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1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso
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₧sü╡ ¿««The Emperor Who Died an Exile
Mohammed Reza Pahlavi: 1919-1980
August 4, 1980
Is it not passing brave to be a King,
And ride in triumph through
Persepolis?
--Tamburlaine the Great,
Christopher Marlowe
He ended fearing for his life,
On the pinnacle of nothingness.
--Owhadi, Persian poet
Not even Scheherazade could have conceived the splendid scene beside
the ancient ruins of Persepolis. The occasion was the 2,500th
anniversary of the founding of the Persian Empire by Cyrus the Great,
and the Shah of Iran had decided to throw a party that would dazzle
even the most jaded of his guests: Kings and Queens, Presidents and
Premiers, sheiks and sultans. More than $100 million was spent on
tents lined with silk and furnished with Baccarat crystal and
Porthault linens, banquets laden with roast peacock stuffed with foie
gras, magnums of Chateau Lafite-Rothschild.
The year was 1971. Yet even then, to those who looked beyond the
grandeur, there were signs that all was not well in the Shah's realm.
The party grounds were sealed with barbed wire; troops armed with
submachine guns stood guard. The University of Tehran was closed to
forestall embarrassing signs of protest. By 1978, resentment against
the imperial arrogance of Persepolis had ignited a revolution that
spread from mosques to merchants to the remotest villages of the
country. When Mohammed Reza Pahlavi died in a Cairo hospital last
week at the age of 60 of lymphatic cancer complicated by a hemorrhage
of the pancreas, it was after 18 months of exile.
No longer was he the Aryamehr (Light of the Aryans) and Shahanshah
(King of Kings), a absolute ruler of the remnant of the Persian
Empire that his father had renamed Iran. Since fleeing the country
in January 1979, he had been a man without a country, a man with a
price on his head, placed there by the Muslim fundamentalists who
overthrew him. His search for a home took him initially from Egypt
to Morocco to the Bahamas to Mexico. Last October he requested
permission to enter the U.S. for medical treatment. Despite warnings
that his admission could irreparably damage relations with the new
government in Tehran, the Carter Administration, encouraged by Henry
Kissinger and David Rockefeller, decided to admit the Shah on
humanitarian grounds.
Iranian anger at what was seen as American protection of the ousted
dictator boiled over. Militants seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran,
took everyone present hostage, and demanded that the Shah be returned
to stand trial for various "crimes." Washington refused. There was
no indication, how his death would affect the 52 Americans who are
still being held captive after eight months.
After his recover, the Shah briefly found a haven in Panama. In
March, fearful of extradition proceedings and again in need of
surgery, he went to Cairo at the invitation of Egyptian President
Anwar Sadat, who offered his "good friend" a home and medical
treatment there.
It was a measure of the manner in which he had ruled that in death,
as in life, the former shah was remembered more generously by
foreigners than by his own people. Some of the harshest judgments
had been pronounced by those who had faithfully, and sometimes
servilely, worked under the Shah. "He was essentially a weak man who
played the role of the dictator," said Fereydoun Hoveida, who for
seven years was the Shah's Ambassador to the United Nations.
Despite his dynastic pretensions, the Shah was not to be the monarchy
born. His commoner father Reza Khan, a hot-tempered colonel in the
Persian Cossack cavalry, seized power in a bloodless coup in 1921.
He forced parliament to dissolve the decadent, 129-year-old Qajar
dynasty in 1925 and proclaim him Shah. He took Pahlavi--an ancient
Persian language--as his dynastic name. Following his coronation,
his first-born son Mohammed Reza, then seven, was designated crown
prince. The elder Shah paraded the child around in gold-encrusted
uniforms, groomed him in sports and, when he was twelve, packed him
off to Le Rosey, an exclusive Swiss boarding school. By then, as the
Shah wrote in his 1961 autobiography, he already had a mystical sense
of mission and was convinced by visions that he had been "chosen by
God" to save his country.
In 1941, when the Allies needed a secure route to ship war supplies
to the Soviet Union, Reza Shah, a Nazi sympathizer, was forced into
exile. His son, then 21, initially was little more than a
figurehead. At war's end he confronted his first crisis when Soviet
forces, refusing to leave the country, set up a puppet regime in the
northern province of Azerbaijan. Iran took the issue to the United
Nations and with considerable support from the U.S., succeeded in
having them expelled.
His next serious test began in 1951, when the popularly elected
government of Premier Mohammed Mossadegh nationalized the Anglo-
Iranian Oil Co. In 1953, right wing monarchists in the army
unsuccessfully attempted to depose Mossadegh; the Shah was forced to
flee to Rome. A few days later, however, a countercoup sponsored by
the CIA restored him to the throne. The Shah launched a ruthless
purge, particularly of remnants of the Communist Tudeh Party, which
had been outlawed in 1948. He also organized a secret-police
network, SAVAK, that was to become one of the most notorious in the
world.
The Shah set about trying to transform his feudal nation into a
modern state. In the early 1960s, he informed his ministers: "I am
going to go faster than the left." His dream of economic and social
reforms was shared by a new generation of intellectuals, who also
believed, mistakenly as it turned out, that political reforms would
follow. The Shah's ambitious reform program--the so-called White
Revolution--included a number of laudable aims: a literacy corps,
equal rights for women, nationalization of forestry and water
resources, profit-sharing schemes for workers, and land reforms
designed to break up huge feudal estates.
