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Reform takes on a new face in
Iran
By Safa Haeri
PARIS -
Iran's reformists, already facing defeat that some
political analysts predict as "crushing" in the
legislative elections due in February, face a further
daunting challenge from militia belonging to the ruling
ayatollahs' guardians of the Islamic revolution.
At least 40 officers of the elite Revolutionary
Guards are believed to have shed their olive-green
uniforms to take seats in the next majlis, which will be
the eighth since the country's Islamic revolution in
1979. "Though the military is barred by the constitution
from political activities, their participation in
elections has no constitutional limitation on condition
that they have got out of the ranks in due time," Dr
Qasem Sho'leh Sa'di, a prominent lawyer and scholar,
told Asia Times Online.
The conservatives plan
to retake control of parliament by bringing in the
soldiers at a time that reforms promised more than six
years ago by Hojjatoleslam Mohammad Khatami during his
electoral campaign have not only not materialized, but
the regime faces a "legitimacy crisis".
"Iran is
on the brink of a kind of social collapse," warned
Mohammad Ali Namazi, a member of the reformist fraction
that currently controls the majlis, calling on officials
to pay more attention to domestic problems, particularly
social factors, than political and international issues.
"Generalized corruption, the increase in cases
of illegitimate relations of women for material reasons,
the escape from home of young girls, the staggering
number of financial and drug addict prisoners on the one
hand and prostitutes on the other, the hopelessness of
the youngsters and the gap between the rich and the poor
etc have discredited the system," he told a recent open
session of parliament.
Tensions between the
Revolutionary Guards - or Pasdaran in Persian - with
reformists heightened after Fatemeh Haqiqatjoo, an
outspoken member of the majlis' Article 90 Committee,
which deals with legal, judicial and human rights
issues, denounced the guard's "illegal activities",
including allegedly the incarceration of dissidents in
prisons that are outside the control of both the
government and the majlis.
"Arrest, imprisonment
and torture of students, nationalist-religious
activists, journalists and dissidents in the past years
were carried out by the Revolutionary Guards," she told
the open House on November 10, noting that lawmakers had
been able to visit most of the prisons bar "frightening,
terrible, dreaded ones that are controlled by the
Guards".
"If threatening the Islamic Iran
Participation Front [the country's largest political
organization led by Mohammad Reza Khatami, the
president's younger brother] by a high-ranking commander
of the Revolutionary Guards, the arrest of students and
journalists, torturing and forcing them to fabricate
confessions shown latter on television are not brazen
cases of involvement in political affairs, what are
they?", asked the outspoken deputy from Tehran.
Her remarks met with a stern warning from
General Yahya Rahim-Safavi, the commander of the
Revolutionary Guards, who, in a letter to Hojjatoleslam
Mehdi Karroobi, the speaker of the majlis, urged him to
"harness some of his cattle".
"I call on you to
stop some of the deputies going too far in their
declarations by informing them that confronting the
enemy, wherever and whoever he might be, is the prime
duty of the Guardians of the Islamic revolution," he
said.
At the same time, a student commander of
the Basiji - Iran's volunteer Islamist militia - warned
reform-seeking students that their views and activities
would no longer be tolerated by the forces of the
revolution.
Sho'leh Sa'di says that the regime
is "already overwhelmed by the military" and observes
that every time dissidents or the population show any
signs of major protest, the rulers call on the military
to frighten them. "The militarization of the regime's
organs, particularly the majlis, would only precipitate
the confrontation between the regime with the
population," he warned, explaining: "The more soldiers
take part in the elections, the less people will turn
out at ballot boxes. As the elimination of the classic
reformists would place the conservatives directly in
front of the people, mostly the young generation and its
growing demands for radical changes, the outcome is
crystal clear: more civil disobedience leading to more
confrontation, leading to opening the doors to foreign
intervention," hinting at possible United States
involvement as Washington has Tehran firmly in its
sights.
A university professor, Sho'leh Sa'di,
spent 40 days in jail because of an open letter to
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the leader of the Islamic
Republic, not only because he addressed him as
hojjatoleslam, a lower rank in the Shi'ite hierarchy,
but also because he criticized Khamenei's domestic and
foreign policies.
Ali Keshtgar, editor of the
Paris-based Mihan (Homeland) monthly review, agrees. "By
bringing in the soldiers of their own to the majlis, the
conservatives, already a tiny minority, would cut their
remaining roots in Iranian society, paving the way for
more opposition from the people against the present
oppressive system," he told the Persian service of Radio
France International.
