Obituary - Dr. Amir Ali Sheibany It is with a sad heart and tears in our eyes that we announce, on Friday morning of November 28th at 10:47 am London time, our father Amir Ali Sheibany passed away after an eventful 92 years of life with both his sons by his side. Born 2 weeks before Nowruz of 1922 in Birjand, Khorasan to Hamideh Ghaffari and Amir Masoum Khan Sheibany, he was the 5th of 8 siblings, Amir Mohamad, Tahereh, Effat, Amir Hossein, Amir Ali, Abdol Hamid, Behjat, Farokh and half brother to Dr. Amir Birjandi. His father was the last trustee of the Mir Hassan Khan Trust, set up in the mid-eighteenth century with the endorsement of Grand Ayatollahs of the time in Karbala, Mashad and elsewhere. Our father became identified with his last accomplishment, as the one who built from the ground up the Zobahan AryaMehr complex and associated iron ore and coal mines and mills. As the managing director of National Iranian Steel Corporation he lead a workforce of 75,000 in building an integrated steel industry designed for a capacity of 10m tons per year that through the multiplier effect, and built in pressure of such an investment, could create up to 2 million jobs across the country. This gained him the highest ranking Homayoun decoration and the honor of becoming civilian adjutant to HIM Shahanshah AryaMehr. However, less well known was his long and equally significant prior history of achievements that touched the lives of Iranians. Upon graduating from Harvard University in the 1950’s, Amir Ali Khan was offered a job at Imperial College of London to continue his research on nuclear waste dispersal, this time for British Nuclear Fuels. But he soon returned to the land of his birth and established, and for the first 3 years chaired Iran’s Atomic Energy Commission secretariat during the premiership of Jafar Sharif-Emami. And, at the very same time, he taught at the Faculty of Engineering of Tehran University. Over the following years he acted as the Undersecretary of State for the Ministry of Industry and Mines, which later became the Ministry of Economy, during which time he was instrumental in the rapid expansion of Iran’s Industrial base, and was signatory to the building of 12,000 industrial units. Over time, our father was instrumental for building all types of factories sprouting in empty deserts, including a cement factory with one of the largest capacities in the world and a steel mill in Isfahan built with a parliament-approved budget of $1 bn (inflation adjusted $7.4 bn). The actual expenditure for the said steel mill ended up being only $0.5 bn, for the first 2 million tons of steel output. This was an exceptional achievement since the cost was about one tenth of the over $5bn budget of the nearby Mobarake steel mill with 3 million tons of steel output. Our father was responsible for building three cities for the steel industry workers, one of which, Aryashahr, was designed for up to 350 thousand residents. Built 25 km west of Isfahan, in 1975 its master plan won in 1975 the award for the Best Designed Master Plan for a City in a competition in Brazil. With the help of the Iranian city planners our father presented to HIM the Shahanshah the master plan behind the Khorshid AryaMehr industrial zone of Isfahan (which houses a military industrial complex). At this time Dr. Amir Ali Sheibany also lectured on the effects of industrialization on war at the National Defense University and was proud to befriend many distinguished public servants there. One by-product of this work was that well over 1000 young engineers completed their military service whilst at ZobAhan alongside a program for 8000 soldiers who were to receive training there. Our father was also quite a personality at home. A true force of nature. He maintained a high standard of etiquette, spoke fluently in 4 languages (Persian, French, English, Russian) and understood Arabic and German also. Having asked a non-Iranian friend of 30 years for an opinion, the response was “Your fathers personality was erudite, intellectual, a great raconteur, modest, learned, magnanimous. He was exceptionally cultured and an expert on horsemanship, classical music, ancient history, especially the Middle Easts. Most importantly very loyal and faithful to the people he esteemed and loved and to the beliefs which he stood by, which cannot be said about many people in the political and diplomatic arena neither in those days nor today.” Additionally we would add he played the accordion and piano like a romantic. As a father he was a bundle of never ending surprises, and he loved our mother very much. When Amir Ali Khan Sheibany started his government career in the late 1950’s he entered a third world environment of cynicism and despair in the middle of the Cold War. Only a few years after the fall of Premier Mossadegh, some of his colleagues in the ministries believed all levers of power where being pulled by the USA and all industrial planning initiatives must be self-censored based on what was perceived or rumored to be permissible by the US government. Yet other, more senior colleagues would insist he should join the Freemasonry societies if he wanted upward career progression. But most visible of all in the world he had entered, was a sense of pervasive financial corruption; a world where high government positions, politics and business were perceived to be the road to personal riches at the expense of the then hopeless masses who were only being given promises, and more promises. Therein lies, we believe, the legacy of our father. Along with a growing number of young technocrats, symbolized by the youthful energy of the Shahanshah of Iran, HIM Mohamad Reza Shah Pahlavi, our father pursued a hopeful vision, where the highest ethical standards would emanate from within his government ministry, where the interests of the working class of the country would trump perceived foreign and personal interests, where politics could not interfere within the new corporations of Iran. As the many, many persons whose paths he crossed would attest, including the corruption investigators of the regime that followed in 1979, Amir Ali Khan from Birjand maintained the highest standard vis-a-vis the real and perceived conflicts of interest inherent in a role with such influence. Like many people of that generation, he left the country in better shape than he found it and abstained from the perks of privilege in his private life. He suffered a stroke 2 years prior to 1979, due to the pressures of work. Despite this, he forcefully carried on and signed the 4.5m tons agreement with the Soviets, just 4 months prior to the end of his government contract of March 1979 and retirement. Like many, he was surprised by the turn the country took and the severe penalties that were imposed on him by the new so-called Islamic regime. Having failed to kill him in 1979, we were told his horse, once the Olympic show jumping champion of Germany, was killed instead by the new Islamic regime. Not only were all his personal properties and retirement pension seized by the revolutionaries, his inheritance from his parents from both before and after the revolution were expropriated by the revolutionary courts. Prime Minister Hoveyda, who along with the Shahanshah, was a figure that played central to many of the stories we heard about the past, once introduced our father to the US Ambassador to Tehran, as his “. . . roughest, toughest, shrewdest fighter. But I like him”. The construction of the steel works was the end of a very long road of objections and obstacles by other industrialized countries, specifically Britain and the United States. Iran had to ultimately rely on Russian help for its completion. One Stanford-based researcher identified that declassified CIA reports had stated in 1966: “The shah often acted against US advice. … Iran’s decision to purchase a steel mill from Soviet Union… is one sign of this newfound independence. Iran’s active role in OPEC, and the Shah’s willingness to stand up to the west is another.” To our father’s surprise, at a small reception party in his honor at Iran’s Moscow embassy, he was greeted in person by the Soviet troika including Brezhnev and Kosygin, implying an interest in a sincere and long relationship with the Shah and Iran by the Russians. An indication of our father’s impact and his involvement in more than just steel production. The Persian expression “rouheshan shad’ (“happy be his spirit”) came to mind as we saw our father on his death bed today. Like the last picture of premier Amir Abbas Hoveyda lying face up in the mortuary, whose body was taken to a burial spot by one of our relatives, the scene was at the same time both grievous and peaceful, with none of the worries of this world showing on his face. We thank God for giving us this extra 35 years with our father, a pleasure and right that was stolen from the children of so many dear friends of ours. It was our fathers last wish that he be buried back in Iran where he had his happiest memories. To honor his wishes, we shall send his body to Tehran and entrust our relatives there with his burial. Amir Khosrow & Amir Parviz
Posted on: Mon, 01 Dec 2014 00:22:34 +0000
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