Iranians to endure undemocratic future

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): Recently, Iran's most senior judge, Ayatollah Mohammed Yazdi, was angrily rejecting calls for an international investigation into the murders of two opposition leaders and three secular writers in November and December. Speaking at Friday prayers at Tehran University, he warned worshipers that "the enemy is trying to pave the way for foreigners to enter the country and say there is no security here."

"In Algeria there have been savage killings recently, but there is no question there of a United Nations investigation team," he complained. "Whereas when two or three people are killed in our country, immediately it is blown out of proportion."

It was a typically paranoid performance by a conservative cleric, just the sort of thing that gives the Islamic Republic of Iran a bad name -- except that five days later, the secret police admitted that their own agents had done the killings.

This was exactly what the reformers who support President Mohammed Khatami suspected: that the killings were intended to cow anybody who challenges the right of a certain group of clergymen to tell the whole nation what to do. But they were astonished to hear that the Intelligence Ministry had arrested its guilty members and denounced them -- and they take it as a sign that Khatami is finally gaining the upper hand in his struggle to democratize Iran.

The Iranian public has already shown what it wants by electing Khatami to the presidency with an 69 percent majority in May, 1997.

But under Iran's 'Islamic' constitution, the elected president has less power than the supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is chosen by a council of clerics. In particular, the president has little control over the key instruments of power: the intelligence services, the armed forces, and the courts.

That's why so little has changed in Iran nineteen months after Khatami's election. The conservative faction -- what Ayatollah Khamenei's brother Hadi (who supports the reformers) describes simply as "the one that wants to keep the power" -- has been able to stymie every initiative that Khatami and his allies have taken by a combination of judicial manipulation and open intimidation.

This is not really about religion (though the conservative faction pretends that it is). Neither President Khatami nor the majority of those who voted for him want to undo the Iranian revolution of 1978 that overthrew the Shah (who had, after all, been installed by a U.S.-backed coup).

They don't even want a wholly secular state in Iran. For better or for worse, the huge sacrifices Iranians made during the revolution and the subsequent decade of struggle, when the United States backed Saddam Hussein's attack on the country, have locked Iran into an 'Islamic' constitution for at least a generation. The ideals that so many died for cannot just be cast aside.

But in practice there are as many ways to be 'Islamic' in your politics as there are to be 'Christian' or 'Hindu'. The real question in Iran is not whether the style stays Islamic, but who runs the place: the clergy or the people. So far, the clergy have won every round.

They put Gholamhossein Karbaschi, the popular mayor of Tehran and President Khatami's most visible political ally, on trial for corruption, and sentenced him to five years in prison. (The cleric who served as prosecutor was also the judge.)

When the most prominent non-conservative cleric, Ayatollah Ali Montazeri, suggested soon after Khatami's election that the proper role of the supreme religious leader was to supervise, not to rule, they put him under house arrest. (And then they jailed his son-in-law Medi Hashemi for good measure, for the crime of leading demonstrations protesting against Montazeri's confinement).

Twice in the past eighteen months, a newspaper has started up in Tehran that simply behaved as though Iran were a country with freedom of speech. Each time, it has instantly become one of the most widely read papers in the country. And each time the courts have then shut it down -- and jailed its editors.

Finally came the killings. Starting with the disappearance of a well-known dissident writer last August, a succession of murders of prominent intellectuals spread terror through reformist circles in Tehran. Some even fled abroad, and those who stayed at home were terrified: "Whenever I hear footsteps from downstairs, I see the specter of death before my eyes," said Firouz Gouran, editor of the banned monthly Jame'eh Salem (Healthy Society), last month.

President Khatami managed to get permission for a team of his own investigators to work alongside the security services in the search for the death squad that was at work, but hardly anybody expected that they would actually come up with the real culprits -- and right inside the Intelligence Ministry, too. It does suggest that the balance of power is shifting in Tehran.

That will be confirmed if Intelligence Minister Qorbanali Dorri Najafabadi (who was foisted on Khatami by the conservatives) is now forced to resign. But to say that the balance of power is shifting is not to say that the game is over. Far from it.

From the beginning there were strong democratic elements in the Iranian revolution. As with most big revolutions where a lot of blood is spilled (consider the French, for example), the extremists tend to take over for a while afterwards, but that does not necessarily mean that the original impulse has been lost forever.

It has clearly not been lost in Iran. Despite isolation, fanaticism and pauperization (the country's population has doubled to 60 million since the revolution, while the economy has basically marked time), most Iranians are still committed to a modern and democratic future.

There will be years of struggle yet, but as former Tehran mayor Gholamhossein Karbaschi remarked soon after his conviction: "I think we are going toward a very good democracy,"