According to a recent
opinion survey carried out by students at Tehran Medical
University, more than 83 percent of the people want
radical changes in the constitution, and 77 percent of
the interviewees believe that the reform process has
reached a dead end. As a result, 38 percent demand that
Khatami step down, while 30 percent would prefer that
all reformist members of the majlis resign.
Asked to designate the main causes of the
failure of the reformists to implement their promised
reforms, the great majority of the people questioned in
the survey point to the systematic opposition of the
all-important organs controlled by Khamenei, namely the
Council of Guardians and the judiciary.
A
crucial, if not the vital issue, in the elections will
be the normalization of relations with the "Great
Satan", the name Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the
leader of the Islamic revolution, bestowed to the United
States.
Washington cut all relations with the
newly-proclaimed Islamic Republic of Iran soon after the
events of 1979 that drove the US-backed monarchy out of
power, and imposed economic sanctions after
revolutionary students stormed the huge American embassy
in Tehran on November 4, 1979, taking 55 staff and
diplomats hostage for 444 days.
Aware that the
survival of their regime is directly linked to the state
of relations with the US, the world's undisputed master
after the fall of the Soviet empire, the conservatives
have appointed Mohammed Javad Ardeshir Larijani, one of
their best and most trusted brains, to lead the campaign
for the conquest of the majlis as the first step towards
restoration of ties with America.
"Larijani, an
ardent defender of Islamic values, educated in
sun-bathed California, and his team of strategists not
only do not consider the 'Great Satan' as an enemy of
the Islamic Republic, but as a political and trading
partner in the future," wrote Der Spiegel, one of
Germany's most influential news weeklies in a recent
article.
The son of a senior ayatollah, Larijani
was named some months ago as the international
communications director for the judiciary. His younger
brother, Ali, a former officer of the Revolutionary
Guards, is the director general of the state-run,
leader-controlled Voice and Visage (Radio Television) of
the Islamic Republic.
The Havana cigar-smoking,
smartly dressed Larijani is the director of a think tank
that advises the leader on important, complicated and
complex international issues. He is credited for having
urged Khamenei to authorize the signing of the
controversial additional protocol to the
Non-Proliferation Treaty and thereby escape possible
international sanctions that could have been decided by
the United Nations Security Council in the event that
Tehran did not bow to the demands of the Vienna-based
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The
US, Israel and some European countries are concerned
that Iran's ongoing project for the construction of an
atomic-powered electricity plant in the Persian Gulf
port of Bushehr is a front for building a nuclear
arsenal aimed primarily at destroying Israel. But Iran
and Russia, which is providing the atomic reactor,
insist that the project is for civilian use only, and
IAEA inspectors have confirmed that they have found no
evidence confirming American claims.
Under the
agreement signed by Hojjatoleslam Hasan Rohani, the
influential secretary of the Supreme Council for
National Security, with the foreign affairs ministers of
Britain, France and Germany, on October 21, Iran
accepted to open up all its nuclear-related projects and
programs to international inspectors and suspend its
uranium-enriching activities.
Although many
people see no way out for Iran's hardliners, they still
have some trump cards to play. "Contrary to the
reformists, who claim that opening up the political
atmosphere of the nation is key to solving other
shortcomings, mostly the anger of the young generation
at the lack of political freedom, what the majority of
people are interested in is not politics, but more
employment, especially for the hundreds of thousands of
youngsters who under present conditions see no other
solution but to seek jobs outside the country," notes
one Iranian economist in Tehran.
Directly
controlling all the regime's levers of power, including
the armed forces, the security and intelligence
services, the economy and the judiciary, the
conservatives call all the shots. Thus, they could,
should they seriously want to remain in power, yet
improve relations with the US, take a number of steps.
These could include: order the Revolutionary Guards back
to their garrison; rein in the activities of pressure
groups; enforce more privatization of the economy; bring
the huge wealth of the bonyads - foundations -
under government control, such as making them pay taxes;
improve the country's human rights record, and stop
supporting radical Islamist and Arab groups opposed to
peace with Israel.
"If they do that, and the
odds are that they will, a new map will emerge for the
region comprising Iran, Turkey and ... believe it or
not, Israel, the three linked to Washington at the
expense of Europe in one hand and some Arab states, like
Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt, on the other," an
Iranian scholar following the situation in his home
country told Asia Times Online on condition that his
name not be mentioned.
(Copyright 2003 Asia
Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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