National Front (Iran)

The National Front of Iran (Persian: جبهه‌ ملی ایران, romanized: Jebhe-ye Melli-ye Irân) is an opposition political organization in Iran. Founded in 1949 by Mohammad Mosaddegh, it is the country’s oldest—and arguably largest—pro-democracy group operating inside Iran, although it has never regained the prominence it enjoyed in the early 1950s.

Initially, the front was an umbrella organization for a broad coalition of forces with nationalist, liberal-democratic, socialist, bazaari, secular and Islamic tendencies, that mobilized to successfully campaign for the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry. In 1951, the Front formed a government which was deposed by the 1953 Iranian coup d'état and subsequently repressed. Members attempted to revive the Front in 1960, 1965, and 1977.

Before 1953 and throughout the 1960s, the Front was torn by strife between secular and religious elements. Over time its coalition split into various squabbling factions, with the Front gradually emerging as the leading organization of secular liberals with nationalist members adhering to liberal democracy and social democracy.

During the Iranian Revolution, the Front supported the overthrow of the monarchy and its replacement with an Islamic Republic. In the early years of the post-revolutionary government, it served as the primary symbol of the nationalist movement. It was banned in July 1981. Although it is under constant surveillance and officially illegal, it remains active inside Iran.

The National Front had its roots in a protest against ballot-rigging, where Mohammad Mosaddegh led a peaceful procession from his house to the Marble Palace on 15 October 1949, threatened to take sanctuary in a major mosque or shrine, and was eventually allowed into the palace with 19 other people, where they stayed for four days. The Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, eventually gave in and promised fair and honest elections. After the sit-in, the leaders of the protest formed the National Front and elected Mossadegh to be its chairman. The Front was conceived to be a broad alliance of like-minded associations (rather than individuals, as in a normal political party) with the aim of strengthening democracy, press freedom, and constitutional government. The most important groups in the Front were the Iran Party, the Toilers Party, the National Party, and the Tehran Association of Bazaar Trade and Craft Guilds.

Soon after its founding, the National Front opposed the existing Western domination and control of Iran's natural resources, and related revenues, which began with colonialist concessions during the Qajar era. Since the early 1910s, Iran's oil assets were dominated by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), whose predecessor company in bought the concession from William Knox D'Arcy. D'Arcy had negotiated the concession in 1901 with Mozaffar ad-Din Shah Qajar, the Shah of Iran, who granted a 60-year petroleum search concession in a transaction in which the only money to change hands was a single personal payment to the Shah by D'Arcy. In truth, the British government owned 51 percent of shares in the AIOC and by 1950, revenue generated by the Abadan Refinery, a staple of the Iranian oil concession, was the British government's single largest overseas investment. Even after acceding to a renegotiated arrangement with the Shah's government in 1933, the AIOC (which later became BP) persistently violated the terms of the concession agreement; even as Iran's movement for nationalization grew in the late 1940s the AIOC remained obstinate. Although AIOC was highly profitable, "its Iranian workers were poorly paid and lived in squalid conditions."

The goal of the National Front was to nationalize Iran's oil resources and to counteract British dominance of Iran's internal affairs by initiating direct relations with the United States. The Front became the governing coalition when it took office in April 1951, with Mosaddegh elected Prime Minister. Mosaddegh's minister of foreign affairs Hossein Fatemi enforced the "Oil Nationalization Act", passed by the Majlis in March and ratified by the Senate. The Act, reluctantly signed by the Shah, called for nationalization of the assets held by AIOC, from which the government of Iran had hitherto only received minimal compensation. This led to British counter-moves and the loss of nearly all oil incomes for both sides during the Abadan Crisis.^{[citation needed]}

Though nominally supportive of the United Kingdom's position, the United States refused to intervene directly. After Anglo-French efforts to topple Mossadegh's government and restore the status quo only resulted in increased instability and compounded financial loses, the British government again sought American intervention; U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower reluctantly authorized the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to overthrow the Mossadegh government, in an event known as the 1953 Iranian coup d'état. Prior to the coup, the National Front was made up of four main parties; the Iran Party, which was founded in 1946 as a platform for Iranian liberals, including figures such as Karim Sanjâbi, Gholam Hossein Sadighi, Ahmad Zirakzadeh and Allah-Yar Saleh; the Toilers Party of the Iranian Nation (a left-wing party that advocated a non-communist socialist Iran, led by Mozzafar Baghai and Khalil Maleki); and the Society of Muslim Warriors (an Islamic party led by Âyatollâh Âbol-Ghâsem Kâšâni).