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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Iran
Index
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi distributes land deeds to a peasant woman under a land reform
program
Courtesy United States Information Agency
Elections to the twenty-first Majlis in September 1963 led to
the formation of a new political party, the Iran Novin (New Iran)
Party, committed to a program of economic and administrative reform
and renewal. The Alam government had opened talks with the National
Front leaders earlier in the year, but no accommodation had been
reached, and the talks had broken down over such issues as freedom
of activity for the front. As a result, the front was not
represented in the elections, which were limited to the officially
sanctioned parties, and the only candidates on the slate were those
presented by the Union of National Forces, an organization of
senior civil servants and officials and of workers' and farmers'
representatives, put together with government support. After the
elections, the largest bloc in the new Majlis, with forty seats,
was a group called the Progressive Center. The center, an exclusive
club of senior civil servants, had been established by Hasan Ali
Mansur in 1961 to study and make policy recommendations on major
economic and social issues. In June 1963, the shah had designated
the center as his personal research bureau. When the new Majlis
convened in October, 100 more deputies joined the center, giving
Mansur a majority. In December, Mansur converted the Progressive
Center into a political party, the Iran Novin. In March 1964, Alam
resigned and the shah appointed Mansur prime minister, at the head
of an Iran Novin-led government.
The events leading to the establishment of the Iran Novin and
the appointment of Mansur as prime minister represented a renewed
attempt by the shah and his advisers to create a political
organization that would be loyal to the crown, attract the support
of the educated classes and the technocratic elite, and strengthen
the administration and the economy. The Iran Novin drew its
membership almost exclusively from a younger generation of senior
civil servants, Western-educated technocrats, and business leaders.
Initially, membership was limited to 500 hand-picked persons, and
it was allowed to grow very slowly. In time it came to include
leading members of the provincial elite and its bureaucratic,
professional, and business classes. Even in the late 1960s and
early 1970s, when trade unions and professional organizations
affiliated themselves with the party, full membership was reserved
for a limited group.
In carrying out economic and administrative reforms, Mansur
created four new ministries and transferred the authority for
drawing up the budget from the Ministry of Finance to the newly
created Budget Bureau. The bureau was attached to the Plan
Organization and was responsible directly to the prime minister. In
subsequent years it introduced greater rationality in planning and
budgeting. Mansur appointed younger technocrats to senior civil
service posts, a policy continued by his successor. He also created
the Health Corps, modeled after the Literacy Corps, to provide
primary health care to rural areas.
In the Majlis the government enjoyed a comfortable majority,
and the nominal opposition, the Mardom Party, generally voted with
the government party. An exception, however, was the general
response to the Status of Forces bill, a measure that granted
diplomatic immunity to United States military personnel serving in
Iran, and to their staffs and families. In effect, the bill would
allow these Americans to be tried by United States rather than
Iranian courts for crimes committed on Iranian soil. For Iranians
the bill recalled the humiliating capitulatory concessions
extracted from Iran by the imperial powers in the nineteenth
century. Feeling against the bill was sufficiently strong that
sixty-five deputies absented themselves from the legislature, and
sixty-one opposed the bill when it was put to a vote in October
1964.
The measure also aroused strong feeling outside the Majlis.
Khomeini, who had been released from house arrest in April 1964,
denounced the measure in a public sermon before a huge congregation
in Qom. Tapes of the sermon and a leaflet based on it were widely
circulated and attracted considerable attention. Khomeini was
arrested again in November, within days of the sermon, and sent
into exile in Turkey. In October 1965, he was permitted to take up
residence in the city of An Najaf, Iraq--the site of numerous Shia
shrines--where he was to remain for the next thirteen years.
Although economic conditions were soon to improve dramatically,
the country had not yet fully recovered from the recession of the
1959-63 period, which had imposed hardships on the poorer classes.
Mansur attempted to make up a budget deficit of an estimated US$300
million (at then prevalent rates of exchange) by imposing heavy new
taxes on gasoline and kerosene and on exit permits for Iranians
leaving the country. Because kerosene was the primary heating fuel
for the working classes, the new taxes proved highly unpopular.
Taxicab drivers in Tehran went on strike, and Mansur was forced to
rescind the fuel taxes in January, six weeks after they had been
imposed. An infusion of US$200 million in new revenues (US$185
million from a cash bonus for five offshore oil concessions granted
to United States and West European firms and US$15 million from a
supplementary oil agreement concluded with the Consortium, a group
of foreign oil companies) helped the government through its
immediate financial difficulties.
