Iran Analysis: Towards the Final Battle? (Zahra)

EA correspondent Ms Zahra takes a close look power and resistance in Iran:

Recent news from Iran gives an ambiguous impression. The regime carries out more arrests. It concentrates and extends its power: political (President Ahmadinejad's chief advisor Esfandiar Rahim Mashai now holds 18 additional offices), economic (the extensive sale of state-owned companies to Revolutionary Guard foundations), and military sphere (new Basiji headquarters in Tehran, heavy security measures for any of Ahmadinejad’s provincial visits).

Yet, at the same time, even a "cultural" step such as using hijab as a new cause for oppression attests to the weakness of this regime. Major political, economic, and social issues remain unsolved, with no attempt to deal with them on the horizon.


POLITICAL: The nuclear case is unresolved, and more sanctions loom. Corruption investigations of high-ranking officials such as 1st Vice-President Mohammad Reza Rahimi, have been postponed temporarily but could be pressed again by the Govenrment's "conservative" opponents. The tension over the ban on the last two reformist parties, Mosharekat (Islamic Iran Participation Front) and Mojahedin of the Islamic Revolution, lingers.

ECONOMIC: Ahmadinejad's subsidy cut plan has not been implemented two months after its approval by the Majlis. Disinvestment in the oil and gas sector, such as the South Pars and Assalouyeh fields, continues, oil sales are impeded by undeclared sanctions, and the general decline in production is not halted. Unemployment and inflation are growing, while the cases of unreturned loans (allegedly up to $50 millions) to state banks are pending.

SOCIAL: Eleven months after the disputed presidential elections, thousands of protesters are still imprisoned, and the cases of more than 100 demonstrators killed on the streets, raped in prisons, or tortured to death in facilities such as Kahrizak remain unsettled. Purges in universities and offices have not quieted protest.

Instead of addressing these crucial problems, Ahmadinejad’s government resorts to “moral” issues to discipline youth and women, the two groups of Iranian society who have constantly established their resistance against his backward social policies.

Meanwhile the opposition is closing ranks: even though the clergy in general has remained silent, high-ranking clerics such as Ayatollah Sane’i or Ayatollah Dastegheib, following the example of the late Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, have sharply condemned governmental violence against protesting citizens.

This year’s May Day was an opportunity to build relations between the Green Movement and labour unions, and last Friday four Islamic labour associations declared that they would merge. Executions of Kurdish citizens have led to an unprecedented wave of solidarity, addressing the relationship of Iran's majority society to its ethnic minorities. Peaceful protests in Kurdish areas attest to a tacit adoption of the Green Movement’s principle of non-violence.

Editorial staffs of Green websites have issued a joint statement on resistance. Women of all political currents celebrated their union in a moving Nowruz meeting of publishers, lawyers, and human rights activists (for example, Shahla Lahiji, Nasrin Sotudeh, and Minou Mortazi) with Zahra Rahnavard. Students organise rallies and fasts for their imprisoned professors and comrades, popular artists boycotted the state-owned Islamic Repbulic of Iran Broadcasting, and the international Fajr Film Festival. Authors and their associations issue statements against repression and dedicate poems to the executed.

One may ask why the embattled Presidential candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi and the former President Mohammad Khatami have not yet formed a joint front of opposition. The probable answer is that diversity is likely to attract more supporters from different political camps. Conflicting concepts, which become apparent in their statements such as Karroubi's last letter, can reflect the pluralistic nature of this popular movement.

Recent developments point to a growing division of Iranian society into two camps. The economic and military power of the Government, backed by the Revolutionary Guard and Basiji faces a majority of unarmed and impoverished people.

But the appearance of power vs. the powerless is superficial. This government is incapable to solve fundamental economic issues, which will impede its efforts to concentrate its military power in the long run. As soon as the government is not able to pay its (para)-military forces sufficiently, its last stronghold will crumble. Infusing Basiji and other paramilitary forces with “revolutionary” ideology may stop this disintegration temporarily, but even these troops do not live in a social vacuum. Even the pretext of the preservation of Islam to oppress dissidents has much lost of its credibility since the historically unprecedented killings of unarmed protesters on the religious festival of Ashura (27 December).

The Islamic Republic's most radical, undemocratic and reactionary forces have declared war on Iranian civil society, which has proven during the past 11 months its commitment to a modern, pluralistic, and peaceful Islamic state. This may the last battle of those forces as they try to deny the social and political transition of an Islamic state towards a democratic society.