A Time to Say No
December 09, 2004
Iran va Jahan
Cyrus Kadivar
Earlier this week an extraordinary scene took place at Tehran University. It was Student Day and the Iranian president, Mohammed Khatami was giving a speech to 1,500 students who had gathered to listen to him in the auditorium.
For many of the young boys and girls present the hypocrisy was intolerable. How could they forget that five years ago in this same university hundreds of students had been beaten up by state-thugs and revolutionary militia – at least two were killed in their blood-stained dormitories and another pushed out of a third floor window.
Their sense of let-down was understandable. Thousands of their classmates still languished in prison. Those who have been amnestied continue to bear physical and psychological scars. The tales of torture and incarceration was still fresh in the minds of the students that day.
Suddenly, a clean-shaven male student in leather jacket and blue jeans stood up in front of the reporters and television cameras and addressing the president, shouted: "Shame on you!"
Another student, this time an attractive female student, her fine features covered in make-up and framed by a pretty silk scarf, could no longer stay quiet. “Where are your promised freedoms?" she demanded. A ripple of laughter, anxious looks and excitement filled the air.
A visibly-shaken Khatami adjusted his turban and began a pathetic defense of his record, criticising the powerful hardliners who have closed newspapers and jailed dissidents. But the heckling continued. More students cheered and booed the president. “Freedom for everyone,” they chanted. Observers later put this down to the students’ frustration with the collapse of Iran's reform movement and Khatami’s failure to standup to the conservatives who won the parliamentary elections in February 2004 and who now plan to seize the presidency in May 2005.
Khatami who is concluding his second and final term in office as a virtual lame duck - having once been seen as a force for great change in the Islamic republic, appeared uncertain as he vacillated between threatening to expel the challenging students and using conciliatory language. "There is no Third World country where the students can talk to their president and criticise the government as you do now,” he said.
The students were not impressed. In fact, their anger was shared by many Iranians who in the past 25 years have suffered abominably from a vile regime, evil-minded, paranoid and petty, who have relied on a huge security apparatus to spread fear and psychological terror around them.
"I really believe in this system and the revolution and that this system can be developed from within," Khatami told his unruly audience. Violence, mass executions, mob rule, and injustice: the 1979 Khomeini-led Islamic Revolution (which the marginalized President Khatami so fervently hopes to reform) was one of the most convulsive time periods in the history of the Iranian people and the world. Radicals, from left to right, seized control of the government, and thousands of innocent people lost their lives, all in the name of an elusive democracy.
In the name of exporting the revolution, a costly war between Iran and neighboring Iraq left millions of dead and homeless people on both sides. To add to these horrors, the hard line mullahs ordered the massacre of thousands upon thousands of suspected “counterrevolutionaries” in the summer and autumn of 1988.
Ayatollah Khomeini’s death in 1989 ushered President Hashemi Rafsanjani’s pragmatic era of reconstruction and controlled liberalization of society. The economic sector expanded. Overnight, the bonyads, an octopus empire operating behind so-called Islamic charities, began to finance a corrupt elite who brokered deals with European businessmen. Nevertheless, the unpopularity of the regime continued to deepen.
In 1997 Khatami rescued the faltering regime in a clever example of political engineering which opened a window of light on a dark landscape. Newspapers flourished and a certain amount of free speech galvanized a new generation of post-revolutionary intellectuals. Artists, writers, film directors found creative ways to fool censorship.
Within two year, in the summer of 1999, Iran’s students supported by male and female activists, rose in their thousands to demand an end to arbitrary rule and an end to the Cult of the Supreme Leader. It all ended in tears and bloodstained walls.
Indeed Khatami’s lack of sympathy for the students was unforgivable. The repression that has followed in recent years has clearly eroded any semblance of liberalism in the Islamic state. Newspaper editors, lawyers, former parliamentarians, writers, students and dissident clergymen found themselves harassed, beaten, tortured and jailed. Stick and carrots did not halt the public anger.
Sensing danger, the hardliners loyal to Supreme Leader Khamenei and encouraged by the ambitious ex-president Rafsanjani, appear to be reasserting themselves. The so-called reformists who once supported Khatami’s velvet revolution are in disarray. On the surface there seems to be no organized opposition group inside Iran.
What does exist however, is a simmering defiance that could translate into a broad act of civil disobedience. Thanks to the internet and satellite television and foreign radio broadcasts, the Iranian people no longer live in an isolated world of prayers and state propaganda. The dramatic images of the Ukrainian protests has stirred their imaginations, especially in the student campuses. The will of the people is a frightening and exhilarating force, especially for a regime that finds itself in a corner. For the moment there is a certain political stalemate. Will the Iranian people cross the line?
Anybody watching the photos of young students challenging the lame-duck President Khatami can sense the impatience and frustration in their determined faces and clenched fists. History is filled with stories of tyrants falling down overnight.
All revolutions devour their children. In Iran, because of its ambiguous, somewhat suspect origins, the revolution has gone full circle. Ostensibly it began as a movement to reform an absolute monarchy, gave birth to Islamic fundamentalism, and after several violent mutations ended in creating an even more ruthless tyranny.
What endangers the Islamic theocracy in Iran today is not an improbable US military invasion but the clear disillusionment of the majority of the Iranian people with Khatami and the regime he represents. The incredible expansion of NGO’s and public apathy points to widening gap between the Islamic state and the people.
The initial relief, hope and excitement that ushered Khatami’s enigmatic presidency has soured, adding to the unbearably painful trauma of ordinary Iranians. A new president will undoubtedly face an even greater challenge on the political, economic and social fault lines. Internationally, Iran faces a chorus of disapproval and criticism for its suspect nuclear agenda, support for terrorism and human rights abuses.
Looking back on Khatami’s legacy, we see a man of paradoxes. The man who opposed the tyranny of monarchy became an accessory of an incorrigible religious tyranny; the man who desired Islamic democracy watched helplessly as the die-hard revolutionaries crushed civil liberties and all opposition. His trust in the noble goals of the revolution whilst not acknowledging the evil nature of the system that created him, has doomed his place in history. Based on this paradox, his dream to reform the Islamic republic inevitably has turned to dust. Only a true referendum under international supervision can return power to the people of Iran.