The People Wait

Last month Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi called Iran's legislators to his palace and ordered them to schedule new elections this month. Opposition candidates would be permitted, and the elections were to be completely free. But he explained candidly: "As head of the state, I am above parties, and organizations. If the government is not working properly, even though it has a majority, I can dismiss the government and disband the Majlis. What difference does it make to me who becomes a Deputy?"

Startling as this pronouncement sounded to Western ears, it created little stir among Iranians. For ever since the Shahanshah ousted weepy Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953, he has ruled with an unabashed if benevolent absolutism. To set an example in land reform, he distributed thousands of royal acres to the peasants, set in train such long range developments as dams, roads and irrigation, and has lavished much of the oil revenues of Iran in a buildup of the 200,000-man army.

Cause & Effect. The overthrow of the neighboring Turkish government this spring disturbed the Shah and his court. He also vividly remembers the uprising in Iraq which ended with the assassination of King Feisal. There is ample cause for unrest in the Shah's kingdom, and from across the border, Radio Moscow keeps up a steady drumfire of abuse. In his shabby capital of Teheran, a small portion of the population lives in splendor while the rest exist in the squalor of centuries, washing themselves in the open gutter jubes which double as sewers and water mains. In the arid countryside, the poor scrape the soil at wages of 60-c- a day while absentee landlords flatly refuse to follow the Shah's lead in giving up some of their property to the peasants. In recent years the cost of living has risen steadily. The nation's foreign exchange has been drained dangerously by a government indulgence which lets favored army officers and the country's rich import luxury goods ranging from Cadillacs to air conditioners.

The threat of trouble comes mainly from Iran's growing body of intellectuals, either educated abroad or trained at home by Western-influenced teachers. Admiring liberty, they are humiliated by the servility of their Parliament; taught to respect honesty, they are disgusted by the pall of corruption that hangs over the Shah's court. Yet the intellectuals are responsible for part of Iran's plight: they want only the whitest of white-collar jobs and would rather be unemployed lawyers than hard-working engineers.

Hope for Safety. There is no country in the Middle East where the stakes are bigger or U.S. involvements as great. For 16 years, a U.S. military mission has been advising and training the Iranian army.

U.S. firms, such as David E. Lilienthal's Development & Resources Corp., are building Iranian dams and highways; more than $1 billion in U.S. economic and military aid has poured into Teheran in the past nine years. Yet an Iranian mission has just asked Washington for an additional loan to balance the badly out of whack Iranian budget, and the military-minded Shah grumbles that he is not getting any supersonic century series jet fighters, even though there are only a handful of Iranian pilots skillful enough to fly the F-86s he already has.

The Shah clearly hopes that this month's elections will provide a safety valve. "We have two political parties which will have interparty strife," he says. But even so, the Shah is leaving little to chance. Old Mossadegh, who is still secretly admired by many Iranians, is kept safely sequestered on his estate 25 miles outside Teheran, and any Mossadegh supporter finds it impossible to run for election. Of the authorized parties, the Melliyun is under the leadership of Prime Minister Manouchehr Eghbal who once told Parliament, "I am not interested in your criticism and your complaints. You may say whatever you like. I don't depend on your votes. The Shah has ordered me to serve, and I am his servant." The opposition Mardom party was set up on the Shah's orders by his oldest friend, Asadollah Alam. One of the opposition charges is that the government party does not adequately explain to the people how much the Shah has done for them. Grumbled a prominent Iranian in private: "You would think they are both trying to get the Shah elected Prime Minister."

Despite the Shah's good intentions and high intelligence, he seems to have developed a supernatural reverence for his own mission, delights in the praise of fawning courtiers. His secret police, a necessity in a country bordering on Communist Russia, are all too often inclined to treat any outspoken critic of the regime as a subversive. Reform-minded men, earnestly hoping that corruption and inefficiency can be cleaned up by the Shah before the forces of unrest become explosive, generally fear to speak out. Said one young nationalist, "Personally, I want the Shah to remain as a democratic king, giving powers to duly elected ministers, but I don't think he wants to do it. Meanwhile, the people wait, hour by hour "

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.