The Shah's Divided Land

Day after day they marched, tens of thousands strong, defiant chanting demonstrators surging through the streets of Tehran, a capital unaccustomed to the shouts and echoes of dissent. The subject of their protest was the policies of Iran's supreme ruler, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Some carried signs demanding his ouster. Others called for a return of long denied civil and political liberties and the enforcement of Islamic laws. A few even demanded the legalization of the Tudeh, Iran's outlawed Communist party. The crowd, at times numbering more than 100,000, was a colorful, sometimes incongruous cross section of Iranian society: dissident students in jeans; women shrouded in the black chador, the traditional head-to-foot veil; peasants and merchants; and most important the bearded, black-robed Muslim mullahs, the religious leaders of the Shi'ite branch of Islam, which commands the allegiance of 93% of Iran's 34.4 million people.

The challenge to his leadership stunned the Shah and outraged his generals, who argued that the demonstrations were surely eroding his authority--and in turn the army's--and must be stopped. Declared an army officer: "We told the Shah, as Lincoln once said, a house divided cannot stand by itself." Said a general to the Shah: "It is against our military honor to stand the present situation." A lengthy late-night Cabinet meeting followed, and on the morning after, Premier Jaafar Sharif-Emami proclaimed a curfew and martial law for six months. Not in a quarter-century had Tehran been under the rule of troops.

Next day the demonstrations began again and this time ended in fatal, fiery riots. Many marchers apparently had not yet heard the martial-law proclamation over Radio Iran or else they chose to defy it. Jaleh Square in downtown Tehran was packed with thousands of protesters. A local religious leader appealed to them to disperse. They refused. A cavalcade of motorcycles, followed by groups of women and young children, began to proceed toward squads of armed soldiers. After repeated warnings, the soldiers lobbed canisters of tear gas into the crowd, then shot into the air. As the throngs advanced, the troops lowered their guns and fired. At nightfall, after the bodies of the victims had been loaded into army trucks and carried away, the government announced that 86 people, mostly women and children, had died, and 205 others were wounded.

For the proud Shah, as for his distressed people, it was a sorry week, yet one that had been a long time coming. For months the Shah's opposition had been growing more demonstrative, especially the Shi'ite mullahs and their followers. Three weeks ago, the militance took on a mad and sinister cast: terrorists set fire to a movie house in Abadan, killing 377 people. In an attempt to placate the religious conservatives, the Shah two weeks, earlier had installed Sharif-Emami as Premier, largely because he was respected by Iran's moderate Muslim clergy. Sharif-Emami closed gambling casinos and restricted other practices considered offensive by the Shi'ites. He also lifted a ban on the formation of political parties. Only the Communists remained outlawed. Said one of the mullahs at the time: "Our Prague spring cannot last long. But will the Shah understand that?"

The Shah's problems are magnified by the fact that the opposition does not arise from a single political sector, like the communists, or a single cultural group, like the religious conservatives, who remain his most vocal and articulate foes. The dissent cuts across class, religious and political divisions, ranging from Marxist students on the extreme left to Western-educated intellectuals, professionals and businessmen in the center to religious zealots on the far right. The mullahs, for all their abhorrence of the decadent excesses of modernism, have traditionally been political progressives and nationalists in their outlook.

What the protesters do have in common is bitter frustration over the failure of many of the Shah's economic programs, the rising inflation brought on by oil wealth, the denial of political rights, and years of repressive and insensitive rule. Says a West German foreign-office expert: "For too long, the Shah paid insufficient attention to political pressure groups from right and left, dismissed them as rabble-rousers, and was convinced that his lifting Iran economically at a rapid pace would satisfy most of his people. He also thought that he could keep things under control by the traditional method of ruling with a firm, indeed oppressive, hand. It clearly has not worked."

