|
|
Iran: the reformist safety-valve has gone
The fraudulent parliamentary elections in Iran on February
20 mark the end of the ‘reform-wing’ within the clerical ruling elite of the
Islamic Republic. But the election sweep of the hard-line faction will not
stabilise the mullahs’ regime. On the contrary, it will open the way for a more
radical and uncontrollable protest movement against the theocracy, argues
MAHMOUD BERSANI, who recently visited the country.
‘A FARCE WITHOUT freedom’. This is how Mohammad Resa Khatami,
the president’s brother and leader of the biggest reform-party, Moschakerat,
called the election to the majlis, the Iranian parliament. Of the original 8,157
candidates, 3,605 were rejected by the Guardians’ Council – an unelected body
which examines the candidates concerning their faith in Islam and the Islamic
Republic, their loyalty to the Islamic constitution, and ‘velajate faghieh’, the
absolute rule of the mullahs.
As in all unelected institutions, the Council is dominated
by the regime’s hard-line-faction. In the capital, Teheran, it rejected more
than half of the original 2,050 candidates. Among those not allowed to stand
were 83 sitting MPs. One candidate explained that he was rejected simply because
he had shaved off his beard, taken by the Guardians’ Council as proof of his
lack of faith in Islam. In reaction to these exclusions another 1,000 reformers
withdrew their candidacies and 130 MPs, after a spectacular 26-day-sit-in strike
in the parliament building, resigned from the majlis.
‘Too little, too late’ was the attitude of the people
towards these protest actions of the reform faction. During the four years they
held the majority in the majlis, not one of the more than 50 reform projects was
accepted as law by the Guardians’ Council. In spite of having the presidency and
a clear majority in parliament, the reformers were unable to prevent critical
intellectuals, politicians and journalists from being thrown in jail or even
murdered by the hardliners’ paramilitary groups and secret service
organisations. They were unable to check the judiciary, another bastion of the
conservatives. More than 100 reform-oriented newspapers and magazines had been
banned since 2000, the last two just before the election for publishing a
protest letter against the Guardian Council’s actions.
Because of this inability of the reformers to make a real
difference, to challenge the hard-line faction, the masses remained passive when
the reformers did move. This allowed the conservatives to ignore the reformers’
demand to postpone the election. In the end, the Guardians’ Council only
reversed 1,160 rejections: more than 2,000 candidates remained excluded. The
reformers split on how to react. Most groups decided to call for a boycott of
this fraudulent election. Moschakerat declared: "we do not regard these
elections as being free, fair and legal and therefore see no reason to take part
in them". Even president Khatami said "my government will only hold elections
which take place in the spirit of competition and freedom". But the president’s
by now famous hesitancy, which is the subject of jokes in the streets of
Teheran, got the upper hand of him again. Despite saying the elections were
unfair and undemocratic, he called on the people to cast their vote.
The election results were as had been widely expected.
According to the interior ministry, 190 of the 290 seats were practically
reserved to the conservatives as a result of candidate exclusions: in 202
constituencies there was only one candidate. Overall, the hardliners ‘won’ 156
seats and the reformers only 39, compared to 190 in 1990. Others were mostly
taken by conservative ‘independents’. In the Bam region, which was hit by a
terrible earthquake during which 41,000 people died, the ballot was postponed.
Low turnout
ACCORDING TO THE interior ministry, 50.6% of voters took
part in the election. That is more than was expected by the reformers but,
nevertheless, it is the lowest poll in the 25-year-history of the Islamic
Republic and 17% less than at the last majlis election in 2000. This was in
spite of the fact that the organs of the clerical elite did all they could to
mobilise for the poll. For two weeks, television and radio programmes
permanently hammered one message to the people: ‘vote’. In almost all Friday
prayers, held in every corner of the country, participation in the election was
declared a ‘religious duty’. Rumours were put in circulation that students
without an election stamp in their passports would not be admitted to university
and that state employees who boycotted the election would face problems. It is
therefore probable that many went to the ballot box out of fear of sanctions.
