Iran: regime internationally assertive, but still domestically vulnerable

Iran’s Islamic Republic is extending its crackdown against the Green opposition movement to expat critics. Its actions confirm the concerns of democracy activists and analysts alike that authoritarian regimes are deploying more sophisticated technologies to identify and suppress reformist voices.

The regime’s hard-line Revolutionary Guards and the intelligence ministry “each have their own, separate Internet-monitoring units that track prominent political figures and activists,” a Wall Street Journal investigation reveals:

Late last month, at a military parade in Tehran, intelligence minister Heydar Moslehi announced the training of “senior Internet lieutenants” to confront Iran’s “virtual enemies online.” This month Iran announced a 12-member unit within the armed forces called the Internet Crime Unit to track individuals “spreading lies and insults” about the regime.

The regime’s cyber-suppression confirms fears that the web is a double-edged sword for democracy activists, facilitating international communications and cyber-solidarity while also allowing autocratic governments identify and intimidate those same activists (or “slacktivists”).   

The Revolutionary Guards’ Brigadier General Masoud Jazayeri, recently called for “a system to retaliate against the psychological war that has been launched by our enemies” and described overseas supporters of the Green Movement as “foreign extensions of a soft coup”.

“A large number of the enemy’s infantry has been identified,” he said, warning that “the Islamic Republic will not allow the extensions of a soft coup to act on another sedition and if necessary, the government will make them face serious challenges.”

The regime’s paranoid conviction that domestic unrest is fabricated abroad is evident in Haleh Esfandiari’s account of her incarceration In Evin Prison. Imprisoned for several months after visiting her ailing mother, the Woodrow Wilson Center scholar details how “it was the National Endowment for Democracy and the Open Society Institute (OSI) that earned [her principal interrogator] Ja’fari’s most intense scrutiny.”

In a further indication of the continuing crackdown, leading Iranian economist Saeed Laylaz was this week sentenced to nine years in prison for his part in the Green opposition. At least 81 people, including reformists, journalists and activists, have received prison sentences of up to 15 years for protesting against the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The sentencing of Laylaz came a day after leading dissident cleric Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri urged the regime to “correct their wrong way and gain people’s and God’s satisfaction” following the post-election turmoil.

“Killing, intimidation, threats, arrests, illegal trials against Islamic sharia law, heavy and unfair sentences of political activists and freedom-seekers will not affect their [the people's] will… in demanding rights,” Montazeri said in a statement posted on his website.

As the architect of Velayat-e Faqih, or guardianship of the jurist, the theological basis of the Islamic Republic,  Montazeri “is able to delegitimize [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei more than anybody else,” notes  Mehdi Khalaji, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a former student in Qum:

We have many intellectuals who criticize this regime from the democratic point of view …He criticizes this regime purely from a religious point of view, and this is very hurtful. The regime wants to say, ‘If I am not democratic enough that doesn’t matter, I am Islamic.’ [But] he says it is not an Islamic government.

From his home in Qum, Iran’s center of theological learning, Montazeri has issued a series of politically charged fatwahs, criticizing the regime and encouraging the Green opposition. In one recent written comment he insisted that:

A political system based on force, oppression, changing people’s votes, killing, closure, arresting and using Stalinist and medieval torture, creating repression, censorship of newspapers, interruption of the means of mass communications, jailing the enlightened and the elite of society for false reasons, and forcing them to make false confessions in jail, is condemned and illegitimate.

Another founder of the Islamic Republic to turn against his creation is Mohsen Sazegara. Credited with initiating the Revolutionary Guards, he is now an exiled critic of the Pasdaran’s growing power  in political, financial, media and military spheres. He now describes the regime as “a religious dictatorship” and the Guards as “a corrupt and dangerous mafia.”

Criticized by many Iranian democrats for his record as a leading proponent of Islamic Revolution who presided over severe human rights abuses, Sazegara now believes “the only solution for Iran is a liberal, democratic and secular government.”

Mir Hussein Moussavi, the presidential candidate whose fraudulent defeat by Ahmadinejad prompted the Green movement, has a similarly chequered past, writes Freedom House’s Andrew Apostolou. “The human rights abuses of the Moussavi era relegate Ahmadinejad’s to historical footnotes,” he notes:

Religious and ethnic minorities suffered particularly harsh treatment; for example, more than 200 Baha’is were executed, all Baha’i organizations were declared to be criminal in August 1983, three-quarters of Iran’s remaining Jews fled the country, and thousands were killed in a “counterinsurgency” campaign in Iran’s Kurdish regions. The cultural scene was devastated by a “cultural revolution” in which the regime violently seized control of universities, “Islamized” courses, informally barred all Baha’is from universities, threw academics out of their jobs, banned books, and rejoiced in the flight of dissident intellectuals.

Yet it’s precisely his revolutionary past and current insider credentials – he still has a seat on (but doesn’t attend) both the Expediency Council and the Supreme Council for the Cultural Revolution – that make him a threat to the state, Apostolou argues.

While the regime has suppressed Green movement activists associated with Mohammed Khatami and other reformist, it is unable to conduct the full-scale purge sought by some hard-liners without undermining itself by alienating Moussavi supporters in the religious and security elite, including within some of Iran’s “most dangerous programs”.

With Supreme Leader Khamenei lacking credible religious credentials, the regime’s questionable legitimacy was evident this week with the resignation of a prominent conservative cleric. Sensitive to the problem of an Islamic Republic lacking support from its own Ayatollahs, Mohammad Reza Naghdi, the commander of the Basij militia, recently met with senior figures in Qom in an attempt to drum up clerical support for the regime.

The regime has also been unable to act against Hashemi Rafsanjani, another leading critic compromised by a repressive past and a reputation for unprincipled opportunism. But, like Moussavi, his credentials as a founder and insider of the Islamic Republic make him hard to suppress.  

“We can’t forget that Rafsanjani is still a pillar of the regime,” said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla of Emirates University. “He still has a power base even if the authorities are trying to silence him. He’s still a figure to reckon with.”

The current alliance between the Green movement’s ostensible leaders is a tactical one and “absent a foundation of shared values, the threat of defection and opportunism within the alliance is real,” writes Ali Alfoneh. While the revolutionary dynamics underlying the movement will endure without the current leadership, Iran’s historical experience suggests that any democratic transition will be protracted.

“2009 is not the beginning of the end for the Islamic tyranny in Tehran,” he writes. “But it could be the end of the beginning of the necessary revolution.”

The regime is also going on the diplomatic offensive, reportedly encouraged by the democratic West’s reluctance to take a forceful and united stance in criticizing the recent crackdown and human rights abuses.  

“Europe should not try to impose its model of human rights on the entire world,” Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Ali Ahani, said recently. But there seems little indication that Europe is inclined to do so.

A concern to get in line with the U.S. position has prompted European states to modify their position and refrain from condemning the regime’s human rights violations, writes Natalie Nougayrède in Le Monde.

Some organizations and individuals purporting to represent Iranian-American opinion have insisted that Iranians at home and abroad are hostile to U.S. or other external support for Iran’s embattled democrats. But, according to a recent survey, a clear majority (59%) of Iranian-Americans considers ‘promoting democracy and human rights in Iran’ to be the most important goal of any organization claiming to represent them.