For Oil & Islam

Four shots fired in Teheran last week --four shots fired for oil and Islam--were heard around the world.

Ali Razmara, Iran's best postwar Premier, was attending a memorial to a recently deceased religious leader in the Mosque of the Shah. In the press of other business, Razmara had almost forgotten the ceremony and was hurrying in order not to be late. As he stepped briskly into the courtyard, a bearded young Moslem fanatic named Khalil Tahmassebi slid out of a crowd, got behind the Premier, opened fire. The first pistol bullet, which struck the back of Ali Razmara's head, was enough to cause instant death. Two other bullets hit him in the neck and chest. The fourth shot wounded a policeman who was trying to grapple with the assassin.* Police said that Tahmassebi and three accomplices were trying to commit suicide when finally subdued.

Fine Impartiality. Assassin Tahmassebi is a carpenter, a reader of the Koran in the mosque, a member of a small xenophobic sect called Fadayan Islam (Crusaders of Islam) which, with fine impartiality, has been denouncing Truman, Stalin and Britain's George VI. Washington and London, which were shocked and worried by Razmara's murder, regarded Tahmassebi as a mere triggerman; the real instigator was assumed to be Ayatulla Kashani, head of Fadayan Islam and a member of a twelve-man "National Front" in the Majlis (parliament).

In recent months nearly all sectors of Iranian opinion--and especially such nationalist and religious groups as Fadayan Islam--had been screaming for nationalization of oil, that is, for the freeing of Iranian oil from control by Britain, whose present contracts run to 1993 (TIME, Jan. 8; Feb. 5). Razmara had steadfastly opposed nationalization, on the ground that it would cause unemployment and great loss of urgently needed government revenue.

When Razmara became Premier last summer, he took office on a high tide of U.S. approval. Uncontaminated by Iran's smelly politics, Razmara had been a soldier all his adult life, was chief of staff of the Iranian army when he became Premier. He had not been in office long, however, when he found himself whipsawed by U.S. negligence and fumbling, by British hard-dealing, and by the venal Majlis, every member of which would like to be Premier himself. Lately, Razmara made several safety-first concessions to Russia, e.g., banning the Voice of America and BBC broadcasts, allowing Tass, the Soviet news agency, to operate freely.

Only six weeks ago, Razmara carried enough weight in the Majlis to win an overwhelming vote of confidence. Within a few hours of his death, 15 members of the parliament's petroleum commission voted unanimously in favor of the assassin's program: nationalization of oil.

To succeed Razmara as Premier, the Shah appointed Hussein Ala, 68, postwar Iranian Ambassador to the U.S. Hussein Ala is the doughty little statesman who, in 1946, had stood up at Lake Success and successfully demanded that the Russians clear out of the northern Iranian province of Azerbaijan. Until this week, Ala was in charge of a generous and sense-making program of parceling out land, owned by the Shah, to landless peasants. Parliamentary confirmation of Hussein Ala was promptly voted, 69 to 27.

As Minister of Court for 18 months (1944-45), Ala won so much respect from the Shah that the latter left the Minister-of-Court job unfilled for two years after Ala went to Washington. The dogged fight for Azerbaijan in the U.N. almost ruined Ala's health. Outwardly calm and unflaggingly polite, speaking a precise, British-accented English, Ala began to suffer from heart trouble, and after the fight for Azerbaijan was over, he went to Arizona to recuperate.

Picasso's Dove. No one suggested that Iran's Communists had anything to do with Razmara's death. Characteristically, however, the Communists sought to make propaganda hay out of the situation. In Teheran last week 60,000 people, headed by the underground Tudeh partisans, demonstrated not only for oil, but for Communist-style peace. "Down with war agitators!" they shouted. "Long live the free Korean people!" Ten thousand women & children followed a float on which appeared a reproduction of Pablo Picasso's peace dove, known to anti-Communists the world over as "The Dove that Goes Boom."

At Razmara's funeral, which was attended by U.S. Ambassador Henry F. Grady, Soviet Ambassador Ivan Sadchi-kov and other diplomats, old army friends of the dead Premier wept. In his jail cell, Assassin Tahmassebi chanted verses from the Koran, shouted: "Long live Islam, death to the oil company!" Fadayan Islam's newspaper threatened other Iranian leaders with death unless Tahmassebi was turned loose within three days.

*The word "assassin" comes from an old Arabic word, hashshashin, which means a killer hopped up on hashish. A Persian organization, the Assassins, carried on effective anti-Christian terrorist activity during the Crusades.

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