Comment
No Iranian Che http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1541824,00.html
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not some fiery revolutionary, the political descendant of Khomeini, but a tool of the conservatives, says Hossein Derakhshan
Wednesday August 3, 2005
[Fatemeh Khatami (right), the great grand-daughter of Ayatollah Khomeini, helps to distribute campaign leaflets and tracts for the reformist political candidate Mostafa Moin. Photograph: Parastoo Dokouhaki]
Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, has played a smart game this time. He allowed a relatively democratic election to take place but eventually got his favoured candidate as president. In addition, he managed to secure a voter turnout high enough to silence American criticisms that the leadership of Iran lacks a legitimate mandate.
Although he was himself president for around eight years, until Khomeini died, at the time the constitution did not give Mr Khamenei a serious role in running the government. It was the prime minister who was responsible for selecting the cabinet; the presidency was only a symbolic position. But the position of prime minister was subsequently removed from the constitution and the power of the president expanded - not enough, though, to challenge the supreme leader, whose own authority had been extended to some extent.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's win reflects a significant socio-economic gap in Iranian society. But it would be wrong to view his victory as a sign that people are tired of reform and have given up hope of change toward a transparent democracy.
Mr Ahmadinejad, a moral conservative, does not represent the majority of Iranians, two-thirds of whom are under 30 and many of those liberal in orientation. Neither does he represent the continuation of Ayatollah Khomeini's vision for the future of Iran. Rather, he is someone through whom the supreme leader will, for the first time, try to manage the executive branch of the regime.
Many western journalists, although regretful for having covered Iran with a distorting focus on the educated and well-off middle-class in Tehran, have started to get things wrong again - but in the opposite way. As Iranians say, they are now falling off the roof from the other side.
They have begun talking about Mr Ahmadinejad as if he were the Muslim reincarnation of Che Guevara. Some of them seem to belive he is a true saviour of Iran, who is going to rescue if from the greed of the mullahs and the imperialist Americans. What they fail to see is how the regime devoted its resources to getting him into the second electoral round, in which he was facing one of the most unpopular politicians in Iran. It was obvious who would win. Even my old aunt would have beaten Mr Rafsanjani in the run-off.
If you want to see what Khomeini's Iran looks like today, just consider Fatemeh Khatami. Fatemeh is the great grand-daughter of Ayatollah Khomeini on her mother's side, and the daughter of Reza Khatami, the former president's brother, who happens to be the president of the Iran Participation Front, Jebheh-ye Mosharekat, the main reformist party.
I first met Fatameh, a 22-year-old student, at a meeting of the special campaign organisation created to build support for Mostafa Moin, the main reformist candidate, among Iranian youth. She was wearing subtle makeup, had on a relaxed hijab, sported yellow sneakers and was hanging out with other young boys and girls in the office and in the streets at night to distribute campaign leaflets.
Her mother, Zahra Eshraghi, clearly remembers Khomeini. "He never pressed us to conduct religious rituals," she told me. Unlike radical clerics such as Mesbah Yazdi, who are among the strongest backers of the new president and follow an extremely conservative version of Shia Islam, Khomeini was a revolutionary. Before his death, in 1989, he liberalised pop music, the playing of chess and many other things that were considered taboo by the Shia establishment.
Khomeini believed in the importance of elections, the role of parliament and restricting the military's involvement in politics. On the other side, there were - and still are - conservative clerics such as Mesbah Yazdi who bluntly denounced democracy and human rights as western imports and called for absolute authority for the supreme leader, who in their minds was the representative of God on earth and without whose consent people's votes and opinions had virtually no value.
Mr Ahmadinejad, a former high-ranking member of the revolutionary guard, would not have reached the run-off had it not been for the massive - and questionably legal - mobilisation conservatives effected. He is also backed by ultra-conservative clerics who have minimum belief in democracy, human rights and social liberties.
Fatemeh Khatami, born and raised in a religious family dominated by Khomeini's ideology, is now a passionate reformist who genuinely believes in human rights and democracy. In Farsi, the same word is used for "great grandchild" and "result". Fatemeh, not Mr Ahmadinejad, is the true result of Khomeini.
. Hossein Derakshan is an Iranian blogging activist who last visited Iran during the elections in June.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006