Before we go on with the second part of these excerpts, I should remind the reader that these are by no means an exact account of what happened in Iran. Nor do they reflect what went on behind the scenes.
These are merely how things were seen from the eyes of ordinary citizens at the time of the revolution. A day to day account, with some minor parts omitted for lack of space.

FALL OF THE PEACOCK THRONE

The Story Of Iran

William Forbis



His Destined Hour

[Bethroned Shah] A few sheets of paper, covered with the squiggles of Persian script -this was what touched off the avalanche that, growing monthly, carried the Shah of Iran in one year from seemingly invincible absolute monarch to dethroned exile. Who wrote the artic le is not known; it could have been Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi himself, or someone under his instructions. Toward the end of 1977, the paper passed under the sombre and thoughtful eyes of the minister of court, Amir Abbas Hoveyda. He no doubt reflected o n the consequences were the paper to be published.

Certainly publication could bring trouble to Hoveyda's rival, Jamshid Amuzegar, the prime minister. Hoveyda sent the article to Dariush Homayun, head of the sinister Ministry of Information, which had power to compel newspapers to print whatever th e ministry sent them.
[Hoveyda] Once a foe of the Shah, Homayun had joined the ranks of the many bright people whom the Shah co-opted by the offer of high office. He passed the article to ETELAAT (information), one of Teheran's two major dailies.

Published by Etelaat on January 7, 1978, the article was an attack on a man named Ruhollah Khomeini, the Shah's most dangerous political opponent. Khomeini is an ayatollah, the highest rank of the mullahs, the priests of the Shiite Moslem faith, which prevails in Iran.

When copies of Etelaat reached Qom, Khomeini's former home and the theological centre of Iran, five thousand devout Moslems gathered in a large mosque to protest the article. Emerging, the crowd ran into a hail of pistol and submachine-gun fire from p olicemen, which killed scores. Afterward, police prevented people from donating blood to the wounded, and more died in hospitals. Qom's Ayatollah Sayad Ghassem Shariatmadari called the shooting "un-Islamic and inhumane" and predicted that "Almighty God wi ll in time punish those responsible."

[Qom] In Islam, the fortieth day after a death is set aside for commemoration of the dead. Mourning for the dead in Qom brought riots and new killings, and mourning for the latest victims forty days later brought another explosion, this time in Tabriz. Mobs stormed banks, stores, government offices, and movie theatres that remained open in defiance of the clergy's call for a strike to commemorate the victims at Qom. The provincial government sent tanks into the streets, and killed about a hundred demonstrat ors. The Shah, for the first time sensing a need to make a concession, purged the governor general of the province and other officials blamed for ordering troops to fire at the mob. But forty days later, riots burst out again in fifty-five towns and citie s, leading to another bloody explosion forty days after that.

The Shah, who had begun the year boasting, "Nobody can overthrow me; I have the support of 700,000 troops, all the workers, and most of the people," grew depressed and ineffective. In August came the insane and horrifying burning of the Rex Cinema in Abadan. Showing that night was REINDEER, an Iranian-made movie generally judged to be hostile to the regime because it told the story of a poor peasant struggling against corrupt officials. The fire killed almost the entire audience, which may have number ed as many as eight hundred. They died because the theatre's doors were locked and because firemen bungled efforts to quench the blaze. The government tried to blame anti-Shah Moslem zealots, on grounds that such fanatics had earlier burned empty theatres that violated Islamic precepts by showing pornographic films. But millions of Iranians, convinced that the doors had been locked by government troops, concluded that the burning of the theatre was a provocation concocted by some mad general, an Iranian v ersion of the Reichstag fire in Berlin.

The Shah tried further concessions, freeing newspapers and television for the first time in twenty-five years to print and show what they pleased. The press responded by publishing chilling accounts of the torture that SAVAK, the secret police, had in flicted on hundreds of oppositionists over many years. The Shah thereupon fired his long-time friend and confidant, the murderous General Nematollah Nassiri, head of SAVAK.

[Amuzegar] If it had been Hoveyda's intention to bring down Amuzegar, he succeeded. Not long after the Abadan fire, the prime minister quit. The Shah brought in Jafar Sharif-Emami, a veteran politician with some renown for his devotion to Islam. Sharif-Emami clo sed gambling casinos, nightclubs, and movie houses showing Western films. He consulted with Qom's Ayatollah Shariatmadari. He indicted Nassiri for torture and illegal imprisonment. For his part, the Shah passed out to his numerous corrupt brothers and sis ters and nephews and nieces an extraordinary "code of conduct" aimed at preventing them from taking bribes to act as go-betweens in government contracts and from cutting themselves in on profitable businesses. He ditched Hoveyda and set his new court mini ster to enforcing the code. All of his relatives except his mother, wife, children, and his brother Hamid thereupon fled from Iran.

