Land reform in Iran
With the land reform in Iran , the existing feudal system was abolished and the arable land was distributed from large landowners to farmers. The land reform was one of the main concerns of the White Revolution of 1963, the reform program of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi .
History of land reform in Iran
A reform aimed at improving the economic situation of the Iranian people had to be started in the agricultural sector. A special task was the implementation of a land reform, with which the ownership structure of the agricultural land was to be fundamentally changed. The first step in land reform, a redistribution of land from large landowners to smaller farm workers, was actually started in the early 1950s. The Shah gave more than 500,000 hectares of land to around 30,000 dispossessed families. Before the land reform, 70% of arable land was owned by a small class of landowners or religious foundations. There was still no official land register. Rather, the land ownership was evidenced by title deeds, whereby the deed did not certify a specific, measured area of land, but a specific village and the land belonging to the village. Before the land reform, 50% of Iran's arable land was in the hands of large landowners, 20% belonged to charitable or religious foundations, 10% belonged to the state or the Crown and only 20% belonged to free farmers. Before the land reform began, 18,000 villages had been recorded whose land was to be divided among the farmers living in the village.
Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi had spoken of the need for land reform for many years, but clergy resistance had repeatedly led him to postpone the reform. At the end of the reign of Prime Minister Manouchehr Eghbal by the then Minister of Agriculture was Jamshid Amusegar the Parliament submitted a bill on land reform, which was however diluted by the representatives of the big landowners as in Parliament that despite the adopted 6 June 1960 the first law is to Land reform did not result in a fundamental redistribution of land ownership in Iran. On November 11, 1961, the Shah commissioned Prime Minister Ali Amini to develop proposals for implementing the planned reform program. On November 14, 1961, Amini declared that the Shah had given him special powers to implement the reform program. The MPs of the National Front expressed massive criticism of Amini, so that in the end Amini had the leaders of the reform critics arrested. In January 1962, he directed his Agriculture Minister, Hassan Arsanjani , to revise the 1960 Land Reform Act. From now on the large landowners were only allowed to own a single village. They had to sell the rest of their land to the state, which in turn would give it to the landless farmers at a much lower price. The state also granted farmers cheap loans when they formed agricultural cooperatives. Prime Minister Amini resigned on July 18, 1962, due to ongoing protests against the reform program and a growing budget deficit. Amini wanted to achieve the budget deficit by cutting armaments spending, which, however, could not be achieved politically.
With the "White Revolution", Mohammad Reza Shah wanted to promote Iran's economic and social reform in a coordinated reform project. After Amini's resignation, Prime Minister Asadollah Alam's cabinet was tasked with putting the reforms into appropriate laws. In January 1963, an amendment to the land reform law drafted by Agriculture Minister Arsanjani was passed, which was supposed to put an end to the feudal system that existed in Iran from the Qajar era . The land reform critics from the ranks of the big landowners accused Arsanjani that the reform law violated the constitution, the laws of Islam and the existing laws of the country. It became clear that the program of the White Revolution and, above all, the land reform against the resistance of the landowners and the clergy could only be implemented if it was supported by the vast majority of the population of Iran. For this reason, the Shah planned a referendum in which the Iranian citizens would vote on whether they would approve or reject the reform projects. Although Khomeini branded the referendum as an anti-God project and called on all believers not to take part in the vote, 5,598,711 Iranians were in favor and only 4,115 against. Grand Ayatollah Hossein Borudscherdi had also spoken out against the reform program, but his death in March 1961 invalidated the anti-White Revolution fatwa .
Mohammad Reza Shah had declared before the referendum:
“If I have decided to bring about a referendum on these reforms, it is because I want to prevent our peasants from ever becoming serfs again, that our country's natural resources benefit the profit making of a few, and that these revolutionary changes are no longer significant can be impaired or destroyed at the instigation of a minority. "
literature
- Afsaneh Najmabadi: Land Reform and Social Change in Iran. University of Utah Press. 1988. ISBN 0-874-80285-7 .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Gérard de Villiers: The Shah. The power and glory of the emperor on the peacock throne. Munich 1976, ISBN 3-453-00632-1 , page 460
- ^ Farah Diba-Pahlavi: Memories. Bergisch-Gladbach, 2004, p. 135.
- ^ Kristen Blake: The US-Soviet confrontation in Iran, 1945–1962. University Press of America, 2009, p. 155.
- ↑ Abbas Milani: Eminent Persians. Syracuse University Press, 2008, p. 88.
- ^ Farah Diba-Pahlavi: Memories. Bergisch-Gladbach, 2004, p. 141.