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The complexities of change in
Iran
By Jeremy Brecher
(Posted with permission from
Foreign Policy in Focus)
This June, vigilante forces attacked nonviolent
Iranian student protesters, charging them on motorcycles
and assaulting them with batons, chains and knives.
Instead of protecting the students against the vigilante
attacks, the Iranian government threatened to punish the
students severely and arrested over 4,000 people. A new
round of protests scheduled for early July was thwarted
by a ban on meetings, the closing of university dorms,
and the kidnapping of three student leaders. Continuing
repression of the student movement, combined with deep
popular unrest, is likely to keep the Iranian conflict
in the world spotlight.
Normally, the global
peace movement and political left would respond to
repression by an authoritarian, theocratic regime with
outrage and protest. But so far there has been a
deafening silence. The reason is probably not that peace
activists don't care about democracy and human rights
when they are trampled by opponents of America. More
likely there is wariness about intervening in a complex,
multiplayer drama in which the left could have an impact
contrary to what it intends. The purpose of this essay
is to promote the discussion needed to help the movement
see its way clear to a more forthright, but responsible,
response. Such a discussion may also help clarify other
situations in which the peace movement and the left must
respond to authoritarian regimes opposed to US
imperialism.
Iran has long had a strong and
recurring internal conflict between autocratic and
democratic tendencies. Its first constitutional movement
forced the shah (monarch) to accept an elected
parliament nearly a century ago, and powerful democratic
movements have periodically arisen since that time.
In 1953, the National Front movement, based in
the urban middle class and led by Mohammad Mossadegh,
aspired to nationalize the British-controlled
Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Newly elected US president
Dwight Eisenhower authorized the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) to cooperate with a British plan to
overthrow the Mossadegh government. The coup was
successful, and the shah was established as a virtual
dictator. He froze out the democratic nationalist
elements that had backed Mossadegh and, with strong
backing from the US, ruled by tyranny, terror and
torture. The US soon succeeded in taking Iran's oil
industry from the British. US policy designated Iran
along with Israel as Washington's "surrogates" for
control of the Middle East.
A recently disclosed
aspect of the CIA operation is that it included
unprecedented political mobilization of the
traditionalist, fundamentalist Shi'ite religious leaders
known as the mullahs. As Gabriel Kolko put it, the US
"eliminated a secular, middle-class nationalism". As
throughout the Middle East, rebellion and discontent
increasingly took on fundamentalist Islamic forms and
ideologies.
Resistance to the shah grew as the
regime become more and more repressive. In 1978 massive
street demonstrations led to bloody confrontations with
the shah's police, and the shah's peasant-based army
soon disintegrated. The revolutionary movement had many
tendencies, but the religious leaders who had first been
politicized by the CIA ultimately won out. In 1979 the
shah fled into exile, and Iran was declared an Islamic
republic. Though elections and some other democratic
forms remained, the mullahs possessed ultimate power and
used mass executions, long incarcerations, and vigilante
violence to impose their will.
A New
generation
Over the course of the 1990s, a new
Iranian generation came of age that increasingly
despised the repressiveness and corruption of the
theocratic regime and the poverty and isolation to which
it was consigning the country. A reformist movement
elected Mohammad Khatami as president. According to
Human Rights Watch, today Iran is caught in a continuing
power struggle between elected reformers, who control
both the presidency and parliament, and clerical
conservatives, who exercise authority through various
offices, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, the judiciary and the Council of Guardians,
and elements of the security forces.
Many
students and other Iranians have lost faith in the
nonconfrontational strategy of the elected reformers. A
quiet but carefully conducted poll in 2002 showed broad
opposition to the regime's policies.
The current
protests, the latest in a series, began with student
opposition to a plan to charge tuition at state-run
universities. The protests spread to a dozen cities, the
demands deepened to include full democratization, and
support included many adult onlookers, who honked car
horns in approval of the student demonstrators. The
movement is self-organized and nonviolent and has wide
public support.
The student movement's principal
demand is to eliminate the power of the
self-perpetuating theocratic elite over the Iranian
government and to allow the elected government to rule
without the "guidance" of the mullahs and their allies.
One widely discussed method to accomplish this proposes
a referendum giving full authority to the elected
government.
