Hassan Arfa

Hassan Arfa as Chief of Staff, December 1944

Hassan Arfa ( Persian حسن ارفع Hasan-e Arfaʿ , listen ^{? / i} ; * 1895 in Tbilisi , Russian Empire ; † 1983 in Monte Carlo ) was an Iranian general and diplomat. He had been married to Hilda Bewicke, a British ballerina, since 1923. The marriage resulted in a daughter, Leila.

Life

Prince Arfa ed-Dowleh (left), the father of Hassan Arfa, in Geneva, 1925

Hassan Arfa was born in Tiblisi, Georgia, in 1895. Arfa's mother, Ludmilla Jervis, was the daughter of a British diplomat and a Russian aristocrat from the Demidov family . His father, Prince Reza Khan Arfa ed-Dowleh, was an Iranian diplomat who served in the Persian Consulate General in Tiblisi. He later became ambassador to Turkey and Russia and representative of Iran to the League of Nations in Geneva. Hassan Arfa's parents divorced in 1900 and the mother moved to Paris with Hassan.

Military career

Hassan Arfa received his school education first from private tutors and later in private schools in Switzerland, France (Paris) and Monaco. Hassan Arfa's father had built a house in Monaco, settled there and invited his son over. Hassan's mother stayed in Geneva while Hassan moved to Monaco with his father. Hassan attended school in Monaco.

After the outbreak of hostilities between Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Montenegro and the Ottoman Empire in 1912, Hassan Arfa volunteered for the Ottoman army at the age of 16 . He was accepted into a cadet facility of the Ottoman Army in Istanbul and began officer training. In the autumn of 1913, Hassan Arfa's father became Minister of Justice in the cabinet of Prime Minister Mohammad Ali Khan Ala al-Saltaneh . Hasan Arfa left the Ottoman cadet institute and traveled with his father to Tehran in January 1914 to take up a post in the diplomatic service of Iran, as his father wanted. Hasan Arfa then decided to continue his military career and was accepted into the Royal Guard. As a member of the Royal Guard, he witnessed the coronation of Ahmad Shah . He made it to lieutenant in the royal guard .

After the outbreak of World War I , Hassan Arfa left Iran with his father and returned to Monaco. He wanted to continue his military training at the Saumur Cavalry School in Paris. Due to the war, the cavalry school had been converted into an artillery school. In April 1915 Hassan Arfa began cavalry training with the Swiss Army in Bern. After completing his cavalry training, Hassan Arfa travels to Istanbul to join the Ottoman army as a volunteer. As an Iranian officer and thus part of the Iranian army, which was considered neutral, he was not accepted into the Ottoman army. He traveled back to Monaco unsuccessful.

After the end of the First World War, Hassan Arfa returned to Iran in 1920 and took up his service in the Persian gendarmerie led by Swedish officers . His first deployment led him against Soviet troops who had occupied northern Iran in order to establish a communist government there. Hassan Arfa's father had meanwhile become Iran's representative at the League of Nations.

The 1921 coup

Hassan Arfa, captain in the second gendarmerie regiment in Tehran, played a crucial role in the success of the coup of February 21, 1921 , without being directly involved in the coup . On the morning of February 20, 1921, Arfa received a call from his commander Major Sheibani informing him that there was a rebellion by the Persian Cossack Brigade , who had not received any pay for months and would march to Tehran to receive their pay to fetch. It is to be expected that around 1000 Cossacks would reach Tehran in the evening. Arfa was ordered to secure the western parts of Tehran with his regiment. When asked whether he should open fire on the Cossacks, the answer was that he should only return fire if he was shot. At 8 p.m., Ahmad Shah called Arfa and asked about the situation. It was quiet. Around 9 p.m., an advance guard of the Cossack brigade was spotted from the gendarme outpost. At 11 p.m. Arfa learned of shots that had been fired in the center of town. Major Sheibani confirmed by telephone that around 1,500 Cossacks had come to Tehran through the Gomrok Gate along with units of the Gendarmerie Brigade. The police officers there did not want to surrender on Tupkhaneh Square and were therefore shot. The situation is calm and Arfa can call his people back to the barracks. The next day everything remained calm. Major Sheibani came to Hassan Arfa and reported that the Cossacks had overthrown the government and that the new Prime Minister was Seyyed Zia al Din Tabatabai , that Reza Khan was the new Commander in Chief and that many important people had been arrested.

General Hassan Arfa at the head of the Iranian cavalry, 1930

During the reign of Prime Minister Ahmad Qavam , Hassan Arfa was involved in cracking down on insurrections and separatist movements in Azerbaijan, Kurdistan and Lorestan. He left Iran in late 1922 and went to his family in Monaco to get married. In mid-1923 he met an Iranian military mission in Paris to buy tanks, armored vehicles, airplanes and transporters for the army newly formed by Defense Minister Reza Khan. Back in Iran, Hassan Arfa was promoted to major in 1925. In 1925 he became the Persian ambassador in Stockholm .

In 1926 he was sent to London as a military attaché . From 1927 to 1929 he attended the military academy École supérieure de guerre in Paris. On his return he took over the post of regimental commander in the newly formed cavalry. In 1932 he was promoted to colonel as commander of the Iranian Military Academy. In 1934 Hassan Arfa Reza accompanied Shah on his state visit to Turkey. In 1936 Arfa became the army inspector general. 1939 received the rank of general.

