Shah of Shahs (6 page)

"Sometimes they would hold a trial. For political acts (but what is a political act? Here, everything is a political act), they used only military courts: closed sessions, no counsel, no witnesses, and an instantaneous sentence. The execution took place later. Has anyone added up the number of people that Savak shot? Hundreds, for sure. Our great poet Khosrow Golesorkhi was shot. Our great director Keramat Denachian was shot. Dozens of writers, professors, and artists were imprisoned. Dozens of others had to emigrate to save themselves. Unbelievably ignorant and barbarous scum made up Savak, and when they got their hands on someone in the habit of reading books they worked him over with particular malice.

"Savak avoided trials and tribunals. They preferred other methods and did most of their killing in secret. Nothing could be established afterward. Who did the killing? Nobody knew. Who was guilty? There were no guilty ones.

"People went after the army and the police with their bare hands because they reached a point at which they could no longer stand the terror. It might look like desperation to you, but to us it was all the same.

"Do you know that if anyone mentioned Savak, whoever was talking to that person would look at him hours afterward and start thinking, Perhaps he's an agent? The one I was talking to might have been my father, my husband, my best friend. I would tell myself, Keep cool, it's nonsense, but nothing helped and the thought kept returning. Everything was sick—the whole regime was sick, and I have to say, I don't know when we will recover our health, our equilibrium. Years of a dictatorship like that broke us, psychologically, and I think it'll take a long long time before we can begin living normally."

This picture was hanging alongside slogans, proclamations, and a few other photographs on the bulletin board in front of a revolutionary committee building in Shiraz. I asked a student to translate the handwritten statement thumbtacked below the photo. "It's written here," he said, "that this little boy, three years old, Habib Fardust, was a prisoner of Savak." "What?" I asked. "Three years old and a prisoner?" He answered that sometimes Savak locked up a whole family, which is what happened in this case. He read the statement to the end and added that the boy's parents had died during torture. Now, a lot of books are being published about Savak's crimes, along with various police documents and personal accounts by people who survived torture. And, the most shocking thing for me, I saw color postcards being sold in front of the university showing the bodies of Savak victims. Six hundred years after Tamburlaine, the same pathological cruelty remains, unchanged except perhaps for the degree of mechanization. The most common instrument discovered in Savak quarters was an electrically heated metal table called "the frying pan," on which the victim was tied down by his hands and feet. Many died on these tables. Often, the accused was already raving by the time he entered the torture chamber—few people could bear the screams they heard while they waited, and the smell of burning flesh. But technological progress could not displace medieval methods in this nightmare world. In Isfahan, people were thrown into huge bags full of cats crazed with hunger, or among poisonous snakes. Accounts of such horrors, sometimes, of course, propagated by Savak itself, circulated among the populace for years. They were so threatening, and the definition of an enemy of the state was so loose and arbitrary, that everyone could imagine ending up in such a torture chamber.

This was taken in Teheran on December 23, 1973: The Shah, surrounded by a bank of microphones, is giving a speech in a hall crowded with journalists. On this occasion Mohammed Reza, usually marked by a careful, studied reticence, cannot hide his emotion, his excitement, even—as the reporters note—his feverishness. In fact, the moment is important and fraught with consequences for the whole world: The Shah is announcing a new price for oil. The price has quadrupled in less than two months, and Iran, which used to earn five billion dollars a year from its petroleum exports, will now be bringing in twenty billion. What's more, control of this great pile of money will belong to the Shah alone. In his autocratic kingdom he can use it however he likes. He can throw it into the sea, spend it on ice cream, or lock it up in a golden safe. No wonder he looks so excited—how would any of us behave if we suddenly found twenty billion dollars in our pockets and knew, additionally, there would be twenty billion more each and every year, and eventually even greater sums? No wonder the Shah acted as he did, which was to lose his head. Instead of assembling his family, loyal generals, and trusted advisers to think over together the most reasonable way of using such a fortune, the ruler—who claims to have suddenly been blessed with a shining vision—announces to one and all that within a generation he will make Iran (which is a backward, disorganized, half-illiterate, barefoot country) into the fifth greatest power on earth. At the same time the monarch awakens high hopes among his people with the attractive slogan "Prosperity for All." Initially, with everyone aware that the Shah is in the really big money, these hopes do not seem completely vain.

A few days after the press conference shown in our photograph, the monarch grants an interview to
Der Spiegel
and says, "In ten years we will have the same living standard that you Germans, French, and English have now."

"Do you think, sir," the correspondent asks incredulously, "you will be really able to accomplish this within ten years?"

"Yes, of course."

But, says the astonished journalist, the West needed many generations to achieve its present standard of living. Will you be able to skip all that?