These failures were bound to invite both U.S. concern and Soviet adventurism because the area is of immense strategic importance. For its part, the U.S. has not commented publicly on the question of Soviet interference in Iran, but some observers do not rule it out. Moscow maintains a diplomatic mission in Tehran that is far bigger than that of the U.S. Intelligence officials assume that the Soviet embassy and consular offices provide cover for large numbers of KGB operatives. What is Moscow's aim? "From the Soviet standpoint," says one Western official, "the game here is pretty simple: worse is better. The Shah is their enemy, and anybody who opposes him is to be supported." Adds a former U.S. diplomat: "If you were in the Kremlin, you would say to yourself, what do we do? You strike at the most vulnerable point, and that point is the Persian Gulf. In effect, you rattle the Shah's bird cage. You rattle it hard. This is what they are doing. But let's not get dishonest. Let's not also say that everybody is a Communist. That's not necessarily true. This is power politics we're playing here today. This is not ideology."

The Shah nonetheless believes that Iran's present turmoil can be attributed to a Communist conspiracy, which he feels has always been at the root of his troubles. In a press conference last month he repeated that argument. "Today," he declared, "the plot is the same, and I have a great deal of information that shows that the rioters receive orders from the Communists." Such is the level of concern in the Shah's regime that there is even talk in high circles of another possible villain: the CIA, which is being accused of deliberately infiltrating the opposition so that its agents would be in place in the new government if the Shah were overthrown.

In any case, the fact is that Iran's own internal problems brought the Shah to the brink of disaster. As frustrations mounted over the months, Iranians turned to their Islamic religious leaders--the mullahs--who, as it happens, have deep grievances of their own. For centuries, the daily lives of the Persians were guided by conservative mullahs of the Shi'ite sect, whose influence embraced not only the country's spiritual life but also its secular culture and economic institutions.

Thus the Shi'ite leaders felt threatened when the Shah set out to create a Western-style nation in the 20th century mold. He called his campaign the White (for bloodless) Revolution. Later it was renamed the Shah-People's Revolution, but changing the name did not prevent the inevitable clash of cultures.

In defiance of the mullahs, the Shah ordered widespread land reforms, divesting the Shi'ite clergy of their vast holdings. The Shah scheduled a referendum on land reform and won his way by a wide margin. He decreed new privileges for women, including the right to vote and to attend institutions of higher learning. In June 1963 the mullahs, having failed to block the Shah's reforms, called their people into the streets. Demonstrations turned into riots, and the Shah sent in his troops. When the rioting stopped several days later, 200 people were dead, and the leader of the mullah opposition, Ayatullah Khomeini, was sent into exile.

Khomeini lives in Iraq and still leads the opposition against the Shah. "The people will not rest," he declared last month, "until the Pahlavi rule has been swept away and all traces of tyranny have disappeared." Scoffing at the Shah's promise to allow free elections next year, Khomeini said: "As long as the Shah's satanic power prevails, not a single true representative of the people can possibly be elected."

Among the mullahs inside Iran, the most powerful is Ayatullah Sharietmadari, a revered Islamic scholar who condemns violence but strongly opposes the Shah on constitutional and religious grounds (see box). Parliament, claims Sharietmadari, too often violates the precepts of Islamic law to the detriment of Shi'ite sensibilities. Gambling, prostitution and pornography are all viewed as typical manifestations of modernism. The Shah's widespread curtailment of civil liberties, freedom of the press and political assembly are looked upon as only further evidence of his determination to deprive the Shi'ites of their power and to transform the nation into a secular state.

Sharietmadari's headquarters--and thus the heart of Iran's internal Islamic opposition--is Qum, a city of 300,000 that ranks with Najaf in Iraq as one of the world's greatest centers of Shi'ite learning. Located 75 miles south of Tehran, Qum is both a symbol and a model of the Iran that the mullahs yearn to preserve. No television aerials mar the pristine skyline; no public cinemas threaten to seduce the inquisitive; no bars or liquor stores offend the strict life of the observant. All women wear the chador and devote much of their lives to weaving fine Persian carpets. Thronging the streets are thousands of turbaned, black-robed mullahs whose entire lives are submerged in the study of theology with Qum's learned men.

But the mosques of Qum are not simply places of learning and prayer. They have also become centers for political action. Says one dissident lawyer: "We have not been allowed to form political parties. We have no newspapers of our own. But the religious leaders have a built-in communications system. They easily reach the masses through their weekly sermons in the mosques and their network of mullahs throughout the nation. That is why so many nonreligious elements cloak their opposition in the mantle of religion."

