Posts Tagged ‘iran’

The fate of rulers in the recent history of Iran bears testimony to its turbulent power relations:  a political activist assassinates Naser al-Din Shah in 1896. The powers of his successor Mozaffar al-Din Shah are clipped in 1906 and a parliament installed. Armed uprising to reinstate the parliament forces Mohammad Ali Shah to flee to Russia in 1909. Allied forces remove Reza Shah from the throne in 1941 and the 1979 revolution overthrows his son, Mohammad Reza Shah, establishing and Islamic Republic. 

The revolution did not reign in Iran’s tempestuous political tempo. The first transitional government was forced to resign and abandon Iran’s political scene after Khomeini, the charismatic leader of the revolution, refused to order the release of American hostages in 1979.   The Iran-Iraq war presented Khomeini and his allies with a pretext for ousting the first elected president of Iran, Bani Sadre, in 1981. He is now an exile in Paris.  When People’s Mujahedin, an armed opposition group that fled Iran after the revolution, invaded Kurdistan in 1988, the final year of the war, hardliners executed thousands of ideological prisoners.  Montazeri, a Grand Ayatollah and the assumed heir to Khomeini, was sidelined when his criticised the execution spree.   The lack of a reliable candidate to succeed Khomeini generated a political expediency that permitted him and his allies to tweak the constitution in their own favour.   

Only four months ago millions took to streets to protest against a stolen presidential election.  Those in power responded with a brutal crackdown. They rounded up thousands of protesters and imprisoned tens of prominent members of the Reformist government that had controlled the presidency from 1997 to 2005. Mousavi, Iran’s former prime minister during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war and Khatami, its two-term ex-president, both refused to recognise what they called an illegitimate government and so effectively entered into opposition. 

We see then that even a superficial survey of the past three decades reveals an ongoing tug of war within the Iranian system that is a peculiar blend of elected and unelected offices. What follows is an attempt to help readers make some sense of Iran’s complex and opaque power structure. 

A bit of background

Echoes of the contemporary history of Iran are manifest in its system of governance. The Islamic Republic is a rough marriage of the more modern idea of popular sovereignty and the older one of Islamic governance and so the system draws its legitimacy both from the people and God. 

The ideas of representation and rule of law found their first embodiment in the establishment of Iran’s parliament over a hundred years ago.  For decades, the intellectuals and seculars remained at the forefront of the struggle to protect, revive, or nourish Iran’s democratic institutions.
Shiite Islamic scholars also joined in the debate over sources of legitimacy of governments.  Broadly speaking, some scholars advocated representative forms of government in absence of the ‘hidden’, or the occulted, Imam who is supposed to one day usher an age of justice and true Islamic governance. Others argued that only Islamic jurists can carry on the line of Imams and therefore only they have the right to rule. In their view, popular consent only sources acceptance and not legitimacy. 

Iran’s clerical class that had inherited this ongoing debate won an overwhelmingly large slice of power after the revolution and so this unresolved dispute became mirrored in the synthesis of the Islamic Republic, a system that suffers from an intrinsic competition between its Islamic and largely unelected, and Republican elements.  The new government was born of the massively popular revolution of 1979 that many different movements had helped succeed. The first constitution that Khomeini drafted in the months leading to the revolution had therefore to appeal to all concerned groups, including the communists, liberals, and moderate and hard-line Islamists. This sowed the seeds of further inherent imbalances into the system even before its inception.  In the real race for power though, it was Khominei and his allies who soon took the upper hand and incrementally siphoned power from elected to unelected offices. 
Clues to the latest post-elections upheavals can be found within the context of this escalating competition.
 
How does it work now?

Every four years Iranian people elect members of a national parliament, local councils, and a president.   The president heads the executive branch, the parliament pass bills and approves the cabinet and budget, and the local councils attend to local matters. So in the first instance the Iranians system would appear to be democratic in nature.   However, this is only a small corner of the picture.  