During World War II , Iran was occupied as part of the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran . After the collapse of the Iranian defense and the abdication of Reza Shah, which was forced by the British and Soviets, Hasan Arfa remained in the army under Mohammad Reza Shah without a specific task until he was assigned to the military secret service. In October 1943 Hassan Arfa became the commander of the 1st Guard of the Tehran Army Division. At the beginning of 1944, he assumed the post of military governor of roads, railways and ports to oversee the Allied transports through the Persian Corridor . On December 21, 1944, Hassan Arfa was appointed Chief of Staff of the Army by Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

The 1945 Iran crisis

During the Iran crisis in December 1945, Chief of Staff Hassan Arfa thwarted a communist takeover in Tehran. According to documents from the Iranian military secret service, Stalin planned to install a communist government in Tehran that would consent to the permanent occupation of Iran by Soviet troops and turn Iran into a pro-Soviet satellite state. Specifically, the People's Army of the Azerbaijani People's Government of Jafar Pishevari was supposed to march from the north to Tehran. Communist units from Tabriz and Semnan were to march from the west and east towards Tehran. In Tehran, the communist Tudeh party was supposed to organize a popular uprising. The food supply in Tehran was to be cut off by members of the Tudeh party in Qazvin and Firuzkuh, among others, in order to stir up popular dissatisfaction with the current government. The Soviet troops located in Iran would then have been forced to maintain order. Chief of Staff Arfa initially sent troops from Tehran to the north, west and east of Iran, but they were stopped by Soviet troops on their way to their destinations. Subsequently, troops were mobilized in the provinces to stop the communist associations. In Tehran all important places were occupied by military units. In view of the massive military deployment of the Iranian army, the attempted communist overthrow quickly collapsed.

In mid-January 1946, Prime Minister Ebrahim Hakimi turned to the United Nations Security Council , founded on January 17, 1946 , which called on the Iranian government to negotiate directly with the Soviet Union in order to find a balance of interests on the question of the separatist movements. On January 20, 1946, Prime Minister Hakimi resigned due to a threatened vote of no confidence by the Iranian parliament. At the suggestion of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi , Ahmad Qavam was elected Prime Minister by Parliament.

One of the first acts of Prime Minister Qavam was to comply with the demands of the Tudeh party and to dismiss Hassan Arfa as chief of staff on January 27, 1946. On April 9, 1946, Hassan Arfa was arrested and imprisoned for seven months.

Qavam went to Moscow and began to negotiate with Stalin about the withdrawal of Soviet troops. The US President Harry S. Truman now threatened Stalin with serious consequences to the use of nuclear weapons unless he may go up his troops from Iran. For President Truman, there was no question that the Soviet Union's control of Iranian oil would lead to a shift in the balance of power in the world and could cause massive damage to the emerging Western economy. In the meantime, the United Nations Security Council had intervened in the crisis. Truman's threat did not fail to work. On March 25, 1946, Stalin announced that Iran and the Soviet Union had agreed in principle on the issue of troop withdrawal and that the Soviet troops could withdraw from Iran within six weeks. The Security Council decided on April 4, 1946 not to meet again until May 6, 1946 to check whether all Soviet troops had withdrawn from Iran and how to proceed with the Iranian question. On the same day, Prime Minister Qavam and the Soviet ambassador in Tehran signed an agreement that the Red Army would withdraw from Iran within six weeks of March 24, 1946, that the Azerbaijani People's Government would negotiate with the central government about its continued existence and that in seven weeks from March 24, 1946 the Soviet-Iranian oil company would be founded, in which the Soviet Union will hold 51% and Iran 49% of the shares.

On January 2, 1947, Hassan Arfa received news that all charges against him had been dropped. On March 6, 1947, General Hassan Arfa was released from active military service against his will.

Political career

On March 12, 1951, after Prime Minister Razmara was assassinated by a member of Fedayeen-e Islam , Arfa took over the post of Minister for Roads and Communications in Prime Minister Hossein Ala's cabinet . After Ala's resignation on April 28, 1951, Hassan Arfa's political career was over. Mohammad Mossadegh became prime minister. He had no use for Arfa.

During this time Hassan Arfa founded the "National Movement", a party that acted against Mossadegh. The party published a newspaper called National Movement , in which Hassan Arfa published numerous editorials. After the fall of Mossadegh , he supported the new Prime Minister General Zahedi .

In 1958 Hassan Arfa was sent as ambassador to Turkey for three years and from 1961 to Pakistan for two years. In 1963 he retired from active service. He left Iran in 1979 during the Islamic Revolution and died in 1983 in Monte Carlo, the place where he spent his childhood.

Fonts

• Under Five Shahs . New York: Morrow; London: John Murray, 1964.
• The Kurds: An Historical and Political Study . London: Oxford University Press, 1966.

See also

• Gholamali Bayandor

Web links

• Hassan Arfa . In: Ehsan Yarshater (Ed.): Encyclopædia Iranica (English, including references)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Stephanie Cronin: The Army and the Creation of the Pahlavi State in Iran, 1910-1926 , p. 52.
2. ^ Hassan Arfa: Under five Shahs . London, 1964, p. 108.
3. ^ Hassan Arfa: Under five Shahs . London, 1964, p. 352.
4. ^ Hassan Arfa: Under five Shahs . London, 1964, p. 355.
5. ^ Gerhard Schweizer: Iran . Stuttgart 1991, ISBN 3-7632-4034-9 , pp. 383 .
6. ↑ Gholam Reza Afkhami: The life and the times of the Shah . University of California Press. 2009, p. 98.