Iran: Can the Green Movement Ally with Workers? (Maljoo)

Mohammad Maljoo writes for Middle East Report Online:

It is the custom of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, to devise a name for each Persian new year when it arrives. On Nowruz of the Persian year 1388, which fell in March 2009 Gregorian time, he proclaimed “the year of rectifying consumption patterns”. But Iranians would not be content to mark 1388 simply with thrift. That year of the Persian calendar turned out to be the most politically tumultuous since the revolution that toppled the Shah, as the loosely constituted Green Movement mounted massive street protests against election fraud.

Undeterred, Khamenei has dubbed the year 1389 “the year of doubling ambition and doubling work”, telling Iranians that, having moderated how much they consume, they must now outdo themselves in how much they produce. On the eve of May Day 2010, however, a group calling itself the Iranian Celebration Council of International Workers’ Day posted an online statement heralding a work force “pregnant with strikes” soon to be born. The Celebration Council was not widely known before this statement, but its words spread like wildfire through the network of websites sympathetic to the Green Movement. Is it possible that the Supreme Leader has badly misnamed the annum for the second time in a row? Could the current year of the Persian calendar turn out not to double work but to halve it, as Iranian workers walk off the job in support of the last year’s political ferment?

To the Streets

The Green Movement has its origins in the deep splits within the Islamic Republic’s ruling elite at the juncture of the 30th anniversary of the revolution, the last occasion when the Iranian street reigned supreme. The undemocratic structures in the post-revolutionary state have since withstood numerous pushes, inside and outside parliament, for substantive change. Iran’s “reformist moment” of 1997-2004 was notable for the inability of parliamentary reformers to rally popular forces, whose demands were often too radical for the Islamist politicians. The 2009 upheavals were qualitatively different, as millions marched in support of one post-revolutionary state insider, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, against another, the hardline incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Not long before his death that December, Mousavi’s newfound ally, the key revolutionary leader Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, made an unforgettable prognostication: “In the end the state will have no choice but to capitulate to the Green Movement.”

The intra-elite division is rooted in clashing political-economic interests, specifically the attempt of the narrow claque supporting Ahmadinejad to consolidate the levers of power in its own hands. Since Ahmadinejad won the presidency in 2005, his administration has largely ruled from behind closed doors, only rarely seeking to achieve its political goals through democratic procedure or even minimal consensus among other elements of the Islamic Republic. This move toward consolidation has been apparent in the economic domain as well, such as in the expansion of Revolutionary Guards business interests and the November 2009 statement by administration spokesman Gholam-Hossein Elham that “the Basij militia should do its best to take over the industrial sector in Iran.”

The deepest split of all may be in attitudes toward the very institution of elections. On one side, the reformists and others who value the republican traits of the Islamic Republic have tended to consider elections to be the best way for the elite to settle internal disagreements. Within the limits imposed by the Islamic Republic, the faction whose ideas the people like best will be in charge. On the other side, the hardliners have showed less and less respect for the concept of popular participation in politics, manipulating the voting in their own favor and then demanding that the official results be accepted. For them, elections are a rubber stamp. For the first faction, . The Green Movement -- demanding a credible system for determining “Where’s my vote?” -- feeds the antipathy between the two wings of the elite because it is focused on their main bone of contention.

Meanwhile, the hardliners’ shenanigans have brought their rivals within the state together with forces in the street. In the course of the mid-2000s, the reformist clerics and even moderate conservatives have lost the right to be elected, at least in practice, while Iranian citizens have been further divested of their already restricted choices in elections. There is an economic side to the partnership as well. The Green Movement is largely (though not entirely) made up of middle-class urbanites whose aspirations are tied to the greater liberalization that the reformists generally supported. They are technocrats where the hardliners’ backers are less-educated political loyalists; they want Iran to be more open to global commerce in goods and ideas; they are often pious, but they wish Iran could shed its puritan image and dispense with some of the more oppressively “Islamic” aspects of the post-revolutionary republic. In the late 1990s, it looked like such change could be achieved gradually through the ballot box, but no longer. With this alliance of interests forged, the institution of elections turned from a site of political struggle into a subject of political struggle.

The new site of struggle became the street. For eight months after June 12, 2009, date of the disputed presidential election, the confrontations in Tehran avenues went through numerous ups and downs, generating all manner of predictions of rapid political transformation. After a time, however, it appeared that a balance of street power had been struck. Neither side had achieved its goal and neither had retreated from its initial position: The Greens continued to demand that the state revisit the official election result and the state continued to refuse.

