Shapour Bakhtiar

Shapour Bakhtiar (Persian: شاپور بختیار, listen^ⓘ; 26 June 1914 – 6 August 1991) was an Iranian politician who served as the last Prime Minister of Iran under the rule of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In the words of the historian Abbas Milani: "more than once in the tone of a jeremiad he reminded the nation of the dangers of clerical despotism, and of how the fascism of the mullahs would be darker than any military junta." In 1991, he and his secretary were murdered in his home in Suresnes, France, by agents of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Bakhtiar was born on 26 June 1914 in southwestern Iran into a family of Iranian tribal nobility, the family of the paramount chieftains of the then powerful Bakhtiari tribe. His father, Mohammad Reza Khan (Sardar-e-Fateh), and his mother, Naz-Baygom, were both Lurs and Bakhtiaris. Bakhtiar's maternal grandfather, Najaf-Gholi Khan Samsam ol-Saltaneh, had been appointed prime minister twice, in 1912 and 1918.

Bakhtiar's mother died when he was seven. His father was executed by Reza Shah in 1934 while Shapour was studying in Paris.

He attended elementary school in Shahr-e Kord and then secondary school, first in Isfahan and later in Beirut, where he received his high school diploma from a French school. He attended Beirut University for two years. He and his cousin, Teymour Bakhtiar, then went to Paris for additional university education at the Faculty of Law. There, he attended the College of Political Science.

Being a firm opponent of totalitarian rule, he was active in the Spanish Civil War for the Second Spanish Republic against General Francisco Franco's fascist Nationalists. In 1940, he volunteered for the French army – rather than the French Foreign Legion – and fought in the 30th Artillerie Regiment of Orléans. Bakhtiar did 18 months' military service. While living in Saint-Nicolas-du-Pélem, he fought with the French Resistance against the German occupation. In 1945, he received his PhD in political science as well as degrees in law from the Faculty of Law of Paris and philosophy from the Sorbonne.

Bakhtiar returned to Iran in 1946 and joined the social democratic Iran Party in 1949 and led its youth organization. In 1951 he was appointed director of the labor department in the Province of Isfahan by the ministry of labor. He later held the same position in Khuzestan, center of the oil industry. In 1951 Mohammad Mosaddeq had come to power in Iran. Under his premiership Bakhtiar was appointed deputy minister of labor in 1953. After the Shah was reinstated by a British-American sponsored coup d'état, Bakhtiar remained a critic of his rule.

In the mid-1950s he was involved in underground activity against the Shah's regime, calling for the 1954 Majlis elections to be free and fair and attempting to revive the nationalist movement. In 1960, the Second National Front was formed. Bakhtiar played a crucial role in the new organization's activities as the head of the student activist body of the Front. He and his colleagues differed from most other government opponents in that they were very moderate, restricting their activity to peaceful protest and calling only for the restoration of democratic rights within the framework of a constitutional monarchy. The Shah refused to co-operate and outlawed the Front, imprisoning the most prominent liberals. From 1964 to 1977, the imperial regime refused to permit any form of opposition activity, even from moderate liberals like Bakhtiar. In the following years Bakhtiar was imprisoned repeatedly, for a total of six years, for his opposition to the Shah. He was also one of the most prominent members of the central council of the illegal Fourth National Front in late 1977, when the group was reconstituted as the Union of National Front Forces with Bakhtiar as head of the Iran Party (the largest group in the Front).

At the end of 1978, as the Shah's power was crumbling, Bakhtiar was chosen to help in the creation of a civilian government to replace the existing military one. He was appointed to the position of Prime Minister by the Shah, as a concession to his opponents, especially the followers of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Although that caused him to be expelled from the National Front, he accepted the appointment, as he feared a revolution in which communists and mullahs would take over the country, which he thought would ruin Iran.^{[citation needed]}