Posted on 06/20/2003 8:33:25 AM PDT by yonif
President Bush, please help us. Ali M., Iran (E-mail sent to the BBC News website by an Iranian protester)
During a six-week period between November 17 and December 29, 1989, nonviolent protests swept through Czechoslovakia, bringing about the peaceful overthrow of the communist regime. The Velvet Revolution is the idyllic uprising: bloodless, courageous and popular.
Unfortunately, it was also the exception. That same year, pro-democratic Chinese students took a similar peaceful approach in Tiananmen Square. The bloody suppression that followed shattered the freedom movement and drove dissent underground for those lucky enough to elude incarceration or execution.
As pro-democracy protests in Iran begin to swell, sooner or later Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Sayed Ali Khamenei, will have to make a choice: Will it be Prague or Tiananmen Square?
At present it would be dubious to assume that the radical Islamist mullahs, the Council of Guardians, will allow a bloodless transformation of power. In fact the violence, though moderate, has already begun.
There were nightly clashes in Teheran last week, when hundreds of militants attempted to quiet protesters against the hard-line regime by attacking crowds of onlookers with knives and assorted weapons. Pro-clergy thugs, the baseejis or Ansar Hezbollah, have smashed university dormitories and beaten up students in a wave of violence aimed at intimidation.
But brutality probably won't be enough this time. First the 1979 Islamic revolution and its Shi'ite theocracy and now an impotent reformist have been unequivocally rejected by a younger generation that is not easily intimidated. (Experts say people 30 years or younger constitute 70 percent of Iran's 65 million population.)
On Sunday, recalling the spirit of Vaclav Havel's "Chapter 77" human rights initiative, a group of Iranian dissidents issued an extraordinary declaration defending the right to criticize their leaders. The 248 authentic reformists said the people of Iran had "the right to fully supervise the action of their rulers."
In 1968, with insurgency percolating, Alexander Dubcek took over as head of state of communist Czechoslovakia and introduced the "Prague Spring" reform program, which proposed to bring a "human face" to communism, to "reform communism from within." But after a brief respite hard-line communism was back in Czechoslovakia.
Like Dubcek, Iran's President Muhammad Khatami is a reformist in name only, as the Council of Guardians has veto power over any law he proposes. The president gave Iranians brief hope that policy reforms would be enacted. But other than some hollow words Khatami has refused to confront the council and a once-optimistic population has turned its back on him.
During the height of the Velvet Revolution a relatively unknown Communist Party leader, Karel Urbanek, was elected to lead Czechoslovakia and enact new "reforms." The public immediately rejected these superficial changes, having been through it all before in 1968. Czechoslovakians could look to Germany or Poland and see Europe transforming.
Likewise, Iranians will not be deceived when the next Khatami or so-called reforms are presented to them.
On Sunday President George Bush gave his personal endorsement to the pro-democracy demonstrations, called them "the beginnings of people expressing themselves toward a free Iran." Persian-language satellite television broadcasts operated by Iranian exiles in the United States have also spurred on the protesters.
But is it irresponsible to encourage reformists to attempt to overthrow Iranian theocracy with the threat of violence hanging over their heads, without assurances of US assistance? And if everything the administration says about Iran is true, wouldn't that make sense?
US officials have long argued that Iran could acquire a nuclear weapon by 2006 possibly before. Muhammad El-Baradei, director-general of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), toured Iran's nuclear facilities in February. Diplomats said he was taken aback by the advanced stage of a project using hundreds of centrifuges to enrich uranium.
Last week, a Japanese newspaper reported that Iranian nuclear experts made three secret visits to North Korea earlier this year, possibly to consult on ways to fool international inspectors.
A theocratic Iran in possession of nuclear weapons should be unacceptable to the US and is almost a casus belli for Israel. Wouldn't a popular revolution aided by the United States now be more desirable than Gulf War III in 2005?
By the time Czechoslovakia shook communism, a Soviet Eastern Europe was on its deathbed, with no future in sight. A free Iran is far more significant than the final outpost of a dying ideology.
But this revolution will only have a future if Khamenei and his mullahs realize they don't. For that they will need the free world's help.
The writer is an author and editor based in New York.
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