So pervasive is the network that some nonreligious Iranian dissidents have exploited the mullahs' movement for their own purposes. Some time ago, dissidents who could not otherwise have hoped to be effective signed up with Khomeini in Iraq under religious pretexts. A few then went to Lebanon for training by George Habash's radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Returning to Iran, they posed as clergymen, took code names, formed cells and provoked incidents of terrorism.

One who is dismayed by this infiltration is Abdul Reza Hejazi, Khomeini's associate in Tehran. Himself a mullah of considerable fame, Hejazi spent two years in prison for the crime of receiving a letter from Khomeini and answering it. He stresses that despite accusations to the contrary, the mullahs are not opposed to Western advances in science, medicine and education for Iran. "Islamic civilization and Western civilization can and should merge in order to create a better civilization for all. What we are against from the West is its colonialism in all its shapes and sizes."

After the mullahs, the most visible opposition to the Shah has come from the universities, where there is frequent agitation. Some students are Marxists who preach outright revolution. Many are Muslim activists, following the mullahs in their demands for an Islamic state. Vast numbers of others are caught up in the revolution of rising expectations; growing up in an atmosphere of increasing affluence, they are frustrated by the slow pace of economic and political change.

Up to now, Iranian students seem to have had more impact abroad than at home. This year 100,000 Iranians are studying in other countries--more than 37,000 in the U.S. alone--because there is no room for them at their own universities. Angered and articulate, they have formed a vocal vanguard against the Shah in almost every major city in the world, airing their opposition with slogans in the London subway or demonstrations in Los Angeles, Washington or New York City. Many wear masks when they demonstrate for fear that agents of SAVAK, the heavyhanded Iranian secret police, or authorities in other countries will gather incriminating data on them. Under the Iranian constitution, castigating the Shah, even abroad, is a crime punishable by three to ten years in prison.

Few foreign students express anything but scorn for the Shah and condemnation of his U.S. supporters. Says Phyllis Bennis, a California attorney representing 165 Iranian students who were arrested in a Los Angeles demonstration last week: "Iran has been made a prime market in the Middle East. The Shah is a tool of the U.S. corporations." Others charge that the Shah's modernization program is largely a myth. "People are fighting with the regime because the Shah never did make land reforms," insists Farhad Ehya, a spokesman for the Iranian Student Organization at U.C.L.A. "Whatever he did, he took back. The people don't have education. They don't have health care."

The Shah has often been criticized for enjoying a sumptuous life-style while his people suffer economic distress. His Imperial Majesty, Shahanshah (King of Kings) is, at 58, trim and fit. He and his wife, Empress Farah, 40, Crown Prince Reza, 18, and three other children, shuttle among five palaces in Iran. The Shah enjoys a good game of tennis, skiing at St. Moritz, and flying his own JetStar. He works even harder than he plays, frequently putting in 15-hour days, which are often spent conferring with a handful of trusted advisers.

The country he inherited 37 years ago was not only backward and riven by tribal conflict but notoriously unstable: there had not been a single peaceful succession since Cyrus the Great in the 6th century B.C. In the two decades before his army officer father, Reza Shah, seized power in a military coup in 1921, there had been five different Shahs, a civil war and several coups d'etat. In 1941 the Shah's father, a German sympathizer, was forced to abdicate when the Allies needed a secure route to channel war supplies to Russia. British and Soviet forces occupied Iran, and Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, then 22, took power. After the war, the Soviets stayed on and set up a puppet regime in the northern province of Azerbaijan. The young Shah brought the issue before the United Nations Security Council and succeeded in having them thrown out.

His national integrity secured, the Shah turned to the task of modernization. His achievements--often accomplished by plainly dictatorial methods and at times torture and terror--were remarkable. When the Shah came to power, Iran's illiteracy rate was 95%; today it is 50%. In the 1940s the school population was about 275,000, and Iran had only one institute of higher education; this year a notably improved educational system will receive 10 million pupils, and there are now some 200 colleges and universities. As recently as 1960, only 2% of Iran's women had attended a university; today, women make up 38% of the university population. Having all but ended tribalism and feudalism, the Shah has redistributed land to 16 million people.

