THE SHAH, in common with many autocrats, liked pretena tnal ne ruica over a uniform nation.
The Pahlavi dynasty aggressively "persianised' its subject territories in a vain effort to conceal the tact that Persians are little more than the largest in a kingdom minorities.
Persian-speakers constitute barely half the total populaThe next largest nationality - the 21 per cent of Azerbaijani speakers — do not even belong to the Iranian The national minorities are important spreading the impact of the Baluchis and Afghanis overlap neighbouring Pakistan and Afghanistan in the east. Kurds, Turks, Assyrians and Armenians span the Iraqi and Turkish states in the west. the north Azerbaijan straddles the border with the Soviet Union.
And the Arabs of Khuzestan - the southern oil-producing region which they KnOW Arabestan — provide a bridge to the rest of the Middle East.
Moreover the nationa movements deserve attention as the only political force ever to mobilise the rural population.
Despite severe poverty, active peasant resistance has been rare. More frequent is armed hostility to outsiders on national and ethnic grounds, as with the largely nomadic and militant Baluchis.
The more populous fertile north has seen the most advanced experiments. mediately after the first world the war and Russian Revolution, when the central Iranian power of had crumbled to nothing, many of the northern provinces and Arab Khuzestan autonomous republics.
In the Republic of Gilan, Iran briefly had its experience of soviet power.
Independent Kurdish control of the Lake Ourmiah region continued until 1930, when the Kurdish leader was assassinated while conducting negotiaLORS Reza Shah, Tarner Or Mohammed The Kurdish movement well illustrates the strengths weaknesses orthe oppositions.
After the second world war a Kurdish republic was claimed at Mahabad was also a similar republic in neighbouring Azerbaijan), becoming an immediate refuge Tor Kurdish fighters neighbouring Iraq and Turkey.
It enacted mesures for the promotion of Kurdish language and literature and economic relations with soviet umon, wnien controlca north-west Iran in the months just after the war.
But in December 1946, just a and Im- IRAQ set up only SAUDI ARABIA the Reza and national vear alter its formation. the Mahabad republic fell without a fight to the Shah's troops.
pro- The coolness of the Soviet (there Union was partly to blame for the republic's end. Its best defence would have been an all-out political assault on the central power in Tehran, organising the masses in the other northern minorities. opened The Soviet Union was well the placed to do this, both directly the Tudeh (Communist) Party. But it didn't.
Stalin had
the national movements, ¿CASPIAN SEA • Tabriz Masnt • GILAN Oazvin • MAZANDARAN •TEHRAN •Sanandaj.
• Hamadan Gom • Kermanshah • Arak LURESTAN ON this page and the next RICHARD CARVER looks at some of the most important political groups in Iran:
the Tudeh party, the National Front and the guerilla organisations.
USSR •Gorgan Mashad • KHORASAN of AFGHANISTAN movement did not accept this. -Its autempis to launen armee uprisings failed and militants were hunted down by both SAVAK Parastin, Barzani's secret police.
The KDPI only resumed the struggle when Tehran concluded an agreement with Iraq in 1975.
The Shah's signature on that treaty was an inadvertent signal revival of Kurdish nationalism. Mass protests have grown over three years, culminating in a demonstration tens of thousands in Mahabad last year, organised the KDPI in tavour independence In the weeks since the Shah's fall the movement has grown even further and the upsurge in Tehran and elsewhere has led to