Among the Smugglers

After three weeks of desultory voting--stretched out because of impassable roads and the difficulty of finding literate officials to prepare the handwritten ballots--Iran last week tallied up the results of the election of a new, 200-seat Majlis (Parliament). As the returns trickled in, Premier Manouchehr Eghbal and his conservative Nationalists seemed assured of at least 150 seats. But it proved a Pyrrhic victory.

Concerned by widespread corruption in the government bureaucracy, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi had wanted a free, two-party vote. With the Shah's encouragement, his close boyhood friend, Asa-dollah Alam, had taken to the stump at the head of a loyal opposition called the People's Party, which denounced corruption and urged land reform. At this point, the Shah retired to his six palaces and his pregnant third wife, Farah Diba, whom he counts on to produce a male heir in late October. But while the Shah relaxed, pro-Nationalist landowners herded their villagers to the polls. One independent candidate produced photographs showing that Eghbal's men had used government trucks for the job and that one Nationalist had voted six times.

Outraged by the fraud, Teheran University Professor Mozaffer Baghai, once a lieutenant of ex-Premier Mohammed Mossadegh and now an advocate of Gandhi-style protest, last week rallied 2,000 young Iranians to a meeting of his new movement, the "Protectors of Liberty." Speaking in quiet classroom tones from a stuccoed Teheran balcony, Baghai declared: "Premier Eghbal is a traitor. Among the big opium smugglers are high government officials, deputies, ministers, directors of independent agencies. Dr. Eghbal knows every one of them. If this Cabinet does not resign or is not removed, there will be an end to the Kingdom of Iran."

The Shah studied the returns and called a press conference. "I am not satisfied with these elections," he said bluntly. "If the nation wants me to cancel them, despite the law and the limits of my constitutional power, I will do so." But he held out the hope that the Majlis would reform itself by "changing the electoral law to match conditions in democratic countries." A day later, Premier Eghbal motored to Saadabad Palace and turned in his resignation. At week's end it still lay on the desk of the Shah, who pondered how to soothe a popular unrest not seen in Iran since the fall of weepy, nationalistic Mossadegh seven years before.

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