PEACOCK THRONE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 2 March 1939, Page 10

PEACOCK THRONE

TALL HAWK=NOSED DICTATOR WESTERNISING THE PERSIANS. CHANGES IN RECENT YEARS. Oh, Teheran! How you have changed since last I saw you! Clouds of dust are rising, beams are crashing, old walls are toppling to make room for broad streets and roads down which electric trams and automobiles will soon be running. High poles are springing up everywhere to carry telephone, telegraph, and electric light wires. Lorries and motor buses, guarded by soldiers and armed with searchlights, are already replacing the canal caraven as “Persian,” or Iranian, indifference and indolence give way before Reza Shah Pahlavi (writes Gustav Krist). * Since December 12, 1924, this sixfoot, hawk-nosed, dictator who defied Parliament and drove the last of the Qajars from the Peacock Throne has reined, ending a dynasty which ruled Iran for 131 years. Now 60, the bald, imperious, greymoustached soldier who loves his job, has ruled for 12 years as coronated Shahan Shah, or “King of Kings.” A former Persian Cossack officer born of middle class landowners on the shore of the Caspian Sea, the Shah came to to throne almost illiterate. He now speaks Persian and a smattering of Russian, is styled “Most Lofty of Living Men,” “Brother of the Moon and Stars,” and dominates his country from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf. SPHERES OF INFLUENCE. Surrounded by Baluchistan, Afghanistan, Turkoman Russian, Turkey, and Iraq, Iran, as “Persia,” was originally divided into spheres of influence by the Czarist Russian and British Governments. German, Austrian and Hungarian soldiers, escaping from the Russian prison camps in Turkestan, rallied to the number of 300 under the German military attache, Count Kanitz. Swedish officers and Persian gendarmes joined their force. Kanitz proclaimed a Holy War, and the army fought its way into Turkey by way of Bagdad, destroying the'myth of British and Russian bmnipotence. In its wake came Reza Shah Pahlavi with a newly created army of indendence of 40,000 men, supplied with second-hand rifles, machine-guns and tanks. Severe losses were inflicted on British and Russian troops. Russia, occupied in putting down rising after rising in Turkestan, withdrew from Iran. The British, to protect the Anglo-Persian Oil Company’s concession, which was to last until 1961, negotiated and withdrew.

Reza Shah Pahlava first imposed his will on Iran’s own rebellious and independent tribes of Kurds, Kashgais and Bakhtiaris. He hanged dozens of warring sheiks, made others his permanent “guests,” personally applied the whip to Moslem priests who were disobedient, and disposed, through maladies, of the very healthy friends of the Sultan Ahmad Shah, whom Reza Khan, as Grand Wazir and Dictator, deposed. BLOW TO BRITAIN. Reza .Khan then set out to emancipate his country from British domination. He cancelled the Anglo-Persian’s oil concession. The protection of this oil lease would entail great military expenditures so the British negotiated. Their basic holdings in Anglo-Persia were tremendously decreased. The Shah gained increasing oil royalties, an aggressive, heavily-armed army of 100,000, now capable of standing manfully up to the former masters of the country. Everything British was ignored. British naval bases were moved by request from Iranian soil to the oil-laden Bahrein Islands across the gulf. British advisers and British interests were ousted. German goods began to pour into Iran through a clearing arrangement by Germany s Dr Schacht. One hundred German war planes joined the Iranian air force. The Imperial Airways base was moved to Bahrein, and now giant, tri-motored Junkers, low-wing monoplanes with swastikas gleaming on their tails, roar down into Teheran’s airport, flying the German Lufthansa company’s new airline between isolated, mountainous Iran and the Near East and Europe. Ships and Italian instructor-naviga-tors were ordered from Italy for an Iranian navy. Danes, Czechs, Swedes, Australians, and Italians were brought into the country to undertake a great construction programme, for the new Shah has-an incorrigible interest in reform and in blueprints.