The elected Assembly of Experts that consists of Islamic scholars selects one Islamic jurist for life to the office of the Supreme Leader, the most powerful position in Iran. Khāmenei, its current and only second occupant, has a monopoly over all principle levers of power. He appoints the heads of judiciary, armed forces, and state media. He controls the network of Friday Prayer leaders across the country that he exploits to broadcast his views.  He also effectively employs the Council of Guardian, a major knot in the Iranian system, as his own executive arm.  

This powerful council is essentially the second tier of the legislature and dwarfs the parliament in power. It is composed of six Islamic jurists that the Supreme Leader directly appoints and six jurists that the head of judiciary nominates and the parliament approves. This council is charged with ensuring that all laws comply with the constitution and Islamic law. It also vets all candidates for elected offices and oversees the conduct of elections. 
In practise this council gives the Supreme Leader and his allies tight control over all elected elements. They reg­­ularly ban scores of Reformists from running for office. They screen the Islamic scholars that people can elect to the Assembly of Experts to form a loop that renders the Supreme Leader immune from all scrutiny.  This way Khāmenei enjoys full-power while remaining unaccountable and aloof from the daily details of governing a country. 

Many other power centres are intertwined with the already entangled
official power structure.  Unaccountable and opaque ‘charitable’ organisations control vast sums of money.  Religious centres of learning and prominent Islamic scholars continue to yield influence over the government.  The office of the Supreme Leader has tried hard to dilute their powers over the years. It has tried to make them financially dependent and has cultivated a parallel network of loyal state-sanctioned scholars.   Family relations also appear to be another binding force within Iran’s closed circle of power.  For example, Khāmenei’s son, Mojtaba, is married to the daughter of the ex head of Iran’s parliament. Ahmadinejad has assigned his family members to high governmental posts.  And most prominently, two of the five influential Larijani brothers currently head the parliament and the judiciary. 

The Revolutionary Guards that were established to defend the winners of the revolution against conspiracies and partook in the Iran-Iraq war alongside Iran’s conventional army have now grown to resemble what many term “a state within state”.   They now have a fully-fledged army and control a large network of organised plain-cloth volunteers (basijis) that are planted in every institution to act as their eyes and ears.  This very same network has a double use as a vicious tool that can be unleashed to suppress dissent as was done during the post-election protests. 

The Guards have huge stakes in the economy that includes interests in oil extraction, construction, telecom, customs, etc.  They recently demonstrated their method and appetite for dominating the economy when they used military jets to shut down Tehran’s international airport after a Turkish contractor won the procurement to operate it.  

Ahmadinejad – himself an ex-Guard man – oversaw a silent militarisation of political power during his first term in office.  Ex-Guard men crept to many local and provincial offices.  A billionaire ex-Guard man became the head of the Ministry of Interior Affairs that conducted this summer’s controversial elections.   The Guards publicly showed their muscles during the post election events and grabbed a large share of political power. Now even the head of the Ministry of Intelligence is an ex-Guard man. 
The Revolutionary Guards have become so powerful over the years that it is no longer clear whether they or the Supreme Leader sit in command of their symbiotic relationship. 

Why do we vote then? 

So it appears that unelected elements have grown to dominate their elected counterparts within the Islamic Republic of Iran.  In fact, their grip on all election matters is so tight that many unsatisfied Iranians dismiss elections as sham safety valves that release the tension every so often and provide seals of approval for an undemocratic system. Yet Iranians have demonstrated that they tend to turn out in large numbers to vote. Why?
The reason is that the president has a tangible impact on people’s lives as he initiates bills, controls the budget, executes laws, and represents Iran in the world.  Some participate with the hope of gradually strengthening Iran’s civil society and entrenching the culture of party politics. Many participate because they view constant pressure from the people as a bargaining chip in their incessant struggle to wrestle out concessions for elected offices. And most participate to voice their unflinching support for Republican element of the system and to exert their force as the system evolves to better reflect the true balance of forces inside Iranian society.

