Iran: Time, Gentlemen, Please

As the Shah of Iran returned last week from a fortnight's visit to Norway and Italy, it was to a discouragingly unchanged Teheran.

Premier Ali Amini, who came to power five weeks ago during a menacing and near-revolutionary period, had set out to do all that a man could to clear the air. He jailed scores of senior civil servants and other important profiteers, purged 33 generals and 270 colonels from the graft-riddled army. He freed the press from oppressive secret police surveillance, re-established freedom of assembly, and began sweeping corrupt and inefficient bureaucrats out of government ministries.

He invited all common citizens to report to him with any official who asked for a bribe; officials were so chastened that for the first time in years service was rendered citizens without the usual greasing of palms. Said a Teheran lawyer: "An empty pocket now holds as much power as a fat purse."

In the Ministry of Education alone, 643 officials were fired, and 370 others were pried away from their bureaucratic desks and ordered out into the provinces to teach people how to read. In the Ministry of Agriculture, new Minister Hassan Arsanjani ordered a fresh topographic survey of government-owned lands, preparatory to parceling them out to landless peasants. As for Iran's big landowners, Premier Amini personally warned: "I do not expect slow action from you either." A long-ignored law restricting individual family holdings to 1,000 acres of irrigated, and 2,000 acres of nonirrigated land was dusted off and declared operative. Cried Arsanjani: "First we will tackle those who own 150 villages and whose only talent is for drink and drugs and for beating and torturing peasants," Premier Amini himself, who has none of these particular predilections, owns lands the size of Massachusetts, and it was presumed that these too will be redistributed. But nothing Amini did seemed to mollify the reactionaries and leftists who opposed him. Fortnight ago a military coup engineered by a Teheran garrison officer was averted only when the Shah, then still in Norway, personally telephoned the army chief of staff with orders to stop the plot. The officer who led the aborted coup was disgruntled because some of his friends had been caught in Amini's purge of the army.

On the left, the National Front Party was still shrilly demanding a changeover to neutralism and early elections. The

National Front is led by taciturn Allahyer Saleh, 64, who collaborated with the Communists in 1947, later served in the government of weepy old Mohammed Mossadegh. Saleh claims that only the National Front can save Iran from Communism, on the ground that it is the only political organization untainted by corruption and, therefore, enjoying public confidence.