In practice, however, many of the reforms were ineptly administered;
others were deeply resented. The Shah, like his father before him,
soon found himself at odds with the country's powerful Muslims
clergy. After a series of violent riots, the Ayatullah Ruhollah
Khomeini, one of the most prominent spiritual leaders in Iran, was
arrested and sent into exile, where he laid the groundwork for the
overthrow of the Pahlavi regime and eventually became the leader of
the revolution.
"Tragically," writes Hoveida in his highly critical book, The Fall of
the Shah, "the Shah's reforms were eclipsed within a few years by his
increasing authoritarianism. In his consuming passion for what he
conceived of as his divine mission, he came to believe in his own
infallibility." Some observers sensed elements of megalomania when,
in his long-delayed formal coronation in a lavish 1967 ceremony, he
placed the crown upon his own head as a symbol of his absolute
supremacy.
Throughout his life, the Shah sometimes seemed to be conducting a
kind of psychological battle against what he apparently feared was
his own weakness. He became an accomplished pilot, a versatile
sportsman, a reputed womanizer--and an insensitive despot before whom
even Premiers were expected to bow. "Nobody can influence me,
nobody," he once told Italian Journalist Oriana Fallaci, adding
contemptuously: "Still less a woman."
In 1975, he dissolved various throne-directed political parties--the
only ones allowed to operate--and created the Rastakhiz (National
Resurgence) Party. All Iranians were instructed to join it. Those
who disagreed with the party's ideology, in essence a civil religion
based on Shah worship, were blasted as "traitors" and told to leave
Iran and renounce their citizenship. The jails filled with thousands
of political prisoners, and SAVAK was universally reviled for its
tactics of terror and torture. "No country in the world," concluded
Amnesty International in 1975, "has a worse record in human rights
than Iran."
The Shah's dreams of glory were fueled by Iran's oil wealth. In
1973, the Shah's voice had been the decisive one at the Tehran
conference that vastly increased the price of oil. Over the next
year, the country's revenues from its wells and refineries shot up
from $2 billion to more than $20 billion a year. Rather like a child
who has suddenly won big at Monopoly, the Shah dreamed of
transforming Iran into a new industrial power, a kind of West Germany
of the Middle East. Western visitors were subjected to stern
lectures by the Shah on the profligacy of industrial nations, which
wasted "the noble product" on heating homes and fueling factories.
As with his early promises of reform, the dream of rapid
industrialization went awry. Inflation ran wild, and so did
corruption, especially among members of the royal family. Billions
of dollars were wasted on misconceived, mismanaged, prestige-oriented
development projects.
Staunchly anti-Communist, the Shah dreamed of making Iran a military
power, the protector of the Persian Gulf. Convinced that he was a
reliable and unassailable ally, Washington--most notably the Nixon
Administration--encouraged him to build up his arsenal. He did--to
the tune of $36 billion. By 1978, Iran had one of the world's most
sophisticated collections of advanced weaponry, including F-14 jet
fighters and a variety of guided-missile systems. Meanwhile 63,000
of Iran's 66,000 villages had neither piped water nor electricity.
The capital of Tehran (pop. 5 million) lacked a sewer system.
Throughout 1978, riots and protests were harbingers of the coming
revolution. By and large, Western leaders accepted the Shah's
assurances that his opposition was merely a gaggle of "Islamic
Marxists," abetted by "foreign agents and traitors." Eventually, the
Shah made some concessions to placate his critics; he lifted press
censorship and released some political prisoners. By then it was too
late.
Caught up in his dream, the Shah worked hard, putting in 15 hours a
day at his desk in Niavaran Palace in Tehran. He seemingly found
little happiness in either his public or his private life. He seldom
smiled, and his voice lacked warmth or expression. His first
marriage, to Egypt's Princess Fawzia, King Farouk's sister, ended in
a 1948 divorce when the Shah concluded that she could not give him a
male heir (a daughter, Princess Shahanaz, is now 39). Three years
later, the Shah married Soraya Esfandiari, a beautiful Iranian
commoner. He divorced her in 1958, again because the union failed to
produce an heir. In 1959, he married Farah Diba, then a 21-year-old
architecture student in Paris. Sensitive and compassionate, Farah
sought to soften the harsh policies of her husband when possible.
She is the mother of his four other children: Crown Prince Reza, 19,
Princess Farahnaz, 17, Prince Ali Reza, 14, and Princess Leila, 10.
The Shah's end was far from princely: the hasty flight, the
uncertain wandering, the last hours in a hospital far from Tehran.
Those images make it hard to assess history's ultimate verdict. "He
ruled as a lion and a fox," concludes Professor James Bill, an Iran
specialist at the University of Texas, "but in the process he forgot
the needs of his people. He insulated and isolated himself from
them, and in the end failed to build the political institutions and
social trust they needed." He steered his country into a revolution,
only to find that, as it gathered force, his people decided that they
would no longer allow him to steer his country anywhere.
By Marguerite Johnson