Iran
| Author | George Kurian |
| Pages | 489-492 |
Page 489
Official country name: Islamic Republic of Iran
Capital: Tehran
Geographic description: Middle Eastern country bordered by Iraq to the west, Afghanistan to the east, the Caspian Sea and Turkmenistan to the north, and the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman to the south
Population: 68,017,680 (est. 2005)
The two principal law enforcement agencies of Iran are the Gendarmerie and the National Police. The Gendarmerie, the older of the two police agencies, was founded in 1911. It has been completely reorganized twice—after World War II and after the 1979 Islamic revolution. Originally set up under the Ministry of Finance to control rural banditry so that taxes could be collected in the rural countryside, the Gendarmerie was organized and commanded by Swedish officers in its formative years. When Reza Pahlavi was crowned as Reza Shah in 1926, he absorbed the Gendarmerie into the army. The force remained unchanged until 1943, when it was given autonomy under the Ministry of the Interior. It retained this autonomy until 1980 when the mullahs (Muslims trained in Islamic law and doctrine) brought it back under army control and placed it under an army commander. A major landmark in the history of the Gendarmerie was the U.S. Mission to the Imperial Gendarmerie (GENMISH), which was assigned to Tehran from 1953 to 1956. Consisting of approximately twenty U.S. "advisers," GENMISH was responsible for developing the Gendarmerie as a modern force with U.S.-built weapons, light aircraft, helicopters, armored patrol cars and jeeps, trucks and motorcycles, and mobile radio network.
The National Police was founded in the early decades of the twentieth century when first Italian and then Swedish advisers offered police training to Iranians and founded the first school for training police officers. It was not, however, until 1921, that Reza Khan, shortly after his assumption of power, brought the various departments under the central control of the Ministry of the Interior. In its formative years, the National Police was essentially a paramilitary force, and the military orientation was prominent until the 1970s. By the mid-1970s, however, most of the military officers in the upper ranks, whose presence had been a cause of dissension among the career police officers below them, had been reassigned to the armed forces, leaving the National Police an entirely civil force.
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The demilitarization of the National Police was accompanied by an upgrading in the quality of personnel, the modernization of virtually every aspect of the operation, and the doubling of the size of the force. During much of this period, these efforts were aided by the Public Safety Division under the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) training mission, which worked principally in the areas of training, communications, narcotics control, and traffic control. The mission was terminated during the 1960s. Perhaps the greatest progress was made in the area of recruitment and training.
In 1979 when the mullahs toppled the shah, both police agencies underwent their most dramatic transformation since their founding. However, both have retained their identity although in a vastly different setting. The dreaded SAVAK (acronym for the Organization for Intelligence and National Security), the shah's secret police organization, was replaced by SAVAMA (acronym for Information and Security Organization of the Nation), a theocratic gestapo. The Revolutionary Guard and komitehs, one of the primary organs of suppression, were introduced into the system to serve as Jacobin institutions for inspiring terror in the citizens, enforcing cruder forms of Islamic justice, and handling even routine law enforcement tasks with fervor.
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