1965-75 - A Period of MajorProgress
in Iranian State and Society
-but at what cost?..
The Government of Ali Mansur.
Elections to
the twenty-first Majlis in September 1963 led to the formation of a new political
party, the Iran Novin (New Iran) Party, committed to a program of
economic and administrative reform and renewal. The Alam government had opened
talks with the National Front leaders earlier in the year, but no
accommodation had been reached, and the talks had broken down over such issues
as freedom of activity for the front. As a result, the front was not represented
in the elections, which were limited to the officially sanctioned parties,
and the only candidates on the slate were those presented by the Union of
National Forces, an organization of senior civil servants and officials and
of workers' and farmers' epresentatives, put together with government support.
After the elections, the largest bloc in the new Majlis, with forty seats,
was a group called the Progressive Center. The center, an exclusive club
of senior civil servants, had been established by Hassan Ali Mansur in
1961 to study and make policy recommendations on major economic and social
issues. In June 1963, the shah had designated the center as his personal
research bureau. When the new Majlis convened in October, 100 more deputies
joined the center, giving dexterious Mansur a majority. In December, Mansur
converted the Progressive Center into a political party, the Iran Novin.
In March 1964, Alam resigned and the shah appointed Mansur prime minister,
at the head of an Iran Novin-led government.
( Above, a photo of Ali Mansur a bright
young diplomat in 1947, next to my father A. Sepahbody Ambassador of
Iran in Paris, he knew better... - Photo by Farhad
Sepahbody)
The events leading to the establishment of the Iran Novin and the
appointment of Mansur as prime minister represented a renewed attempt by
the Shah and his advisers to create a political organization that would be,
modern, loyal, attract the support of the educated classes and the technocratic
elite, and strengthen the administration and the economy. The Iran Novin
drew its membership almost exclusively from a younger generation of senior
civil servants, Western-educated technocrats, and business leaders. Initially,
membership was limited to 500 hand-picked persons, and it was allowed to
grow very slowly. In time it came to include leading members of the provincial
elite and its bureaucratic, professional, and business classes. Even in the
late 1960s and early 1970s, when trade unions and professional organizations
affiliated themselves with the party, full membership was reserved for a
rather limited group.
In carrying out economic and administrative reforms, Mansur created
four new ministries and transferred the authority for drawing up the budget
from the Ministry of Finance to the newly created Budget Bureau. The bureau
was attached to the Plan Organization and was responsible directly to the
prime minister. In subsequent years it introduced greater rationality in
planning and budgeting. Mansur appointed younger technocrats to senior civil
service posts, a policy continued by his successor. He also created the Health
Corps, modeled after the Literacy Corps, to provide primary health care to
rural areas.
In the Majlis the government enjoyed a comfortable majority, and the nominal
opposition, the Mardom Party, generally voted with the government
party. An exception, however, was the general response to the Status of Forces
bill, a measure forced upon Iran by the American government and which granted
diplomatic immunity to United States military personnel serving in
Iran, as well as to their staffs and families. In effect, the bill would
allow these U.S. personnel to be tried by the United States rather than Iranian
courts for crimes committed on Iranian soil. For all Iranians, the bill
vividly recalled the humiliating capitulatory concessions extracted from
our country by the imperial powers in the nineteenth century and which had
been abolished by Reza Shah. Feeling against the bill was sufficiently strong
that sixty-five deputies absented themselves from the legislature, and sixty-one
opposed the bill when it was put to a vote in October 1964. It would have
later on have dire consequences for the United States as well as for Monarchy.
The measure also
aroused strong feeling outside the Majlis. Khomeini, who had been
released from house arrest in April 1964, denounced the measure in a public
sermon before a huge congregation in Qom. Tapes of the sermon and a leaflet
based on it were widely circulated and attracted considerable attention.
Khomeini was arrested again in November, within days of the sermon, and sent
into exile in Turkey. In October 1965, he was permitted to take up residence
in the city of Najaf, Iraq--the site of numerous Shia shrines--where he was
to remain for the next thirteen years. Although economic conditions were
soon to improve dramatically, the country had not yet fully recovered from
the recession of the 1959-63 period, which had imposed hardships on the poorer
classes. Mansur attempted to make up a budget deficit of an estimated
US$300 million (at then prevalent rates of exchange) by imposing heavy new
taxes on gasoline and kerosene and on exit permits for Iranians leaving the
country. Because kerosene was the primary heating fuel for the working classes,
the new taxes proved highly unpopular. Taxicab drivers in Tehran went on
strike, and Mansur was forced to rescind the fuel taxes in January, six weeks
after they had been imposed. An infusion of US$200 million in new revenues
(US$185 million from a cash bonus for five offshore oil oncessions granted
to United States and West European firms and US$15 million from a supplementary
oil agreement concluded with the Consortium, a group of foreign oil companies)
helped the government through its immediate financial difficulties.
