Harsh penalties for those who sowed "corruption on earth"
In the euphoric days that followed the exile of the Shah, the streets of Iran's cities echoed to the rallying cry of the Islamic revolution: "Allahu Akbar!" (God is great!). Last week those shouts were heard again, this time from behind the walls of Qasr prison, a grim fortress in downtown Tehran. "Allahu Akbar!" shouted witnesses at closed trials of military men and government officials who had served the Shah. "Allahu Akbar!" cried members of the firing squads that dispatched the condemned.
By week's end at least 109 officials of the old regime had been tried, found guilty and shot, in a display of revolutionary justice that to much of the world seemed vengeful and barbaric. The trial scenes recalled the bloody aftermath of other revolutions, such as the Reign of Terror in 18th century France (see box) and the roster of the doomed read like a Who's Who of Iranian politics.
The most prominent victim was Amir Abbas Hoveida, 60, Iran's Premier from 1965 to 1977. After an extended trial, he was found guilty of treason and "sowing corruption on earth." Among the other men convicted by the courts were former Foreign Minister Abbas Ali Khalatbari, several former members of the Majlis (parliament) and more than two dozen generals, including the last chief of the air force and two former heads of SAVAK, the secret police.
The trials were an acute embarrassment to Premier Mehdi Bazargan. Last month, angered by accounts of the humiliation of Hoveida in midnight hearings, Bazargan went on TV to denounce the summary trials as "a disgrace." During a midnight visit to the holy city of Qum, he persuaded Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, spiritual leader of the revolution, to suspend all trials (including Hoveida's) until new guidelines could be set. But when regulations were announced two weeks ago, the trials resumed not under the jurisdiction of the ministry of justice, but of a hitherto unknown Council of Revolutionary Tribunals. The council is believed to be an arm of the secret Revolutionary Council, directed by Khomeini, that may well be the real governing authority in Iran. A spokesman for Bazargan said last week that the Premier did not learn of Hoveida's death sentence until several hours after the execution had taken place. But he added that Bazargan felt that the penalty was in order.
Defendants in the revolutionary courts are tried under the Shari'a, the Islamic law based primarily on the Koran, rather than under Iran's penal code. Trials are conducted by a five-man panel of judges. Verdicts in the trials, some of which have lasted less than an hour, are reached by a majority vote of the judges; the sentence is handed down by the senior judge, whose appointment is approved by Khomeini, and carried out immediately. There are no appeals. The new regulations allow for defense attorneys, though none were seen at last week's trials in Tehran. The guidelines also allow for "open" courts; in practice, attendance has usually been limited to witnesses, relatives of the accused and reporters from Ettela'at a formerly pro-Shah newspaper that now supports the government. Some members of the foreign press have recently been admitted.
As reported in the Iranian press, testimony at the trials has been sometimes startling, often moving. Khalatbari, a venerable intellectual who was charged with allowing SAVAK and CIA agents to use his foreign ministry as a cover, insisted that he was only following orders-a defense heard often at the trials. Khalatbari also raised a damning but unproven charge against the Shah, who, he said, "used to commit treason. He killed a few people with his own hands."
In other cases, victims of torture and imprisonment under the old regime-who have been urged to come forward by appeals over Radio Iran-showed up in court with disfigured limbs and scarred bodies. "You know me, don't you?" cried one pathetically misshapen young man, about 20, to a SAVAK sergeant on trial. "Look, look at these joints that no longer function. Look at these wounds that even now won't heal!" The defendant shrank before the recollection of a night he perhaps remembered too well.
Until the end, Hoveida maintained that the policies he carried out for the Shah would have worked had they been given more time. "I should like to stress that if there is need for a victim," he told the court, "I am willing to be it." After his death sentence was read last week, he reportedly asked for a month's stay of execution so that he could write his memoirs. It was refused. Hoveida was shot by a firing squad using Israeli-made Uzi submachine guns.
Major General Hassan Pakravan, a former head of SAVAK, told his trial judges: "I accepted all the responsibilities then, and I accept them now." Air Force General Amir Hussein Rabii expressed his anger at U.S. General Robert E. Huyser, the deputy commander of U.S. forces in Europe, who had been sent to Iran with the goal of persuading the military leaders not to mount a coup against the Shah's last Premier, Shahpour Bakhtiar. Huyser, said Rabii, "came and picked up the Shah like a dead mouse by its tail and threw him out." The former air force chief asked for leniency on the grounds that he had refused orders from Bakhtiar to bomb an arsenal in Tehran that had been overrun by demonstrators. The plea was denied.
U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim and Amnesty International have issued protests against the Iranian trials. No complaints have been registered by any Islamic nation. Until last week, the Carter Administration had refrained from comment, apparently concerned that criticism might endanger the lives of the 3,200 Americans still living in Iran. But after U.S. Ambassador William Sullivan returned to Washington for consultation-expectations are that he will be replaced and a new ambassador named this week-the State Department issued a guarded statement about "the executions of persons who are apparently denied internationally accepted standards of justice."
