Shapour Bakhtiar

Shapour Bakhtiar ( Shapour Bakhtiar  (help·info)) (also Shapur Bakhtiar) (Persian:شاپور بختیار Shāpūr Bakhtīār) (26 June 1914 – 6 August 1991) was an Iranian political scientist, writer and the last Prime Minister of Iran under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

Early life

Bakhtiar was born on 26 June 1914 in southwestern Persia [Iran] into a family of Iranian tribal nobility: the family of the paramount chieftains of the then powerful Bakthiari tribe. His father was Mohammad Reza Khan (Sardar-e-Fateh), his mother Naz-Baygom, bothLori and Bakhtiaris. Bakhtiar's maternal grandfather, Najaf-Gholi Khan Samsam ol-Saltaneh (a.k.a. Saad ad-Daula), was appointed prime minister twice, in 1912 and 1918. Bakhtiar's mother died when he was seven years old. His father was executed by Reza Shah in 1934.

Education

He attended elementary school in Shahr-e Kord and then secondary school, first inIsfahan and later in Beirut, Lebanon, where he received his high school diploma from a French school. He attended Beirut University for two years. However, then his cousin, Teymour Bakhtiar, and he went to Paris for university education. There he attended the College of Political Science.

Being a firm opponent of all totalitarian rule, he was active in the Spanish Civil War for the Republican side against General Franco's uprising and fascism. Later he volunteered for the French army and fought in the Orleans battalion and in the French Resistance against the occupation by Germany when living in Saint-Nicolas-du-Pélem. In 1945 he received his PhD, in political science, as well as degrees in law and philosophy, from the Sorbonne.

Political career

Bakhtiar returned to Iran in 1946. In 1951 he was appointed by the ministry of labor, first as director of the labor department in the Province of Isfahan and later the same position in Khuzestan, center of the oil industry. In 1951 Mohammad Mosaddeq had come to power in Iran. Under his premiership Bakhtiar was appointed deputy minister of labor in 1953. After the Shah was reinstated by a British-American sponsored coup d'état, Bakhtiar remained a critic of his rule.

In the mid-1950s he was involved in underground activity against the Shah's regime, calling for the 1954 Majlis elections to be free and fair and attempting to revive the nationalist movement. In 1960, the Second National Front was formed and Bakhtiar played a very crucial role in the new organization's activities as the head of the student activist body of the Front. He and his colleagues differed from most other government opponents in that they were very moderate, restricting their activity to peaceful protest and calling only for the restoration of democratic rights within the framework of a constitutional monarchy. Despite these moderate demands, the Shah refused to cooperate and opted to outlaw the Front and imprison the most prominent liberals. From 1964 to 1977, the imperial regime refused to permit any form of opposition activity, even from moderate liberals like Bakhtiar. In the following years Bakhtiar was imprisoned repeatedly, a total of six years, for his opposition to the Shah. He was also one of the prominent members of central council of the illegal Fourth National Front in late 1977, when the group was reconstituted as the Union of National Front Forces with Bakhtiar as head of the Iran Party (the largest group in the Front).

Because he had been a leader in the resistance, Bakhtiar, at the end of 1978 as the Shah's power was crumbling, was chosen to help in the creation of a civilian government in place of the military one, which had existed up to this point. He was appointed to the position of Prime Minister by the Shah, as a concession to his opponents, especially the followers of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Although this caused him to be expelled from the National Front, he accepted the appointment, as he feared a revolution, in which communists and mullahs would take over the country, which he thought would ruin Iran.

In his 36 days as premier of Iran, Bakhtiar ordered all political prisoners to be freed, lifted censorship of newspapers (whose staff had until then been on strike), relaxed martial law, ordered the dissolving of SAVAK (regime's secret police) and requested that the opposition give him three months to hold elections for a constituent assembly that would decide the fate of the monarchy and determine the future form of government for Iran. Despite these conciliatory gestures, Ayatollah Khomeini refused to collaborate with Bakhtiar, denouncing the premier as a traitor for siding with the Shah, labeling his government "illegitimate" and "illegal" and calling for the overthrow of the Monarchy. Bakhtiar made some key mistakes during his premiership including allowing Khomeini to re-enter Iran. In the end, he failed to rally even his own former colleagues in the National Front behind him and his government was overwhelmingly rejected by the masses, except for a very small number of pro-Shah loyalists and a handful of moderate pro-democratic elements. The opposition was not willing to compromise and the Shah was forced to leave the country in January 1979; Bakhtiar left Iran again for France in April of the same year.

French exile and series of assassination attempts

Shortly after the revolution, Ayatollah Sadegh Khalkhali, a religious judge and then chairman of the Revolutionary Court, informed the press that the death sentence was passed on the members of the Pahlavi family and former Shah officials, including Bakhtiar.

From his base in Paris, Bakhtiar led the National Movement of Iranian Resistance, which fought the Islamic republic in his homeland. The Islamic Republic issued a death sentence for him. On 18 July 1980, he escaped an assassination attempt by a group of three attackers in his home in Neuilly, a suburb of Paris, which killed a policeman and a neighbor. The assassination team was captured.

Assassination

On 6 August 1991, Bakhtiar was murdered along with his secretary, Soroush Katibeh, by three assassins in his home in the Parisian suburb of Suresnes. The inquest found that he was stabbed by a knife matching a nearby blood stained bread knife. Bakhtiar's dead body was not found until at least 36 hours after his death, despite the fact that he had heavy police protection and that his killers had left ID (presumably faked) with a guard at his house. Two of the assassins escaped to Iran but the third, Ali Vakili Rad, was apprehended in Switzerland, as well as an alleged accomplice, Zeyal Sarhadi, a great-nephew of former president of Iran Hashemi Rafsanjani, and both were extradited to France for trial. Vakili Rad was sentenced to life in prison in December 1994, but Sarhadi was acquitted. Vakili Rad was paroled from jail in France, after serving 18 years of his sentence on 19 May 2010. He was received as a hero by Iranian officials. This happened only two days after Tehran freed Clotilde Reiss, a French student accused of spying by the Islamic regime. Both the French and Iranian governments deny the two affairs are linked.

Bakhtiar is buried in Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.

Hours after the assassination of Bakhtiar, a British hostage was released from Lebanon, presumably held by Hezbollah, but a French hostage was taken. Although many in the Iranian exile community speculated of official French complicity in Bakhtiar's death, the second kidnapping is said to cast a shadow over such theories, allegedly as the French would seem unlikely to support an operation that included the kidnapping of another French hostage in Lebanon, although there is no apparent connection between the two events.

Writings

In addition to many articles, Bakhtiar's books "Ma Fidélité" in French (Edition Albin Michel, Paris, 1 December 1985, ISBN 2-226-01561-2, ISBN 978-2-226-01561-7) and "37 Days after 37 Years" in Persian ("Radio Iran" Publications, Paris, 1982), including his biography and political career until the Iranian Revolution as well as his beliefs, are of special interest regarding society and politics in the Pahlavi Era and the period of riots and turbulence before the fall of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.