Despite his fear of the Russians, the Shah receives extensive aid from the U.S.S.R. By Soviet count, 134 projects have been launched with Moscow's help, among them metallurgical plants, engineering facilities and a trans-Iranian trunk gas pipeline. Last March the Soviets built a new blast furnace at Isfahan; new smelting and rolling mills will follow soon. All told, these projects are claimed to account for the production of 90% of all coal in Iran, almost 90% of the iron ore and 70% of the steel.

But Moscow is also the enemy, and in recognition of this and his pivotal role as the guardian of the Persian Gulf oil lanes, the Shah has become commander in chief of one of the mightiest military machines in the Middle East. In 20 years, he has bought $36 billion in arms--half from the U.S. He has submarines from West Germany, tanks from Britain, frigates from Holland. His air force flies 141 F-4Es, 64 F-14As, 20 F-14s; and 180 more jets are on order. He has spent $500 million on 491 Bell helicopters, and will pay out another $500 million to train his men to fly them. Washington evaluates the Shah's army as an intensely loyal, well-equipped force. Manpower is 220,000, with 300,000 reserves.

The immense investment in military hardware has left the Shah open to charges that some of that money--which has helped him hold the allegiance of the military --should have been spent to improve civilian living conditions. Though a booming city, Tehran suffers a severe water shortage. Housing costs have shot up. The drop in oil income in the past three years (because of the fall of the dollar), though only 3%, found Iran financially overextended. As a result, many development projects simply came to a halt. Inflation leaped to 50% a year, profiteering became widespread, and the confluence of troubles served to highlight some of the faults that have long characterized the Shah's modernization program.

By last summer, excessive bureaucracy, credit difficulties, erratic cash flow, transport and communications bottlenecks were prevalent. Once again, the expectations of the poor and middle class were frustrated. Rent for a modest two-room apartment in Tehran rose to $1,000 a month. For luxury villas in the northern part of the city, a monthly rent of $5,000 was not considered extravagant. There was a year's wait for a $6,000 Iranian-manufactured automobile; imported Mercedes 280s sold for $60,000.

The effects of "progress" were often disastrous. Hundreds of thousands of peasants fled their native villages for the lure of more profitable work in the cities, leaving formerly cultivated farm land to revert to desert. At the same time, Iran, which for ages had been all but self-sufficient, suddenly had to import more than 60% of its food products. Along with imports of food came more than 1 million foreign workers: Pakistani and Filipino truck drivers, Indian engineers, Korean and Japanese workers--to say nothing of the more than 40,000 American military and civilian personnel whose advice and training were needed for the new weapons and industries. But for most Iranians the pattern of life changed slowly, if at all. Most villages still lack piped water, sewers, electricity and doctors.

Much of the trouble stemmed from the fact that commercial projects were designed by a small group of Western-educated technocrats, who failed to take into account the profound effect that such changes would have on the Persian psyche. Housing projects, for example, are depressing to most Iranians, whose tradition demands an architectural style that emphasizes seclusion and privacy. Many residents of such projects feel as though they are living in public view, and they detest it. Tehran Sociologist Ehsan Naraghi, who received his doctorate from the Sorbonne, believes that under the pressure of economic development there has been a tragic and costly neglect of Iranian culture. "We have stressed the material aspects of life," he says, "and have lost our cultural identity." Adds Amir Taheri, 38, editor in chief of Kayhan, Iran's largest daily (circ. 700,000): "What does this Westernize-or-bust program give us? Western banks, Western guns, Western secret police, Western buildings. They are supposed to solve our problems. But do they? I don't think so. We need to get to our own culture and then use what can be integrated from the West."

Explaining why she joined the National Front, a coalition of leftist parties opposed to the Shah, Dr. Homa Darabi Keyhani, 38, a New York City-trained pediatrician and child psychiatrist, recalls her experiences as a doctor in a small Iranian village ten years ago. The people had a saying that the first child belonged to the crows--because of the likelihood that it would not survive. "That is bitter and terrible to hear," she says. "Millions were spent to build big gambling casinos. Corruption thrived around us while kids died because they drank contaminated water, and there was no vaccine for infectious diseases. Do you wonder that we are desperate?"

