http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/recaps/articles/eav112103.shtmlA journalist who spent part of the summer in Tehran says Iran’s fundamentalist rulers expect reformists to fail in upcoming elections. This event would spur Iran’s theocrats to make overtures to the United States and introduce economic reforms, the journalist says. And Iranians – disillusioned, increasingly secular and chronically underemployed – may accept progress on these terms.
Afshin Molavi, who has written for EurasiaNet and others, told an Open Forum of the Open Society Institute how much he’d learned by traveling through Tehran on July 9 – the fourth anniversary of violent student protests. What struck him, he said, was how thoroughly the hardliners who control the judiciary had discouraged mass protest. After a three-year period in which the conservative Guardian Council – a 12-member group appointed by the country’s Supreme Leader – brazenly shut down independent newspapers and silenced critics, Molavi said, Iranians are more likely to talk about "economic pain" than about political yearnings.
On July 9, he explained, Tehran felt "eerily quiet." While the fundamentalist Guardian Council, headed by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, controls the judiciary and big sections of the security and economic systems, reformists, including President Mohammed Khatami, are "on the ropes." Molavi also sees thousands of Iranians who "reject" the entire government but remain "disorganized, leaderless, expectant and ineffective."
A hint of the fundamentalists’ success came at 8 a.m., he said, when he turned on his television to see that satellite signals from Iranian expatriate stations in Los Angeles, along with the Voice of America, had been blocked. The fact that satellite news from Los Angeles has become Iranians’ main source of information, Molavi explained, testified to the success of the media crackdown. Further testimony came at an early afternoon press conference when armed thugs working for the judiciary carried students away at gunpoint before a shocked group of reporters. The students, said Molavi, had been explaining why they were calling off protest actions for security reasons.
"A couple of years ago, the word ‘fear’ did not come up as often as it did this summer," Molavi told his audience. "The judiciary is trying to inject fear into the discourse." As a result, he said, student leaders who once placed their hopes in Khatami "are now more interested in leaving Iran."
Economic stagnation plagues Iran’s civilians. Molavi says conditions include 40 percent unemployment, annual emigration in the hundreds of thousands, and wages so weak that trained physicians often take jobs as market traders or taxi drivers. Things are so bleak, he said, that some express nostalgia for the dictatorship that prevailed before the 1979 Islamic revolution.
At the same time, Molavi said, Iran’s ruling theocrats are feeling more confident than ever. All the regional parties who had pressured them in the past – the Taliban in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and aggressively pro-Western officials in Russia – are either deposed or subdued. Molavi expects the Guardian Council to "vet" any 2005 presidential candidates who appear more radical than Khatami. This would lead to a rout at the polls, as reformists stay home in disgust, repeating a pattern that prevailed in Tehran’s City Council elections in March. It would also free the conservatives to claim a fresh mandate. That mandate, Molavi predicted, would lead them to "engage with the United States and open some social channels, just so that they can have political credit for advances."
Before any of that happens, though, mass repression will probably remain in force. Molavi made that clear with his description of the evening of July 9.
At around 6 p.m., Molavi said, he sat in the office of a Basij commander who showed him a fax ordering the volunteer militia to avoid the university area. This overt effort to scare students into feeling unsafe rippled through the city, Molavi said. On the way to Tehran University, he found several Basij checkpoints, where men in keffiyeh wearing buttons honoring the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini inspected cars and otherwise bullied travelers. "One person told me that the scene eerily recalled the early days of the revolution," Molavi said. The Basij have traditionally allied with conservatives, but their deployment on July 9 openly intimidated reformists. Molavi says the conservatives also tapped a more radical group, Ansar al-Hezbollah, to clamp down on protest.
As a result, Molavi said, a rock concert across town drew higher turnout than any protest action. "People said: look, I could go to the demonstration and get arrested or beaten, or I could go to a concert and have fun," Molavi said. "They were doing the math."
Despite this grim day, Molavi said, "civil society is not dead" and many Iranians in a burgeoning middle class yearn for freer lives. He noted that the country skews very young, and said that within a generation, up to 75 million voters will have no memory of active membership in the Islamic revolution. While conservatives will probably be able to control politics in the short term, Molavi pointed to several trends that could upset fundamentalists’ rule.
One is a growing anticlericalism among intellectuals. Molavi said he had seen ordinary clergy passed by as they try to hail cabs and otherwise face sneers from the public. This trend fits in with a broader philosophical acceptance of secularism among the middle class. With secularism comes, Molavi said, growing "resentment of" Iran’s funding to Hezbollah and Hamas and disaffection for the Palestinian cause in general. And all these trends fuel a surprising surge in Iranian nationalism, which has never informed the state’s politics as much as religion has.
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