A 20-year obsession with forestalling a ‘velvet revolution’ against the Islamic Republic drives Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, a Washington meeting heard today. Taken aback by the democratic rhetoric and momentum generated by Mir-Hossein Mousavi’s supporters, the regime is likely to consolidate around a hard-line axis reflecting the dominance of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IGRC).
“The people are ahead of Mousavi,” said Mohsen Sazegara, a co-architect of the Guards and former deputy prime minister. “During the Islamic Revolution, it was an insult to call someone a liberal,” he told the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
But now the younger generation and the urban middle class are demanding democracy, liberalism and human rights. Mousavi has always remained a principle-ist, committed to defending the Islamic Republic, but many of his supporters felt they could use his candidacy as a “bridge to democracy.”
Mousavi “is not a liberal at all,” Sazegara said recently ”He is a moderate. He tried to show himself in the debates and in propaganda that he is a moderate and is someone who can bring together all of the factions of the Islamic republic.”
Mousavi’s inner circle is under tremendous pressure from Khamenei, Sazegara told the WINEP meeting, but it is not in any position to manage the current demonstrations which are largely spontaneous.
The “next phase” should consist of a general strike alongside a concerted attempt to persuade the police, army and the Revolutionary Guards not to open fire on peaceful protesters, said Sazegara, who is profiled in a recent book on Middle East democrats. Ominous reports that several leading IGRC generals have been arrested suggest that the regime is preparing a crackdown.
The current “very fragile situation” could likely lead to “several episodes of bloodshed”. But 35 years of experience in Iranian politics and observing the largest mobilizations since the Islamic Revolution tells him that people can be mobilized through non-violent struggle to defeat the regime.
Recent events confirm a change in the nature of the regime rather than a factional shift, said the Washington Institute’s Mehdi Khalaji, a consolidation of power within the “totalitarian complex” at the regime’s core at the expense of the Presidency and the Majlis, the system’s relatively democratic institutions.
Khamenei has distanced himself from the clerics and the older revolutionary generation associated with former presidents Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami, he said. The degree to which the traditional elite is fracturing is evident in the Youtube video in which Rafsanjani’s wife calls for people to go to the streets to defend their rights.
This view concurs with another analysis which suggests that the current coup is the culmination of a long-running contest between Khamenei and Rafsanjani in which Ahmedinejad and Mousavi, respectively, have served as proxies.
Whereas Rafsanjani’s focused on the senior echelons within the power structure, such as the, Expediency Council, Qom clerics, the Majlis, and the merchant class represented by the Tehran bazaar, Khamenei remained head of all three government branches, state media, and the armed forces, and expanded his political base through control of “lucrative institutions such as Imam Reza Shrine or the Oppressed Foundation, which have almost unlimited capacity for extending political patronage.”
It is this network that mobilized in support of Ahmedinejad’s candidacy as the “IRGC and the Basij volunteers running into tens of millions swiftly mobilized [and] coalesced with the millions of rural poor who adore Ahmedinejad as their leader [in] a repeat of the 2005 election.”
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