And for ways to get the Shah to accept reduced powers
In the northern Iranian town of Tabriz, a group of soldiers suddenly found themselves confronting a large but peaceful group of anti-Shah demonstrators in the local bazaar. As the chanting marchers approached, one soldier said he was going to join them. He was immediately shot by one of his comrades, who in turn was attacked by the angry crowd. The soldier who had fired was saved by the quick intervention of a colonel, who took off his own pistol and offered it to the demonstrators, shouting: "We are the same people. Why do we kill each other?" After that, most of his soldiers stacked their arms in a truck and joined the marchers. The protesters urged the soldiers to participate in the chant of "Death to the Shah," but they refused. Some wept.
The incident in Tabriz last week was but one of a number of symptoms of a growing restiveness within the Shah's army as its small-scale clashes with the citizenry continue. In Najafabad, located near the industrial city of Isfahan, security forces were reported to have gone on a rampage against political dissidents. In the holy city of Qum, soldiers fired on a group of marchers. In the northeastern town of Mashhad, troops and police burst into a hospital and beat up the staff for having tended injured protesters.
At the same time, the government of Premier Gholam Reza Azhari, who is also the army chief of staff, was using tough methods to break a nationwide oil strike. In Ahwaz, workers were given their choice of going back to their jobs or being fired; by week's end most of the country's 37,000 oil and refinery employees were back at work, and production rose to roughly half the normal output of 6 million bbl. per day.
As the relative calm continued, a palace adviser confided, "The Shah's mood is much, much better." He was said to be putting in 15-hour days and even to be working on Friday, the Muslim day of rest. Neither he nor his wife, the Empress Farah, had made any public appearances for two weeks, although the Empress slipped away one day to go skiing in the nearby Elburz Mountains. The Shah was staying out of sight, according to a spokesman, both for security reasons and because he did not "want to resurrect the impression that he runs the country."
Apparently this curious comment meant simply that the Shah wanted to keep out of public view while he attempted to end Iran's political crisis by putting together a civilian government to replace the two-month-old military regime. This was no small task, since most opposition leaders were calling for his ouster.
The Shah last week sounded out Gholam Hussein Sadighi, 73, a onetime Interior Minister, on the possibility of forming a "government of new faces." Sadighi, a professor of sociology at the University of Tehran, had been jailed five times for his opposition to the Shah. His response to the Shah's invitation was to offer several preconditions: there must be an end to martial law and the troops must go back to their barracks; the prosecution of officials on corruption charges must be speeded up; and a regency council must run Iran while the Shah takes a "rest."