Word: ayatullah
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...moment, however, authorities may be less unsettled by such external threats than by their own internal divisions. The Ayatullah has established 20 different agencies for intelligence and security. All of them jockey for position by twisting Khomeini's proclamations, as well as the Koran, to their own advantage. According to Dr. Ardeshir San'ati, a former full colonel and key medical officer in the Army, who recently fled to the U.S., "The Islamic Guards see Iran as their personal fiefdom and treat all others, especially the armed forces, as their serfs." Since a system of Islamic justice superseded...
...regime's most urgent dispute revolves around economic policy. To the left is a group, headed by Khomeini's probable successor, Ayatullah Hussein Ali Montazeri, 61, which contends that the revolution was, is and always must be conducted on behalf of the downtrodden. They favor redistribution of income, nationalization of foreign trade and land reform. "We please the middle and lower classes," said President Seyed Ali Khamene'i, 44, last summer, "and let big landlords, big factory owners and the wealthy seethe in discontent." Opposing them are the ultrarightist clerics who insist that the Koran unequivocally condemns...
...matter is crucial because Khomeini has come to realize how little he can afford to antagonize the bazaari, the prosperous and traditional merchants who helped finance his overthrow of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Four years ago the Ayatullah sneered that "economics matters to donkeys." By now, he has been heard to confess, "If the bazaar opted out of the Islamic Republic, the republic would face defeat...
...mollifying the merchants, however, Khomeini does not want to shortchange the common man, whose interests he claims to champion. By last year local black-marketeering had become such a fine art that rice cost five times as much in Tehran as in New York. In April, therefore, the Ayatullah issued a withering diatribe against "heartless hoarders and overchargers" and launched a brutal purge against "economic terrorists." Thousands of small traders were fined, imprisoned and publicly whipped; in August two black-marketeers were sentenced to death...
...Central Bank, Mohsen Noorbaksh, the nation has cut its foreign debt from $7.4 billion in 1978 to $500 million. In 1983 alone Iran repaid $419.5 million to the American Export-Import Bank and also returned $350 million to France. Noorbaksh claims that within four years of the Ayatullah's takeover, Iran had accumulated foreign exchange reserves of $13 billion, higher than at any time during the Shah's rule. Foreign businessmen, mostly from the West, can again be seen all over Tehran...