Page 295 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

292 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

they were actively abetted by the shah, who sought as a deliberate act of policy
to secure their political quiescence by conferring more and more economic
benefits upon them, a policy made possible by the steady augmentation of
Persia’s oil revenues from the mid-1960s onwards.
The policy of buying the loyally of his subjects by economic rewards, at the

same time as he compelled their obedience by the sword, was also applied by
the shah to the Persian people at large. In 1962 he inaugurated a programme of
land reform, the object of which was both to improve the country’s agriculture
and to benefit the peasants by increasing the proportion of landholders among
them. Though observers differ in their estimates of the degree of success
achieved by the first stage of the land reform - which concentrated upon the
distribution of crown lands and the reduction of the holdings of absentee
landlords - there is general agreement that some progress was made. The
second stage of the programme, which began in 1965, brought further redis­
tribution of land through sales, although large landholders were permitted to

keep their estates on condition that they improved their farming methods and
productivity. Agricultural co-operatives were also set up and loans made
available to the peasant shareholders. The success of this stage was more
problematical, as we shall see later in looking at the performance of Persian
agriculture over the past decade. What is more certain is that the motive for the
land reform was political rather than economic, being designed to cement the
bond between the shah and the rural population, upon whose fealty he, like

preceding shahs, ultimately depended to give legitimacy to his rule. It was a
relationship commonly found in all Oriental despotisms, including those
which exist, in one form or another, elsewhere in the Middle East today. There
was, moreover, a further purpose apparent in the institution of the land reform
at this time. The Kennedy administration was in power in the United States,
and the shah was anxious to curry favour with it by playing the liberal
monarch.
Land reform was only part of what the shah presented to his people ahd the
world as his ‘white revolution’, which was officially inaugurated in 1963 with

the promulgation of the third five-year development plan and which was
intended to transform Persia smoothly and swiftly into a replica, at least, of a
modern state. Ten years later the spectacular rise in oil prices vastly increased
Persia’s oil revenues, and the shah’s ambitions soared with them. The fifth
economic development plan announced in January 1973 had envisaged the
expenditure of $35,500 million over the next five years to expand Persias
industry and improve the country’s agriculture. This figure was almost

doubled to $69,600 million in the revised version of the plan which the sh
ordered to be drawn up in August 1974 and which was eventually published in
May 1975. In it Muhammad Reza Shah proclaimed his intention to u
‘Great Civilization’ in Persia and to make his country the fifth industria
power in the world before the end of the century. The miracle was to