The reformist MP Fatemeh Haghighatdju claimed in parliament that 17% of the
votes cast were invalid. But in the big cities, most people nevertheless openly
abstained from the election.
Abstentions were especially high in the former bastions of
the reformers, the big cities of Isfahan and Teheran, as well as the Kurdish
areas. In the capital only 28% of the six million eligible voters went to the
polls. In Isfahan participation was also less than a third. In the province of
Kurdistan, the turnout more than halved from 70% to 32%. As a result of the
abstention of their former voters, the reformers even lost their former
strongholds. The conservatives won all five seats in Isfahan. In the capital,
the new conservative group ‘Developers of Islamic Iran’ took the biggest share
of the votes. Its head, Ghulam Ali Haddad Adel, is connected through the
marriage of his daughter to the ‘religious head’, Ali Khamenei, formally the
most powerful man in the country. Haddad Adel had previously only captured a
seat in the majlis through obvious manipulation. In this year’s election, not
even the well known reform politician and president of the majlis, Mehdi Karrubi,
won one of the 30 mandates in Teheran.
Although before and during the election the masses remained
largely passive towards the power struggle at the top, on election day itself,
anger about the blatant manipulation erupted in some instances. In the southern
city of Firuzabad and in Iseh in the south-western province of Khusistan violent
clashes between angry voters and state forces took place. Eight people died as a
result and many were injured.
‘Teheran spring’ ends
MOSTAFE TADJSADEH, A leading member of the reform-oriented
Islamic Iranian Participation Front, told the AFP news agency that, in "free
elections we would have won a majority of seats". That is very doubtful. The
people of Iran, who in their great majority desperately want change, have lost
faith in Khatami and his supporters. Young people and women especially had set
their hopes on Khatami after his election to the presidency in 1997 and again
after the reformist sweep of the parliamentary election in 2000. But these
forces did not deliver. The so-called ‘Teheran spring’, the attempt to reform
the Islamist regime from above, is over. "The reformists are dead", a 23-year
old medical student from northeast Iran told AFP. "They were dead already, but
now they are even deader". A young member of the reform-oriented Student Islamic
Association said: "The reforms have been dead for years and they were finished
by these kind of elections". "Even if the reformist candidates had been
approved, I would not have participated", another young female student said. A
journalist and former supporter of Khatami, who had spent two years in jail,
explained: "We have risked our necks for him [Khatami]. But except for words of
consolation he has done nothing, although he had 20 million voters behind him".
At the universities especially, the attitude towards Khatami is marked by
extreme bitterness. When the students took to the streets in 1999 to protest for
democracy and freedom and against the repression of independent thought, Khatami
not only failed to support them, but on TV even called the students, who carried
his picture, "troublemakers and hooligans". The student movement has radicalised
since then. During protests in 2003 the students openly demanded an end to the
absolute religious system, the ‘velajate faghieh’. They also called on Khatami
to resign.
The students have recognised that Khatami and his supporters
do not want a general change in Iranian society. The reformers accept the
‘velajate faghieh’ and the Islamic constitution, which is structurally
undemocratic. It gives absolute power and a right to veto all decisions to the
‘revolutionary leader’, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. "The power of the revolutionary
leader is given to him by God", Khamenei himself recently explained. "God gives
this power to people who are just and morally incontestable and who are accepted
by the people". The latter is clearly not the case any more. A dictatorial
system, which rests on these kind of preconditions, cannot be fundamentally
‘reformed’. It can only be swept away by a mass movement. Khatami and his
supporters want the contrary: their aim is to prevent a revolutionary mass
movement from below by conceding reforms from above. This faction of the
clerical elite recognises the enormous anger existing within broad layers of
Iranian society. By allowing certain limited freedoms and using a softer and
‘democratic’ kind of language, Khatami wants to provide a safety-valve for the
pressure building up. But in contrast to the hopes that focussed on him, he
never wanted to achieve fundamental change. Khatami himself is part of the
clerical elite which took away power from the masses during the revolutionary
uprising in 1979. Otherwise he would have never even had the chance to be
elected: in 1997 the Guardians’ Council only accepted four of the 238 candidates
for the presidency – one of them being Khatami, himself a mullah, of course.
