Leading opposition figures in Iran are facing a purge, judging from comments by the commander of the elite Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). Mohammad-Ali Jafari has alleged that reformist leader Mohammad Khatami, and former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani’s son, have been working to undermine the Islamic Republic and the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Jafari cited confessions of jailed reformist politicians arising from the current show trials to justify his allegations. He quoted Mohammad-Ali Abtahi, Khatami’s former vice-president, as saying his former boss aimed to “achieve a ruling system in which there was either a very weak supreme leader or no supreme leader“.
The IRGC commander is a leading hard-liner and proponent of asymmetrical warfare against the West. Exiled analyst Mohsen Sazegara, a founding member of the Guards, said Jafari’s appointment in 2007 was akin to putting the IRGC on a war footing, deepening its political involvement and tightening its grip on state institutions.
The allegations have fostered fears of a wider cultural revolution aimed at wiping out dissident voices within state institutions. Hardliners are also targeting universities, fearful that the forthcoming return to classes will see a revival of the unrest that followed the fraudulent June 12 election.
”It’s possible that since they haven’t been able to repress the movement completely…with the start of the classes there might be more protests,” says Ghasem Sholeh Saadi, a former legislator and a professor at Tehran University.
The regime has reason to fear the precedent set by earlier student protests, The Economist notes:
In the autumn of 1978 the beleaguered shah postponed the autumnal return of Iran’s politically disgruntled students to their universities by several months. But when the institutes of learning eventually opened their doors, the students soon poured furiously into the streets in their tens of thousands, until, in the growing mayhem, the shah fled and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini replaced him. Could the same process occur all over again?
The Stalinist-style show trials, suppression of protesters and internecine divisions within the ruling elite suggest that the Islamic Republic is far from the beacon Khamenei describes as “a third way different from dictatorships and tyrannical systems on the one hand and democracies removed from spirituality and religion on the other.”
But the show trials may be prompting a backlash from the Iranian public, analysts suggest. “What’s happening is that [the government] is trying to discredit the reformist opposition and cow the rest of the population,” says Stanford University’s Abbas Milani. “My sense, from what I hear, is that people are having the exact opposite reaction,” he adds.
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