Of course.

I think of this interview now, when Mohammed Reza is no longer in the country and, surrounded by half-naked shivering children, I am wading through mud and dung among the squalid clay huts of a little village outside Shiraz. In front of one of the huts a woman is forming cow patties into circular cakes that, once dried, will serve (in this country of oil and gas!) as the only fuel for her home. Well, walking through this sad medieval village and remembering that interview of a few years back, the most banal of reflections comes into my head: Not even the greatest nonsense is beyond the reach of human invention.

For the time being, however, the autocrat locks himself in his palace and begins issuing the hundreds of decisions that convulse his homeland and lead to his overthrow five years later. He orders investment doubled, begins the great importing of technology, and creates the third-most-advanced army in the world. He commands that the most up-to-date equipment be ordered, installed, and put in use. Modern machines produce modern merchandise, and Iran is going to swamp the world with its superior output. He decides to build atomic power plants, electronics factories, steel mills, and great industrial complexes. Then, since there is a delicious winter in Europe, he leaves to ski in St. Moritz. But his charming, elegant residence in St. Moritz suddenly stops being a quiet hideaway and retreat, because word of the new Eldorado has spread around the world by this time and excited the power centers, where everyone immediately has begun calculating the amounts of money to be plucked in Iran. The premiers and ministers of otherwise respectable and affluent governments from serious, respected countries have begun to line up outside the Shah's Swiss domicile. The ruler sat in an armchair, warming his hands at the fireplace and listening to a deluge of propositions, offers, and declarations. Now the whole world was at his feet. Before him were bowed heads, inclined necks, and outstretched hands. "Now look," he'd tell the premiers and ministers,
"you don't know how to govern and that's why you don't have any money." He lectured London and Rome, advised Paris, scolded Madrid. The world heard him out meekly and swallowed even the bitterest admonitions because it couldn't take its eyes off the gold pyramid piling up in the Iranian desert. Ambassadors in Teheran went crazy under the barrage of telegrams that their ministers turned on them, all dealing with money: How much can the Shah give us? When and on what conditions? You say he won't? Then insist, Your Excellency! We offer guaranteed service and will ensure favorable publicity! Instead of elegance and seriousness, pushing and shoving without end, feverish glances and sweaty hands filled the waiting rooms of even the most petty Iranian ministers. People crowding each other, pulling at each other's sleeves, shouting, Get in line, wait your turn! These are the presidents of multinational corporations, directors of great conglomerates, representatives of famous companies, and finally the delegates of more or less respectable governments. One after another they are proposing, offering, pushing this or that factory for airplanes, cars, televisions, watches. And besides these notable and—under normal circumstances—distinguished lords of world capital and industry, the country is being flooded with smaller fry, penny-ante speculators and crooks, specialists in gold, gems, discotheques, strip joints, opium, bars, razor cuts, and surfing. These operators are scrambling to get into Iran, and they are unimpressed when, in some European airport, hooded students try to hand them pamphlets saying that people are dying of torture in their homeland, that no one knows whether the victims carried off by the Savak are dead or alive. Who cares, when the pickings are good and when, furthermore, everything is happening under the Shah's exulted slogan about building a Great Civilization? In the meantime, Mohammed Reza has returned from his winter vacation, well rested and satisfied. Everyone is praising him at last; the whole world is writing about him as an exemplar, puffing up his splendid qualities, constantly pointing out that everywhere, wherever you turn, there are so many foulups and cheats, whereas, in his land—not a one.

