Mohammad Mosaddegh
Dr Mohammad Mosaddegh was an Iranian politician, author, and lawyer who served as the prime minister of Iran from 1951 to 1953, elected by the 16th Majlis. He was a member of the Iranian parliament from 1923, and served through a contentious 1952 election into the 17th Iranian Majlis, until his government was overthrown in the 1953 Iranian coup d'état aided by the intelligence agencies of the United Kingdom and the United States, led by Kermit Roosevelt Jr. His National Front was suppressed from the 1954 election.
Before its removal from power, his administration introduced a range of social and political measures such as social security, land reforms and higher taxes including the introduction of taxation on the rent of land. His time as prime minister was marked by the clash with the British government, known as the Abadan Crisis, following the nationalisation of the Iranian oil industry, which had been built by the British on Persian lands since 1913 through the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, later known as British Petroleum.
In the aftermath of the overthrow, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi returned to power, and negotiated the Consortium Agreement of 1954 with the British, which gave split ownership of Iranian oil production between Iran and Western companies until 1979. Mosaddegh was subsequently charged with treason, imprisoned for three years, then put under house arrest until his death and was buried in his own home in order to prevent a political furor. In 2013, the United States government formally acknowledged its role in the coup as being a part of its foreign policy initiatives, including paying protesters and bribing officials.
Early life, education and early career
Mosaddegh was born to a prominent Persian family of high officials in Ahmedabad, near Tehran, on May 19, 1882; his father, Mirza Hideyatu'llah Ashtiani, was the finance minister under the Qajar dynasty, and his mother, Princess Malek Taj Najm-es-Saltaneh, was the granddaughter of the reformist Qajar prince Abbas Mirza, and a great-granddaughter of Fath-Ali Shah Qajar. When Mosaddegh's father died in 1892 of cholera, his uncle was appointed the tax collector of the Khorasan province and was bestowed with the title of Mosaddegh-os-Saltaneh by Naser al-Din Shah Qajar.Mosaddegh himself later bore the same title, by which he was still known to some long after titles were abolished.
Mossadegh's mother wanted her son to marry his cousin, daughter to her sister and Mozaffar ad-Din Shah Qajar.
In 1901, Mosaddegh married Zahra Emami, a granddaughter of Naser al-Din Shah through her mother Zi'a es-Saltaneh.
Education
In 1909, Mosaddegh pursued education abroad in Paris, France, where he studied at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris. He studied there for two years, returning to Iran because of illness in 1911. After two months, Mosaddegh returned to Europe to study a Doctorate of Laws at the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland. In June 1913, Mosaddegh received his doctorate and in doing so became the first Iranian to receive a PhD in law from a European university.Mosaddegh taught at the Tehran School of Political Science at the start of World War I before beginning his political career.
Early political career
Mosaddegh started his political career with the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1905–07. At the age of 24, he was elected from Isfahan to the newly inaugurated Persian Parliament, the Majlis of Iran. However, he was unable to assume his seat, because he had not reached the legal age of 30.During this period he also served as deputy leader of the Society of Humanity, under Mostowfi ol-Mamalek. In protest at the Anglo-Persian Treaty of 1919, he relocated to Switzerland, from where he returned the following year after being invited by the new Iranian prime minister, Hassan Pirnia, to become his minister of justice. While en route to Tehran, he was asked by the people of Shiraz to become the governor of the Fars province. He was later appointed finance minister, in the government of Ahmad Qavam in 1921, and then foreign minister in the government of Moshir-ed-Dowleh in June 1923. He then became governor of the Azerbaijan Province. In 1923, he was re-elected to the Majlis.
In 1925, the supporters of Reza Khan in the Majlis proposed legislation to dissolve the Qajar dynasty and appoint Reza Khan the new Shah. Mossadegh voted against such a move, arguing that such an act was a subversion of the 1906 Iranian constitution. He gave a speech in the Majlis, praising Reza Khan's achievements as prime minister while encouraging him to respect the constitution and stay as the prime minister. On 12 December 1925, the Majlis deposed the young Shah Ahmad Shah Qajar and declared Reza Shah the new monarch of the Imperial State of Persia, and the first shah of the Pahlavi dynasty. Mosaddegh then retired from politics, due to disagreements with the new regime.
In 1941, Reza Shah Pahlavi was forced by the British to abdicate in favour of his son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In 1944, Mosaddegh was once again elected to parliament. This time he took the lead of Jebhe Melli, an organisation he had founded with nineteen others such as Hossein Fatemi, Ahmad Zirakzadeh, Ali Shayegan and Karim Sanjabi, aiming to establish democracy and end the foreign presence in Iranian politics, especially by nationalising the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company's operations in Iran. In 1947 Mossadegh once again announced retirement, after an electoral-reform bill he had proposed failed to pass through Majlis.
