squads of the
revolutionary tribunals. The committees often served the interests
of powerful individual clerics, revolutionary personalities, and
political groups, however. They made unauthorized arrests,
intervened in labor-management disputes, and seized property.
Despite these abuses, members of the Revolutionary Council wanted
to bring the committees under their own control, rather than
eliminate them. With this in mind, in February 1979 they appointed
Ayatollah Mohammad Reza Mahdavi-Kani head of the Tehran
revolutionary committee and charged him with supervising the
committees countrywide. Mahdavi-Kani dissolved many committees,
consolidated others, and sent thousands of committeemen home. But
the committees, like the revolutionary courts, endured, serving as
one of the coercive arms of the revolutionary government.
In May 1979 Khomeini authorized the establishment of the
Pasdaran (Pasdaran-e Enghelab-e Islami, Islamic Revolutionary Guard
Corps or Revolutionary Guards--see
Special and Irregular Armed Forces
, ch. 5).
The Pasdaran was conceived by the men around
Khomeini as a military force loyal to the Revolution and the
clerical leaders, as a counterbalance for the regular army, and as
a force to use against the guerrilla organizations of the left,
which were also arming. Disturbances among the ethnic minorities
accelerated the expansion of the Pasdaran.
Two other important organizations were established in this
formative period. In March Khomeini established the Foundation for
the Disinherited (Bonyad-e Mostazafin--see
Treatment of Veterans and Widows
, ch. 5).
The organization was to take charge of the
assets of the Pahlavi Foundation and to use the proceeds to assist
low-income groups. The new foundation in time came to be one of the
largest conglomerates in the country, controlling hundreds of
expropriated and nationalized factories, trading firms, farms, and
apartment and office buildings, as well as two large newspaper
chains. The Crusade for Reconstruction (Jihad-e Sazandegi or
Jihad), established in June, recruited young people for
construction of clinics, local roads, schools, and similar
facilities in villages and rural areas. The organization also grew
rapidly, assuming functions in rural areas that had previously been
handled by the Planning and Budget Organization (which replaced the
Plan Organization in 1973) and the Ministry of Agriculture.
Trouble broke out among the Turkomans, the Kurds, and the
Arabic-speaking population of Khuzestan in March 1979
(see Peoples and Languages
, ch. 2). The disputes in the Turkoman region of
Gorgan were over land rather than claims for Turkoman cultural
identity or autonomy. Representatives of left-wing movements,
active in the region, were encouraging agricultural workers to
seize land from the large landlords. These disturbances were put
down, but not without violence. Meanwhile, in Khuzestan, the center
of Iran's oil industry, members of the Arabic-speaking population
organized and demanded a larger share of oil revenues for the
region, more jobs for local inhabitants, the use of Arabic as a
semi-official language, and a larger degree of local autonomy.
Because Arab states, including Iraq, had in the past laid claim to
Khuzestan as part of the "Arab homeland," the government was bound
to regard an indigenous movement among the Arabic-speaking
population with suspicion. The government also suspected that
scattered instances of sabotage in the oil fields were occurring
with Iraqi connivance. In May 1979, government forces responded to
these disturbances by firing on Arab demonstrators in Khorramshahr.
Several demonstrators were killed; others were shot on orders of
the local revolutionary court. The government subsequently quietly
transferred the religious leader of the Khuzestan Arabs, Ayatollah
Mohammad Taher Shubayr al Khaqani, to Qom, where he was kept under
house arrest. These measures ended further protests.
The Kurdish uprising proved more deep-rooted, serious, and
durable. The Kurdish leaders were disappointed that the Revolution
had not brought them the local autonomy they had long desired.
Scattered fighting began in March 1979 between government and
Kurdish forces and continued after a brief cease-fire; attempts at
negotiation proved abortive. One faction, led by Ahmad Muftizadeh,
the Friday prayer leader in Sanandaj, was ready to accept the
limited concessions offered by the government, but the Kurdish
Democratic Party, led by Abdol-Rahman Qasemlu, and a more radical
group led by Shaykh Ezz ad Din Husaini issued demands that the
authorities in Tehran did not feel they could accept. These
included the enlargement of the Kordestan region to include all
Kurdish-speaking areas in Iran, a specified share of the national
revenue for expenditure in the province, and complete autonomy in
provincial administration. Kurdish was to be recognized as an
official language for local use and for correspondence with the
central government. Kurds were to fill all local government posts
and to be in charge of local security forces. The central
government would remain responsible for national defense, foreign
affairs, and central banking functions. Similar autonomy would be
granted other ethnic minorities in the country. With the rejection
of these demands, serious fighting broke out in August 1979.
Khomeini, invoking his powers as commander in chief, used the army
against other Iranians for the first time since the Revolution. No
settlement was reached with the Kurds during Bazargan's prime
ministership.
Because the Bazargan government lacked the necessary security
forces to control the streets, such control passed gradually into
the hands of clerics in the Revolutionary Council and the IRP, who
ran the revolutionary courts and had influence with the Pasdaran,
the revolutionary committees, and the club-wielding
hezbollahis (see Glossary),
or "partisans of the party of
God." The clerics deployed these forces to curb rival political
organizations. In June the Revolutionary Council promulgated a new
press law and began a crackdown against the proliferating political
press. On August 8, 1979, the revolutionary prosecutor banned the
leading left-wing newspaper, Ayandegan. Five days later
hezbollahis broke up a Tehran rally called by the National
Democratic Front, a newly organized left-of-center political
movement, to protest the Ayandegan closing. The
Revolutionary Council then proscribed the front itself and issued
a warrant for the arrest of its leader. Hezbollahis also
attacked the headquarters of the Fadayan organization and forced
the Mojahedin to evacuate their headquarters. On August 20,
forty-one opposition papers were proscribed. On September 8, the
two largest newspaper chains in the country, Kayhan and Ettelaat,
were expropriated and transferred to the Foundation for the
Disinherited.
In June and July 1979, the Revolutionary Council also passed a
number of major economic measures, whose effect was to transfer
considerable private sector assets to the state. It nationalized
banks, insurance companies, major industries, and certain
categories of urban land; expropriated the wealth of leading
business and industrial families; and appointed state managers to
many private industries and companies.
Data as of December 1987
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