The friend who was left behind. Amir Abbas Hoveyda, Prime Minister
of Iran had
the ability to please everyone including the clerics seen above . Yet, he
was made a scapegoat, imprisoned,
abandoned and later on executed by the Islamic Republic.
The Government of Amir Abbas Hoveyda
With this cash influx, Mohammad Reza Shah was able to maintain political
stability despite the assassination of his prime minister and an attempt
on his own life. On January 21, 1965, Mansur was assassinated by members
of a radical Islamic group. Evidence made available after the Islamic Revolution
revealed that the group had affiliations with clerics close to Khomeini.
A military tribunal sentenced six of those charged to death and the others
to long prison terms. In April there was also an attempt on the shah's life,
organized by a group of Iranian graduates of British universities. To replace
Mansur as prime minister, the shah appointed Amir Abbas Hoveyda ,
a skillful former diplomat and and highly competent executive of the National
Iranian Oil Company. Hoveyda had helped Mansur found the Progressive Center
and the Iran Novin and had served as his minister of finance.
Hoveyda's appointment marked the beginning of more than a decade
of impressive economic growth and relative
political stability
at home. During this period, the shah also used Iran's enhanced economic
and military strength to secure for the country a more influential role in
the Persian Gulf region, and he improved relations with Iran's immediate
neighbors and the Soviet Union and its allies.
( Hoveyda was a kind, generous and gentle
person. Photo at left shows Hoveyda, a computer enthusiasm, wearing his eternal
orchid. ) Hoveyda remained in office for the next twelve
years, the longest term of any of Iran's modern prime ministers. During this
decade, the Iran Novin dominated the government and the Majlis. It won large
majorities in both the 1967 and the 1971 elections. These elections were
carefully controlled by the authorities. Only the Mardom Party and, later,
the Pan-Iranist Party, an extreme nationalist group, were allowed to participate
in them. Neither party was able to secure more than a handful of Majlis seats,
and neither engaged in serious criticism of government programs. In 1969
and again in 1972, the shah appeared ready to permit the Mardom Party, under
new leadership, to function as a genuine opposition, i.e., to criticize the
government openly and to contest elections more energetically, but these
developments did not occur. The Iran Novin's domination of the administrative
machinery was further made evident during municipal council elections held
in 136 towns throughout the country in 1968. The Iran Novin won control of
a large majority of the councils and every seat in 115 of them. Only 10 percent
of eligible voters cast ballots in Tehran, however, a demonstration of public
indifference that was not confined to the capital.
Under Hoveyda
the government highly improved its administrative machinery and launched
what was dubbed "the education revolution." It adopted a new civil service
code and a new tax law and appointed young better qualified personnel to
key posts. Hoveyda also created several additional ministries in 1967,
including the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, which was intended
to help meet expanded and more specialized manpower needs. In mid-1968 the
government began a program that, although it did not resolve problems of
overcrowding and uneven quality, increased the number of institutions of
higher education substantially, brought students from provincial and lower
middle-class backgrounds into the new community colleges, and created a number
of institutions of high academic standing, such as Tehran's Arya Mehr Technical
University. But in the final analysis, had the Shah also given a say
to the old seasoned statesmen of yore and not pushed so far and so fast,
the outcome could have been much different.
( In the 1977 photo above I am in discussio
n at our Embassy with Prime Minister Hoveyda on an official visit to
Morocco.)
The Shah had remarried in 1959, and the new queen, Farah (Diba) Pahlavi,
had given birth to a male heir, Reza, in 1960. In 1967, because the crown
prince was still very young, steps were taken to regularize the procedure
for the succession. Under the constitution, if the Shah were to die before
the crown prince had come of age, the Majlis would meet to appoint a regent.
There might be a delay in the appointment of a regent, especially if the
Majlis was not in session. A constituent assembly, convened in September
1967, amended the constitution, providing for the queen automatically to
act as regent unless the Shah in his lifetime designated another
individual. In October 1967, believing his achievements finally justified
such a step, the Shah celebrated his long-postponed coronation.
To mark the occasion, the Majlis conferred on the Shah the title of Arya-Mehr,
or "Light of the Aryans." This glorification of the monarchy and the monarch,
however, was not universally popular with the Iranians. In 1971, celebrations
were held to mark what was presented as 2,500 years of uninterrupted monarchy
and the twenty-fifth centennial of the founding of the Iranian empire by
Cyrus the Great. The lavish ceremonies (which many compared to a Hollywood-style
extravaganza), the virtual exclusion of Iranians from the celebrations in
which the honored guests were foreign heads of state, and the excessive adulation
of the person of the Shah in official propaganda generated much adverse domestic
comment. A declaration by Khomeini condemning the celebrations and the regime
received wide circulation. In 1975, when the Majlis, at government
instigation,voted to alter the Iranian calendar so that year one of the calendar
coincided with the first year of the reign of Cyrus rather than with the
beginning of the Islamic era, many Iranians viewed the move first as needlessly
complicating the calendar and then as an unnecessary affront to religious
sensibilities. Two years later the calendar went back to the old one.
