Iran: No Longer for the Corrupt

"Corruption is the lubricant of the Iranian economy," a diplomat in Teheran once observed. Depending on the size of the pishkash (bribe), justice was bought and sold, tax rights were purchased, government jobs auctioned off, contracts given, and conscription was waived. Sporadic efforts by Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi to clean things up usually ended dismally in a disastrous series of acquittals, and cases dropped for lack of evidence.

But ten months ago, new Premier Assadollah Alam pledged to undertake "an anticorruption campaign with great diligence and all severity." Though the cynical snickered, Alam got free rein from the Shah, carefully began building airtight cases against suspected grafters among Iran's leading bureaucrats and government leaders. His first major target was General Mohammed Ali Khazai, the Iranian army's chief of ordnance, who had parlayed his $6,000 salary into three houses in the suburbs of Teheran, four apartment houses in France, five automobiles, $100,000 in European banks and $200,000 in cash. A military court convicted Khazai of taking a cut out of government contracts and sentenced him to five years of solitary confinement.

Last week Alam's anticorruption drive was in full swing. In Teheran, a military tribunal sentenced General Abdullah Hedayat, Iran's first four-star general and once a close adviser of the Shah, to two years in prison for embezzling money on military housing contracts, brushed aside his plea for appeal with the brusque explanation that "more charges are pending." The former boss of the Teheran Electricity Board was in solitary confinement for five years; cases were in preparation against an ex-War Minister and twelve other generals for graft. Said one observer: "The Shah has got the grafters and speculators on the run."