مردم و بیگانگان در دوره محمدرضاشاه

Since the Literacy Corps was exclusively concerned with the promotion of literacy in rural areas, the credit side of the balance sheet of the fifteen years of its development looks extremely poor. On the debit side must be put the considerable, and increasing, sums which were ostensibly spent on this almost wholly propagandist venture, which was valuable chiefly to domestic and, especially, foreign apologists of the régime. Apart from that, both this and the Health Corps venture caused a tremendous amount of social hardship and dislocation in villages and rural townships owing to the total contempt with which many of the young, 'educated', 'modern' conscripts treated the rural people; the exploitation of different kinds to which they subjected their 'pupils' and 'patients'; their institution of prostitution among simple peasant folk; the rapes they committed with complete impunity, and so on. Indeed, some of the eye-witness accounts bring one close to tears: in 1965 a Health Corps officer, a doctor of medicine, together with a sergeant, his assistant, respectively purchased a nine-year old and a six-year old peasant girl for sexual comfort. In this case, their immediate superior was a young man of conscience, and upon discovering what had happened a few months after the event he had them arrested and committed for trial. They got away wi with it, none the less! There was, however, one important, and wholly unintended, outcome of these White Revolutionary ventures: they put the educated young men of conscience in touch with the realities of life and social relations in their country, it taught them a great deal, even if they did not manage to teach much to others.

Homa katouzian