With this assistance, Mohammad Reza Shah was able to maintain
political stability despite the assassination of his prime minister
and an attempt on his own life. On January 21, 1965, Mansur was
assassinated by members of a radical Islamic group. Evidence made
available after the Islamic Revolution revealed that the group had
affiliations with clerics close to Khomeini. A military tribunal
sentenced six of those charged to death and the others to long
prison terms. In April there was also an attempt on the shah's
life, organized by a group of Iranian graduates of British
universities. To replace Mansur as prime minister, the shah
appointed Amir Abbas Hoveyda, a former diplomat and an executive of
the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC--see
Oil and Gas Industry,
ch. 3). Hoveyda had helped Mansur found the Progressive Center and
the Iran Novin and had served as his minister of finance.
Hoveyda's appointment marked the beginning of nearly a decade
of impressive economic growth and relative political stability at
home. During this period, the shah also used Iran's enhanced
economic and military strength to secure for the country a more
influential role in the Persian Gulf region, and he improved
relations with Iran's immediate neighbors and the Soviet Union and
its allies. Hoveyda remained in office for the next twelve years,
the longest term of any of Iran's modern prime ministers. During
this decade, the Iran Novin dominated the government and the
Majlis. It won large majorities in both the 1967 and the 1971
elections. These elections were carefully controlled by the
authorities. Only the Mardom Party and, later, the Pan-Iranist
Party, an extreme nationalist group, were allowed to participate in
them. Neither party was able to secure more than a handful of
Majlis seats, and neither engaged in serious criticism of
government programs.
In 1969 and again in 1972, the shah appeared ready to permit
the Mardom Party, under new leadership, to function as a genuine
opposition, i.e., to criticize the government openly and to contest
elections more energetically, but these developments did not occur.
The Iran Novin's domination of the administrative machinery was
further made evident during municipal council elections held in 136
towns throughout the country in 1968. The Iran Novin won control of
a large majority of the councils and every seat in 115 of them.
Only 10 percent of eligible voters cast ballots in Tehran, however,
a demonstration of public indifference that was not confined to the
capital.
Under Hoveyda the government improved its administrative
machinery and launched what was dubbed "the education revolution."
It adopted a new civil service code and a new tax law and appointed
better qualified personnel to key posts. Hoveyda also created
several additional ministries in 1967, including the Ministry of
Science and Higher Education, which was intended to help meet
expanded and more specialized manpower needs. In mid-1968 the
government began a program that, although it did not resolve
problems of overcrowding and uneven quality, increased the number
of institutions of higher education substantially, brought students
from provincial and lower middle-class backgrounds into the new
community colleges, and created a number of institutions of high
academic standing, such as Tehran's Arya Mehr Technical University
(see Education
, ch. 2).
The shah had remarried in 1959, and the new queen, Farah Diba
Pahlavi, had given birth to a male heir, Reza, in 1960. In 1967,
because the crown prince was still very young, steps were taken to
regularize the procedure for the succession. Under the
constitution, if the shah were to die before the crown prince had
come of age, the Majlis would meet to appoint a regent. There might
be a delay in the appointment of a regent, especially if the Majlis
was not in session. A constituent assembly, convened in September
1967, amended the constitution, providing for the queen
automatically to act as regent unless the shah in his lifetime
designated another individual. In October 1967, believing his
achievements finally justified such a step, the shah celebrated his
long-postponed coronation. Like his father, he placed the crown on
his own head. To mark the occasion, the Majlis conferred on the
shah the title of Arya-Mehr, or "Light of the Aryans." This
glorification of the monarchy and the monarch, however, was not
universally popular with the Iranians. In 1971 celebrations were
held to mark what was presented as 2,500 years of uninterrupted
monarchy (there were actually gaps in the chronological record) and
the twenty-fifth centennial of the founding of the Iranian empire
by Cyrus the Great. The ceremonies were designed primarily to
celebrate the institution of monarchy and to affirm the position of
the shah as the country's absolute and unchallenged ruler. The
lavish ceremonies (which many compared to a Hollywood-style
extravaganza), the virtual exclusion of Iranians from the
celebrations in which the honored guests were foreign heads of
state, and the excessive adulation of the person of the shah in
official propaganda generated much adverse domestic comment. A
declaration by Khomeini condemning the celebrations and the regime
received wide circulation. In 1975, when the Majlis, at government
instigation, voted to alter the Iranian calendar so that year one
of the calendar coincided with the first year of the reign of Cyrus
rather than with the beginning of the Islamic era, many Iranians
viewed the move as an unnecessary insult to religious
sensibilities.