The concessions did not work. In early September new bloody riots exploded in Teheran and eleven other cities, and the Shah put Iran under martial law. Ayatollah Khomeini, whom Iraq had deported as an accommodation to the Shah, settled near Paris and by direct-dial telephone to other mullahs in Iran monotonously preached his message: "The pahlavi dynasty must go. No compromise is possible." Tape-recorded and passed from mosque to mosque, his words spread through Iran almost as fast as though they had been televised. The Shah granted Khomeini amnesty, he refused it. On his fifty-ninth birthday, October 26, the Shah freed 1126 political prisoners, crowds shouted, "Death to the Shah!"

A few days later, on Khomeini's call, a general strike began, a strike that with varying effectiveness would not end until after the Shah fell. Oil exports plummeted as production dropped to a fifth of the normal six million barrels a day, costing Ira n $60 million daily in lost sales. On November 5, the biggest mobs yet rioted in Teheran, burning movie houses, airline offices, and the commercial building of the British Embassy. Troops fired, students fell dead. As smoke filled the sky, General Gholam Reza Az'hari, the Shah's chief of staff, drove to the palace and demanded a military government. The next day Az'hari went to work as prime minister and the Shah appeared on television to make an astoundingly contrite speech. "I renew my oath to be the pr otector of the constitution and undertake that past mistakes shall not be repeated," the Shah said. "I hereby give assurance that government will do away with repression and corruption and that social justice will be restored."

For his part, Khomeini called for "rivers of blood" to bring down the Shah. The French government warned Khomeini to lower his voice, but smugly convinced that France would need him when the Shah was overthrown, he refused.

Life became a day-to-day struggle. Troops and demonstrators clashed incessantly; in the cemeteries women wailed at new graves. The smell of the streets were tear gas and smoke from tire-fuelled bonfires. In the narrow moneychangers' shops on Teheran's Ferdowsi Avenue, rich Iranians traded millions of rials to get marks, francs, or dollars at premium prices, money to use for flight from Iran.

At last the Shah saw that his opponents could and would keep the country in turmoil until he, too, fled from Iran. His choice became not whether to go, but how to go without leaving Iran minus any kind of government. To that end, he struck a deal with a courtly lawyer named Shahpur Bakhtiar, whose lifelong opposition to the monarch had several times landed him in prison. In this deal, Bakhtiar became prime minister, the Shah agreed to take a "vacation" abroad, and the two set up a regency council to r epresent the absent monarch. Khomeini implacably condemned the deal; Bakhtiar's party, the National Front, rejected Bakhtiar and forced him to set up a cabinet of unknowns; the Shah dithered about departing. When he sent his mother to the house of his sis ter Shams in Beverly Hills, Iranian students stormed the place and tried to burn it, forcing the queen mother and the princess to take refuge at the palm springs estate of former Ambassador to Great Britain, Walter Annenberg. The Shah thus learned that hi s own exile might be perilous and constricted.

As he dawdled, pressure mounted. Clashes in one place or another brought daily killings. Cities began to look like battlefields. Shortages of gasoline infuriated drivers; shortages of kerosene left millions shivering through snowy nights. In the Persian Gulf, a hundred freighters waited to unload while customs agents s truck. For the same reason, 750 trucks were backed up at the border crossing of the highway from Europe.

The jig was up. The Shah had sent his children to the United States, and on January 16, he and his wife were the last of the Pahlavi family (except the eccentric Prince Hamid) left in Iran. About 12:30 p.m., four helicopters took off from Niavaran Pal ace for Mehrabad airport. At the airport, the departure was a mournful scene. Eyes glistening, the Shah said: "I hope the government will be able to make amends for the past and also succeed in laying a foundation for the future." He bent and lifted a mem ber of the Imperial Guard who tried to kiss the king's feet. Then, having taken the controls of a silver-and-blue Boeing 707, with his wife, he flew off to exile.


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Other excerpts from the book:

Title:   Fall of the Peacock Throne
Author:  William H. Forbis
Imprint: New York, Harper & Row, 1980

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