Iran, from confrontation to reconciliation? By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Mohsen Rezaee, a former commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and
a candidate in last year's presidential race, who is currently secretary of the
powerful Expediency Council, has written to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei urging him to issue a conciliatory statement that would set into
motion "a new movement for unity and brotherhood of all".
He wrote, "[Opposition leader] Mr Mir Hossein Mousavi's retreat from denying
the government of Mr [Mahmud] Ahmadinejad and his constructive suggestion that
parliament and the judiciary should act according to their legal functions with
respect to the government's responsiveness, although belated, could be the
beginning of a unifying movement in the opposition front with others."
After months of high political drama that saddled Iran with now
familiar scenes of street mobilizations and counter-mobilizations by opposition
and pro-government forces, culminating in multiple deaths and hundreds of
arrests, instead of the "imminent collapse" of the Islamic republic, as widely
propagated in the Western media, the country is on the verge of an about-turn
toward stabilization and political reconciliation.
"The system has the power to reach this important objective through foresight
and by adopting a respectful outlook mixed with kindness toward all the people
and groups," Mousavi wrote in his latest statement in which he set forth five
proposals to exit the "current serious crisis".
Mousavi's move toward reconciliation may be interpreted by other factions of
the heterogeneous green movement as "capitulation" and, consequently, he must
show his followers some tangible gains by making his political "retreat". Any
reconciliation process is sure to be complicated and subject to the strains of
a highly polarized polity.
In addition to Rezaee, a number of leading Tehran politicians, including former
president Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, head of the Expediency Council, have
called for "unity of all" and a "return to calm".
Hence, the early part of 2010 will likely feature a qualitative turn-around
from the tumult of the past seven months following the controversial
presidential elections in mid-June and the intermittent flurry of opposition
demonstrations in Tehran and other cities. The protests were most recently
motivated by the death of pro-reform Grand Ayatollah Hoseyn Ali Montazeri,
whose funeral ceremonies gave the green movement an opportunity to drum up its
democratization demands.
A serious miscalculation on the part of the green movement, by holding
political rallies last Sunday during the holy ceremonies of Ashura, has clearly
backfired, especially since some militant demonstrators turned violent and
attacked police stations, threw Molotov cocktails at police vans, and beat up
members of the riot police.
Both Mousavi and a number of intellectual leaders of the green movement, such
as Akbar Ganji, have explicitly distanced themselves from the violent
demonstrators, with Ganji going further and writing that "our problem today is
that some notable personalities of the movement and many of its intellectuals
have mortgaged themselves to the collective populist action [the opposition
street rallies] ... Resorting to violence is not justifiable under any excuse."
Not everyone affiliated with the green movement subscribes to such advice on
the importance of non-violent resistance. A case in point is filmmaker Mohsen
Makhmalbaf, who was a close advisor to Mousavi's presidential campaign last
June and who now from self-imposed exile in France issues incendiary rhetoric
for the overthrow of the Islamic Republic. He has accused the supreme leader of
turning into a "Yazid", that is, the chief nemesis of historical Shi'ism, thus
disregarding Ganji's warning that "the choice of Hosseini-Yazidi discourse is a
very dangerous strategy."
To date, Mousavi, despite his latest communique's pledge of loyalty to the
"Islamic constitution", has not explicitly dissociated himself from his radical
supporters, such as Makhmalbaf, who have inadvertently done much damage to the
legitimacy of the green movement by their violent discourses.
Nor has Mousavi shown any signs of self-criticism in his call on the government
to recognize that there is a serious crisis in Iran - and the fact that he is
partly responsible for creating the crisis, which could have been mostly
avoided had he conceded defeat and recognized Ahmadinejad's electoral victory
instead of clinging to allegations of rigged elections.
A much more important issue deals with the Barack Obama administration in the
United States, in light of the US president's forceful condemnation last week
of the government's crackdown on protesters, defending the latter as simply
citizens who want their full democratic rights. For a president who took office
a year ago by sending clear messages to Tehran that he was not interested in
regime change in Iran, Obama now in some ways resembles his predecessor, George
W Bush, who, before assuming the presidency and launching wars in Afghanistan
and Iraq, kept promising America and the world that he was not interested in
the US's role in "nation-building".
Obama's failure to condemn the anti-government violence in Iran and to urge
law-abiding behavior by the opposition has been widely interpreted in Iran as a
sign of the US's meddling in Iran's internal affairs, thus putting the green
movement and its leadership on the defensive.
Pushed into a corner by a combination of repression from above and ill-advised
tactics and strategies from below that has insulted the religious sensibility
of Shi'ite Iranians, the green movement is gripped by a crisis of its own
making, This now necessitates remedial measures to regain the peaceful and
purely reformist nature of the movement from the clutches of extremist
tendencies.
Should the green movement succeed in this difficult task of self-regrounding on
a firm legalist and reformist footing, the guarded optimism about political
reconciliation invoked in the above lines could be realized.
In conclusion, an important sign of the government's flexibility and
willingness to tread the path of political reconciliation is its decision to
allow the pro-reform newspaper, Bahar, to publish again after being banned. Led
by Saeed Pour Azizi, a former press secretary of former president Mohammad
Khatami, Bahar is destined to fill an important vacuum in articulating a sound,
coherent and measured reformist discourse in Iran.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New
Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) . For his Wikipedia entry,
click here. His
latest book,
Reading In Iran Foreign Policy After September 11 (BookSurge Publishing
, October 23, 2008) is now available.
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