Some scholars familiar with Iran argue that the trials should not be seen as a display of mindless Islamic fanaticism. There was widespread fear in Iran, they point out, that if the leaders of the former regime were not brought swiftly to trial, armed radical guerrillas would then take vengeance into their own hands. "I'm disappointed by the way the trials have been conducted under closed auspices," says Princeton's Richard Falk, "but we must remember that those men executed were implicated in crimes against their people. In that context, we can compare their punishments with war criminals in Germany and Japan who were killed for crimes against humanity."
The condemned got little sympathy from Iranian students in the U.S., who were among the most vociferous critics of the Shah. Some pointed out that the death toll so far is a mere fraction of the tens of thousands who were killed during the last year of the Shah's regime. Others are disappointed that the trials are not public so that the facts of life under the Shah could be brought into the open. "The reason the executions were committed so promptly," says Younes Benab, an Iranian professor of economics in Washington, "is that there is fear in Iran that there may be another coup."
A more serious danger is that the country may slide into anarchy. Government forces have been barely able to suppress uprisings by rebellious Turkoman and Kurdish tribesmen in the northern provinces. Although petroleum production rose above 4 million bbl. a day last week, the oilfields around Ahwaz are still largely in the hands of dissident workers' councils, which have held numerous sit-ins to protest low wages and poor working conditions. Some 3.5 million Iranians (one-third of the work force) are unemployed; thousands of them milled around the ministry of labor in Tehran last week, demonstrating for jobs. Meanwhile, the Bazargan government survives by the grace of Khomeini, who spends his days in Qum receiving petitioners and issuing elamiehs (directives) against profiteering and other anti-Islamic practices. Says a Western diplomat in Tehran: "I no longer have any confidence whatsoever that Khomeini knows what is going on."
The Shah, meanwhile, was vacationing on Paradise Island in the Bahamas, still brooding about where and how he will spend his years in exile. He would like to come to the U.S. TIME has learned that President Carter has dispatched two emissaries to advise him not to apply for a visa. In defense of this repudiation of an old ally, Administration officials cite both the enormous security problem that the Shah's presence would create as well as the difficulties that the U.S. would have in improving relations with the new revolutionary government of Iran.
Some influential Americans, including former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, are appalled by this attitude toward an exiled ruler who was a staunch defender of U.S. interests during his years in power. The Shah's friends argue that he should be allowed into the country on humanitarian grounds, and that a superpower like the U.S. should not be so concerned about the feelings of the unstable government in Tehran.
In the euphoric days that followed the exile of the Shah, the streets of Iran's cities echoed to the rallying cry of the Islamic revolution: "Allahu Akbar!" (God is great!). Last week those shouts were heard again, this time from behind the walls of Qasr prison, a grim fortress in downtown Tehran. "Allahu Akbar!" shouted witnesses at closed trials of military men and government officials who had served the Shah. "Allahu Akbar!" cried members of the firing squads that dispatched the condemned.
By week's end at least 109 officials of the old regime had been tried, found guilty and shot, in a display of revolutionary justice that to much of the world seemed vengeful and barbaric. The trial scenes recalled the bloody aftermath of other revolutions, such as the Reign of Terror in 18th century France (see box) and the roster of the doomed read like a Who's Who of Iranian politics.
The most prominent victim was Amir Abbas Hoveida, 60, Iran's Premier from 1965 to 1977. After an extended trial, he was found guilty of treason and "sowing corruption on earth." Among the other men convicted by the courts were former Foreign Minister Abbas Ali Khalatbari, several former members of the Majlis (parliament) and more than two dozen generals, including the last chief of the air force and two former heads of SAVAK, the secret police.
The trials were an acute embarrassment to Premier Mehdi Bazargan. Last month, angered by accounts of the humiliation of Hoveida in midnight hearings, Bazargan went on TV to denounce the summary trials as "a disgrace." During a midnight visit to the holy city of Qum, he persuaded Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, spiritual leader of the revolution, to suspend all trials (including Hoveida's) until new guidelines could be set. But when regulations were announced two weeks ago, the trials resumed not under the jurisdiction of the ministry of justice, but of a hitherto unknown Council of Revolutionary Tribunals. The council is believed to be an arm of the secret Revolutionary Council, directed by Khomeini, that may well be the real governing authority in Iran. A spokesman for Bazargan said last week that the Premier did not learn of Hoveida's death sentence until several hours after the execution had taken place. But he added that Bazargan felt that the penalty was in order.
Defendants in the revolutionary courts are tried under the Shari'a, the Islamic law based primarily on the Koran, rather than under Iran's penal code. Trials are conducted by a five-man panel of judges. Verdicts in the trials, some of which have lasted less than an hour, are reached by a majority vote of the judges; the sentence is handed down by the senior judge, whose appointment is approved by Khomeini, and carried out immediately. There are no appeals. The new regulations allow for defense attorneys, though none were seen at last week's trials in Tehran. The guidelines also allow for "open" courts; in practice, attendance has usually been limited to witnesses, relatives of the accused and reporters from Ettela'at a formerly pro-Shah newspaper that now supports the government. Some members of the foreign press have recently been admitted.
