Iran, from confrontation to reconciliation?


By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
Asia Times
Jan 5, 2010


Mohsen Rezaee, a former commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and a candidate in last year's presidential race, who is currently secretary of the powerful Expediency Council, has written to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei urging him to issue a conciliatory statement that would set into motion "a new movement for unity and brotherhood of all".

He wrote, "[Opposition leader] Mr Mir Hossein Mousavi's retreat from denying the government of Mr [Mahmud] Ahmadinejad and his constructive suggestion that parliament and the judiciary should act according to their legal functions with respect to the government's responsiveness, although belated, could be the beginning of a unifying movement in the opposition front with others."

After months of high political drama that saddled Iran with now familiar scenes of street mobilizations and counter-mobilizations by opposition and pro-government forces, culminating in multiple deaths and hundreds of arrests, instead of the "imminent collapse" of the Islamic republic, as widely propagated in the Western media, the country is on the verge of an about-turn toward stabilization and political reconciliation.

"The system has the power to reach this important objective through foresight and by adopting a respectful outlook mixed with kindness toward all the people and groups," Mousavi wrote in his latest statement in which he set forth five proposals to exit the "current serious crisis".

Mousavi's move toward reconciliation may be interpreted by other factions of the heterogeneous green movement as "capitulation" and, consequently, he must show his followers some tangible gains by making his political "retreat". Any reconciliation process is sure to be complicated and subject to the strains of a highly polarized polity.

In addition to Rezaee, a number of leading Tehran politicians, including former president Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, head of the Expediency Council, have called for "unity of all" and a "return to calm".

Hence, the early part of 2010 will likely feature a qualitative turn-around from the tumult of the past seven months following the controversial presidential elections in mid-June and the intermittent flurry of opposition demonstrations in Tehran and other cities. The protests were most recently motivated by the death of pro-reform Grand Ayatollah Hoseyn Ali Montazeri, whose funeral ceremonies gave the green movement an opportunity to drum up its democratization demands.

A serious miscalculation on the part of the green movement, by holding political rallies last Sunday during the holy ceremonies of Ashura, has clearly backfired, especially since some militant demonstrators turned violent and attacked police stations, threw Molotov cocktails at police vans, and beat up members of the riot police.

Both Mousavi and a number of intellectual leaders of the green movement, such as Akbar Ganji, have explicitly distanced themselves from the violent demonstrators, with Ganji going further and writing that "our problem today is that some notable personalities of the movement and many of its intellectuals have mortgaged themselves to the collective populist action [the opposition street rallies] ... Resorting to violence is not justifiable under any excuse."

Not everyone affiliated with the green movement subscribes to such advice on the importance of non-violent resistance. A case in point is filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, who was a close advisor to Mousavi's presidential campaign last June and who now from self-imposed exile in France issues incendiary rhetoric for the overthrow of the Islamic Republic. He has accused the supreme leader of turning into a "Yazid", that is, the chief nemesis of historical Shi'ism, thus disregarding Ganji's warning that "the choice of Hosseini-Yazidi discourse is a very dangerous strategy."
To date, Mousavi, despite his latest communique's pledge of loyalty to the "Islamic constitution", has not explicitly dissociated himself from his radical supporters, such as Makhmalbaf, who have inadvertently done much damage to the legitimacy of the green movement by their violent discourses.

Nor has Mousavi shown any signs of self-criticism in his call on the government to recognize that there is a serious crisis in Iran - and the fact that he is partly responsible for creating the crisis, which could have been mostly avoided had he conceded defeat and recognized Ahmadinejad's electoral victory instead of clinging to allegations of rigged elections.

A much more important issue deals with the Barack Obama administration in the United States, in light of the US president's forceful condemnation last week of the government's crackdown on protesters, defending the latter as simply citizens who want their full democratic rights. For a president who took office a year ago by sending clear messages to Tehran that he was not interested in regime change in Iran, Obama now in some ways resembles his predecessor, George W Bush, who, before assuming the presidency and launching wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, kept promising America and the world that he was not interested in the US's role in "nation-building".

Obama's failure to condemn the anti-government violence in Iran and to urge law-abiding behavior by the opposition has been widely interpreted in Iran as a sign of the US's meddling in Iran's internal affairs, thus putting the green movement and its leadership on the defensive.

Pushed into a corner by a combination of repression from above and ill-advised tactics and strategies from below that has insulted the religious sensibility of Shi'ite Iranians, the green movement is gripped by a crisis of its own making, This now necessitates remedial measures to regain the peaceful and purely reformist nature of the movement from the clutches of extremist tendencies.

Should the green movement succeed in this difficult task of self-regrounding on a firm legalist and reformist footing, the guarded optimism about political reconciliation invoked in the above lines could be realized.

In conclusion, an important sign of the government's flexibility and willingness to tread the path of political reconciliation is its decision to allow the pro-reform newspaper, Bahar, to publish again after being banned. Led by Saeed Pour Azizi, a former press secretary of former president Mohammad Khatami, Bahar is destined to fill an important vacuum in articulating a sound, coherent and measured reformist discourse in Iran.

Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) . For his Wikipedia entry, click here. His latest book, Reading In Iran Foreign Policy After September 11 (BookSurge Publishing , October 23, 200 is now available.

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