Παρασκευή 7 Φεβρουαρίου 2014

THE IRANIAN REVOLUTION OF 1979

THE IRANIAN REVOLUTION OF 1979
 
There are plenty of myths about the causes of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The 1973-1974 rise in the price of crude enabled the Shah to finance his modernisation programme, but as it began to falter, dissent increased. The death of Khomeini's sons made things worse, but it was a fire in a cinema in Abadan which sparked major demonstrations. A new Prime Minister was installed but he failed to get a grip on the situation and Khomeini, by then in France, emerged as the leading opposition figure. The situation steadily deteriorated culminating in the Shah's departure in January 1979 and the melting away of the power of the army. The strategic and other consequences of the revolution were very serious. But that is another story.
 
James Buchan read Persian at Oxford University and in Isfahan in the 1970s and was for many years a foreign correspondent of the Financial Times. His book Days of God: The Revolution in Iran and Its Consequences was published by John Murray in 2012.This is the edited text of a lecture given to the Society on 8 May 8, 2013
 
The Iranian Revolution of 1979 is not the easiest subject for the historian. Thirty-four years on, the animosities of that period have not subsided but are very much still with us. The falsehoods of the time survive and even flourish and however the historian tries to knock them on the head, they appear elsewhere, like moles in an English lawn.
 
The Islamic Republic depends in part for its legitimacy or right to rule on an heroic or epic account of the revolution, and exaggerates the crimes of the Shah, the leadership of the seminary clergy, and the sufferings of the Iranian people. The preamble to the Constitution of the Islamic Republic, which was drawn up in the second half of 1979, states that 60,000 Iranians died and 100,000 were injured in the revolution year. Women with infants in their arms ran into the mouths of machine guns. In reality, the number of dead was quite a bit under 3,000 and, as far as I know, no machine gun was deployed on either side.
 
Back in 1979, leftist views had greater currency than today and foreign observers looked for the causes of revolution in the material conditions of Iranian life. In fact, the Pahlavi monarchy was successful in raising the standard of living in Iran, more successful than its predecessors and more successful than the subsequent Islamic Republic, as is shown by the graph in Figure 1.


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Figure 1 GDP per capita (Constant 2000 US$)


Finally, the Iranian émigrés and royalists find it hard to understand why the Pahlavi state, so effective in its way, should have tumbled like a house of playing cards. They are apt to see in the revolution a conspiracy of foreign powers. Yet the diplomatic correspondence now open to inspection shows that, in 1978 and 1979, Britain, the US and the Soviet Union all felt themselves to be out of their depth in Iran. This country and the Soviet Union recognised that, while the US – or at least its ambassador in Tehran, William H. Sullivan – pressed on, into a diplomatic fantasy land and became enmired.

Consequences and causes

What were the effects of the Iranian Revolution? The Shah's departure and Khomeini's return obliterated British and American influence in Iran, brought religion back to centre stage in the politics of the Muslim world, upset the balance of forces in East Asia and inaugurated 30 years of warfare. As for the causes, they were many, but let me select a few.
 
The first cause, and one often overlooked, is that by the late 1970s monarchy was going out of style in the world. Between World War II and 1979, monarchies disappeared in Italy, Albania, Greece, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Ethiopia and Afghanistan. Mohammed Reza Pahlavi felt islanded in a republican ocean, was profuse in his support to other royal houses, and at one point tried to marry into the house of Windsor.
 
The Pahlavi monarchy was of recent foundation. The founder, Reza Pahlavi, was an officer in the Iranian Cossack brigade. He came to prominence when he marched two regiments of his men on Tehran in February 1921 and seized control of the country's disintegrating armed forces. Within two years, he sought to establish a republic on the pattern of that just created from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire by Kemal Pasha, but ran into opposition from the armed forces, the public and, particularly, the seminary clergy. In late 1925, Reza was named to the throne and crowned in April of the next year.
 
