Page 1 of 2 Attack on the 'Shark' shakes Iran By Mahan Abedin
As the Islamic Republic continues to grapple with a profound political crisis,
the focus of internal wrangling is steadily shifting to the eye of the storm.
There is a widespread belief that former Iranian president and a long-time
pillar of the establishment, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, is at the core of
the internal squabbles that are threatening to tear apart the legacy of the
Islamic revolution of 1979. Recent weeks have witnessed unprecedented verbal
assaults on Rafsanjani, spearheaded by Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi, a former head
of the judiciary and current influential member of the powerful Guardians'
Council.
These unprecedented verbal assaults - which question Rafsanjani's ambiguous
stance on the political crisis - would have been unthinkable prior to the
controversial June 2009 presidential poll. The collapse of factional politics
in the Islamic Republic has
not only made it possible to sideline Rafsanjani, but has even raised the
prospect of removing him altogether from the political scene. The impending
downfall of Rafsanjani will be the third and potentially most important purge
in the history of the Islamic revolution.
Akbar Shah
For most of the past 30 years and until very recently, Ali Akbar Hashemi
Rafsanjani had been a pillar of the Iranian revolutionary establishment. With a
record of political activism stretching back nearly six decades, Rafsanjani's
revolutionary credentials are on a par with Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei, the
leader of the Islamic revolution.
Rafsanjani's opponents depict him as an ultra-opportunist with little political
conviction. In the light of Rafsanjani's long political record and his profound
impact on the development of the Islamic Republic, these accusations are not
entirely fair or accurate. Prior to the victory of the revolution in February
1979, Rafsanjani was a devoted disciple of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
and was wholeheartedly committed to the project of establishing an Islamic
state in Iran.
His involvement went so far as playing a pivotal role in the assassination of
former Iranian prime minister Hassan Ali Mansour in January 1965. He was
arrested and imprisoned by the shah's secret service SAVAK (National
Intelligence and Security Organization) on at least three occasions from the
early 1960s to the late 1970s.
For his part, Rafsanjani sees himself as a great reformer on a par with Iran's
legendary modernist 19th century prime minister, Mirza Taqi Khan Amir-Nezam
(aka Amir Kabir). Amir Kabir served as premier in the years 1848 to 1852,
during the reign of Naser-al-Din Shah Qajar, who is widely regarded as the
first "modern" Iranian monarch.
Rafsanjani's conscious affiliation with aspects of Iran's long monarchical
history (which is anathema to Iranian Islamic revolutionaries) led some to
label him "Akbar Shah". This title was not only an effusive reference to
Rafsanjani's penchant for Persian history, but more importantly it was an
allusion to his political style and the fact that by the end of the 1980s he
had accumulated all the power and prestige of an absolute Iranian monarch.
Rafsanjani's meteoric political rise in the 1980s - when he was speaker of the
Majlis (parliament) - lay in his profound understanding of the chaotic and
fragmented politics of the Islamic Republic and his uncanny ability to exploit
factional politics to his own advantage. For his extraordinary political
skills, his critics and admirers alike labeled him the "shark", thus
buttressing his Machiavellian reputation. Rafsanjani's complex and deceptive
political style led him to adopt moderate and radical ideological positions,
depending on the mood of the day. For this flawless display of expediency,
Western governments and the media were by the early 1980s referring to him as a
"pragmatist", an altogether not inaccurate description.
A natural oligarch, by the late 1980s Rafsanjani had masterminded an
extraordinary accumulation of power and wealth inside his family and among his
closest advisers and followers. Following the demise of Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini in June 1989, Rafsanjani moved swiftly to consolidate his position. He
masterminded the downfall of former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi and led
efforts to abolish the premiership post altogether in August 1989, thus
increasing the power of the presidency.
Having been elected president in July 1989, this suited Rafsanjani who then
collaborated with the arch conservatives and the Islamic right more broadly to
sideline the Islamic left. This culminated in the widespread purge of leftist
candidates for the April 1992 Majlis elections, which paved the way for the
ascendance of the Islamic right. The removal of Mousavi in August 1989 and the
parliamentary purge of April 1992 had widespread political and ideological
repercussions and contributed directly to the events of June 2009.
