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THE ROVING
EYE
Theocracy meets democracy in
Iran
By Pepe Escobar
The Iranian reformist newspaper
Mardomsalari nailed it: "These June 17
[presidential] elections are the most important
since the beginning of the Islamic republic in
1979. Iranians have the choice of handing victory
to former president Ali Akbar Heshemi Rafsanjani,
vote for a reformist candidate to pursue the
reforms, or allow conservative radicals to take
power in all branches of government."
The
Iranian election campaign started this week amid
major turmoil after the unelected, conservative
Guardians Council rejected all but six out of more
than 1,000 presidential hopefuls.
The
Guardians Council, composed of six ayatollahs and
six lawyers, was conceived by Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini - leader of the Islamic revolution - to
supposedly represent the best interests of Iranian
public opinion and the constitution. This past
weekend the council vetoed all but one reformist
candidate, as well as 89 women candidates. The
official reason: "Non-respect of Islamic values."
The six candidates approved included the favorite,
Rafsanjani, a centrist; mild reformer Mehdi
Karrubi, a former parliamentary spokesman; and
four conservatives (a former chief of police, a
former commander of the Guardians of the
Revolution, the mayor of Tehran and a former head
of the national radio and TV network).
The
reformist Islamic Iran Participation Front, whose
main candidate was vetoed, immediately threatened
to boycott the election. The Guardians Council did
the same thing in early 2004, disqualifying more
than 2,000 candidates from legislative elections.
A widespread election boycott led to conservative
control of the majlis (parliament). Voting
participation in the February 2004 elections was
only 50.57% - the lowest in the country's history.
This week, though, came a bomb - or the
system trying to save itself. Supreme Leader
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei sent a decree to Guardians
Council leader Ayatollah Ahmad Janati asking him
to review the decision to disqualify popular
reformist Mostafa Moin, a former higher education
minister, and Vice President Mohsen Mehralizadeh.
Moin is in the center of the furor. He is the
leading candidate of the reformists, running for
the Islamic Iran Participation Front, the largest
pro-reform political party, led by Mohammad Reza
Khatami, the younger brother of outgoing President
Mohammad Khatami, who is barred from serving a
third term. The Supreme Leader and the
conservative ayatollahs around him sensed they
might be defeated by a powerful weapon:
absenteeism. Americans may consider a president
chosen by roughly half the electorate as a
legitimate one. Not the Iranians.
Polarization
The importance of
these elections cannot be overstated. They mix
with the outcome of the nuclear negotiations
between Iran and the so-called EU-3, the foreign
ministers of European Union members France,
Britain and Germany; Washington's impatience to
drag Iran's regime to the United Nations Security
Council so it can be slapped with sanctions; and
insistent rumors of an Israeli air strike against
Iran's nuclear facilities. Rafsanjani is in favor
of an "accommodation" with the US, but he is no
favorite with Washington's hawks.
Among
the candidates, accepted or rejected, Moin is the
only one in favor of continued suspension of
uranium enrichment by Iran, so a
political/economic agreement can be reached with
the EU-3. Iran's top negotiator, Hassan Rowhani,
and the EU-3 ministers are back at the negotiating
table for emergency talks this Tuesday in Brussels
and this Wednesday in Geneva. If the talks fail,
Tehran has warned it will restart uranium
reprocessing - which it is entitled to anyway in
terms of its nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
rights.
Although Rafsanjani departs with
an early lead, polls in Tehran suggest none of the
candidates will get more than 50% of the vote, and
thus preclude a run-off between the top two.
Departing president Khatami, the man who coined
the "dialogue among civilizations", tried
everything in his two consecutive four-year terms
to reform the system. But he was ultimately
defeated: his two crucial bills to increase
presidential powers were repelled by the
conservatives.
Safa Haeri of the
Paris-based Iranian Press Service (and contributor
to Asia Times Online) confirms that "except for
personal interference by Khamenei in favor of a
certain candidate, namely Ali Larijani, now the
leader's personal representative at the Supreme
Council for National Security, Rafsanjani, the
chairman of the influential and powerful
Expediency Council, is likely to reoccupy the seat
he held from 1989 to 1997, if not in the first
round, but certainly in the second tour of
balloting". As chairman of the Expediency Council,
Rafsanjani is already the de facto No 2 in Iran.
The council was established by Khomeini in 1988 to
mediate between parliament and the Guardians
Council. Above it there's only Supreme Leader
Khamenei.
As far as the elections are
concerned, polarization is the name of the game.
The online opposition paper IranEmrooz, edited by
Iranian exiles in Germany, denounces "Islamists
trying to legitimate their presence by ... ritual
elections that are everything but democratic".
Another newspaper close to the reformists says
that "in a democratic system, it makes no sense
that the Guardians Council may disqualify this or
that candidate". On the other side of the fence,
government spokesman Abdullah Ramezanzadeh
recently said that "thanks to the Imam [Khomeini],
Iran could progress economically and become
independent from foreign powers". Jomhouri Islami,
a newspaper close to the clerics, insists that to
vote "is a religious obligation". Independent
newspaper Shargh gets closer to the mark than
anyone: "The government must not prepare itself
for a sweeping conservative victory, but most of
all for massive abstention." It's fair to argue
that the ayatollahs gave post-Shah Iran two major
assets - education for all and elections. All
Iranians have been to school, so they are able to
judge things for themselves, much more than under
the Shah. As for elections, the ayatollahs had to
notice that they were not able to have a democracy
by remote control. Khatami's first victory in 1997
led to a double-headed structure of power:
theocracy meets democracy.
Khatami's
reforms may have ultimately failed - critics say
the system is anti-democratic and impervious to
any improvement - but Iranians at the same time
discovered the power of absenteeism. Today, the
majority of the population - young, less than 25
years old, and having lived all their lives under
the ayatollahs - wants total separation of Shi'ite
religion and the state. Moreover, in this last
quarter of a century, Iran has lost half of its
gross national product, due not only to the
endless Iran-Iraq war that raged for nearly a
decade in the 1980s, but to the predominance of a
bureaucracy preventing the flourishing of foreign
trade.
Iranian society is arguably the
most dynamic, the most advanced and the most
critical in the Muslim world - light years ahead
of the youth in the Arab world or in Pakistan, for
instance. There is a cultural revolution going on
in Iran - against theocracy. The die is cast, and
if reformers like Moin are not in the ballot,
these elections could yet represent the triumph of
civil disobedience.
(Copyright 2005 Asia
Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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