The last days of Iran under the Shah - Financial Times

David Patrikarakos

FEBRUARY 6, 2009

As late as 1978, US security officials were lauding the stability of Iran, their Gulf ally. The oil-rich state had a highly sophisticated army and ruthlessly effective secret police. It was also bulging with US-supplied arms. And yet a year later, it imploded in the face of mass civil disobedience and public demonstrations. How – and why?

The reasons are clearer than the mechanisms. The Shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, had been dependent on the west throughout his rule – a source of anger among his subjects. Iranians couldn’t forgive Britain’s meddling in their country during its 19th-century power struggles with Russia in central Asia – or London and Washington’s role in the 1953 coup that ousted the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadeq. It was the CIA’s first overthrow of a foreign government – salad days for 20th-century international politics.

The same allied powers – Britain and the USSR – that had forced the Shah’s father, Reza Pahlavi, to abdicate in 1941 put his son on the throne the same year. Aware of his debt to them, he ruled cautiously. But opposition was never far from the surface. In 1963, the Shah’s so-called White Revolution, a series of modernising reforms, brought him into conflict with a scowling mullah from the dusty town of Khomein in central Iran – the Ayatollah Khomeini. Angered at government encroachment on traditional areas of clerical responsibility, notably education and family law, Khomeini publicly denounced the Shah. His subsequent arrest sparked three days of rioting that left hundreds dead. He was sent into exile the following year.

“Under the Shah, we had an expression: ‘Your thoughts smell like gormeh sabzi’ [a pungent green stew]. It meant you were in danger because you were thinking,” says Farrokh Negahdar, the former leader of the communist group ­Fedayeen-e Khalq who spent 10 years in the Shah’s prisons, and now lives in London. Negahdar was one of the many who took the struggle from the universities to the streets. “I knew from an early age that my life was never going to be peaceful,” he shrugs. “Khomeini’s [1963] revolt against the Shah was an example to us all. But things really got going in the late 1970s.”

But widespread unrest continued, inspired by tape recordings of the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini’s speeches against the Shah, smuggled into the country and stealthily distributed among the people. Government clashes with demonstrators in the holy city of Qom and repeated student protests in Tehran increased pressure on the Pahlavi government. “I told the public,” says Homayoun, that “if the leftists or Islamists take over, you won’t be as free as you are now; they are totalitarians and we are not. I coined the slogan: ‘Now is the Time to Choose’. Unfortunately, they did.”

“It was important that everyone choose,” says Mohsen Sazegara, one-time aide of Ayatollah Khomeini and founder of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Today he lives in Washington, but during the 1970s he battled against Pahlavi’s rule. “I organised strikes and demonstrations. But what I really wanted to do was create a slogan for the revolution that everyone could rally around. So I hit upon ‘The Shah Must Go’, which, when it filtered down to the streets, became ‘Death to the Shah’.” Old television footage shows thousands of people in the Tehran streets chanting these words. “It was important because it divided the revolutionaries from the reformists – those who wanted change but sought reconciliation with the Shah,” adds Sazegara. “That wasn’t an option for us.”

The Revolutionary Shah
On September 8 1978, the government declared martial law in the face of the worsening situation. But the bloody crackdown never came. Instead, on November 6, the Shah went on Iranian TV and radio to address the nation. He promised not to repeat past mistakes and to make amends: “I heard the voice of your revolution... as Shah of Iran, as well as an Iranian citizen, I cannot but approve your revolution,” he said.

On September 8 1978, the government declared martial law in the face of the worsening situation. But the bloody crackdown never came. Instead, on November 6, the Shah went on Iranian TV and radio to address the nation. He promised not to repeat past mistakes and to make amends: “I heard the voice of your revolution... as Shah of Iran, as well as an Iranian citizen, I cannot but approve your revolution,” he said.

On that day the Shah became the first person in Iran to publicly describe the piecemeal demonstrations and intertwining strands of political discontent as a revolution. He also urged the people to allow him to implement it. He competed with Khomeini for its leadership. - Read  More

The last days of Iran under the Shah - Financial Times

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