Prime Minister of Iran
Election
On 28 April 1951, the Shah confirmed Mosaddegh as Prime Minister after the Majlis elected Mosaddegh by a vote of 79–12. After a period of assassinations by Fada'iyan-e Islam and political unrest by the National Front, the Shah was aware of Mosaddegh's rising popularity and political power. Demonstrations erupted in Tehran after Mosaddegh was elected, with crowds further invigorated by the speeches of members from the National Front. There was a special focus on the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and the heavy involvement of foreign actors and influences in Iranian affairs. Although Iran was not officially a colony or a protectorate, it was still heavily controlled by foreign powers beginning with concessions provided by the Qajar Shahs and leading up to the oil agreement signed by Reza Shah in 1933.The new administration introduced a wide range of social reforms: unemployment compensation was introduced, factory owners were ordered to pay benefits to sick and injured workers, and peasants were freed from forced labour in their landlords' estates. In 1952, Mosaddegh passed the Land Reform Act, which forced landlords to place 20% of their revenue into a development fund. This development fund paid for various projects such as public baths, rural housing, and pest control.
In March 1951, Mosaddegh nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, cancelling its oil concession, which was otherwise set to expire in 1993, and expropriating its assets. Mosaddegh saw the AIOC as an arm of the British government controlling much of the oil in Iran, pushing him to seize what the British had built in Iran. The next month, a committee of five majlis deputies was sent to Khuzestan to enforce the nationalisation. Mosaddegh justified his nationalisation policy by claiming Iran was "the rightful owner..." of all the oil in Iran. He also pointed out that Iran could use the money in a 21 June 1951 speech:
The confrontation between Iran and Britain escalated as Mosaddegh's government refused to allow the British any involvement in their former enterprise. Britain made sure Iran could not sell the oil, which it considered stolen. In July, Mosaddegh broke off negotiations with AIOC after it threatened to "pull out its employees" and told owners of oil tanker ships that "receipts from the Iranian government would not be accepted on the world market." Two months later, the AIOC evacuated its technicians and closed down the oil installations. Under nationalised management, many refineries lacked the trained technicians that were needed to continue production. The British government announced a de facto blockade and embargo, reinforced its naval force in the Persian Gulf, and lodged complaints against Iran before the United Nations Security Council, where, on 15 October 1951, Mosaddegh declared that "the petroleum industry has contributed nothing to well-being of the people or to the technological progress or industrial development of my country."
The British government also threatened legal action against purchasers of oil produced in the Iranian refineries and obtained an agreement with its sister international oil companies not to fill the void left by the AIOC. The entire Iranian oil industry came to a virtual standstill, with oil production dropping almost 96% from in 1950 to in 1952. This Abadan Crisis reduced Iran's oil income to almost nothing, putting a severe strain on the implementation of Mosaddegh's promised domestic reforms. At the same time, BP and Aramco doubled their production in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq to make up for lost production in Iran so that no hardship was felt in Britain.
Still enormously popular in late 1951, Mosaddegh called elections and introduced a modified version of his 1944 electoral reform bill. As his base of support was in urban areas and not in the provinces, the proposed reform no longer barred illiterate voters, but it placed them into a separate category from literate voters and increased the representation of the urban population. The opposition defeated the bill on the grounds that it would "unjustly discriminate patriots who had been voting for the last forty years", thus leaving the National Front to compete against conservatives, royalists, and tribal leaders alike in the upcoming election.
His government came under scrutiny for ending the 1952 election before rural votes could be fully counted. According to historian Ervand Abrahamian: "Realizing that the opposition would take the vast majority of the provincial seats, Mosaddegh stopped the voting as soon as 79 deputies—just enough to form a parliamentary quorum—had been elected." An alternative account is offered by journalist Stephen Kinzer: Beginning in the early 1950s under the guidance of C.M. Woodhouse, chief of the British intelligence station in Tehran, Britain's covert operations network had funnelled roughly £10,000 per month to the Rashidian brothers in the hope of buying off, according to CIA estimates, "the armed forces, the Majlis, religious leaders, the press, street gangs, politicians and other influential figures". Thus, in his statement asserting electoral manipulation by "foreign agents", Mosaddegh suspended the elections. His National Front party had made up 30 of the 79 deputies elected. Yet none of those present vetoed the statement, and completion of the elections was postponed indefinitely. The 17th Majlis convened in April 1952, with the minimum required of the 136 seats filled.
Throughout his career, Mosaddegh strove to increase the power parliament held versus the expansion of the crown's authority. But tension soon began to escalate in the Majlis. Conservative, pro-Shah, and pro-British opponents refused to grant Mosaddegh special powers to deal with the economic crisis caused by the sharp drop in revenue and voiced regional grievances against the capital Tehran, while the National Front waged "a propaganda war against the landed upper class".