Wall Street Journal - July 14, 1999
ANOTHER IRANIAN REVOLUTION? NOT YET
By Dilip Hiro, author of "Dictionary of the Middle East" (St Martin's Press, 1996) and "Sharing the Promised Land: A Tale of Israelis and Palestinians" (Interlink Publishing Group, 1999).
Watching on television the running battles in Tehran between protesting university students and riot police, one is reminded of the early days of the revolution against the shah in 1978. So is history repeating itself? It is tempting to think so, but it would be unrealistic.
The scenario of the impending downfall of the theocratic regime is based on the thesis that the power struggle between reformists and conservatives is reaching a climax. On one side is the conservative Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, the unelected supreme leader, and on the other is the reformist President Muhammad Khatami, who won a four-year term in a landslide victory in 1997.
This perception is based on a false premise--that Mr. Khamanei is an unelected leader. In fact, he is elected for an eight-year term by the Assembly of Experts, elected by voters. Selected last October, the current Assembly of Experts re-elected Mr. Khamanei as the supreme leader, the spiritual and temporal ruler of Iran, the final arbiter of power. Among other things, he appoints the ministers of defense, interior and intelligence, each of whom must win approval from Parliament.
There is a major difference between the 270-member Parliament and the 83-member Assembly of Experts. Whereas the Parliament has a mix of mullahs and laymen, the Assembly of Experts consists exclusively of clerics. This has been one of the reformists' main grievances. Responding to these complaints, Iran's Council of Guardians, a quasijudicial body that also vets candidates for public office, allowed nonclerics to contest the last Assembly poll--but none of them won.
As a rule, regimes fall when they lose touch with the general public and worsen the situation by becoming increasingly repressive. The recent protests notwithstanding, there is little sign of that in Iran today. A unique feature of the Islamic Republic of Iran is the role clerics play in the everyday lives of citizens. They act as neighborhood counselors and helpers, ready to aid the indigent in their congregation. They are in daily touch with the local community in the way, say, a Catholic priest is in an Irish village. As such they act as the eyes and ears of the Islamic regime.
Through this clerical network popular feelings get transmitted upward swiftly during a crisis. And an unstated function of the supreme leader is to strike a balance between competing factions. In April 1998, Mr. Khamanei intervened when the political temperature in Iran rose sharply after the arrest on corruption charges of Tehran's reformist mayor, Ghulam Hussein Karbaschi. After consulting Mr. Khatami and two other top leaders, Mr. Khamanei ordered that Mr. Karbaschi be released on bail, defusing the crisis. Similarly, this Monday Mr. Khamanei condemned last Thursday's police raids on student dormitories as "a bitter and unacceptable incident."
Before Mr. Khamanei's condemnation, the Supreme National Security Council, chaired by Mr. Khatami, and containing two personal representatives of the supreme leader, had dismissed the police chief of Tehran and his deputy for ordering the dormitory raid. And for the first time, the leaders of the vigilante group Ansar-e Hizbollah (Helpers of the Party of God), who had attacked the students, were arrested.
Significantly, the Supreme National Security Council accompanied its statement about the dismissals and arrests with a warning that no further demonstrations should be held without the permission of the Interior Ministry. The next day, when students took to the streets anyway, the authorities imposed a blanket ban on meetings and demonstrations.
Already the protesters have split, with the moderate majority arguing that the students have achieved their aim of highlighting their backing for political reform and for the liberal newspaper Salaam, the closure of which set off the latest protest. It was the radical minority among university students that disagreed and took to the streets.
Events elsewhere in the world--in South Korea in the last decade, for example--show that protests by university students escalate into threats to the social-political system only when they are joined by larger, less-privileged sections of society. In Iran the student agitation has not won the support of groups such as workers, merchants and civil servants. Apparently most ordinary people feel that the concessions that the authorities have made are adequate. Now, by engaging in street fights with the security forces, the radical students are playing into the hands of the conservatives, who can blame reformers for having fomented chaos.
While university students in Tehran have taken up the general cause of freedom of speech and association, they have specific grievances that need addressing. Chief among them is the Islamic injunction against unrelated men and women mixing socially. This means a ban on dating and mixed-sex parties, creating a well of frustration among university students that has erupted into street protests. Iran's leaders will have to tackle this problem with some imagination if they want to avoid more violent student protests.
Equally important is to understand the class context of the fighting between students and vigilantes. The latter are from the working-class neighborhoods of South Tehran, while most university students are from prosperous North Tehran. It is the underlying social antagonism between these groups that plays out as political violence.
To understand this phenomenon is not to condone it. In a civil society there is no place for violence to settle political differences. This is what members of the Ansar-e Hizbollah have been doing for more than a year, with the police standing by with folded arms. The arrest of their leaders should set an example that must be followed unfailingly in the future.
At a deeper level, the present crisis--as well as the earlier one over Tehran's mayor--stems from the existence of a reformist president and a conservative-dominated Parliament, with a judiciary that is the monopoly of clerics. No matter how the present crisis is defused, the tension between Mr. Khatami and lawmakers is likely to continue until the next parliamentary election in February.
So don't be surprised, or get excited, if you see bloody battles between protesting students and riot police in Tehran again.