Renewed protests erupted today as Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei formally endorsed Mahmoud Ahmedinejad as president for a new four-year term, temporarily papering over the cracks revealed in recent factional fights. With a mass trial of opposition figures underway and uncompromisingly strident rhetoric, the regime is taking a notably harder stance towards the reformist opposition.
“A new period has begun,” Ahmedinejad told a recent meeting of the basiji militia. “We’ll seize them by their collars and stick their heads to the ceiling,” he said, referring to the regime’s critics.
Opposition to his election was funded by Western powers who “do not want a new model of divine democracy rising in the world” but seek “to divert global opinion from the collapse of capitalism,” he said.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps also insists that the recent unrest is the result of external powers attempting to undermine the Islamic republic. The regime currently faces a “soft threat”, according to Brigadier General Yadollah Javani, head of the IRGC’s Political Bureau, who cites U.S. declarations of its intent to promote democracy in Iran.
The formal indictment in the mass trial claims that the largest opposition parties took money from foreign NGOs in an attempt to foment a color revolution in Iran.
“Based on the evidence obtained and well-founded confessions of the defendants, these events had been planned in advance and stages of the velvet revolution were carried out in accordance with a time schedule,” the text of the indictment said.
The prosecutor claims that regime defectors like Mir Hossein Moussavi, Ali-Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Mohammad Khatami, and Mehdi Karubi have been aided by six civil society subgroups, notably women’s groups, including the One Million Signatures Campaign; ethnic minorities; human rights activists; independent labor unions, including bus drivers’ union leader Mansoor Osanlou, allegedly funded by the National Endowment for Democracy; non-governmental organizations allowed to grow under Khatami’s presidency; and university students, specifically the Office for the Consolidation of Unity.
The regime has adopted more hard-line tactics, according to an analysis at Tehran Bureau, because it needs to reassure its core supporters and to justify outlawing the three main reformist parties — the Islamic Iran Participation Front, Islamic Revolution Mojahedin Organization, and Executives of Reconstruction Party.
The tactics reflect both a failed attempt by Khamenei to reestablish his authority and Ahmedinejad’s efforts to “establish an independent turf of his own”, writes Abbas Milani, as the Supreme Leader’s absolute rule nears its end:
The developments might bode well for Iranian democracy, and ill for Barack Obama’s Iran policy. Rifts and rancor amongst the ruling elite is often a precondition for democratic transitions; Iran is no exception. Such rifts, however, make the work of “engaging” that country much more difficult; it is hard to engage with a nation if it is not clear who rules it.
Recent Comments