As reported in the Iranian press, testimony at the trials has been sometimes startling, often moving. Khalatbari, a venerable intellectual who was charged with allowing SAVAK and CIA agents to use his foreign ministry as a cover, insisted that he was only following orders-a defense heard often at the trials. Khalatbari also raised a damning but unproven charge against the Shah, who, he said, "used to commit treason. He killed a few people with his own hands."
In other cases, victims of torture and imprisonment under the old regime-who have been urged to come forward by appeals over Radio Iran-showed up in court with disfigured limbs and scarred bodies. "You know me, don't you?" cried one pathetically misshapen young man, about 20, to a SAVAK sergeant on trial. "Look, look at these joints that no longer function. Look at these wounds that even now won't heal!" The defendant shrank before the recollection of a night he perhaps remembered too well.
Until the end, Hoveida maintained that the policies he carried out for the Shah would have worked had they been given more time. "I should like to stress that if there is need for a victim," he told the court, "I am willing to be it." After his death sentence was read last week, he reportedly asked for a month's stay of execution so that he could write his memoirs. It was refused. Hoveida was shot by a firing squad using Israeli-made Uzi submachine guns.
Major General Hassan Pakravan, a former head of SAVAK, told his trial judges: "I accepted all the responsibilities then, and I accept them now." Air Force General Amir Hussein Rabii expressed his anger at U.S. General Robert E. Huyser, the deputy commander of U.S. forces in Europe, who had been sent to Iran with the goal of persuading the military leaders not to mount a coup against the Shah's last Premier, Shahpour Bakhtiar. Huyser, said Rabii, "came and picked up the Shah like a dead mouse by its tail and threw him out." The former air force chief asked for leniency on the grounds that he had refused orders from Bakhtiar to bomb an arsenal in Tehran that had been overrun by demonstrators. The plea was denied.
U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim and Amnesty International have issued protests against the Iranian trials. No complaints have been registered by any Islamic nation. Until last week, the Carter Administration had refrained from comment, apparently concerned that criticism might endanger the lives of the 3,200 Americans still living in Iran. But after U.S. Ambassador William Sullivan returned to Washington for consultation-expectations are that he will be replaced and a new ambassador named this week-the State Department issued a guarded statement about "the executions of persons who are apparently denied internationally accepted standards of justice."
Some scholars familiar with Iran argue that the trials should not be seen as a display of mindless Islamic fanaticism. There was widespread fear in Iran, they point out, that if the leaders of the former regime were not brought swiftly to trial, armed radical guerrillas would then take vengeance into their own hands. "I'm disappointed by the way the trials have been conducted under closed auspices," says Princeton's Richard Falk, "but we must remember that those men executed were implicated in crimes against their people. In that context, we can compare their punishments with war criminals in Germany and Japan who were killed for crimes against humanity."
The condemned got little sympathy from Iranian students in the U.S., who were among the most vociferous critics of the Shah. Some pointed out that the death toll so far is a mere fraction of the tens of thousands who were killed during the last year of the Shah's regime. Others are disappointed that the trials are not public so that the facts of life under the Shah could be brought into the open. "The reason the executions were committed so promptly," says Younes Benab, an Iranian professor of economics in Washington, "is that there is fear in Iran that there may be another coup."
A more serious danger is that the country may slide into anarchy. Government forces have been barely able to suppress uprisings by rebellious Turkoman and Kurdish tribesmen in the northern provinces. Although petroleum production rose above 4 million bbl. a day last week, the oilfields around Ahwaz are still largely in the hands of dissident workers' councils, which have held numerous sit-ins to protest low wages and poor working conditions. Some 3.5 million Iranians (one-third of the work force) are unemployed; thousands of them milled around the ministry of labor in Tehran last week, demonstrating for jobs. Meanwhile, the Bazargan government survives by the grace of Khomeini, who spends his days in Qum receiving petitioners and issuing elamiehs (directives) against profiteering and other anti-Islamic practices. Says a Western diplomat in Tehran: "I no longer have any confidence whatsoever that Khomeini knows what is going on."
The Shah, meanwhile, was vacationing on Paradise Island in the Bahamas, still brooding about where and how he will spend his years in exile. He would like to come to the U.S. TIME has learned that President Carter has dispatched two emissaries to advise him not to apply for a visa. In defense of this repudiation of an old ally, Administration officials cite both the enormous security problem that the Shah's presence would create as well as the difficulties that the U.S. would have in improving relations with the new revolutionary government of Iran.
Some influential Americans, including former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, are appalled by this attitude toward an exiled ruler who was a staunch defender of U.S. interests during his years in power. The Shah's friends argue that he should be allowed into the country on humanitarian grounds, and that a superpower like the U.S. should not be so concerned about the feelings of the unstable government in Tehran.
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