IN MODERN IRAN REFORMS BACKED BY SPIRIT OF NATIONAL REGENERATION

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31235, 6 December 1966, Page 18

IN MODERN IRAN REFORMS BACKED BY SPIRIT OF NATIONAL REGENERATION

,B U th, diplomatic corr'.pondent of "The Time.". London, (Reprinted from "The Time*”, On the morning this article was onreduMv ment in Teheran. Although everyone said that Teheran, that once dust) Extern capitel, had been th at a* tux Western complement of cars and buses, I h * d t axi on its way from the suburbs would run into a tiaffic jam 200 yards long and several more of much the same length.

Teheran is a quarter the size of London, and increasing every day. with young men coining in from the villages at twice the rate of the girls. Amid the frustration and growing heat of the new industrial order, it was pleasant, at least, to see the same morning clusters of bright-eyed' little Iranian girls scampering off in their grey or black trews and school dresses to their first lesson of the day.

be said that 150 per cent of the population suffered, as 50 per cent had one form, 50 per cent another and 50 per cent more than one at the same time. With all these scourges buried now in the receding past, it is small wonder that the old Iranian civil servant, who appeared lethargic, apathetic and corrupt 20 or even 10 years ago, should be being replaced today by younger men less venal (though habits die hard) who in spirit and impatient at the start of a energy resemble a runner race.

in the next two years. Al the same time new brick homes (one room with a courtyard for the poorest, and blocks of flats for the more well to do) are springing up in new suburbs as industrialisation draws labour to the towns. The shops are cram full. Prices have been steady for two years. The children, alert and cheerful, look well fed and clothed, and so nowadays most notably do the army and police. Indeed there are many reasons for saying that Iran is advancing, and knows it, and that the people support the regime in spite of a controlled press and radio and the occasional apprehensions of living in what may be called somewhat paradoxically—a benevolent police state. True, Iranians are too thoughtful and artistic a people to be concerned only with material well-being. They are conscious, like the Chinese, of the length and greatness of their past history, but like the Greeks have no expectation or particular desire to achieve such physical power again. They look foward rather to being once more by land—and now for the first time by air also—the crossroads between Asia and Europe, and to following close upon Turkey’s footsteps in the race to catch up with the West, being confident, like the Greeks, that their business capacity, and native wit, for instance in fathoming a new machine, will enable them to hold their own. This all explains the Shah's urgent desire to let nothing—in particular a lack of foreign exchange—hamper this active advance, even at the cost of serious damage to relations with Britain and the United States over oil.

Certainly there is about the present Iran the spirit not exactly of a nation on the march—the Iranians are too friendly and philosophic a people for that—but rather of a national regeneration, and indeed there are solid reasons for the evident self-confi-dence and growing sense of independence. Opium Measures First and foremost, there is the new standard of health. “Have they really stopped opium?” “Yes,” came the answer from the old Persian —“most unfortunately.” But it was said with something of a twinkle. In fact, the Government have effectively stopped the cultivation of poppies, but opium smokers are desperate folk, and today in its place heroin is smuggled in from Turkey or Afghanistan or across the Persian Gulf. It can have worse effects than opium upon the young, and in the backward areas, addicts, buying at about 10s for one-sixth of an ounce, are still spending sums out of all proportion to their means. Drugs, like opium, are always difficult to stamp out altogether, particularly when in some villages it was used as medicine to stop dysentery or as a natural means of sending a restless baby to sleep. Now, at least, it is no longer a widespread damaging factor in the nation’s health. Malaria Combated

That the race' is a long one, no-one who has flown over the barren mountains and vast arid deserts which make up most of Iran will for a moment doubt, but across the seemingly endless biscuitcoloured waste the metalled roads at last branch out from Teheran over 600 miles south to Isfahan and Shiraz or north-west to Tabriz. Beside the old stone bridges of Shah Abbas of good Queen Bess’s time, over which still slouched not so long ago the camel caravans, there are steel girder bridges with their regular burden of lorries, and in half a dozen days of travel you will be lucky to see six camels. White Revolution Indeed the essential communications and the transport are now available and ready to serve the 50,000 villages of Iran. It is there that the so-called White Revolution is being played out, for out of a total population of some 25 million, threequarters are still living off agriculture. Until the land reform of only four years ago, almost all these village communities shared income from the land with their landlords, broadly in proportion to the contributions which villagers and landlord made to the land’s upkeep. The landlord provided the land itself, the water (which in Iran is usually even more important than land), the seed and usually the animals; the villagers provided their own labour and the animals occasionally. As the villagers had often mortgaged their labour and in some areas had to give part of it without pay (for maintenance work on the village itself), they lived near subsistence level and saw no prospect of improving their lot, which if not stark serfdom was little removed from it. Feudal System Ended Then in June, 1962, after the dissolution of the Majlis, which was then packed with landowners, the first phase of the present land reform programme was put into effect with vigorous support from the Shah, who had long since given an example to the landlords by turning over the royal estates to the villagers in 1950. The land reform forced the large estate-owners to transfer all but one village to the villagers and reduced the estates to between 75 and 500 acres, according to the productivity of the region.

Equally important for the people’s energy is the complete ending of malaria, particularly in the rich ricegrowing strip along the south Caspian coast, which only a few years ago was malariaridden. With this has come, in particular for the cities, the successful combating of consumption and—even more important—of venereal disease, from which it used to

Considerable riots in Teheran followed this sweeping measure a few months later, started it seemed by rabble-rousing rowdies on behalf of the landowners and encouraged by the religious leaders, who saw their own endowments threatened and who were affronted by other aspects of the Government’s social legislation, notably the granting of wider rights to women. The riots were, however, completely—and violently—suppressed, and by the end of 1963 the power of the landlords was broken ana the Shah’s main objective, to end the feudal system on the land, had been attained. A second phase to divide up medium properties and religious endowments is now also well past the point of no return. Trained Staff Short The programme is delayed through lack of trained staff to run the Land Reform Office and the village co-operatives, which the villagers are obliged to form. The co-operatives now number some 6500, with 15,000 to 20,000 required in the end. The importance of the movement as a social factor is that those who have [received their land feel, by all accounts, an independence which they never knew before and have a real incentive to produce more. Rice production, for instance, in the Mazenderam province on the Caspian has increased by one-fifth in the past two years. The old Persian hands will tell you that there has never been so much green in the plains (there is little enough still); so many machineploughs (mostly from Japan at about £250 'to be paid over four or five years); or so many wells, and deeper wells at that The villagers believe, too, that their future will get easier as the co-operatives pay off loans from the state. In the towns, too, there is a sense of growing achievement. Teheran has had a steady piped water supply for only six years or so. Isfahan will have it also in a year or two more. In Teheran a television service was opened at the end of October and four more stations are to follow