Shah White Revolution Essay

Socio-economic policies Hadil Hamid

The White Revolution

In January 1963 the Shah submitted a reform program, later termed the “White Revolution” to national referendum. The reform program was a plan to modernize the country and particularly the rural areas. It included six points: a land reform, the nationalization of forests, a profit-sharing scheme for industrial workers, sale of state-owned factories to the private sector, the formation of literacy corps to remove illiteracy in rural areas and the enfranchisement of women.
The core of the program was the land reform. The land reform meant land redistribution to peasants. The government provided peasants with land they had bought from feudal land lords in return of a loan to be paid over a 15 years period and at very low interest rates. This improved the status of the peasantry as it made it possible for peasants to be independent landowners and also abolished feudalism. However the reform was not all successful. The failure of the reform is that it could not give any or enough land to the majority of the peasants, thus creating landless laborers and a

According to the article, a study done by William J butler, head of the executive committee of the International Commission of Jurists, showed that torture was used systematically in SAVAK’s prisons. In his study William included a testimony by Reza Baraheni, an Iranian poet who was imprisoned by SAVAK in 1973, without being formally charged. Baraheni spoke of “being beaten, whipped and exposed to the sounds of screaming prisoners”. Speaking about his observations of the other prisoners he said: “prisoners were lashed to the top of an iron, double-deck bed, which was transformed into a human roaster.”, and that “with the heat coming from a torch or a small heater, they burn your back in order to extract