Belatedly, and at great cost, the Shah himself has begun to comprehend the real nature of Iran's malaise and his role in its creation (see Interview page 43). In other societies run by strong rulers--Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore, Leopold Senghor's Senegal, Tito's Yugoslavia--literate and cultivated populations have succeeded in matching political progress with economic and cultural development. But Iran's unique society, so influenced by its religious structure and rooted for centuries in a different world, simply could not adjust to such radical change. The Shah failed to realize that the dramatic alterations he envisioned for the economic advance of his nation required the development of an acceptable political system. He concentrated on the army and the institutions that related to executive power. He ruled as an absolute monarch--no matter how worthy his goals--and depended on repressive measures to keep disparate forces in line while he and the technocrats proceeded with the modernization of Iran. Parliament, the press, city councils, the judiciary, trade unions, professional associations were never given a chance to develop.

Meanwhile, corruption persisted. Commissions of 10% on arms sales regularly went to generals, ministers and others in the Shah's court and government. The total prohibition of the right to dissent and documented reports of torture led Amnesty International in 1975 to conclude that "no country in the world has a worse record in human rights than Iran." The Shah's instinctive dislike of democracy led him that same year to end the country's two-party system and establish the Rastakhiz (National Resurgence Party) as Iran's sole political organization.

Amir Abbas Hoveida, Premier from 1965 to 1977, now concedes that it was a mistake to neglect political freedoms. Says Hoveida: "It was more important to have a four-lane highway than to show an interest in political institutions. Economics was our No. 1 problem. Politics was subservient to the economy. But we have been able to get this country out of the orbit of underdevelopment. Now how do we get our spaceship to enter the orbit of developed nations?"

Many American observers agree that the Shah created his own problem in failing to forge a democratic system of political participation. "The Shah has been imaginative and flexible in his economic and foreign policy, but not politically," says Professor J.C. Hurewitz, director of Columbia University's Middle East Institute. "He's given no freedom to the Iranian intellectuals. The result is that Iran suffers from a political vacuum: the people feel left out of things." One hopeful sign may be that the opposition does not have a common ground. Thus for their own purposes, both left and right would probably be satisfied if they were given a greater voice in government and if constitutional restrictions were placed on the Shah's absolutism.

Washington does not believe last week's violent eruptions mean that the Shah is likely to step aside--or be ousted. "It could get nasty or it could settle down," says a U.S. intelligence official. "But we don't feel that he is threatened or has lost control." Still, the U.S. is concerned over the recent events and the dangers they pose for the West. The Administration has been careful not to upset what one State Department official calls "our most complex relationship." The reason is simple enough: few countries in the world are as important to the U.S. strategically and geopolitically. This is because of Iran's pro-Western stance, its location on the Soviet border, its relations with its important but far less stable neighbors, and its moderating role in the Middle East. The Shah is, in short, a bulwark of anti-Communism at the confluence of the Persian Gulf oil routes (see following story).

It is a hopeful sign that in recent months the Shah has begun to make visible reforms in the political and human rights affairs of the nation. He fired the head of SAVAK, who had been identified with that agency's most notorious terror tactics, freed a number of prisoners, and promised to allow dissidents to be tried in civilian rather than military courts. But some specialists in the region blame those small liberalizing measures for the present turmoil. Says one: "Many Iranians took these changes as a sign that the Shah was weakening and responded with almost total cynicism."

Deeply wounded by events spawned from his own dream for Iran, the Shah last week was searching for ways to calm his troubled people. His son, Crown Prince Reza, now in advance fighter-pilot training in Texas, telephoned his father and suggested that he try a dialogue with his opponents. It may have been good advice. With his country under martial law, the Shah's best hope now is to turn forthrightly toward the elusive, and in his case potentially hazardous, goal of democracy. If he sticks to his own target date for parliamentary elections next June, he may still be able to guarantee his future by yielding some of his absolute rule and compromising on a constitutional monarchy. At the same time, he would enhance the stability of a region that might turn to chaos in his absence. If the Shah falls--and that is now something even his most loyal subjects consider at least conceivable--the end of his long rule will not have come at the hands of a foreign power, or the dissidents, or the army, but from social forces that he simply failed to perceive as he tried to modernize his historic remnant of the Persian Empire. .

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