Vladimir Lenin, for all his faults, had a rather good command of language indeed he coined the phrase “useful idiot” used to describe individuals or groups that naively considered themselves to be allies of the USSR but were in fact held with contempt by the Soviet rulers, and were being used by them. This sort of relationship occurs very frequently in politics especially when dealing with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

I am referring to the article written in Issue 3 of the London Student by Rikkie Bruzas entitled “Allow Iran the nuclear bomb” the basic premise being that Bruzas believes that if Iran is allowed the bomb we can then “bend the regime’s ear to our cause”. This betrays a deep misunderstanding of the nature of the Islamic Republic and is sadly not a new tactic. In 1986 two American government officials went to Iran with a Bible, and a chocolate cake, to attempt to persuade “moderates” within the Regime to release hostages. In 1997 the Western powers yet again grew hopeful of change and normalisation of relations as the “liberal reformist” Mohammad Khatami was elected in a shamelessly undemocratic election. Decades on, we can see that their hopes were not realised, and that all the Westerners who eagerly placed their supported in the “moderates” and “reformists” were simply taken for a ride by the Iranian regime and treated as “useful idiots”.

To quote Edmund Burke, “those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it”. The West’s fundamental error has always been to assume that the Islamic Republic can be tamed. They forget that the so-called “moderates” in 1985 are the same people that monopolised Iran’s industries through corruption and nepotism whilst a third of the population lived under the poverty line. They forget that the “reformist” Mohammad Khatami was Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance for a decade during which he prevented all “un-Islamic” forms of media or art being published.

So, sadly, Bruzas is “doomed to repeat history” too if his wish that Iran be given the nuclear bomb is granted. The fact is that those in charge of the Islamic Republic are unelected fascists and have no desire to acquiesce to the West’s wishes or “trust in liberal democracy” as the author of last week’s articles believes. The Mullahs that run Iran sit on a vast empire of oil and gas and control all major industry in Iran. Why would they choose to let go of this power when it has brought them untold fortune and wealth? On top of this they already fund terrorists like Hezbollah, Hamas, the insurgents in Yemen and the Taliban. Do we really want to add a nuclear bomb to their arsenal?

Furthermore the article advocates that we could try to bring “Ayatollah Khamenei and the Guardian Council on [our] side”; a truly appalling idea. Whilst tens of thousands of Iranians have been tortured, raped and killed simply for wanting liberty, the most basic of human rights, it is actually being suggested that we consort and associate with people that sanction rape and murder as state policy! The article sounds an awful lot like the Allied powers in the early 1930s that did nothing to stop the spread of the Third Reich by burying their heads in the sand and hoping that Hitler would stop fascism of his own accord.

The author goes onto mention that “nobody in the leadership of Iran is the malevolent despot that some of our media like to portray”. The facts are that four million people in Iran have an opium addiction problem, earthquakes regularly raze entire towns and villages due to lack of government building regulations, inflation was recently running at 29% and all the while the Iranian leadership chooses to spend billions of pounds on a nuclear weapon programme instead of trying to improve the nation’s infrastructure and the lot of the people. The government of the Islamic Republic of Iran is unelected, violent, corrupt and does not care for Iran’s populace. If these things do not make the leaders of Iran “malevolent despots” I’m not sure what does.

So as we have seen the Iranian government is not going to change or “bend their ear to our cause”. They instigate fraud in elections to cling onto power and they do not set much store by international diplomacy and treaties either, instead using such occasions as an opportunity to deny the Holocaust. At the end of the day those that suffer most are Iran’s people. The ruling despots do not need further support for their misguided policy of spending Iran’s money on building a nuclear bomb, instead the world ought to be isolating the Islamic Republic’s leaders as it did to South Africa during the darkest days of Apartheid, whilst standing shoulder to shoulder with Iran’s people in their struggle for freedom.

Fresh hopes have been raised in the case of SOAS graduate Hossein Derakhshan, who has been held in an unknown Iranian prison for almost six months without any official charges. Read the rest of this entry »