By the summer of 1.938 expensive macadam roads, beet sugar factories, power plants, and cotton mills had been built and paid for in foreign cash. A railroad costing £32,000,000 now joins the Gulf to the Caspian Sea, 865 • miles north. Strategically located to avoid all Iranian cities except Teheran and to skirt the country’s more fertile districts, this railway runs from nowhere to nowhere through numerous mountain passes 7,000 ft high, bores into numerous tunnels, and connects with no foreign lines. It was paid for first by an abortive tax on tea, then by the sale of Iran’s silver reserve, and finally by the export of grain, rice, and dried fruit, which drove Iranian villiges to famine rations. CHANGED TEHERAN. Teheren, “City of the Shadow of God,” has been entirely changed. Thickly populated bazaar districts were condemned and destroyed. New broad, straight avenues pass through once narrow, crooked streets. The bloody “Square of the Guns,” reminder of the might -nf Persia’s kings and used for public executions, has been dug over so no Iranian needs tread upon his brethren’s blood. Magnificent, manyroomed, multi-storied Government buildings stand where once sagged one-storey huts. A handsome post office building covering a city block has arisen. There is a Ministry of War building large neough to hold the English, German and French general staffs. There are also the Imperial Bank of Iran and the Imperial Opera House to cater to the financial clique of the country and the as yet undiscovered taste for opera among Iranian citizensThe ludicrous anomalies, misappropriations, and mass sufferings caused by his dozen years in office mean little to Reza Khan. By Oriental standards, his own, Reza Shah Pahiavi is the man of his generation in the Middle East. It does not matter that Teheran’s water supply still comes through the streets in half-open, easily contaminated drains. It should cause no comment when his Imperial Majesty, driving at night through a street not sufficiently lighted for his tastes, orders more powerful bulbs installed and

plunges the rest of Teheran into semidarkness. NO VEILS FOR WOMEN. Like Kemal Ataturk of Turkey, he has westernised the Iranians, ordered gaol sentences for turban wearers, forbidden veils for women. He has replaced the religious schools with Go-vernment-controlled schools and universities, taught the army to read and write, and decreed that the people, too, must read and write and study Persian history. He has encouraged the Boy Scout movement, and so curtailed the Shiah sect of Mohammedanism (responsible for the Iranian habit of contracting temporary marriages). In this way polygamy has become difficult. The number of wives among Iran's heavy female population has decreased and the number of protitutes increased. The vexing problem of land titles he has solved by making vast rich areas “Crown property”—i.e., his own. Once, indeed, healthy and abstemious, Reza Khan nearly outlawed the opium trade, carried on by camel caravan and railroad through Russia with China. But opium was responsible for half of the Iranian receipts for foreign exports, and is used as well by half the adult population to solace the famine victim, quiet crying babies and pleading children, and to deaden the pain of a disease-ridden population unserved by doctors or hospitals. In the famous Gulistan Palace, the King of Kings receives diplomats, Ministers, army officers, and nobles, who all clasp their hands on their wrists to show that they carry no weapons, and advance bowing deferentially into the sovereignty of the august presence. The Khan’s favourite attire, military uniform, is often worn, for the army still receives fts daily orders from him. ALL IS NOT WELL. All is not well in Iran. Through south-western parts of the country runs chronic famine, which has deepened into acute starvation. Emaciated Iranians can be seen sitting around in streets and doorways, their _ bones nearly sticking through their skins and eyes almost popping from their heads, lacking the energy even to brush away the swarms of flies that cover their bodies. Scores of beggars greet incoming travellers. Despite- the bustling, superficial prosperity of Teheran, unrest exists. His Majesty keeps a tight rein on the army and maintains a force of 20,000 of his best-paid, bestfed, and. best-clothed soldiers in the city. Though he receives his visitors in the palace before the £10,000,000 Peacock Throne of pure gold, whose jewels have long since been replaced by glass imitations, the Shah did not welcome an American auto agent who suggested recently to the King of Kings that he might be interested in” a bullet-proof car for travel through Teheran, such as was formerly supplied' to Al Capone and other American gangsters. A multi-lingual secretary of the sensitive Reza Shah Pahlavi replied, briefly and pointedly, “His Imperial Majesty, beloved of the people, certain of his subjects’ affection, has no conceivable need for such a conveyance.”