Unfortunately, the monarch's satisfaction is not to last long. Development is a treacherous river, as everyone who plunges into its currents knows. On the surface the water flows smoothly and quickly, but if the captain makes one careless or thoughtless move he finds out how many whirlpools and wide shoals the river contains. As the ship comes upon more and more of these hazards the captain's brow gets more and more furrowed. He keeps singing and whistling to keep his spirits up. The ship looks as if it is still traveling forward, yet it is stuck in one place. The prow has settled on a sandbar. All this, however, happens later. In the meantime the Shah is making purchases costing billions, and ships full of merchandise are steaming toward Iran from all the continents. But when they reach the Gulf, it turns out that the small obsolete ports are unable to handle such a mass of cargo (the Shah hadn't realized this). Several hundred ships line up at sea and stay there for up to six months, for which delay Iran pays the shipping companies a billion dollars annually. Somehow the ships are gradually unloaded, but then it turns out that there are no warehouses (the Shah hadn't realized). In the open air, in the desert, in nightmarish tropical heat, lie millions of tons of all sorts of cargo. Half of it, consisting of perishable foodstuffs and chemicals, ends up being thrown away. The remaining cargo now has to be transported into
the depths of the country, and at this moment it turns out that there is no transport (the Shah hadn't realized). Or rather, there are a few trucks and trailers, but only a crumb in comparison to the need. Two thousand tractor-trailers are thus ordered from Europe, but then it turns out there are no drivers (the Shah hadn't realized). After much consultation, an airliner flies off to bring South Korean truckers from Seoul. Now the tractor-trailers start rolling and begin to transport the cargo, but once the truckdrivers pick up a few words of Farsi, they discover they're making only half as much as native truckers. Outraged, they abandon their rigs and return to Korea. The trucks, unused to this day, still sit, covered with sand, along the Bander Abbas-Teheran highway. With time and the help of foreign freight companies, however, the factories and machines purchased abroad finally reach their appointed destinations. Then comes the time to assemble them. But it turns out that Iran has no engineers or technicians (the Shah hadn't realized). From a logical point of view, anyone who sets out to create a Great Civilization ought to begin with people, with training cadres of experts in order to form a native intelligentsia. But it was precisely that kind of thinking that was unacceptable. Open new universities and polytechnics, every one a hornets' nest, every student a rebel, a good-for-nothing, a freethinker? Is it any wonder the Shah didn't want to braid the whip that would flay his own skin? The monarch had a better way—he kept the majority of his students far from home. From this point of view the country was unique. More than a hundred thousand young Iranians were studying in Europe and America. This policy cost much more than it would have taken to create national universities. But it guaranteed the regime a degree of calm and security. The
majority of these young people never returned. Today more Iranian doctors practice in San Francisco or Hamburg than in Tebriz or Meshed. They did not return even for the generous salaries the Shah offered. They feared Savak and didn't want to go back to kissing anyone's shoes. An Iranian at home could not read the books of the country's best writers (because they came out only abroad), could not see the films of its outstanding directors (because they were not allowed to be shown in Iran), could not listen to the voices of its intellectuals (because they were condemned to silence). The Shah left people a choice between Savak and the mullahs. And they chose the mullahs. When thinking about the fall of any dictatorship, one should have no illusions that the whole system comes to an end like a bad dream with that fall. The physical existence of the system does indeed cease. But its psychological and social results live on for years, and even survive in the form of subconsciously continued behavior. A dictatorship that destroys the intelligentsia and culture leaves behind itself an empty, sour field on which the tree of thought won't grow quickly. It is not always the best people who emerge from hiding, from the corners and cracks of that farmed-out field, but often those who have proven themselves strongest, not always those who will create new values but rather those whose thick skin and internal resilience have ensured their survival. In such circumstances history begins to turn in a tragic, vicious circle from which it can sometimes take a whole epoch to break free. But we should stop here or even go back a few years, because by jumping ahead of events we have already destroyed the Great Civilization, and first we have to build it. And yet how do we build it here, where there are no experts and the nation, even if it is eager to learn, has
nowhere to study? In order to fulfill his vision, the Shah needed at least 700,000 specialists immediately. Somebody hit upon the safest and best way out—import them. The issue of security carried great weight here since foreigners, concerned about doing their jobs, making money, and getting home, would clearly not organize plots and rebellions or contest and rail against Savak. In general, revolutions would stop breaking out around the world if, for example, Ecuadorans built Paraguay and Indians built Saudi Arabia. Stir, mix together, relocate, disperse, and you will have peace. Tens of thousands of foreigners thus begin arriving. Airplane after airplane land at Teheran airport: domestic servants from the Philippines, hydraulic engineers from Greece, electricians from Norway, accountants from Pakistan, mechanics from Italy, military men from the United States. Let us look at the pictures of the Shah from this period: He's talking to an engineer from Munich, a foreman from Milan, a crane operator from Boston, a technician from Kuznetsk. And who are the only Iranians in these pictures? Ministers and Savak agents guarding the monarch. Their countrymen, absent from the pictures, observe it all with ever-widening eyes. This army of foreigners, by the very strength of its technical expertise, its knowing which buttons to press, which levers to pull, which cables to connect, even if it behaves in the humblest way, begins to dominate and starts crowding the Iranians into an inferiority complex. The foreigner knows how, and I don't. This is a proud people, extremely sensitive about its dignity. An Iranian will never admit he can't do something; to him, such an admission constitutes a great shame and a loss of face. He'll suffer, grow depressed, and finally begin to hate. He understood quickly the concept that was guiding his ruler: All of you just sit there in the shadow of the mosque and tend your sheep, because it will take a century for you to be of any use! I on the other hand have to build a global empire in ten years with the help of foreigners. This is why the Great Civilization struck Iranians as above all a great humiliation.