February 11, marked every year as “victory day” for the Islamic Revolution, was widely anticipated as the day when the Greens would reassert their dominance in the street. The state sponsors large rallies on this occasion, and the Greens believed they could humble the hardliners with enormous counter-demonstrations. Unexpectedly, however, it was the hardliners who stole the stage, sending hundreds of thousands into the streets to outnumber the Greens, whose ranks had been thinned by an intensive police crackdown. The stalemate endured on June 12, the first anniversary of the disputed election. Protesters lined major boulevards, but the sheer number of police and Basij paramilitaries deployed by the hardliners prevented the pro-Green forces from claiming the streets as their own.

Pinning Hopes on Labor

Since February 11, one reaction to this state of affairs has been to pin hopes on the Iranian working class. The idea is that workers, presumably the primary targets of Khamenei’s Nowruz pronouncement, will follow the middle class onto the scene of mass politics to create a new site of struggle at the point of production. This notion has been particularly attractive to those active in the labor and left movement before and during the 1979 revolution. Saeed Rahnema, for example, “The regime will be in serious trouble when workers and employees in the major industries and in social and government institutions start a strike as they did in the time of the Shah. Strikes are the most important aspect in my view. The regime will not change with street demonstrations alone.”

Iran has witnessed several spirited labor actions in recent years, well-known examples being the wildcat strikes of Tehran bus drivers and schoolteachers. But these actions have not crystallized into what can be called a coordinated, militant labor movement. Furthermore, militancy has not yet appeared in the most sensitive sectors of the economy, oil and transportation of freight. Hossein Bashiryeh, for example, has reported that in 2001 Iranian workers embarked on 303 labor actions across the country, less than six percent of which took place in the oil and transport sectors. Over 45 percent of these 303 strikes were called in protest of delays in pay, and most others also concerned bread-and-butter issues; . These trends of diffusion of protest and relatively small-bore economic demands have held during the Ahmadinejad presidency.

Having said that, the working class has certainly not been absent from the hurly-burly of politics nor from the Green Movement to date. In May, the Center to Defend the Families of Those Slain and Detained in Iran published the names of ten workers who have been killed in post-election street protests, and there is much other evidence that the post-election dissidents include many people without university educations. The hope of Rahnema and others, however, is that workers will go beyond joining the protests and paralyze factories and oilfields by refusing to work. , when a coalition of pro-revolutionary white-collar and blue-collar workers in the public sector emerged to facilitate the final steps on the path toward overthrowing the Pahlavi regime.

The expectation that the working class will save the Greens nevertheless seems to rely implicitly on an invisible-hand analysis, conveying the impression that the economically disenfranchised will join the struggle en masse as if by spontaneous combustion. More than anything else, Ahmadinejed’s plan to phase out price subsidies for such staples as gasoline, bread, water and electricity has lent this analysis its allure. Subsidy reform is predicted to have hyperinflationary consequences, combining with international economic sanctions to hit the working class especially hard. , “Iran is entering a severe economic crisis that increasingly will worsen the condition of the working class. [Ahmadinejad’s] coup d’état government is unable to manage this crisis. We will witness an expansion of working-class struggle that will ally itself with the Green camp.”

Hope Against Hope

But the invisible-hand analysis of Green Movement supporters suffers from at least two flaws. It is not so clear, firstly, that the working class is eager to join hands with the Greens despite the unprecedented level of worker dissatisfaction with the establishment. Mir-Hossein Mousavi refers broadly to social justice themes in his own remarks about the economy, but the core of the Green Movement leadership is devoted to an Iranian version of trickle-down economics, according to which the masses will eventually enjoy the good life but only if the elites prosper first and furiously.

The Green Movement has offered little in terms of a redistributive vision that could motivate the working class to flex its muscles. From the viewpoint of the working class, the current battle is one between one faction that wishes to spread the country’s wealth around the various precincts of the elite and another that aims to monopolize it. The working class would just as soon cast a pox on both houses.Secondly, there is reason to question a linear narrative whereby increasing economic pressures necessarily lead to the entrance of workers into the struggle and successful political action.

Read rest of article....

Iran Interview: Ahmad Batebi "The Green Movement and Mousavi"

Earlier this month, we featured Part 1 of Persian2English's interview with human rights activist Ahmad Batebi, who is living in exile in the US. The website has now published the second part of the discussion:

Maryam NY: I think you agree that supporters outside Iran need to unite more for the Iranian people’s movement. How can we be more united?

