Campos escalares complejos y el campo electromagn´etico

Added to these schemes were the 'Houses of Equity' or 'village courts of

justice'. They were originally founded in 1963 to deal with "misdemeanors

and petty offenses" and, thus, lighten the burden of official courts above the village and prevent minor rural disputes from developing into

major ones at the cost of peasants' time and work. By 1973, there

were reported to be 300 Houses of Equity with 2,400 corps members-judges

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on service m Iran.

The schemes, apart from fulfilling something similar to the Maoist idea of linking the mental and manual labour of youth, helped the Shah's

regime in several ways. First, through them, the Government recruited

the personnel it needed to propagate and execute the White Revolution and

expand contacts between the rural and urban population under its own

control. Second, since the corps members were fulfilling part of their

military service in civilian form, they provided the Government with a source of legitimacy to emphasise the importance of the civilian role of the armed forces and, thus, boost the image and justify the expansion

of the Shah's military power base. Third, they created employment and

opened Government controlled avenues of political participation for graduates, a majority of whom had been previously bitterly critical of the Shah's regime for lack of jobs and participation and had consequently

taken part in public agitation. Fourth, as a result, the schemes

mobilised a good number of the educated Iranian youth, (who possessed more potential for revolt than any other section of the population against the Shah's regime) behind the Shah's leadership.

In addition, the Shah declared 'National Reconstruction' to be yet a necessary follow-up of the above reforms, involving the

consequently, the Government legislated the Urban Renewal and Urban Reconstruction Acts. The 'National Reconstruction' reform, according to an official source, was to narrow the gap in the standards of

living between the cities and villages; to eliminate discrimination among various areas through greater attention to less developed areas; to accelerate rural development and reconstruction and to continue with urban renewal; and to introduce all "modern amenities for transforming

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Iran into a prosperous and powerful country in its region. The Shah, however, realised that the above reforms could not be fulfilled efficiently without adopting fundamental measures, at the same time, to reform Iran's administrative and educational system according to the changing needs of the country. He, therefore, called for an

'Administrative and Educational Revolution' — the last of his reforms for the 1960s. The administrative aspect of this reform was to improve the efficiency and working standard of Iran's fast growing public service. It stressed the need for public servants, in whatever capacity, to

"... work honestly, consciously, and by accepting the responsibilities of their duty. The spirit of procrastination and red-tape must disappear

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from ... offices". It promised the "decentralisation" of the

administrative system and the protection of the "public interest" as well as improvement in the social welfare and security of public servants. The reform therefore envisaged new public service regulations, including the Public Auditing Law which came into force in 1972. The educational aspect of the reform was stressed as essential for the success of the Administrative and all other introduced reforms within a continuing process. It emphasised the need of Iran for trained educational,

agricultural, technical and administrative personnel on the basis of merit and expertise. This was to be achieved at whatever expense by training

students inside and outside Iran, but particularly in Western countries.

The Shah, however, failed to couple these socio-economic reforms with any major political reform towards realising his promise of

"political democracy". He left the political structure and machinery, over which he presided, almost intact and continued to centralise

politics under his absolute control so that his throne could strengthen his traditionally central position in Iranian politics. In general, the

Iranian people were still denied the basic political freedoms and civil liberties necessary to fulfil the Shah's promise to 'democratise'

and 'decentralise' the Iranian system for the sake of political stability and capitalist oriented socio-economic development. The people were not allowed either to criticise Government policies or to seek redress for

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their grievances individually and collectively. The Shah continued to maintain the Parliament, which was reopened in 1963 after a lapse of three years, and the two-party-system, which he had instigated in 1957, and formally allowing the people to elect the Majlis every four years. As in the past, however, party membership and elections were strictly controlled by the Government and the opposition was suppressed to prevent them from expressing themselves publicly, although some representatives of peasants, workers and women found their way into Parliament in 1963 and 1967 elections at the cost of landlords,

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signifying the new bases of support for the Shah. In fact, by 1964, even the principle of the two-party-system dwindled. The Shah instigated a new ruling party called 'Irani Novin' (The New Iran) which was at

first led by his loyal colleague, Ali Mansur, Iran's prime minister from 1964 to 1965. After Mansur's assassination in early 1965, he was succeeded by his finance minister and a former intellectual critic of the

Shah's regime, Amir Abass Hoveyda, who soon made Iran Novin virtually the sole political party contesting elections; the formal opposition

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party, Mardoom, continued to be nothing more than a name. Those opponents who could not be coopted into the Shah's system through either the formal process of parliament and the two parties or the informal process of the White Revolution's programme, were to be suppressed, as

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in the past, effectively by SAVAK.

Thus, despite his frequent promises, the Shah largely failed to 'democratise' or increasingly 'institutionalise' the Iranian political system. He consequently failed to expand institutionalised political participation by his political opponents and gradually disperse political power to the extent required by his capitalist oriented programme of

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socio-economic reforms. (It is true that he initially needed a degree of political centralisation in order to put his reforms into

practice.) His failure to do so can be attributed to two major factors: (1) the nature of his throne which required continued centralisation of politics for its own survival as the central feature of Iranian politics; and (2) the Shah's personal unwillingness to take the necessary risk involving limitation of his own power. In the long run, this together with the Shah's inability to plan and execute his

reforms according to the needs of Iran, failed to serve the cause of stability and effective development. This, however, will be discussed in detail in Chapter IX .

Nevertheless, by the end of the 1960s, the Shah had come a long way from his unpopular and insecure domestic position before 1963, which had caused him and Washington grave concern about the effective continuity of his regime. By initiating his reforms, no matter how

'undemocratic', 'autocratic' and 'unfruitful' they were in the eyes of his opponents and in terns of their results for the Iranian people, the Shah had achieved several short-term objectives in improving his domestic credibility and security. First, he generated a process of controlled mass mobilisation and opened up new bases of support, probably more psychological than anything else, for his leadership among peasants,

industrial workers, women and youth and those intellectuals, professionals, technocrats and bureaucrats, who had been previously unhappy with his regime for other than ideological reasons. Second, he stimulated a higher degree of economic activity which, together with his mass mobilisation, improved the prospects for immediate socio-economic stability and raised the people's hopes for a better future. This accelerated growth of Iran's middle class — a factor necessary for the Shah's regime in

pursuing a guided capitalist mode of socio-economic development. Third, as a result, he stimulated some social and economic bases whereby he could transform 'autocratic' model of economic development, which he pursued in many ways in the 1950s, into a combination of this model with

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