Word: iran
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, the handsome, greying Shah of Iran, stepped from the plane one day last week, exchanged greetings with Italy's President Giovanni Gronchi, Premier Amintore Fanfani and six Cabinet ministers...
...small cluster of Iranian citizens resident in Italy set up a shout of "Zendibad Shahanshah [Long live the King of Kings]!" The Shah made a the brief speech commenting on the good relations between Italy and Iran, which, he said, "were reinforced by the oil agreement." Oil and the influence of the Shah are perhaps the two most important factors in the slow but certain awakening of the Iranian nation from the sleep of decadent centuries...
Without its oil, pouring from the ground at a rate of 1,000,000 barrels a day and earning the nation an estimated $250 million this year, Iran would simply be another semi-arid pastoral and agricultural nation like its neighbor Afghanistan. Without the special qualities of its 19 million people, who have been taught cleverness and patience by history, are generally more devoted to their kinsmen than their nation, and are suspicious of every move by those in power, Iran would be an easier country to govern. For example, Iranian slum dwellers have been known to refuse to move...
...Shah is fighting not only corruption and graft but the deadening hand of Iran's "thousand families" who are absentee owners of 70% of the land. The Shah himself, as the nation's biggest single landowner (2,500,000 acres), has shown the way by distributing his vast farm properties to the peasants of about 300 of his villages. But the thousand families are cool to land reform. Even worse, landlords seldom reinvest their profits in upgrading the soil. Tenants, who can usually be dispossessed at will with no compensation for any improvements they have made, are understandably...
...returned from exile in Eastern Europe to Damascus, and Mustafa Barzani, famed Kurdish rebel long harbored in Soviet exile, arrived back in Iraq. The Kurds (whose great leader in the time of the Crusades was Saladin) are a volatile minority of 5,000,000, spread across Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran and southern Russia. Openly defying Nasser's ban on party politics, Bakdash is publishing a Communist newspaper in Syria. But Barzani remains harmlessly holed up so far in Baghdad-presumably because Iraq's Premier Kassem is resisting Nasser's merger, which suits Moscow's desires...