Decline of an oligarch
There is a story within establishment circles in Iran that while on his death
bed and during his last moments, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini - the
founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran - held the hands of both Rafsanjani and
Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei to forewarn them that the revolution would
"endure" as long as the two men stayed "together".
This is probably a myth, but like all myths it has served as a kind of truism,
acting as a warning sign to the devotees of the Islamic revolution. Moreover,
it served as a unifying call during the early 1990s when the Islamic Republic
was struggling to adjust to radically different conditions following the end of
the Iran-Iraq War in 1988 and the demise of the regime's founder-leader the
following year.
The myth was enthusiastically taken up by Rafsanjani and his followers - who by
the early 1990s had come to be known as the "kargozaran" (technocrats) -
who naturally exaggerated Rafsanjani's role in facilitating Khamenei's ascent
to the leadership position following Khomeini's demise.
The notion of an unbreakable bond between Rafsanjani and Khamenei was
encapsulated by the popular slogan of the day "Khamenei Zendeh Baad Hashemi
Payandeh Baad" (roughly translating into "long live Khamenei and
Hashemi [Rafsanjani]"). To Rafsanjani's followers, the bond between Khamenei
and Rafsanjani symbolized a consensual separation between ideology and
government in the Islamic Republic.
To the so-called technocrats, Khamenei in his capacity as the valiye faghih
(ruler-scholar) represented the regime's ideology, whereas Rafsanjani as
president headed a putatively non-ideological government. To put it in
15th-century Florentine political-religious terms, Khamenei was a latter-day
Girolamo Savonarola to Rafsanjani's Niccolo Machiavelli.
From the very outset this division was wholly unacceptable to grassroots
supporters of the Islamic regime, who naturally gravitated towards Khamenei.
They correctly saw the technocrats' strategy as one designed to gradually
reduce the role of velayat-e-faqih (rule of the jurisconsult), which is
the ideological cornerstone of Iran's unique system of Islamic government, into
a ceremonial one.
To grassroots supporters of the Islamic Republic, Rafsanjani and his so-called
technocrats had embarked on a pseudo-secularization process whose desired
outcome was the "normalization" of the Islamic Republic along prevailing
Western economic and political discourses.
The massive resistance by the revolution's grassroots to Rafsanjani's political
ambitions was exacerbated by his government's poor economic and social
performance. By 1993, the government had borrowed tens of billions of dollars
from foreign lenders (under the guise of reconstruction following the end of
the Iran-Iraq War); inflation was in double digits; and major Iranian cities
were rocked by unrest, most noticeably Mashad in May 1992.
Within four years Rafsanjani's government had reversed much of the gains of
Mousavi's government in the 1980s. Governmental corruption - which had been
drastically reduced in the 1980s - had once again reared its ugly head in the
form of half-hearted privatization schemes, which did much to distort the
Iranian economy.
By the time of the June 1993 presidential election, the once-powerful Akbar
Shah was already in decline. Even though he won a second term, his power and
prestige steadily eroded in the period 1993-1997. In the great struggle between
ideology and expediency, the former had clearly prevailed, as evidenced by the
strengthened position of Ayatollah Khamenei.
The downfall
The 1997 presidential election ushered into power the reformist Seyed Mohammad
Khatami. Khatami's stunning electoral victory once again shifted the
ideological and political battle in the Islamic Republic to a contest between
the Islamic left and the Islamic right.
But there was a crucial difference this time around insofar as sections of the
old Islamic left had now "reformed" and were presenting new
political-ideological discourses. While there was great variety in these
discourses, the dominant trend was set on reconciling the Islamic revolution
with normative Western political theory.
In short, the political and social program of former president Khatami and his
followers was a prescriptive agenda whose ultimate outcome would inevitably be
the embrace of Western-style liberal democracy. To hardcore supporters of the
Islamic regime, Khatami's stunning electoral victory presented a mortal threat
insofar as it propelled the core structural tensions between the regime's
"republican" and "Islamic" dimensions onto a higher plane. Unlike in the 1980s,
the reformed nature of the Islamic left raised the specter of the revolution's
"democratic" aspirations fatally undercutting its "Islamic" identity.
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