Iran, meantime, experienced a period of unprecedented and
sustained economic growth. The land distribution program launched
in 1962, along with steadily expanding job opportunities, improved
living standards, and moderate inflation between 1964 and 1973,
help explain the relative lack of serious political unrest during
this period.
In foreign policy, the shah used the relaxation in East-West
tensions to improve relations with the Soviet Union. In an exchange
of notes in 1962, he gave Moscow assurances he would not allow Iran
to become a base for aggression against the Soviet Union or permit
foreign missile bases to be established on Iranian soil. In 1965
Iran and the Soviet Union signed a series of agreements under which
the Soviets provided credits and technical assistance to build
Iran's first steel mill in exchange for shipments of Iranian
natural gas. This led to the construction of the almost
2,000-kilometer-long trans-Iranian gas pipeline from the southern
fields to the Iranian-Soviet frontier. The shah also bought small
quantities of arms from the Soviet Union and expanded trade with
East European states. Although Soviet officials did not welcome the
increasingly close military and security cooperation between Iran
and the United States, especially after 1971, Moscow did not allow
this to disrupt its own rapprochement with Tehran.
In 1964 the shah joined the heads of state of Turkey and
Pakistan to create an organization, Regional Cooperation for
Development (RCD), for economic, social, and cultural cooperation
among the three countries "outside the framework of the Central
Treaty Organization." The establishment of RCD was seen as a sign
of the diminishing importance of CENTO and, like the rapprochement
with the Soviet Union, of the shah's increasing independence in
foreign policy. The three RCD member states undertook a number of
joint economic and cultural projects, but never on a large scale.
The shah also began to play a larger role in Persian Gulf
affairs. He supported the royalists in the Yemen Civil War
(1962-70) and, beginning in 1971, assisted the sultan of Oman in
putting down a rebellion in Dhofar
(see Historical Background
, ch.
5). He also reached an understanding with Britain on the fate of
Bahrain and three smaller islands in the Gulf that Britain had
controlled since the nineteenth century but that Iran continued to
claim. Britain's decision to withdraw from the Gulf by 1971 and to
help organize the Trucial States into a federation of independent
states (eventually known as the United Arab Emirates--UAE)
necessitated resolution of that situation. In 1970 the shah agreed
to give up Iran's long-standing claim to Bahrain and to abide by
the desire of the majority of its inhabitants that Bahrain become
an independent state. The shah, however, continued to press his
claim to three islands, Abu Musa (controlled by the shaykh of
Sharjah) and the Greater and Lesser Tunbs (controlled by the shaykh
of Ras al Khaymah). He secured control of Abu Musa by agreeing to
pay the shaykh of Sharjah an annual subsidy, and he seized the two
Tunbs by military force, immediately following Britain's
withdrawal.
This incident offended Iraq, however, which broke diplomatic
relations with Iran as a result. Relations with Iraq remained
strained until 1975, when Iran and Iraq signed the Algiers
Agreement, under which Iraq conceded Iran's long-standing demand
for equal navigation rights in the Shatt al Arab, and the shah
agreed to end support for the Kurdish rebellion in northern Iraq.
With the other Persian Gulf states, Tehran maintained generally
good relations. Iran signed agreements with Saudi Arabia and other
Gulf states delimiting frontiers along the continental shelf in the
Persian Gulf, began cooperation and information-sharing on security
matters with Saudi Arabia, and encouraged closer cooperation among
the newly independent Gulf shaykhdoms through the Gulf Cooperation
Council.
To enhance Iran's role in the Gulf, the shah also used oil
revenues to expand and equip the Iranian army, air force, and navy.
His desire that, in the aftermath of the British withdrawal, Iran
would play the primary role in guaranteeing Gulf security coincided
with President Richard M. Nixon's hopes for the region. The Nixon
Doctrine, enunciated in 1969, sought to encourage United States
allies to shoulder greater responsibility for regional security.
Then, during his 1972 visit to Iran, Nixon took the unprecedented
step of allowing the shah to purchase any conventional weapon in
the United States arsenal in the quantities the shah believed
necessary for Iran's defense
(see
Foreign Influences in Weapons, Training, and Support Systems
, ch. 5). United States-Iranian
military cooperation deepened when the shah allowed the United
States to establish two listening posts in Iran to monitor Soviet
ballistic missile launches and other military activity.
Data as of December 1987
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