Now It Is Up to the Shah

Will his departure alleviate a winter of discontent?

The first heavy snows of winter began falling across Iran last week, blanketing once bustling boulevards and the country's strike-bound industrial centers. For a time, even Tehran fell silent, though at least 30 people were killed and more than 120 wounded in clashes in other cities. Iran's revolution was far from over, fueled still by the fact that the Shah had not yet left the country.

Despite the Shah's earlier pledge to Prime Minister Shahpour Bakhtiar, 62, head of the nation's new civilian government, that he would take a "holiday" outside the country, the 59-year-old monarch had not budged. But perhaps it was a matter of precise timing. In Washington late last week, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance announced that the Shah would indeed leave soon on an extended vacation. It was a sound idea, added Vance, "and we concur with that decision." Wary of appearing to meddle in Iran's crisis, Washington issued discreet instructions to Ambassador William Sullivan to respond affirmatively if the Shah asked his advice about leaving the country. It was clear that the longer he remained, the more difficult would be the process of unifying the nation. Bakhtiar later announced that the Shah might leave this week. Among skeptics, that message gained credibility at week's end when the Shah took the significant step of naming the nine-member regency council required by law to rule in his absence.

Meanwhile, Bakhtiar, an ex officio regency-council member, moved to win popular support for his government. He immediately lifted press censorship and reopened the universities closed last June. In presenting his new Cabinet to Parliament, he detailed elements of a program that included support for Iran's Arab neighbors, "especially the Palestinians," and a ban on future oil shipments to Israel and South Africa. He promised to disband SAVAK, the secret police, and announced that he had released 266 political prisoners and would compensate families of the more than 2,000 Iranians who had been killed in the months of rioting.

Washington, too, tried to marshal support for the new government, even as the threat of a military coup grew more ominous. Reports from U.S. military attaches described how troops were being reassigned to areas distant from relatives and friends, a step that some analysts viewed as a way to lessen any inhibitions among the soldiers to open fire during a confrontation with anti-Shah protesters. To defuse the coup threat, the Administration dispatched General Robert E. Huyser to Tehran to coax military leaders into supporting Bakhtiar.

A coup would almost certainly mean a bloodbath--"worse than Chile," according to U.S. officials. It was doubtful that the army could effectively run the country or get oil production back to normal. As a Western diplomat observed last week, "The military has proved they can take over the streets, but they can't get people back to work."

In what appeared to be a cautious attempt to avoid inciting the army, Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, the opposition's exiled religious leader, last week issued new orders to his followers to avoid "indiscriminate violence." He also declared that he bore "no hostility" toward countries that might give the Shah asylum and would allow continued oil shipments to the West. "Our relations with the U.S.," he added, "would be good relations as long as the U.S. stops supporting the Shah and leaves us to decide our own destiny."

Even as the Shah remained secluded behind the walls of Niavaran Palace, he was striving to cut his losses. The palace announced that the Shah had decided to donate $230 million to the Pahlavi Foundation, but most Iranians were convinced that the grant was a mere token. Besides, cynics argued, the Pahlavi Foundation, with its vast global network of real estate, banks and corporations estimated to be worth around $3 billion is controlled by the Shah.

There was nothing, in short, that would become the Shah's reign so much as his leaving it--and swiftly at that. Despite the country's financial disarray and their many personal hardships, reported TIME Correspondent William McWhirter from Tehran last week, most Iranians seemed confident that their revolution would succeed. Even among the wealthy or those once loyal to the Shah, there was growing respect for a revolution that had been brought about, not through arms, but through civil disobedience and the sustained withdrawal of labor. Said an Iranian civil servant, himself still loyal to the Shah: "Sometimes there is a revolution from the top and it's not right. This is a revolution from the people, and it's going to be good for the future of Iran. Those people who withdrew their dollars and put them in their luggage, they won't have a country any longer. Their new country is their money."

A local grocer in Tehran told McWhirter that the panic hoarding of past months had ceased. "People have changed their spirit," he said. "There is nothing we are afraid of any more. Before, the old government told us to charge ten tomans ($1.30) for a box of sweets and we charged twelve. Now Khomeini says to charge ten and we charge nine."

When a soldier walked into the shop, he was greeted amiably by the other customers. He assured a schoolteacher: "I want whatever the people want." And what was that? As one Western expert put it last week, "Iranians want a slower pace, a more traditional society. In a Muslim country, the duty of a good government is simply not to interfere in the lives of its people too much and to allow them to live as good Muslims." Whether Iran will get that kind of government is still far from certain.

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