Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was one of the wealthiest men of his time, yet his fortune was insufficient to compensate the nations that spoiled him while he was in office. On January 16, 1979, he began living as a stateless person with his wife Farah Diba and their children. Monarchy has ended after 2,500 years.
.png "mohammad reza pahlavi and his wife") |
| Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his wife Farah Pahlavi in Egypt |
A jet prepares to take off on an unknown route. A soldier approaches and attempts to kiss Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's shoes before boarding the jet, but the king, presumably in a final show of dominance, forbids him. He glances for the final time at that land he doesn't know but knows he'll never see again. The Western-pampered king is now recognized to be stateless. On January 16, 1979, 37 years of power came to an end, as did a 2,500-year-old monarchy.
The streets of Tehran were crowded with Iranians celebrating the demise of the shah as soon as the jet took off. A gang joined the statue of Reza Khane, father of the emperor and founder of the dynasty, in Sepagh Square, which was crushed into a thousand pieces and smashed to the ground. Not only was a monument shattered, but the attempted westernization of a nation that decided to stick to its traditions was also coming to an end. A wealthy nation with a large number of impoverished citizens.
The fall of the Shah in Iran
Many Iranians saw their ruler as a puppet of foreign forces. It was sufficient to recall his ascent to the throne. He did it at the age of 22 in 1941, when the English compelled his father to abdicate due to his Nazi connections. "We put it in, we take it out," British Prime Minister Winston Churchill said at the time, accurately but undiplomatically.
Reza Pahlavi was crowned in a grandiose ceremony witnessed by international leaders. He sat on the 'Peacock Throne,' which gleamed with 27,000 gold-set valuable stones, and donned a crown set with 3,380 precious stones. He promised to "provide bread to my people" when he assumed.
Three decades later, although majority of Iran was impoverished, Iran's king had become one of the world's wealthiest men. He had various properties in the United Kingdom and the Seychelles, including a 52-room mansion in Biarritz and a 35-story structure in Manhattan. His excess of money was such that for his wife Farah Diba's anniversary, he presented her a globe made of 37 kilograms of pure gold and encrusted with 51,366 beautiful stones. Workers at the oil wells, on the other hand, were paid 50 cents each day.
In an attempt to modernize his nation, the shah permitted women's suffrage, abolished the wearing of the mandatory veil, constructed shopping malls, erected major infrastructures in Tehran, and supplied the army with the most current Western weaponry. Although many of the policies were progressive, the way they were implemented was horrifying. The Savak was a parapolice force run by the CIA in the United States. Its 15,000 spies penetrated all aspects of Iranian civil life, including workplaces, political, social, and religious groups, and colleges; they even spied on Iranian students studying abroad. Asset confiscation, passport revocation, job loss, torture, and even murder were meted out to anyone labeled as opponents of the Shah.
Iran began to experience rising inflation in the mid-1970s. The monarch's reaction was to freeze credit, which halted projects that could aid the public, and anger rose. Meanwhile, in Paris, Ayatollah Khomeini was garnering the backing of a rising number of Iranians who considered his monarch's projected Westernization as an affront to Islam. His talks and sermons, which were secretly recorded on hundreds of cassettes and distributed around the country, were heard by peasants, students, laborers, and the disinherited of that rich but impoverished nation. The ayatollah's beliefs had become the almighty shah's greatest political enemy, and not even Savak could suppress them.
Crisis in Iran
The situation got increasingly precarious in the fall of 1978. Khomeini began to command political life and prepare the insurgency through his clergy. Iran had become unruly, with just the imperial guard remaining faithful to the monarch.
On January 16, 1979, the Shah took the only course available to him: he withdrew into exile, claiming that he was "going on vacation." The Shah and his family fled the nation when Khomeini returned, never to return. The royal family began their own journey. They did not realize that they also launched the so-called "curse of the Pahlavis".
The Western-pampered guy became a stateless person. Rainier of Monaco was the first to grant them shelter. "It was a surprise since we weren't particularly close, but in the end, the French authorities refused," Farah said. They arrived in Morocco as visitors to King Hasan II. They then traveled to the Bahamas. They landed in Mexico in June 1979 as a result of pressure from the US government and businesspeople. The Washington Post reported at the time that Henry Kissinger had been pleading with the administration of then-Mexican President José López Portillo for months to issue temporary residency visas to the deposed monarch and his family.