A complex picture
This
situation appears to be a straightforward confrontation
of idealistic young democrats and repressive
fundamentalist authoritarians. But it is embedded in a
context of geopolitical manipulation that complicates
the picture.
Over the last quarter century,
every US administration has implacably opposed the
Islamic Republic in Iran. During the Iran-Iraq war,
Washington even supported Saddam Hussein as a bulwark
against Iran. This is hardly because the US has sought a
democratic Iran - it supported both the mullahs and the
shah at one time or another. Rather, it sees Iran as a
critical source of oil and a powerful country that
currently threatens - but could support - both US and
Israeli interests.
Germany, France, Britain and
Russia have taken advantage of US isolation from Iran to
develop ties with the regime and to profit from its oil
wealth. According to the New York Times, France, for
example, is "committed to the stability of the Islamic
Republic". Opportunistic European support for the
current Iranian regime has actually led many of its
opponents to consider the US as their only potential
savior.
As part of its post-September 11
bluster, the Bush administration declared Iran part of
the "axis of evil" and has made numerous threats against
it. In order to amplify those threats, the White House
has seized on recent indications that Iran is continuing
its quest for nuclear weapons, which was initiated by
the shah. Washington has pressured the European Union,
Russia, and the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) to encourage Iran to accept tighter monitoring of
its nuclear programs.
Currently the Bush
administration is divided on its Iran policy. Mainstream
conservatives in the State Department have been inclined
to support the official reform movement, whereas
neo-conservatives in the Defense Department see an
opportunity to promote a pro-US revolution in Iran.
The Bush administration has repeatedly hinted
that it might pursue an Iraq-style attack and
occupation. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice,
echoing threats that preceded the US attack on Iraq,
recently spoke of a "Made in America' solution" if
multilateral action does not produce results. "Sometimes
one has to fight wars to deal with tyrants," she warned.
Notwithstanding such implicit threats, the problems of
managing the aftermath of a US attack on Iran appear to
be an awesome deterrent.
President George W Bush
recently praised the student protests as "the beginning
of people expressing themselves toward a free Iran".
This comes as US troops regularly censor the media and
shoot down demonstrators next door in Iraq. Although the
Bush administration may wish to use student protest to
destabilize the situation in Iran, Washington is
notorious for promoting revolts that it is not then
willing to buttress - witness the US encouraged
uprisings by Kurds and Shi'ites in Iraq after the Gulf
War that Saddam was allowed to suppress with extreme
brutality. So the White House is unlikely to have
scruples about cheering on the Iranian students to
destruction. Encouraging the student revolt is done in
the interest of Washington's agenda, which can not be
accurately described as seeking freedom, independence
and self-determination for the people of Iran.
The actual impact of Bush administration
destabilization efforts is difficult to evaluate. Bush's
endorsement of the student movement may already have
helped hardliners legitimate their suppression of the
students as necessary to guard against "foreign forces".
On the other hand, fear of foreign intervention may also
serve as a constraint. For example, after the start of
the student demonstrations, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei said on state television, "I call on the pious
and the [conservative cadres] not to intervene whenever
they see riots." Two days later, a right-wing militia
pledged not to take part in the street skirmishes.
Such restraint may lead some supporters of
democratization to see US threats as a way to accelerate
reform. But that presumes that democratization really
matters to the Bush administration. In fact, the mullahs
are less likely to respond to US threats by conceding
democracy and human rights to their citizens than by
offering concessions suited to the real Bush agenda -
such as oil deals and a cooperative stance regarding
Iraq.
Dilemmas for the peace
movement
For the global peace movement and the
left, this situation presents several interlocking
dilemmas. How is it possible to promote human rights and
democracy in Iran without strengthening Washington's
drive to dominate the world in general and the Middle
East in particular? How is it possible to oppose
European support for the Islamic Republic without
undermining the development of a much-needed united
front for the containment of US aggression? How is it
possible to encourage disarmament and restrict the
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction while
discouraging US threats against Iran and other
countries?
The problem is in some ways parallel
to that faced by the international peace movement in the
1980s, when repression of nonviolent antiauthoritarian
revolts in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe
coincided with aggressive US military expansionism. At
that time, the European nuclear disarmament movement
developed a sophisticated strategy that simultaneously
increased pressure for human rights in the East and
demilitarization in the West. Today we need to build
democratic alternatives to the tyranny of the mullahs,
the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and
the devastation that the US has wreaked on Afghanistan
and Iraq and now threatens to visit on Iran.