Iran, meantime, experienced a period of unprecedented and sustained economic
growth. The land distribution program launched in 1962, along with steadily
expanding job opportunities, greatly improved living standards, and
moderate inflation between 1964 and 1973, help explain the relative lack
of serious political unrest during this period. In foreign policy, the
Shah, with grat ability, used the relaxation in East-West tensions to improve
relations with the Soviet Union. In an exchange of notes in 1962,
he gave Moscow assurances he would not allow Iran to become a base for aggression
against the Soviet Union or permit foreign missile bases to be established
on Iranian soil. In 1965 Iran and the Soviet Union signed a series of agreements
under which the Soviets provided credits and technical assistance to build
Iran's first steel mill in exchange for shipments of Iranian natural
gas. This led to the construction of the almost 2,000-kilometer-long
trans-Iranian gas pipeline from the southern fields to the Iranian-Soviet
frontier. The Shah also bought small quantities of arms from the Soviet Union
and expanded trade with East European states. Although Soviet officials did
not welcome the increasingly close military and security cooperation between
Iran and the United States, especially after 1971, Moscow did not allow this
to disrupt its own rapprochement with Tehran.
In 1964 the shah joined the heads of state of Turkey and Pakistan to create
an organization, Regional Cooperation for Development (RCD), for economic,
social, and cultural cooperation among the three countries "outside the framework
of the Central Treaty Organization." The establishment of RCD was seen as
a sign of the diminishing importance of CENTO and, like the rapprochement
with the Soviet Union, of the Shah's increasing independence in foreign
policy. The three RCD member states undertook a number of joint economic
and cultural projects, but never on a large scale.
The Shah also began to play a larger role in Persian Gulf affairs. He supported
the royalists in the Yemen Civil War (1962-70) and, beginning in 1971, assisted
the sultan of Oman in putting down a rebellion in DhofarHe also reached an
understanding with Britain on the fate of Bahrain and three smaller islands
in the Gulf that Britain had controlled since the nineteenth century but
that Iran continued to claim. Britain's decision to withdraw from the Gulf
by 1971 and to help organize the Trucial States into a federation of independent
states (eventually known as the United Arab Emirates--UAE) necessitated esolution
of that situation. In 1970 the Shah agreed to give up Iran's long-standing
claim to Bahrain and to abide by the desire of the majority of its inhabitants
that Bahrain become an independent state. The Shah, however, continued to
press his claim to three islands, Abu Musa (controlled by the shaykh of Sharjah)
and the Greater and Lesser Tunbs (controlled by the shaykh of Ras al Khaymah).
He secured control of Abu Musa by agreeing to pay the shaykh of Sharjah an
annual subsidy, and he seized the two Tunbs by military force, immediately
following Britain's withdrawal.
This incident offended perennial troublemaker Iraq which broke diplomatic
relations with Iran as a result. Relations with Iraq remained strained until
1975, when Iran and Iraq signed the Algiers Agreement, under which
Iraq conceded Iran's long-standing demand for equal navigation
rights in the Shatt al Arab, and the Shah agreed to end support for the
Kurdish rebellion in northern Iraq. With the other Persian Gulf states, Tehran
maintained generally good relations. Iran signed agreements with Saudi Arabia
and other Gulf states delimiting frontiers along the continental shelf in
the Persian Gulf, began cooperation and nformation-sharing on security matters
with Saudi Arabia, and encouraged closer cooperation among the newly independent
Gulf shaykhdoms through the Gulf Cooperation Council. When Iraq threatened
Kuwait in an endemic border dispute, the Shah militarily and politically
supported Kuwait. This little-remembered and timely rescue helped
differ the Iraqi designs until Saddam's ill-fated invasion of that country
in 1990 with the ensuing U.S. "Desert Storm."
To enhance Iran's role in the Gulf, the shah also used oil revenues to expand
and equip the Iranian army, air force, and navy. His desire that, in the
aftermath of the British withdrawal, Iran would play the primary role in
guaranteeing Gulf security coincided with President Richard M. Nixon's hopes
for the region. The Nixon Doctrine, enunciated in 1969, sought to encourage
United States allies to shoulder greater responsibility for regional security.
Then, during his 1972 visit to Iran, Nixon took the unprecedented step of
allowing the Shah to purchase any conventional weapon in the United States
arsenal in the quantities believed necessary for Iran's defense. United
States-Iranian military cooperation deepened when the shah allowed the United
States to establish two listening posts in Iran to monitor Soviet ballistic
missile launches and other military activity. The morality of this story:
Do not get involved in Iranian politics and if you do, know what you are
doing. Unfortunately that was not President Carter's case.
Above: The end of a Friendship. The Shah and Empress Farah with
President Carter and Mrs. Carter
on the balcony of the White House in 1977. Carter's Presidency marked the
start of the breakdown
of traditional ties of frienship between Iran and the America
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