What Khatami fears most is a mass movement from below, which will not be
controllable by any of the regime’s factions. This explains Khatami’s famous –
or infamous – hesitancy. He does not have a power-base within the structures of
the Islamist state. His only source of power is, or rather was, the support of
the masses. But he never dared to play this card, for fear of losing control
over his supporters. In the end, he always gave in to the pressure of his
conservative opponents.
The different wings of the political establishment represent
different, and partly contradictory, interests within Iranian society. Both
factions are far from homogenous but in general the reformers rest on more
modern bourgeois elements while the hardliners represent powerful groups who
control big parts of the economy and most of the state apparatus. Important
sections of the reform camp favour economic development and modernisation
through the use of foreign technology. The conservatives on the other hand have
traditionally close ties with the bazaar traders but are also connected to
mafia-type organisations which profit from smuggling all the goods – from
alcohol and other drugs to pornography – usually called ‘western evils’ by these
same leaders. They also rest on the ‘foundations’, powerful financial
institutions that started off as charity organisations but now control wide
sections of the economy. Politically, the conservatives rest on the most
backward elements in the villages while the reformers, until recently, received
the support of the intelligentsia and the youth.
Political and social crisis
THE VICTORY OF the hardline-faction in the internal
power-struggle does not at all indicate a stabilisation and consolidation of the
regime. On the contrary: the rule of the clerical elite is in a deep crisis of
legitimacy, and it has lost its safety-valve. Its more sensible and flexible
elements have been pushed out of the state-apparatus. It is probable that, at
the presidential elections next year, in which Khatami cannot stand a third
time, the reformers will loose the presidency as well. This means that all
resistance to established politics from now on has to take the form of
fundamental opposition to the theocratic system itself. While the students and
other progressive elements have lost hope in Khatami, they have not become
apolitical. Iranian society remains deeply politicised. And wide layers are
still enormously dissatisfied with the political and economic situation.
According to a poll, conducted by the interior ministry in June 2002, about 90%
of the population is not satisfied with the Islamic Republic. Nearly half of
those questioned complained about the lack of individual and collective legal
security while 32% said they did not see any perspective for their future in
Iran.
The reason for this is not just the lack of democratic
rights and individual freedom. It is also reflects the deep social crisis of the
country. Officially, unemployment stands at 11.2% and inflation at 16.5%, but
the real figures are much worse. Millions of Iranians survive by selling goods
in the streets of the big cities or by depending on their families. Over half of
Iranian families live at or below the poverty-line. 800,000 young people enter
the job-market every year, many of them after finishing university. Their
expectation of a respectable livelihood is not fulfilled: 13% of physicians are
unemployed. Four out of five teachers live below the poverty-line. A consequence
of this is an enormous ‘brain drain’: between 150,000 and 180,000 Iranians try
to leave the country every year. In this respect Iran is first on a list of 91
underdeveloped countries, says the World Bank. The Economist estimates that the
Iranian economy has contracted by 30% since the revolution 25 years ago.
Starting this summer, fuel will be rationed for at least four years. Because of
the lack of refineries, Iran has to import 27m barrels of fuel per day, though
it is one of the major oil-producing countries of the world!
The lack of basic necessities, the delay of wage payments,
job insecurity, lay-offs, and other issues, occasionally lead to resistance and
strikes by groups of workers. The most recent instance was a strike of workers
in a copper-smelting plant in the southern province of Kerman against management
plans to lay off part of the workforce. As in many of these cases, special
police forces brutally attacked the workers and killed four of them. Strikes and
independent unions are banned in Iran. Instead, ‘Islamic workers’ councils’ are
supposed to mediate between workers and employers in the case of conflicts. In
spite of this lack of basic workers’ rights, the number of strikes and protests
seems to be on the increase.
Neo-liberal policies
THE REFORMERS OFFER as a cure for the social and economic
crisis the same neo-liberal recipe that has failed in the rest of the world.