Having no dynastic or solemn claim to the throne, Reza promoted modernity, national unity and, as he later put it, “making the Persians work”. He brought security to the roads and introduced public education, a civil service, a new legal code and the rudiments of modern industry. He made himself unpopular by introducing military conscription and European costume for men and women. He abdicated after British and Soviet armies invaded Iran in 1941. His son, Mohammed Reza, needed more than 20 years to shake off the control and influence of the Western Allies.
Both Reza and Mohammed Reza claimed to be constitutional monarchs, but both sought absolute rule: Reza from the late 1920s till his abdication in 1941, and Mohammed Reza from 1964 until the end of 1978. Thus, even as their schools, factories and model armies were creating a new middle class, they refused to admit that class to power. During those periods of absolute rule, Parliament, the Press and intellectual life were suppressed. The Pahlavi Court took on a composite, or Ruritanian, character.
 
Their reforms brought both Shahs into conflict with the Shia clergy, which had long seen itself as the guardian of Iranian character and traditions. There was nothing new in that. What was new was the character and will of Ruhollah Khomeini. He came to prominence in 1963 in a violent and insulting attack on Mohammed Reza over such reforms as land distribution and votes for women, as well as the presence of the American military in Iran. Khomeini was sent into exile in 1964, first in Turkey and then Iraq, where he took on some of the fashionable Leftist, Third Worldist ideology of the time, which survives like a fly in amber in the Islamic Republic. In 1970, he broke with the institution of monarchy and devised a theory of clerical government which was to become his ladder to supreme power.
 
Of all causes, the most important was the shift in the balance of power away from the consumers of oil to the producers. In the autumn and winter of 1973–1974, the price of crude oil quadrupled and Mohammed Reza found his annual revenue increased from about US $1bn to about US $25bn. Iran now had the money to finance any fantastical form of government: not just the modern, enlightened, coercive and well-armed state of the Pahlavis but also Khomeini's clerical dictatorship. That is the capital fact of modern Iranian history. If modern Iranian government had to depend on taxation there would have been no Pahlavi “Great Civilisation” and no Khomeinist rule of saints. Oil may be God's blessing to the Iranians, but it is also His curse.

The prelude to revolution

With the rise in crude oil prices of 1973–1974, Mohammed Reza chose to make a dash for economic growth, which ended 18 months later in a chaos of inflation, port congestion and shortages of basic goods and services. (Incidentally, the same thing happened in Saudi Arabia.) Mohammed Reza responded by attempting to increase his political control with the formation in February 1975 of a mass single party, the Rastakhiz. A year later, Mohammed Reza added to the plethora of Iranian calendars an imperial or shahinshahi calendar, dating from Cyrus the Great, which baffled, or infuriated, Iranians. Those events occurred at a time when the economy was in chaos and the Shah had lost prestige. In November 1976, the United States elected as President a Democrat, Jimmy Carter, who vowed to make human rights the principal goal of US overseas policy.
 
Mohammed Reza thought he could adjust to Carter in the same way he had adjusted to the Kennedys in the early 1960s. There was an end to systematic torture in the prisons. The Shah sacked his long-serving prime minister, Amir Abbas Hoveyda, and replaced him with a competent but dour public servant, Jamshid Amouzegar, who attempted to squeeze inflation out of the economy. The liberal opposition, which had been lying low since the early 1960s, became more bold. Khomeini, who had become disheartened during the years of Mohammed Reza's success, returned to commenting on affairs in Iran.

The outbreak

On 23 October 1977, Khomeini's elder son, Mostafa, died in Karbala. He is the gentleman in this photograph in Figure 2 (taken in Iraq in 1965), just behind his father's right shoulder.


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Figure 2 Khomeini and supporters


Mostafa is said to have been killed by the Shah's security service, Savak, but there is no evidence of that and that is one of the trials of the historian of Iran. The Islamic Republic makes claims but then does not trouble to assemble any evidence to support them. Within Iran, there were calls for Khomeini to be permitted to return to the land of his birth.
 
The Court responded with a libellous attack on Khomeni that appeared in the newspaper Ettelaat on 7 January 1978. The article accused Khomeini quite falsely of being an Indian agent of the British (and, also, for a while, of the Egyptians). Thirty years on, it is hard to believe something so fantastical, illiterate and childish could have such consequences. As Aristotle says, when great interests are at stake, a trifle may cause a revolution.
 
