The Persian Government at the week-end reimposed martial law as it awaited the results of the recently completed general elections.

The elections were not for the return of a new Government.

They were for the return of a Majlis, or Lower House, which will endorse the royalist and national recovery policy of General Zahedi and his colleagues of the new military regime.

There were no Mossadeq or Tudeh Communist candidates.

Still dazed, still dosed with Communist propaganda from the underground and still reluctant to recognise the cost of the follies of the egoist Dr. Mossadeq, now in gaol, the Persian people seem to be badly in need of the strong Government which General Zahedi is determined to give them. [Premier Fazlollah Zahedi]

The picture which Dr. Mossadeq leaves behind him is one of a formerly prosperous country bankrupt in two years, and with social services, railways, rolling stock, road building and State and commercial enterprises of all kinds running to ruin or already derelict.

He leaves 50,000 unemployed in Abadan and the oilfields, and another 100,000 in Teheran and other cities. It is an immense burden on the nation that many of these are Government employees and are still being paid.

And even now, if British and Persian negotiators are able to settle their claims over the Abadan refinery without further loss of Persian prestige, oil will have to be piped over 100 miles to the crude-oil port of Bandar Mashur, in the Persian Gulf, because the Shatt-el-Arab river jetties at Abadan have become hopelessly silted.

The prospects for thousands of Persians dependent on what was formerly the world’s greatest refinery, producing 30 million tons of petrol a year, but which today is half obsolete, half ruin, can only be migration.

That is just one more item in the cost of Dr. Mossadeq’s histrionics to his countrymen.