Ahmad Batebi: We Iranians think we are good and everyone else is bad.

Iran Interview: Ahmad Batebi “People’s Movement Will Stay Alive with Knowledge and Information”

For example, when you tell someone to come and take part in a demonstration, he or she says, “No, I’m not coming because there will be monarchists there.” Then you ask, “What’s wrong with that?” They respond, “Monarchists stole and robbed the country’s money and left Iran.”

Then you say, “Let’s go to another protest.” They say, “No, because there will be MKO (Mujahedin Khalq Organization) people there.” You ask, “Why is that bad?” They answer, “They went to Iraq in the midst of the Iran-Iraq war and betrayed the Iranian people.” Then you ask the monarchists, members of the MKO, and the leftists to come to a [planned] demonstration. They say they are not coming because Mousavi supporters will be there. You ask, “What is the problem with that?” They respond, “Mousavi was the Prime Minister at the time of the 1988 massacres.”

This shows that our mind passes judgment rapidly: “this is good” and “that is bad”. We think that we are right and good and others are wrong and evil.

The judge who sits in our minds is not a fair judge, but rather like a Saeed Mortazavi [former Tehran Prosecutor General, now an advisor to the President] who does not allow defence for the other side. People make mistakes. Everyone errs. Do you want to ban a person from entering the movement forever? The first step is to say that we are bad and others are good. Then we need to kill Judge Mortazavi from our heads and admit that we also make mistakes like others.

Maryam: In your view, should Mousavi explain his role in the 1988 massacres?

Batebi: No, not now.

Look, I am not a “Mousavist”. I believe that people should vote [in the Presidential elections], because I believe in active participation. I say that if everybody casts a vote, then every single person can make demands. The reason that the movement has become so strong is that many people participated [in the election]. Then they asked, “Where is my vote?” If we had boycotted the election, we wouldn’t have this many “creditors” asking for their shares.

But, I didn’t vote for Mousavi and I disliked him because I believed he was a little conservative and he still wants to take Iran back to its origins [of the 1980s].  However, as time passed, I realized that I was very wrong about Mousavi. It is true, my mode of thought is different from Mousavi’s. I am a secular person and I do not have many common views with him in such domains, but now, I have a lot of respect for him, because he has stood up to defend the people’s rights.

If we want to kill Mortazavi from our minds and judge [Mousavi] realistically, then in the era that Mousavi was Prime Minister, let’s consider that there were three separate powers [estates] in Iran: legislative, executive, and judiciary. Those who committed the murders were in the Judiciary. If we put ourselves in Mousavi’s shoes, in 1988, in the midst of war and conflict and while Khomeini was still alive and had such charisma, what should we have done? Were we supposed to kill Khomeini? Were we supposed to stand up to the Judiciary? The mood and atmosphere was not such that Mousavi could do anything in particular.

However, Mousavi should explain one day what the issues were, who was responsible, and what his role was. If he had made a mistake, he should apologize to the people, and if not, he should offer an explanation. He has to do this, but doing it now means hitting and beating ourselves. Once the movement prevails, then there is a lot of time to ask Mousavi to address this issue.

Maryam: The reason I suggested Mousavi to acknowledge the massacres is to unite the people more.

Batebi: But such an acknowledgment is only important for unifying people outside Iran. It’s not important for people who live inside Iran. It is enough for the Iranian people that Mousavi has had the courage to stand up to the ruling establishment. We who live outside the country cannot decide for the Iranian people. [What you mentioned] is the demand of the Diaspora community. I also believe he has to explain [his role], but we have more important issues to deal with right now. The people in Iran want the movement to continue breathing. It is better if Mousavi shows courage and stands like Karroubi. Then, later, we have time for all these debates.

Iran: To Lead or to Follow? 4 Cartoons on Mousavi and the Greens

There was a commotion last week over the first of these cartoons, drawn by Nikahang Kowsar, showing Mir Hossein Mousavi putting out "Statement #300". The reformist site Rooz had posted it but, after pro-regime media picked up on the cartoon as a sign of tension and decline in the opposition, withdrew Kowsar's caricature from its website.

Yet this has not been the only cartoon raising the political question --- tactical and strategic --- of Mousavi's place in the opposition and the Green Movement. We post three others which point to the important and ongoing discussion not only of "leadership" and activism but also of the Green Movement's relationship to groups pressing for political, legal, and civil rights in Iran.