The arrival of the newspaper in the seminary town of Qom that evening provoked a riot at which between five and nine young men were killed. Forty days later, in Tabriz in the north-west, a memorial service for the dead of Qom ended in violence and a crowd went on the rampage, setting fire to cinemas, liquor stores, luxury hotels, Bahai property, banks and other symbols of the Pahlavi regime and foreign influence. The army was deployed for the first time and six people were killed. Forty days later, there was a riot in Yazd with as many as 20 dead. But by June, those demonstrations had become predictable in timing and character. The British and American ambassadors thought it was safe to go abroad on leave, and Mohammed Reza retired to Nowshahr on the Caspian where, according to his visitors, he brooded on the ungratefulness of his subjects.

The fire

That all changed on 19 August 1978. That evening four religious militants spread an inflammable solvent mixed with vegetable oil, thiner and roghan, in the first floor corridor of the Rex Cinema in Abadan. Around 470 men, women and children died, suffocated by the fumes.
 
Khomeini and the liberal opposition claimed that the fire was the work of Savak, and was designed to discredit the religious protest. That was not true. The chief perpetrator, a drug addict named Hosein Takbalizadeh, was tormented by guilt and repeatedly confessed to setting the fire, not that anybody would listen. Under pressure from the families of the victims, the Islamic Republic finally held a hearing in Abadan in August 1980 and Takbalizadeh and sundry other men, including the owner of the cinema, were condemned to death and executed. None the less, the Islamic Republic and many in the West continue to promote the false version of events.
 
On 27 August 1979, Mohammed Reza dismissed Amouzegar and replaced him with Jafar Sharif Emami, whose chief claim to fame was as Grand Master of the Iranian Freemasons. He tried to win favour with the religious opposition by rescinding the imperial calendar, closing casinos and such like, and permitting marches to celebrate the end of the fasting month of Ramadan.
 
The marches of 4 and 7 September showed how the atmosphere had altered since the Abadan fire. Whereas up to then the street demonstrations had never numbered more than a few thousand, and had not established a foothold in Tehran, as many 100,000 marched on 4 September from the extreme north of Tehran to the railway station in the south. To break the momentum of the demonstrations, Sharif Emami made the first of two mistakes. He imposed a curfew and martial law in Tehran and other cities to begin on the morning of Friday, 8 September. However, the announcement did not go out until 6 am on the Friday, by which time crowds were gathering for a march at Zhaleh Square, about a mile to the east of the Parliament building. Pelted by missiles, soldiers opened fire into the crowd and, in a series of confrontations round the square and to the east, some 64 people were killed, including a woman and a young girl.
 
Black Friday, as it was known, destroyed what was left of Mohammed Reza's morale. The British and American Ambassadors, Sir Antony Parsons and William H. Sullivan, returned from their holidays abroad to find the Shah in great anxiety and dejection. He appeared to believe that Britain and the US were behind the disturbances. Black Friday also frightened the opposition. There were no more street demonstrations. Instead, the Left organised wild-cat strikes in the the public services, water, post and electricity which added to the general misery and uncertainty. Oil production, on which the monarchy depended for its revenue and credit, was disrupted and then gradually shut down.
 
Towards the end of September, Sharif Emami made his second mistake. The Prime Minister asked the Iraqi government, under the good-neighbour provisions of a 1975 treaty between the two countries, to muzzle Khomeini. On 24 September, the Iraqi security service surrounded the old man's house in Najaf and prevented him receiving visitors or going out. Later the guards were withdrawn, but Khomeini had never felt comfortable in Iraq and was determined to leave. He planned to go to a Muslim Arab country, but the murder at the end of August in Libya of the Iranian religious scholar Imam Moussa al-Sadr, alarmed his advisers. They persuaded Khomeini to go to France, where Iranians could stay for 90 days without a visa. A house was found in the small village of Neauphle-le-Château. There Khomeini was besieged by reporters, whom he worked as if to the manner born. It is said he did some 400 print or broadcast interviews.
 
