| |
Food for thought in troubled
Iran
If you're
trying to run a dictatorship, here's a tip: Always,
always, always sweat the small stuff. Because sometimes
the devil really is in the details - details like
cafeteria food. If you ever let the quality of the
cafeteria food slip ... well, look at what's going on in
Tehran right now.
Last Saturday, a group of
students living in a dormitory at Tehran University
decided that they hated the cafeteria food so much it
was time to do something about it. (It was the evening
break of the Ramadan fast, and they were hungry.) So
they marched across campus shouting for better food.
By Wednesday night, marches were drawing
thousands, protests had spread across the country,
newspapers around the world were going with the story,
two parliamentary representatives had submitted their
resignations, and the supreme leader of the country,
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was saying things like, "I hope
that the time would never come when the leadership feels
it should get the force of the people to enter the scene
to resolve a problem."
By "force of the people",
he meant the lebas shakhsiha, the plainclothes
contingent of the Revolutionary Guards, explained a
23-year-old protester named Shahrzad who spoke to Asia
Times Online, who said that she nevertheless remained
rather less than frightened. "Of course, [Khamenei] has
this popular force ready to pour in the streets to make
trouble. But those plainclothes, they're always
interfering anyway. We don't care about them. Everybody
knows them. Everybody hates them."
In any case,
by this time nobody was shouting about the kebabs any
more. They were shouting for the release of Hashem
Aghajari, a prominent history professor and politician
allied with the reformist Mujahedin of the Islamic
Revolution Organization (MIRO), who had been sentenced
to death by hanging the week before. His crime:
insulting the Prophet Mohammed during a speech he made
last spring in which he was also critical of the
theocratic premise of Iran's ruling clerical regime.
But there is more here than meets the eye.
First, few seriously predict that Aghajari's sentence
will actually be carried out. Aghajari's attorney, Saleh
Nikbakht, said that he would appeal. And speaker of
parliament Mehdi Karrubi spoke out against the sentence
during the legislature's open session, saying, "I, as a
cleric and the spokesman of religious dignitaries whom I
have contacted, announce my hatred and disgust at this
shameful verdict ... I say to his family that [the
execution] will not take place and even that with the
help of God he will soon return to his family."
But the sentence on the disabled veteran of the
Iran-Iraq war comes in the context of an ongoing battle over
two bills currently wending their way through
parliament. After five years in power, President Mohammad
Khatami finally introduced two pieces of legislation last
month into the majils - parliament - designed to reduce
the power of the theocrats. One would give him the power
to suspend unconstitutional court rulings; the other
would put distance between the clerics and the election
process. Both measures are expected to pass easily.
But then the hard work begins. Before becoming
law, the bills must be approved by the Guardian Council,
which is - surprise! - composed largely of the very ones
at whose power the bills take explicit aim. In the case
of deadlock, the bills would then go to the Expediency
Council, chaired by Ayatollah Ali-Akbar
Hashemi-Rafsanjani, for judication.
It is in
these two bodies where the real battle for control is
being waged, and it is in these two bodies where
Aghajari's death sentence was meant to be noted.
Aghajari isn't the first significant MIRO member to have
run into trouble with the courts; Mustafa Tajzadeh and
Behzad Nabavi have also been charged with crimes against
the state. And according to an October 21 report in
Iran's state news agency, Khatami spent two hours
discussing the two bills with Hashemi-Rafsanjani, but
the agency didn't know the outcome of the meeting.
And Expediency Council member Hojatoleslam Ali
Akbar Nateq-Nuri, a former speaker of parliament, told a
meeting of clerics in Sari on October 31 that the two
bills were unnecessary, especially "under circumstances
in which America is mischievous, and believes Iran to be
an axis of evil". He went on to predict that "proposing
these bills will cause a crisis in the country".
It may be a bit early to call the current
protests in Tehran a "crisis". Shahrzad says that she
doubts the fire will spread anywhere near to the point
it did in 1999, when similar protests erupting at the
same university campus - in the same dormitory, even -
resulted in police beatings and arrests and long prison
sentences. "I was present at the 1999 riots, and I could
see the fury and the anger in people's eyes," she says.
"Then they were shouting for freedom of expression. This
time, to me, it doesn't seem like that."
To
others, it does. "Execution of Aghajari is execution of
thought in Iran!" was one slogan the students were
shouting as they held up pictures of the imprisoned
professor. "Political prisoners should be released!"
"Freedom of thought forever!" "Our problem is the
judiciary!" "His crime was revealing the truth!"
And it is undeniable that the protests threw
such a scare into Khamenei that he's been reduced to
threatening to set his secret police on young and
unarmed students - something that hasn't happened in
Iran, at least to any significant extent, since 1999.
See what happens when you don't sweat the small
stuff?
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
contributed to this article.
(©2002 Asia
Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact content@atimes.com
for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
