IRAN: Summary Justice

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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.