Iran: Working Together? The Women's Movement & The Greens (Kakaee)

Last weekend Gozaar published a set of seven articles, all of which deserve reading, on the state of the opposition, the Green Movement, and activism for civil rights.



I have highlighted this analysis by Parisa Kakaee because it is my impression --- reinforced by conversations this week --- that the relationship between the "Greens" and civil rights groups is one of the most important issues in the evolution of the post-election situation in Iran.

A year ago today Iran was on the verge of entering a new chapter in its history. During the days before the election, an ongoing dialogue among different factions about whether or not to participate in political decision making, and the enthusiasm and excitement in the streets and at election headquarters, particularly among the youth, placed Iran in a position to undergo some unexpected events.

Different groups inside the women’s movement merged together and came to an accord over some minimum demands as their communal requisitions, and under the name of “convergence of the women’s movement to set forth demands in the election” entered the stage of the electoral campaign.

Coalition members who were present at the election centers and assemblies distributed brochures and carried placards expressing, “we vote for the demands of women.” This approach presented a new way for women to participate in the electoral process and seemed somewhat unfamiliar and unexpected for those members of society who were targeted by these messages, to a point where at times their inquiry about the nature of this practice and its place in the electoral process opened the door for lengthy discussions.

After the election results were announced, most people and social groups who were disappointed after all their efforts became desperate. In an attempt to compensate for their dismay and to claim their rights, they began to voice their protests collectively and with unprecedented unity. This was only the beginning of many aftershocks that went against all equations and became a reminder of the need for a new vision suitable for a different setting.

The irony was that while the demands of the social groups did not materialize and their inherent right to political participation was not recognized, and because women were part of the people and were campaigning by their side, and most importantly because of their known activities, women were among the first ones arrested and forced to pay a higher price.

The question is did all these events and the high repercussions bring the women’s movement closer to claiming its demands, or on the contrary is public awareness of the women’s movement that was slowly gaining momentum in society now further away and the path to success now longer than before?

Journalist and women’s rights activist Asieh Amini has an answer to this question:

Our expectations of the issues, groups and movements must be based on reality. Before the election, social groups and movements, including the women’s movement, had their own character and behavior and their interaction with society depended on the circumstances of time and place. The election disrupted all the political and social equations inside the country.

This change was not limited to the relationship between the women’s movement and the people, but was quite noticeable in other areas. Consequently we cannot expect that one social group remain unaffected by such a great event.

The pattern by which the women’s movement acted changed after the election. There was confusion among many groups and movements about how to maintain the usual trend of their activities. However, I believe that if we analyze this issue from different points of view, we may be able to draw different conclusions from what seems to be an “unpleasant event” and a “halt” in the process.

As I witness how the role of the women’s movement is becoming the subject of many analyses, or how the protest movements are adopting the non-violence approach, I see an extension of the women’s movement in society, its development and success, and not its interruption.

Following the 2009 presidential election, many activist women, not all belonging to the women’s movement, were arrested. Some unprecedented verdicts were issued against them and some of them are still serving time for their charges. It seems that the prevailing atmosphere facilitated the harsh treatment against the One Million Signature Campaign. The members who were arrested, like many other social groups, were falsely accused and went through long interrogations. Many women activists were forced to leave the country and this was a high price paid by the women’s movement after the election. As Asieh Amini puts it:

Even though the intensity of the arrests, the exodus of many citizens, the dispersion inside the country, the underground getaway, closure of internet sites, and the disruption of many demonstrations planned by women may be considered as negative, those who responded to the ensuing social movements were more than the one million individuals we expected in our Campaign, and this by itself is another noticeable accomplishment. In spite of the heavy price paid, it would be an incomplete analysis if we don’t acknowledge that the demands of the women’s movement are now being pursued in our society more seriously than before.

Khadijeh Moghadam, another women’s rights activist, believes that the way people stipulated a main demand in their protest, “where is my vote,” was something that was experienced before in the Campaign: “People, while not all aware of the Campaign’s stipulation and function, brought up a specific and tangible demand. It was the unique experience of this movement that without any leadership, and quite peacefully, this demand became pivotal.”

The change of demands after the election

Even though the convergence of the women’s movement , which included a spectrum of both secular and religious members, happened before the election, another section of this body, including some members of the One Million Signature Campaign were not in agreement with the movement’s new approach. They believed bringing up the demands of the Campaign in a new format in order to participate in the election would only serve to politicize an ongoing civil movement and would disseminate the potential of its members.