He settled in Cuernavaca, where he attempted to remain unseen while being surrounded by a security staff of more than 70 individuals at all times. There was a story from that period about a meal in honor of the Shah that was planned at Casa Morelos - the official state residence- that took weeks to prepare with the advice of American chefs and food and wine purchased overseas and flown to Mexico by private jet. The meal consisted of four courses: meat, fish, champagne, and wine pairings for each dish.
The shah came unwell, and all he wanted to eat was yogurt with berries. The issue was locating a silver container in which to give him food. Because it was nearly difficult to go out and buy it at the time, they created a silver bowl in which someone had to place cigars. They cleansed and disinfected it before serving the yogurt.
In search of refuge
The visit was only temporary. Sick with cancer, which he had been diagnosed with in 1974 but kept so secret that not even the CIA was aware of it, he petitioned then-US President Jimmy Carter to allow him to have surgery in the US. He received everything, but not the stay; when he tried to return to Mexico, they wouldn't let him. He created rejection wherever he went; in Panama, he caused significant problems for General Torrijos. It was deemed an act of aggression against their country by Iran's brand new Islamic administration to open the doors to it. No country wanted to make enemies with the new regime and, more importantly, lose its primary oil supply.
On March 24, 1980, he arrived in Egypt, the home of what he called his “only friend”, President Anwar el Sadat . Seriously ill, he was airlifted to Meadi hospital where his spleen was removed. He began a long convalescence in the Kubbeh palace, in the Egyptian capital, cared for by his wife and his four children. But his condition worsened.
He passed away on July 27, 1980. There were no flowers, memorials, pomp, or state funerals. He was fired by a few ambassadors rather than presidents, kings, or prime ministers. He was buried in the same mosque as the bones of another ousted Egyptian monarch, Farouk. "The vampire of the century is dead," said the Tehran Times, and hundreds of people flocked to the streets to praise Allah for the departure of the final ruler.
It would not be the last time death would strike the Pahlavis. Princess Leila died in London in 2001 after ingesting a drug-cocaine cocktail. Her mother attempted to make sense of the unexplained. She promised her daughter, "exiled at the age of nine, never recovered from her father's death." "The curse" would eventually reach Prince Ali Reza Pahlavi, who committed suicide in Boston ten years later.
What happened to one of the world's greatest fortunes was never revealed. Some researchers put the figure between $2,000 and 20,000 million. The disparity is not due to a lack of mathematical ability, but rather to the money being related to oil exports in Iran and the personal use that the shah made of that cash. The Pahlavi Foundation, ostensibly a charity but in practice a profitable investment house with interests in banks, hotels, casinos, industrial and mining ventures, agricultural companies, construction companies, and trading companies, according to The Washington Post, is the main instrument of his fortune both in his country and abroad.
For example, it owned 10 percent of a joint venture in Iran with General Motors to assemble cars and Bank Omran, the country's fifth-largest commercial bank.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, Farah Diba remarked concerning his money that "many falsehoods were published about it" and that when he went into exile "I didn't want to take anything with me. Just some boots that I thought were necessary to keep going at the time. My favorite books, a poster of musician Sattar requested by my daughter Farahnaz, and my own jewelry. When you have to leave your home, nation, and friends, material possessions lose their worth. I also shot photographs of my children, but I'd like to find the ones from my trip to Iran.
Recently they wrote me from the palace (currently it is a museum and you can visit it) to tell me: “Your Majesty, don't worry, all your things are here”. He also assured that he sold jewelry and asked his friends for help in order to survive. She made these statements in her Paris apartment overlooking the Seine and the Grand Palais and filled with works of art such as a painting by Miró.
The shah also denied his money in his final days. In an interview in a New York hospital months before his death, he promised that his wealth did not exceed $100 million, and that with exile expenditures, it might have been reduced to around $50 million. Little or a lot for a man who had money and power but did not honor his commitment to feed his people.
Author: Susane Ceballos
Source: INFOBAE