Word: savak
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Since he announced his liberalization measures, which are designed to culminate in free elections next June, the Shah and Premier Sharif-Emami have lifted restrictions on the formation of new political parties, curbed the activities of SAVAK, Iran's notorious secret police, and cracked down on widespread corruption among profiteering businessmen and former government officials. General Nematullah Nasiri, who was head of SAVAK for 13 years before he was fired last June, has now been brought back from his post as Ambassador to Pakistan reportedly to face charges of corruption and murder. The government will also press charges against...
...articulate, they have formed a vocal vanguard against the Shah in almost every major city in the world, airing their opposition with slogans in the London subway or demonstrations in Los Angeles, Washington or New York City. Many wear masks when they demonstrate for fear that agents of SAVAK, the heavyhanded Iranian secret police, or authorities in other countries will gather incriminating data on them. Under the Iranian constitution, castigating the Shah, even abroad, is a crime punishable by three to ten years in prison...
...hopeful sign that in recent months the Shah has begun to make visible reforms in the political and human rights affairs of the nation. He fired the head of SAVAK, who had been identified with that agency's most notorious terror tactics, freed a number of prisoners, and promised to allow dissidents to be tried in civilian rather than military courts. But some specialists in the region blame those small liberalizing measures for the present turmoil. Says one: "Many Iranians took these changes as a sign that the Shah was weakening and responded with almost total cynicism...
...companies and the U.S. government has been what Henry A. Kissenger '50 used to like to call "political stability." The price paid by the bulk of Iranian people has been continued mass poverty in the face of petro-dollar plenty and perpetual intimidation by the SAVAK, the Shah's secret police. For Pahlevi's most out-spoken critics it has often meant imprisonment and grotesque torture that has been only too vividly documented by some of those who escaped...
Police detained six suspects. Among them: the owner of the Rex, who was charged with negligence for having ordered his employees to lock the exits to prevent terrorists from entering the theater. But opposition groups outside Iran accused SAVAK, the Shah's secret police, of setting the blaze in order to provoke a backlash against dissident groups. Many Iranians, however, blamed Ayatullah Khomeini, a Shi'ite mullah (religious leader) who has lived in exile in Iraq since 1963. Khomeini swore unrelenting enmity to the Shah after hundreds of his followers were killed while protesting the monarch's land-reform program...