IRAN: Summary Justice

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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."