However, the women’s coalition came to an agreement over “joining the convention to eliminate discrimination against women” and “changing discriminatory laws” and announced these as the demands of the women’s movement. The result of the election, and disregard for the votes of political and social groups along with that of the public, transformed the demands and changed them into a common discourse. According to Asieh Amini, "Women’s demands after the election were not merely to change the laws anymore, but rather to seek democracy, to refrain from violence, to promulgate civil relations, to propagate civil protest and to dare say NO.”

Non-violent campaign

The major point on which the One Million Signature Campaign insisted  was to find ways to establish a dialogue with the regime and to achieve a cultural refinement of the public. These are its similarities with the Green Movement, which many activists believe has been copied successfully from the women’s movement.

What happened after the election was an overt aggression by the government, while the people persisted in continuing the campaign without violence, except for some occasional defensive behavior. Asieh Amini believes, “No excuse must distract people from the goal they believe in. If non-violent behavior is the pattern and the expectation, a peaceful and secured society must not allow any group to cause any deviation from this goal.”

The question is how can we make this behavior institutionalized? This journalist [Amini?] believes:

One of the challenges of the Green Movement and other movements such as that of women is the lack of any plan as to how to continue defensive campaigning. A non-violent campaign needs some creativity. It seems as though the think tanks that were responsible for organizing coalitions and unions in other movements, such as the women’s movement, which led to collective decision making were absent in the Green Movement. This was a serious void in what the Green Movement copied from the women’s movement.

On the other hand, an oppressive regime is nothing new. It has been seen throughout history how some political groups chose to use violence in response to a government’s oppression and how its negative impacts lingered around for many years. The civil movements received positive responses from Iranian society for choosing the most civil approaches. Resorting to violence will take us further away from security, peace, and democracy.

Another factor is that women’s presence in protests contributes to less violence. As Khadijeh Moghadam, another women’s movement activist, states:

If it were not for the presence of mothers and women in general in the public protests, there is no doubt violence would have escalated. A week after Neda was killed, the mother participants of the Green Movement, using the experience of the women’s movement, especially the Campaign, showed up in Laleh park and adjacent streets, Behesht-e Zahra, in front of Evin prison, the Revolutionary court, and the Judiciary building and demanded the end of killings, the prosecution of those responsible, and the release of those imprisoned for their beliefs. This was an unprecedented move in the history of the women’s movement in Iran.

For aforementioned reasons, although the women’s movement is considered a model for the Green Movement in some cases such as the promotion of a non-violent campaign, in order to employ more practical solutions to institutionalize the non-violent campaign, the movement needs to seek more appropriate approaches compatible with the new circumstances of this society and offer it in a more effective manner. This is because admiring the philosophy of non-violence is not enough to address the questions of the young generation who, these days, are finding themselves alone and vulnerable facing the most serious types of oppression.

Iran Request: Nonsense about "Twitter Revolution". Please Stop.

UPDATE 1825 GMT: Jared Keller has modified his final paragraph so it now reads, "The Green Revolution in Iran was muzzled, sadly, although the movement continues to put pressure on the Iranian regime a year after its initial protests. The Twitter Revolution, however, is far from over." He has also engaged in a productive dialogue over the original piece, noting his main intention was to establish the role of Twitter in events, correcting misconceptions, and adding, "I regret using 'totally stifled' as a rhetorical flourish [about the Green Movement]; I don't intend to make the same mistake in the future.

It's been wearying to read the recent mis-interpretation of social media and its place in the post-election conflict in Iran.

There is, however, a step beyond today, as Jared Keller of The Atlantic tries to set the record straight --- for which he should be thanked --- only to walk face-first into an even worse two-dimensional error. My response:

I am grateful that Jared Keller corrects the superficial notion --- sometimes put out in misunderstanding, sometimes to grab a cheap headline --- that Twitter is the movement for change in Iran.

Twitter is a tool --- a very powerful tool --- to keep information moving in and out of Iran even at the height of represssion by the regime.

It's ironic, then, that Mr Keller seems not to have used Twitter to lead him to the information of what is happening day-by-day in Iran, more than a year after the 2009 election. Had he done so, he would not have made the assertion --- as superficial as the notion of the "Twitter Revolution" and as ill-informed --- that "the Green Revolution in Iran was muzzled, sadly, its political organs now defunct and its development totally stifled".

The movement for civil rights is still much alive, with thousands defying arrest and intimidation to show up on streets in cities across Iran last Saturday and with political pressure building against the Government on a daily basis, both from the opposition and from "battles within the establishment".