The
goal for the global antiwar movement and the left should
be a nonviolent transition to democracy in Iran complete
with human rights and freedom from domination by outside
powers. The movement should aim to empower the Iranian
people against the mullahs, the US the EU, or anyone
else who would treat them as pawns for self-serving
agendas.
Next steps
The first step
toward this goal is to demand that the Iranian regime
release all political prisoners, regardless of their
beliefs, and end the suppression of protesters' human
rights by its own agencies and those of vigilante
groups. There is also a clear need to support the
peaceful struggle of the Iranian people for democracy,
including a referendum to decide their own future. An
important aspect here is the demand that European
countries and the EU end both tacit and active support
for the suppression of human rights and democracy by the
Iranian regime.
International support for human
rights played a major role in the democratization in
Poland, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.
History indicates that outside support for responsible
government can have a substantial impact in Iran as
well. In 1996, a German court implicated Islamic
Republic leaders of assassinating their opponents in
Berlin. Several European countries then briefly cut
diplomatic ties with the regime. The ruling had a huge
impact on Iranian opinion, contributing substantially to
the reformist President Khatami's landslide victory.
Support can take the form of action as well as
words. In Poland, labor and left activists bolstered the
Solidarity movement by smuggling in printing presses,
fax machines, photocopiers and other means for
mobilizing the public. Satellite broadcasts are already
playing a significant support role for the Iranian
movement. More direct contact, ranging from solidarity
delegations to the kind of volunteer human rights
observation and nonviolent intervention provided by the
"Internationals" in Palestine, would be difficult but
appropriate. So would a campaign for international human
rights monitors.
Such an approach is almost the
opposite of a US "liberation" that seeks to impose
"democracy" and "human rights" through war and
occupation, along the model of Afghanistan and Iraq. The
international peace movement should demand human rights
and democratization in Iran alongside its demands for an
end to the US occupation in Iraq and the Israeli
occupation in Palestine.
The left must also lay
out an approach to the problem of weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) that provides an alternative to the
selective Bush administration policy of threatening to
unilaterally "Saddamize" WMD-aspiring states. A good
starting point is to demand that all countries support
the Syrian-sponsored UN proposal to make the Middle East
a WMD-free zone.
This would require the US and
other powers to address the issue of Israeli nuclear
weapons as part of discussions about eliminating weapons
of mass destruction. And in order for any response to
proliferation to be effective, the existing nuclear
powers would need to meet their responsibilities under
the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by moving promptly
toward the elimination of their own nuclear weapons. In
such a context, specific demands that Iran not build
nuclear weapons and that it comply with IAEA demands for
answers to questions about its nuclear program are
appropriate. But such demands need to be combined with
negotiations to provide Iran with other means of
security against military attack.
Iran is only
one of many countries that appear to oppose the Bush
administration's imperial juggernaut but that also
suppress the human rights of their own people. It is
always a temptation for the peace movement and the left
to soft-pedal our critique of such regimes out of a
feeling that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." It is
particularly hard to find a balanced position when
Washington is utilizing the flaws of those regimes it
opposes to justify aggression against them while
ignoring the equal or greater crimes of regimes it
supports.
Failure to defend human rights in such
circumstances only plays into the hands of the Bush
juggernaut, however. Perhaps the most effective Bush
administration justification for its aggression,
especially with the media-manipulated American people,
is its claim that the US overthrow of regimes like those
in Afghanistan and Iraq frees people from tyranny and
establishes human rights and democracy. Any movement to
terminate the Bush juggernaut shoots itself in the heart
when it fails to identify a better way for people to
liberate themselves from oppression. We can't afford to
provide any justification for the charge that we are the
defenders of tyrants. Let us instead be known as people
whose fundamental solidarity is not with one or another
government but with all people who are struggling for
liberation from oppression.
Jeremy
Brecher jbrecher@igc.org is a historian and
the author of 12 books, including Strike! and
Globalization from Below, and is a regular
contributor to Foreign Policy in Focus
(Posted with permission from Foreign
Policy in Focus)
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