Khatami, speaking in parliament about the aims of the fourth five-year-plan,
said: "The finances and the budget of the state have to be put in order… the
private economy has to be massively supported, and the administration has to be
reorganised". He continued: "The state monopolies have to be wound up or brought
under control, economic advantages and privileges have to be scrapped". In
recent years, the reformers have pursued a policy of privatisations and cutting
down subsidies on basic consumer goods. Furthermore, Khatami demanded
intensified co-operation with international companies and the entry of Iran into
the World Trade Organisation (WTO). In February the latter was rejected, for the
15th time since 1996.
According to a recent study, Iran is one of the least
internationally integrated economies worldwide. To break this international
isolation was one of the main aims of the reformist faction. Partly because of
the uncompromising line of the hawks in Washington, this has failed so far. The
outcome of the election will mean a stiffening of the hardliners on both sides,
in Iran and the US and Europe. Richard Boucher, spokesman of the US State
Department, said the election process did not fit ‘international standards’ (no
doubt set by the US in Afghanistan and Iraq?). The election was a setback mainly
for the EU, which had followed a strategy of ‘constructive dialogue’ with the
Iranian regime’s reform camp over recent years. This policy had achieved some
remarkable results for the European powers, especially for Germany. German
exports to Iran have grown by an annual rate of 20% in the last three years.
With $270m of assets, Germany also holds most direct investments in this "very,
very important country" (German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer). But other
countries – like Russia, Japan, France and Austria – have also recently
intensified their economic cooperation with Iran.
Paradoxically, the victory of the Iranian conservatives
could lead to an improved relationship with the ‘Great Satan’, the USA. Neither
side is as dogmatic on the issue as their rhetoric might suggest. It is
significant that it was the hard-line faction itself that struck the deal with
the US-dominated International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), to allow them to
investigate Iran’s nuclear capabilities. The situation has opened up, especially
since the US-led war against neighbouring Iraq. This was reflected in the fact
that both sides used the tragic Bam earthquake to send diplomatic signals of
reconciliation. In the aftermath of the election, Boucher also spoke of engaging
"Iran on specific issues of mutual concern and in an appropriate manner, if we
decide it is in our interest to do so". An important field of ‘mutual concern’
might be Iraq. For the US occupation forces there, it is of vital importance to
include the leaders of the Iraqi Shiites – closely connected to the Iranian
regime – in any new order. Concessions by Teheran on the question of Iraq, or
Afghanistan where it has great influence in the western regions, could put the
mullahs back into the international game. But such a rapprochement of the two
arch-enemies is most probably not likely to take place until after the
presidential elections in both countries.
Concerning internal politics, too, the victorious
conservatives may proceed on an unexpected path. It is possible that they will
not dare to attack the individual freedoms won in the recent period. Although
the Guardians’ Council, immediately after the election, announced that the
majlis would "in the future concentrate on the strengthening of Islam… and push
through belief and morals in public life", there were also other signals. The
conservative leader, Ghulam Ali Haddad Adel, emphasised at a news conference
that the winners would not use violence to enforce the strict Islamic social
rules, which have been loosened during Khatami’s presidency.
A lot has changed in the life of Iranians since his election
victory in 1997. The atmosphere in the streets of Teheran, Shiraz and other big
cities has changed radically. Men and women openly stroll in the many parks or
at the grave of Hafiz or other poets. Women with heavy make-up wear well-fitting
coats instead of wide, dark capes. Western influenced pop music is played
without fear. All of this was unimaginable just a couple of years ago. Life in
Iran has changed not because of Khatami’s actual policies but because people
have lost fear. In 1997 it became clear to everyone that a huge majority wants
change. Khatami’s election therefore served to enhance the self-confidence of
the masses towards the organs of the state and the reactionary groups. If the
conservatives now want to turn the clock backwards, they will meet massive
resistance, of the youth in particular. Almost 30 million young people, around
40% of the population, were born after the 1979 revolution. These youth, who see
their desired path blocked by old mullahs with white beards, represent the great
potential for a mass movement for change in Iran.
|