World: Men Against a Monarch

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Since then, Sanjabi has been in and out of jail and politically powerless. When the Shah began his liberalization program in 1976, Sanjabi emerged from oblivion to revive the National Front. After conferring with Khomeini in Paris last week, Sanjabi flatly ruled out the prospect that the Front might join a coalition government. Sanjabi's main goal now is a national plebiscite on the monarchy: "What we want is that the autocratic government and dictatorial order of the present regime be terminated."

ALI AMINI, 71, a moderate politician who is seeking to work out a compromise between the Shah and the resistance movements. Like Sanjabi, Amini was a Cabinet minister under Mossadegh; he broke away and later served as Ambassador to Washington and then briefly as Premier himself in 1961-62. Amini also quarreled with the Shah about the monarch's tendency to concentrate power in his own hands. Before the military government was appointed, Amini was the key negotiator in trying to set up an all-parties coalition, in which he intended to serve.

It was Amini who persuaded Sanjabi to visit Khomeini in France with the idea of forming a coalition government. Explaining his maneuvers to TIME'S Cairo Bureau Chief Wilton Wynn last week, Amini insisted that a coalition would have shown "the nation and the world that there is an alternative to the present regime. But I did not succeed. The extremists say we must wait. I say we don't have time to wait."