What were the government’s goals to be achieved by settlement of nomads in Iran ?
During the First Settlement Period 1934 – 1941
The forced settlement process during this period was planned in the name of modernization, development, political centralization, and national unification. The government wanted to replace tribal leaders and political system with its own political apparatus by killing and exiling the traditional leaders, and by forcefully destroying the traditional political institutions by breaking the nomadic sociocultural and political structure.
During the Second Settlement Period 1941 – 1962
No official goals were adopted by Mohammed Reza Shah during this period for the nomads.
During the Third Settlement Period 1962 – 1979
During this period Mohammed Reza Shah formulated many ambitious plans for Iran. The land reform program affected the nomads adversely. According to these land reform laws, some agricultural lands belonging to feudal landlords were to be distributed to those who lived and worked on the. The fate of the nomads, as regarding the land question, was left unanswered in these laws. In essence, land reform was an effort to alter the existing feudal relations. The Iranian ruling class in conjunction with European and American multinationsls with the launching of the land reform program had planned to transform Iran from a feudal society to a dependent capitalist state (Roosevelt, 1979). However, there is a fundamental contradiction between feudalism and capitalism. The economic relations in a feudal society are fundamentally different from those in a capitalist society, as are social relations. In a feudal society the work force is engaged in agriculture and production is generally meager, principally at the subsistence level. Much of the production has no market commodity value. That is to say, most production is for the producer’s own consumption. Markets therefore are not developed, and the amount of over production traded in the market place is small. Most of the population has little or no purchasing power. Mass production is a rare phenomenon. In a technologically advanced society, masses are employed in industries where commodities are extensively produced and marketed; practically no one is engaged in subsistent economic activity.
The government established sweeping policies in many other areas. In an attempt to achieve stable commodity prices, the government kept the wholesale price of meat—a major nomadic production— and wheat that some nomads produced, and other grain crops, artificially low, while the costs of other goods and services were rising at highly inflationary rates.
A tribal education program, designed in the 1950’s and headquartered in the city of Shiraz, gained added support in the 1960’s and 1970’s from the government. It trained and delivered teachers to all tribal areas of Iran. The goal of tribal education was not to improve the economic status of the nomads but to Persianize them. Tribal education was an attempt to expand governmental authority and provide a work force for the industries in towns. In the other two periods when there was very small demand for laborers in towns, education for tribal youth was not provided, or it was provided to only a very small number.
To transform Iran into a dependent capitalist nation, a work force had to be attracted from the countryside to urban centers where assembly line industries were being built. Abrahamian (1980) wrote that “virtually every new industrial enterprise in Iran after 1965 was an assembly plant, in which consumer goods were fabricated elsewhere and put together in Iran.” These industries, primarily American, such as car assembly plants and other light industries have found their way into Iran, especially in the last twenty years, although some did exist in Iran before the 1960’s. This planned transformation in Iran required that rural to urban migration be encouraged.