Two leading opposition figures have called on Green movement supporters to mobilize on February 11, the anniversary of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. The move casts doubt on recent suggestions that relatively moderate elements within the regime and opposition were ready to reach an accommodation or pact to end the continuing political turmoil.
The emergence of Iran’s Green movement provides an opportunity for the Obama administration to correct the “severe pendulum swing” from the previous administration’s Freedom Agenda and articulate a distinctive approach to promoting democracy and human rights, a Washington meeting heard today.
The Green Way Web site reports that Mehdi Karroubi and Mir Hossein Moussavi called for Iranian citizens to protest on February 11 to demand their rights.
“The widespread arrests of political activists and university students, the silencing of the media, and the forced confessions of prisoners are against the principles of Islam and the constitution of Iran,” the leaders said in a statement.
Karroubi last week hinted at a possible deal with the regime, stating that he recognized the legitimacy of President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and obliquely hinting that Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, hard-line head of the Council of Guardians, was the real cause of the current divisions.
Some form of negotiated pact is the most likely outcome of the current political conflict, Georgetown University’s Dan Brumberg told a Washington meeting today. But, as the experience of Poland in 1989 suggests, a pact could still be a precursor to broader political transformation.
Regime hardliners’ conviction that they were in the midst of an “existential conflict” that threatens the Islamic Republic itself could veto any accommodation, he told a meeting at the US Institute of Peace. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is the pivotal player in this “elaborate and highly opaque chess game”, said Brumberg, acting director of USIP’s Muslim Initiative.
He is aligned with the hardliners currently calling the shots within Iran’s notoriously fractious political system. But conservative pragmatists within the clergy, business and even the Revolutionary Guards – well-represented within the majlis and Expediency Council – would prefer a negotiated solution.
The slogans for next week’s protests will focus on the illegitimacy of the Supreme Leader and, by extension, the Islamic Republic, confirming the radicalization of the Green movement. The movement’s early demands – Where is my vote? – have given way to a more radical questioning of the Islamic Republic.
The movement’s radicalization is prompting some Green leaders to return to the status quo, one analyst suggests, “rather than risk being swept aside by the wide-ranging changes the movement’s success would usher into Iran.”
The movement hijacking of next week’s anniversary by the world’s “most vibrant and imaginative civil disobedience movement” would be the “ultimate embarrassment” to the regime, said Robin Wright, a senior fellow at USIP. A deal to end the standoff might fracture the Green movement but would provide no long term solution to the regime’s systemic crisis.
While Mousavi has been faulted for lack of strategic leadership, Fatemeh Haghighatjoo insisted that the Green movement’s “multipolar” and decentralized organization was “perfect for the circumstances.
A former reformist deputy in the Iranian Parliament, she said that took the regime insiders of the Islamic Left, represented by Mousavi and Karroubi, to do what outsiders could not – act as catalysts for the Green movement’s emergence while assuring and retaining the support of relatively conservative elements in the clergy and security forces.
The Islamic Republic has always been politically fractious, but it now faced a “dramatically different” challenge, said Suzanne Maloney, resident scholar at the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution, due to the depth of the breach within the elite (typified by Mousavi’s open rejection of Khamenei’s authority in disputing the election; the scope of the opposition – extending to conservative clerics; the public venting of intra-regime disputes; and the escalating and resilient challenge of the Green movement.
Supreme Leader Khamenei remains the principal obstacle to a negotiated pact as his experience of the Shah’s failure to contain the Islamic Revolution convinced him that any compromise or concession will inevitably lead to regime change, Maloney said.
Iran’s state-run Press TV reports that President Ahmadinejad has warned that the government will deal a harsh blow to “global arrogance” on February 11. The regime last week hanged Mohammed Reza Ali Zamani, 37, and Arash Rahmanipour, 20, who were convicted of being enemies of God and conspiring against the Islamic Republic.
Although Ahmadinejad’s base of support appears to have steadily shrunk, he retains strategic allies within the security forces, having deliberately chosen collaborators aligned with the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, writes Genieve Abdo. It would be a mistake to underestimate the regime’s tenacity, she told a Washington meeting.
But a question remains about the feasibility of an alternative strategy of outright repression, said Brookings’ Maloney told the USIP event. The Revolutionary Guards Corps is as diverse as the country itself and anecdotal evidence suggests support for the Green movement within its ranks.
The prospect of sanctions will have little impact on regime behavior, either on human rights or its nuclear program, said George Lopez, a senior fellow at USIP. Current sanctions proposals were unduly punitive and primitive, and failed to target the key members of the ruling elite.
The regime appears to be preparing a violent response to next week’s protests.
“I thank the judiciary chief for executing two rioters and urge him to execute others if they do not give up such protests,” Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati told worshippers at Tehran University. “We showed weaknesses until Ashura … There is no more space for tolerance,” said Jannati, head of the Council of Guardians and a staunch supporter of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The regime’s rhetoric evokes ominous memories of the fierce repression of the 1980s, Hadi Ghaemi, coordinator of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, told a meeting at Washington’s Center for American Progress.
He dismissed as suggestions that the Obama administration and other outside actors should not seek to influence events in Iran as “intellectually dishonest, morally wrong and, in policy terms, counterproductive”. Initiatives should be multilateral, he said, but criticized the administration’s “half-hearted” efforts to engage other states on Iran.
The Obama administration should stand for something more than simply “bearing witness” to the Iranian people’s struggle, warned Michael Signer, a fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute. It has over-reacted to its predecessor’s “overly ideological” approach to promoting democracy, and liberals and progressives risk harming themselves by marginalizing democracy and human rights as a foreign policy priority, he insisted.
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