Ali Amini

1905 - 1991

Iranian statesman of the Pahlavi period.

Ali Amini was born in 1905 to Qajar aristocracy. His father was Amin al-Dowleh, prime minister in the Qajar period, and his mother was Fakhr alDowleh, daughter of Qajar monarch Mozaffar alDin Shah.

After being educated in France, Ali Amini returned to Iran and entered government service. By 1947, he was a member of the Iranian parliament and was known as a pro-American liberal. The shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, distrusted Amini primarily because of the latter's support for a limited constitutional monarchy. In 1950, after the nationalization of Iranian oil, Mohammad Mossadegh, the premier, appointed Amini minister of finance, but he was dismissed in 1952. He was reinstalled as minister of finance in the cabinet of General Fazlollah Zahedi, following the CIA-engineered coup against the government of Mossadegh.

Amini was the main Iranian statesman to negotiate the Consortium Oil Agreement of 1954, whose signatories were made up of a number of foreign oil companies (several American companies with 40 percent of the shares, several British ones with another 40 percent, and a host of French and Dutch companies with the remaining 20 percent). According to the agreement, the companies would produce and market Iranian oil for twenty-five years, and the Iranian government would receive 50 percent of the proceeds. The agreement in effect annulled the nationalization of Iranian oil achieved under Mossadegh.

In 1961, faced with popular unrest over the state of the economy and lack of political freedom, the shah reluctantly appointed Amini prime minister. In 1962, Amini was forced to resign because of the shah's refusal to curtail military expenditures in the national budget. As manifested in the tenets of the White Revolution of 1963 (renamed the Revolution of the Shah and the People after 1967), the shah appropriated Amini's pro-American, liberal, and land-reform policies. While not silent during the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Amini did not assume a prominent position in it. He left Iran shortly thereafter and died in Paris in 1991.

Bibliography

Katouzian, Homa. The Political Economy of Modern Iran: Despotism and Pseudo-Modernism, 1926 - 1979. New York: New York University Press, 1981.

Zonis, Marvin. The Political Elite of Iran. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971.

— NEGUIN YAVARI