Inheriting a revolutionary legacy and
projecting power as a revisionist actor on the
world stage, the Islamic Republic of Iran
constantly prides itself as an historically
superior system to the ancien regime that
perpetuated itself for a quarter of century with
the help of American power and a notorious secret
service.
Today, in light of the official
news of the house arrest of two leading opposition
figures, Mir Hussain Mousavi and Mehdi Karubi, the
regime risks fueling the furnace of anti-Iran
forces in the West as well as in the Middle East,
which count on the debilitating consequences of
internal strife to weaken Iran's rising power.
According to Hojatol Eslam Ejehi, a
spokesperson for the Justice Ministry, "The first
step" against Mousavi and Karubi, referred to
as leaders of "sedition"
(fetneh), has begun by cutting off their
telephone and Internet services and curbing their
movements, in essence placing them under house
arrest. This while, according to opposition
websites, both men and their spouses have been
transferred to Heshmatieh prison in Tehran.
Western governments and rights
organizations have denounced the move against the
opposition leaders, who have a long track record,
ie, Mousavi was prime minister during the
Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, and Karubi was a
speaker of parliament (Majlis). The German
government, for instance, which has recently moved
nearer to Iran, is hopeful that Tehran will show
sensitivity to their expressed concern over the
fate of Karubi and Mousavi, after summoning Iran's
envoy to Berlin. The Germans recently favored a
United Nations Security resolution condemning
Israel's illegal settlements, which was vetoed by
US, and succeeding in securing the release of two
of its nationals from Iran's jails accused of
spying; this was made possible by a Tehran visit
of German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle.
The risk is that the German stance against
Iran may harden and negatively affect its attitude
in future rounds of the "Iran Six" talks with
Tehran on its nuclear program. The other members
of the of the six are the five permanent members
of the United Nations Security Council - the
United States, Britain, France, Russia and China.
On a broader level, how the Iranian
government behaves towards its internal dissent
has a direct impact on its image in the region, a
key issue nowadays that much of the Arab world and
North Africa is engulfed in revolutionary
upheavals and the question of which model to
emulate has acquired a new significance.
If Iran is perceived as moving away from
the rule of law and toward arbitrary and
autocratic exercise of power, this will undermine
its efforts to enhance its net of solidarity,
including in countries such as Egypt, which has
just overthrown its entrenched dictator, Hosni
Mubarak.
Consequently, it is vitally
important for the sake of Iran's foreign and
regional agenda to disallow the harm to its
external image that would in turn diminish its
chance of ingratiating itself to the newly
democratizing regimes in the region. Tehran can do
this only by remaining loyal to its own Islamic
constitution, in which the rights of political
opposition operating within the constitutional
framework, ie, refraining from overthrowing the
regime, are enshrined.
Political
factionalism has been, from the outset of the
post-revolutionary system, tolerated, giving the
Islamic Republic a semi-pluralistic image that
cannot and should not be compromised for the sake
of any faction in Iran.
Nowadays,
factionalism has focused on, among other matters,
the upcoming election for the 86-member Assembly
of Experts, presently headed by pragmatist former
president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who is
vilified by some hardline groups over complicity
with leaders of the opposition Green movement.
Trying to distance himself from the Green
leaders, in a recent television interview
Rafsanjani implicitly criticized them for joining
forces with known counter-revolutionary groups by
refusing to take part in the official pro-Egypt
rallies last month and, instead, calling for a
separate rally that turned out to be an
anti-government spectacle with some protesters
chanting death to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei.
In retrospect, the Green
leaders' decision - to reject the government's
small olive branch by inviting "all groups" to
take part in the pro-Egypt revolution rally -
appears to have been misguided and a major
miscalculation that has backfired. If their
intention was to spread the democratic fever
gripping the rest of the region to Iran, they
underestimated the extent of the government's
stern reaction that essentially nipped it in the
bud, thus setting the stage for today's
prosecution of those leaders and some of their
followers.
"The Green leaders missed a
unique opportunity to demonstrate their political
acumen by moving toward reconciliation," says a
Tehran University political science professor who
supports reformist politics in Iran, adding that
in his opinion the only future available to the
Green movement is to "de-radicalize", or it is
doomed.
However, speaking on the condition
of anonymity, the professor advised the rulers to
refrain from taking any action against Karubi or
Mousavi "outside the legal framework ... there may
be short-term gains by putting them under house
arrest, but for how long? It is better to commence
legal proceedings against them and allow them to
have legal representation and defend themselves
against the allegations." Pointing at Iran's
"culture of martyrdom", the professor stated that
the Green movement may actually be energized by
the prosecution of its leaders and even further
"radicalized".
Path toward political
reconciliation Democracy, as English
author George Orwell once put it, is the counting
of heads and not breaking them. Iran's unique
experimentation of Islam and electoral politics,
as a key manifestation of an Islamic democracy,
hinges on the sustaining power of political
competition and tolerance of dissent, not to
mention the politics of compromise, a dread word
in Iranian political discourse.
But, with
important parliamentary and presidential elections
approaching next year and the year after that
respectively, the only logical path toward
political evolution in Iran is to harmonize
inter-elite factionalism and to steer clear of
arbitrary exercises of power against the groups
and parties known as reformists.
This is
by all indications a two-way process and the
reformists have their work cut out, since they
have lost much of their momentum since the summer
of 2009, when huge mass protests followed the
presidential elections that culminated in the
victory of incumbent President Mahmud Ahmadinejad.
According to Ahmad Montazeri, son of the
late dissident ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri, in
his letter to Supreme Leader Khamenei, political
reconciliation could materialize if there is an
initiative from the top to form a reconciliation
committee. The leader is simultaneously being
lobbied by conservative factions to take decisive
action against the "heads of sedition and their
accomplices".
How the leader responds to
these contrary pressures will likely hinge on his
perception of the balance between internal
stability and the protection of the rights of
opposition figures, a delicate issue at a time
when Iran's enemies are anything but shy about the
importance of exploiting the pro-democracy
movement in Iran to undermine the regime's foreign
objectives.
Concerning the latter, David
Frum, a neo-conservative who was former US
president George W Bush's speechwriter and who is
credited with coining the term "axis of evil" in a
speech he wrote for his boss' state of the union
address in 2002, has questioned President Barack
Obama's Iran policy, urging him to seek regime
change partly through the democracy movement. If
it turns out that the Obama administration is
tilting toward endorsing the neo-conservative
agenda against Iran in the coming weeks or months,
then it is clear that the Tehran rulers will
intensify their efforts to stamp out "Americanist
dissent", a pejorative term used by Iran's
conservatives to label Green supporters and their
leaders presently suffering the indignity of house
or prison confinement.
The release of
political prisoners and the retracking of
government-opposition hostilities toward
reconciliation is now most certainly in the
country's best national interests.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the
author of After Khomeini: New Directions in
Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) . For
his Wikipedia entry, click here.
He is author of Reading
In Iran Foreign Policy After September 11
(BookSurge Publishing , October 23, 2008) and his
latest book, Looking
for rights at Harvard, is now available.
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