Meanwhile in Iran, the armed forces were becoming frustrated at the weakness and drift of the Sharif Emami government. On 4 November students who were occupying Tehran University tore down the statue of Reza Shah on the campus. Soldiers fired through the railings and at least one student was killed. The next day, Sunday, 5 November the army and police held aloof while there were concerted arson attacks on banks, liquor stores and cinemas and even the British Embassy.
 
That evening of 5 November Mohammed Reza most reluctantly agreed to the formation of a military government, under the chief of staff, General Azhari, to restore order and end the strikes. The deterrent effect of military government he then mitigated in a television broadcast the next day, 6 November. During the broadcast, the Shah apologised for some of the excesses of autocratic rule and vowed to adhere to the 1906 Constitution. Everybody remembers the sentence: “I have heard the message of your revolution.” Mohammed Reza wanted somehow to insert himself at the head of the movement for change. Unfortunately, that position was by now occupied by Khomeini. The military government also arrested several former officers of the regime, including Hoveyda and the former head of Savak, General Nassiri.
 
Azhari had some success at first in raising oil production, but the strikes and shortages continued. December coincided with the month of Moharram, when Iranians traditionally mourn the death in battle of the Prophet's grandson, Hosein. At the climax of the mourning month, which fell on 10 and 11 December, millions marched through the streets of Tehran and other towns. Those marches were a decisive rejection of the monarchy and an endorsement of Khomeini as the undisputed leader of the rebellion. The Left and the liberals convinced themselves that Khomeini and the clergy would mobilise the masses and then somehow leave the modern classes to establish the new government. In that, they were deceived.
 
Azhari suffered a mild heart attack, and withdrew from the scene. For a period, Iran had no government. In the end, Mohammed Reza could find only one man to form a government, a nationalist and Francophile named Chapour Bakhtiar whose courage greatly exceeded his good judgement. Mohammed Reza needed little persuading to leave Bakhtiar a free hand. After ordering the service chiefs to support Bakhtiar, on 16 January the Shah left the country for Egypt.
Bakhtiar and the general staff tried to prevent Khomeini returning. But events had their own momentum. Khomeini returned on 1 February to the greatest crowd ever to assemble in Iran. Khomeini appointed a provisional government under Mehdi Bazargan, which existed alongside that of Bakhtiar. That situation could not continue, but for a period of about a week nobody would move. The armed forces would not come over to the revolution nor Khomeini call for an armed insurrecition.
 
The spark came on the evening of Friday, 9 February, at Doshan Teppe Air Force Base just to the east of Zhaleh Square. Mutinous cadets and aircraftmen barricaded themselves into the cadet school at the base and, when the Imperial Guard or household division tried to dislodge them, crowds converged on the base. All attempts to reinforce the Imperial Guard failed through a mixture of incompetence, insurbordination and desertion. In the course of Saturday, 10 February, police stations and barracks fell to the insurgents and, early the next morning, in pouring rain, men broke through the wall of the principal armaments factory between the base and Zhaleh Square and started distributing weapons.
 
That Sunday morning, the service commanders convened in north Tehran and announced the neutrality of the armed forces in the battle. That was designed to end the attacks on the bases but, like everything attempted by the imperial armed forces in those days, it was not successful. In the next months, many senior officers were shot and the imperial armed forces ceased to be a factor in the region's politics, with consequences both in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at the end of that year and the Iraqi attack on the Iranian oil province in September, 1980. Bakhtiar escaped to France, where he busied himself with émigré politics until he was assassinated by agents of the Islamic Republic in 1991. The Shah died in Cairo in July, 1980.

The revolution: second phase

With the defeat of the royalists and destruction of the army, the revolutionaries fell to fighting among themselves. As is well known, Khomeini and his supporters triumphed in the end, but not before some 10,000 Iranians had perished in prison, some 200,000 had fallen in the war with Iraq and about half a million had passed into exile. It was the greatest catastrophe to befall Iran since the Middle Ages. That story, however, needs a second article.
 
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03068374.2013.826016

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