In brief. After 1953 the Iranian state built a system of security services, censorship and special courts. International organisations and Iranian opponents criticised it, and the government rejected much of that criticism. Numbers are uncertain and must be read with their sources.
This article is the first in a continuing series. It does not argue that the period was only repression. It sets out what critics inside and outside Iran said and what the historical record can and cannot show.
The system
After 1953 the government strengthened its security services. SAVAK, the intelligence and security organisation, was created in 1957 and was reportedly advised in its early years by foreign services. It watched political activity, the press, universities and trade unions. Newspapers and books needed to pass censorship. Political cases were often handled by military courts, and prisoners could be held for long periods. Evin prison in Tehran became a well-known place of detention for political prisoners.
Iranian and international observers in the 1960s and 1970s, including human rights organisations, reported arbitrary arrest, restrictions on the press and the use of military courts for political cases. The government denied or minimised many of these reports.
A contested record
How many people were held, and how they were treated, is disputed. The shah’s government gave low figures and said that those held were terrorists or criminals. Opposition groups and some international organisations gave much higher figures and described torture.
Estimates of the number of political prisoners in the 1970s differ greatly depending on who produced them and how. A reliable statement gives the number, the author, the date and the method, and says that independent checking was almost impossible at the time.
Abrahamian’s study of prisons and confessions is one of the most detailed academic treatments of the period and is a good place to start, with the caution that sources from inside the prison system are limited.
The opposition
The state’s critics were not one group. The Tudeh Party and other left-wing movements, the National Front and liberal nationalists, religious activists around clerics and lay thinkers, and armed groups of the 1970s, some Marxist and some Islamist, had different goals and often distrusted each other. Writers, lawyers and students also spoke out through petitions and open letters.
Many historians argue that the closing of legal political space made opposition move toward the mosque, the bazaar and underground groups, which contributed to the way the 1978–79 movement formed. Others point to wider causes.
How to read this period
Anyone who cites a figure about repression in these years, whether to defend or to condemn the monarchy, should be asked where it comes from. Irooni will continue this series with individual topics, each with its sources, and will say when the evidence is thin.
Notes and sources
- Ervand Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions (Princeton University Press, 1982).
- Ervand Abrahamian, Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran (University of California Press, 1999).
- Abbas Milani, The Shah (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
- Amnesty International reports on Iran from the 1970s: the specific report, year and its method must be added after the reports are opened.
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