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
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.
|
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.
|
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
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου