The Ayatollahs' Democracy: An Iranian Challenge

by Hooman Majd

  As other protests erupted, the opposition leaders were emboldened to issue statements, openly challenge the government line while still calling for nonviolent protest, and even appear on the streets (or at funerals of the fallen) themselves, although the authorities often forcefully cut short such public appearances. Protests, generally peaceful, in fact seemed to occur spontaneously every time there was an occasion to gather on the streets of major cities, such as on Qods (Jerusalem Day) in September, or even at soccer games, where state television broadcasts mysteriously reverted to black and white (to avoid showing tens of thousands of green-wearing fans) and suffered the occasional loss of sound (whenever fans shouted political slogans instead of cheers for their teams). Wearing green, the color of Mir Hossein Mousavi’s presidential campaign (and the color of Islam, which later became a symbol for opposition to the government of Ahmadinejad), had become de facto illegal in Iran, a supreme irony in a country where the green banner of the prophet and of Islam itself is a visible and daily reminder of the nature of the republic. Mousavi, a onetime staunch Islamist who had served as prime minister in the 1980s until the post was abolished, became the standard bearer of the reform movement in 2009, a movement still visibly Islamic not just because of the color it chose, but also because of its premise that Islam and democracy are fully compatible.

  With every protest, and particularly the noisier ones or the ones where participants included the leaders of the opposition, the attention of the normally self-obsessed West was momentarily diverted East. Later allegations of rape and torture in Tehran’s detention facilities in the immediate aftermath of the election made small headlines for the first time in weeks (although rape and torture of political prisoners had not been unknown in Iran since practically the dawn of its empire), and led some Iran experts and analysts, as well as some journalists, to conclude that the nascent summer revolution they had witnessed from afar (or up close, in the case of some reporters) was genuine and the days of clerical rule numbered, if not in months, then perhaps a few short years. Visible cracks in the leadership were analyzed ad nauseam; every word, gesture, or movement of top political figures and clerics was parsed for meaning, and the weakness of Iran (in the face of a peoples’ unrest), once feared as a resurgent and dominant power in the Muslim Middle East, proclaimed as fact. But many Westerners, having viewed the first stirrings of unrest in June as the makings of a “color” or “velvet” revolution along Eastern European lines, fell back into the habit of viewing Iran and Iranians through a Western lens, passing judgment on everything from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei’s hold on power to the “meekness” of opposition leader Mousavi, according to one respected but highly disappointed journalist, who out of his entire life had spent only three or four weeks in Iran, one of them in June prowling the streets of Tehran and reporting with great flourish on the first great people’s revolution of the twenty-first century. “Revolution”? No. Mir Hossein Mousavi meek? Yes, if the excitement of marching with a million people down Valiasr Avenue onto Azadi Boulevard should have, in the minds of hopeful Western journalists, led to two million marching on Khamenei’s residence the next day, and perhaps three million a few days later, led by the heroic Mousavi waving a giant green banner, marching on Parliament or the presidential offices on Pasteur Avenue. Sorry, but neither Mousavi, as brave an Iranian politician as there has been in half a century, nor Iran itself, will ever conform to a foreign script or to its impatient timeline, much as some may want them to. And Ayatollah Khamenei’s hold on power was neither as strong nor as weak as proclaimed: Khamenei and Mousavi were being Iranian to the core, acting as Iranians who understand Iran and as their fellow Iranians do, and in a way that has confounded non-Iranians for as long as Iran has mattered. Allah is Great.

  The truth about the summer of 2009 is that there never really was a revolution, or even the beginnings of a revolution—green, Twitter, velvet, or otherwise—no matter how hard some, on both sides, tried to Tiananmen-ize the protests, ascribe sedition and insurrection to the opposition, or contort the unrest into analogies with the Iran of 1979. Putting a Western face on the unrest, one that viewed the teeming masses of Iranians as agitating for a liberal democracy and freedom from the rule of the mullahs, was never going to tell the whole story.

  Initially, the Iranians who marched, protested, and shouted slogans were merely angry at the election results, leading even Ali Larijani, the conservative speaker of Parliament and a close ally of the Supreme Leader, to confess publicly that “the majority of Iranians don’t believe the election,” and some clerics to openly defy the regime, causing the first serious public rift in the leadership in the young history of the Islamic Republic. Anger is why Iranians came out onto the streets—young, old, bearded, clean-shaven, chador-clad, pious, secular, and Chanel-wearing fashionistas for all to see, to register their disapproval of what they believed to be a rigged vote, an insult to every Iranian who believed that the one truly democratic aspect of their system had been rudely violated. Islamic Democracy with a capital D had always been the goal of the reform movement, from well before the candidacy of Mousavi, a goal they believed was neither oxymoronic nor an impossibility. Along with millions of Iranians, including many conservatives who subscribed to the theory of power vested in the people, they now felt that that democracy had been subverted. In exercising their right to peaceful protest, a right guaranteed under the constitution, they kept democracy alive in Iran for another few days, but the government’s subsequent brutal suppression of that right was an indication to those who protested of how horribly wrong the democratic experiment had gone.

  We, Westerners and secular Iranians, may have wanted to impute to the protests something they were not—namely, a rejection of the Islamic regime altogether—but in doing so we inadvertently harmed the cause of the masses of Iranians we purported to be in sympathy with. Iranian exile organizations, with ready access to the Western media, joined in the frenzy of the Green Movement and the excitement of a brewing revolt; groups who had called for boycotting the vote were suddenly expressing solidarity with those who actually filled out a ballot. Nothing could have been more sickening to many of the Iranians who braved the batons and bullets of the Basij than to see Maryam Rajavi, head of the largely despised Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), hold a press conference in Paris in the summer of 2009, in front of a large poster of the brutally murdered Neda Agha-Soltan as if to claim her for her group. (Rajavi couldn’t, however, bring herself to wear green.) The Iranian state media, searching for evidence of foreign plots, or plots by hated exile groups, to convince the masses that what they had witnessed in June was not a stolen election but a foreign-inspired plan to overthrow their government, could not have engineered a better clue for its audience. In fact, the government quickly spun Neda’s death as a planned and even rehearsed shooting by the opposition, by foreign-backed or exile groups (intimating that the Mujahedin were responsible) to discredit the Islamic Republic, even going as far as producing a documentary (broadcast on state television later in the year) on her death that purported to “prove” their case. As preposterous as that was, the government knew that at least some conspiracy-minded Iranians—and Iranians are nothing if not expert conspiracy theorists—would buy the story. Prince Reza Pahlavi, son of the last Shah and pretender to a throne that no longer exists, shed crocodile tears at his press conference in Washington, D.C., in the immediate aftermath of the election, comfortably distant from the burning streets of Tehran but available for all to see on YouTube. He was perhaps marginally less cynical than Mrs. Rajavi, but equally helpful to Mir Hossein Mousavi’s enemies. His subsequent wearing of a green rubber wristband, symbol of Mousavi’s opposition to Ahmadinejad but not to the Islamic Republic, only diluted the message that every green-wearing Iranian broadcast to the world. Pahlavi was now Green, but perhaps more with envy at what the children of Iran had managed to do in a few weeks than what he had been unable to for thirty years from his base in Washington.

 
The revolution may not be televised any longer, to paraphrase the great Gil Scott-Heron, but pirates seemed determined to hijack it anyway. A famous and well-meaning filmmaker, a self-appointed spokesman for Mousavi (who needed no spokesman as he was frequently able to deliver his messages, even filmed interviews, to the world via the Internet), spoke to the European Parliament a day before the eighteenth-of-Tir demonstrations. He warned the members that if nothing were done to confront Iran, it would presently be in possession of nuclear weapons, weapons that would be threateningly pointed at their home cities. Again, Tehran’s propaganda machine could not have asked for a greater gift, one they could use to further marginalize Mousavi, who had actually proclaimed during his campaign that uranium enrichment would continue under his administration, and that Iran’s nuclear policy would not change with a change of administrations. (The government has consistently labeled anyone who opposes nuclear development as unpatriotic if not an actual traitor, and indeed the nuclear program enjoys widespread support in Iran.) The same spokesman kept issuing various reports from Paris that conflicted with Mousavi’s statements in Iran, who had insisted earlier that his positions would only be articulated from his headquarters in Tehran. In September 2009, just as President Ahmadinejad was again defending Iran’s nuclear program at the United Nations, the filmmaker issued a statement claiming that the opposition was as concerned with Iran’s nuclear program as was the West, thereby doing nothing for the cause of reform in Iran and only assisting the regime with its propaganda. We paid attention to all of these Green Iranians, we listened to those with the loudest voices, and we drew conclusions, but we also fed Iran’s hungry propaganda machine, one that was determined to make Green not the symbol of Islamic freedom, but the color of counter-revolutionary insurrection.

  As the summer of 2009 gave way to autumn, and the revolution that never was began to fade from fetishistic Western headlines, Iran was still undergoing turmoil and changes within, as faithfully reported by Iranian websites—some created in the aftermath of the election—but the nuclear question, one that for six years had been the preoccupation of most of the Western world, was sure to dominate headlines once again. And dominate it did, with a revelation in late September, while President Ahmadinejad was in New York City to address the UN General Assembly, that Iran had secretly built another nuclear facility in the desert near Qom. That dramatic revelation by President Barack Obama, Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the United Kingdom, and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, on the sidelines of a G-20 conference in Pittsburgh, resulted in much speculation and mostly negative coverage of Iran and its nuclear ambitions, and added to Western suspicions that Iran was intent on developing weapons alongside its reactors, just as it also had oppressed its people and manufactured election results. But Iran countered, its propaganda and foreign policy machines in overdrive, comfortable in the knowledge that at least in regard to its nuclear rights it had the support of its people and, despite Western claims, had much of the world outside of Western Europe and the United States on its side.

  If President Ahmadinejad’s administration had been weakened by the events of the summer of 2009, it was a mistake to believe that Iran itself had, and anyone who really understood Iran recognized as much. For Iran, which embarked on a path of renewal as a great civilization and power, even empire, in the years following the revolution of 1979, was still very much united in its determination to continue, and no opposition leader would have suggested otherwise. Meanwhile, Western sympathizers with Iran’s Green Movement worried out loud that in any U.S. negotiations with Iran, negotiations President Obama had promised but hadn’t quite started, great care had to be taken to avoid harming the cause of democracy or the opposition movement itself, for example, by legitimizing the government of President Ahmadinejad. But the opposition to the administration in Iran wanted no farangi, or foreign, help or involvement. The internal struggles in Iran were about the Ayatollahs’ democracy, and they would not affect her relationship with the farangis, no matter what those farangis did or did not do. The battle in Iran was over her future, not her past, over what was democratic and what was not.

  In the first decade of the twenty-first century, very few Iranians wanted a Persia defined for them by non-Persians, as it had been for so long preceding their Islamic Revolution of 1979. In the fall of 2009, perhaps the most perspicacious slogan of the Mousavi Green Movement was one completely ignored by both the Western media and most Iranian exiles, many of them agitating as best they could for the downfall of the entire regime. “Na dolat’e coup d’état, na menat’e Amrika!” Mousavi proclaimed, while green-wearing Iranians abroad joined former Iran-bashers such as former vice president Dick Cheney and Senator John McCain and countless right-wing talk-show hosts in demanding that President Obama offer overt support for the “pro-democracy” protesters on Iran’s streets. “No to a coup d’état government,” Mousavi’s slogan said, and we heard that, but we did not hear the rest: “but no to an indebtedness to America.” Menat is a Farsi word that is actually impossible to translate, and “indebtedness” is hardly the most accurate indication of its meaning. It can be a state of indebtedness or of begging a favor, of being in an uncomfortable state of owing. As far as most Iranians who did hear the message were concerned, though, Mousavi couldn’t have been clearer in his sentiments. Iranians may have wanted sympathy from the West, but they did not want help, and they wanted to owe no one, in their quest for their own form of democracy.

  For some observers, both Western and Iranian, the summer of 2009 was the beginning of the end of the Islamic Republic, as we know it. How could the fractures that appeared in June ever be healed? If it wasn’t the presidential election itself (and elections are stolen all the time after all, even in the United States), then how could a political system survive street protests that wouldn’t completely disappear; a great disaffection on the part of a large portion of the population, particularly the influential middle class; pressure from the West over foreign policy and the nuclear issue; and concern over the validity and credibility of the velayat-e-faqih, rule of the jurisprudent, or, in other words, the Supreme Leader himself? If what started out as a protest against a stolen vote then turned to mass disgust and anger over the government’s reaction to those protests, even from conservatives opposed to Mousavi, then how could that government survive?

  Looking at the unrest in Iran from a Western perspective, even a pop culture perspective, one might be forgiven for believing that the days of the Islamic system were numbered. After all, at no time in its history had the world’s attention been so focused on its abuse of her citizens, or her citizens’ fight for their basic human rights. In 2009, Jon Bon Jovi recorded a version of “Stand By Me” with an Iranian singer, in New Jersey–accented Farsi, to express solidarity with Iranians battling their government; U2 performed “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” bathed in green light—with Farsi words projected on multiple Jumbotrons but thankfully not issuing from Bono’s lips—on its 2009 world tour, right before singing a song dedicated to Burmese dissident Aung San Suu Kyi (thereby lumping the Iranian protesters in with dissident citizens living under dictatorships everywhere); and Basij became a new code word for government thuggery and terror. But Iran suffered political fissures in 2009 precisely because the establishment (and almost everyone in the opposition could be considered a part of the establishment) had split so openly, not because dissidents had burst onto the scene.

  Everyone on either side of the political spectrum, at least those inside Iran, had once been united in establishing the Islamic regime, and together they had led Iran’s quest for independence and an independent political system. Everyone had worked within the system, quietly or openly, to reform it—those on the right to “reform” its democratic aspects to guarantee its future as a revolutionary state, and those on the left and in the opposition to reform its autocratic and dictatorial aspects to achieve what they saw as its original intent: an Islamic democracy that vested power in the people, and in consul
tative bodies (mimicking the early days of Islam) that would not legislate in direct contradiction of Islamic law. In the very beginning the two sides had agreed on everything, from the fight against anti-regime dissidents such as the Mujahedin-e-Khalq or against traitors within, to the U.S. Embassy seizure in 1979 and to relations with the West. The election of Hojjatoleslam (a Shia clerical title one rank below Ayatollah) Seyed Mohammad Khatami as president in 1997 (and his re-election in 2001) brought forth the idea that Iran’s Islamic system could be reformed, that there were differing ideas of what an Islamic democracy might look like, and President Ahmadinejad’s legitimate election in 2005 was a referendum on reform of such reform, or reform of the system against corruption and the perpetual rule of an established clerical elite, embodied by his opponent, Ayatollah Rafsanjani. Neither president was successful in pushing Iran forward politically, from a revolutionary state to a post-revolutionary state, and it is unlikely that a Mousavi win in 2009 would have had great success either. True reform, certainly of the kind we attributed to the demands of the protesters, would always be a Sisyphean task in Iran, a country where various factions and governmental bodies hold power, and disappointment with any regime that tried was virtually guaranteed up until now. Yes, up until now, but probably no longer.

  At the end of 2009, a documentary aired on television in the United States and Great Britain on the life and death of Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman whose murder on the streets of Tehran was witnessed by millions around the globe courtesy of cell phone camera footage uploaded to YouTube. Neda, her friends and family told the viewers, someone who became for many a symbol of the democracy movement, was disillusioned with life in Iran and would have jumped at an opportunity to emigrate if she had been presented with one. She was apparently none too keen on any of the candidates in the presidential election, and like many young, urban, middle-class Iranians, she felt that her future lay anywhere but in the land she called home. And yet she went out onto the streets to protest. A few days earlier she would have been happy to leave those streets altogether, but she continued to protest, even after the government threatened violence, until the moment she was shot in the heart and left to die on the pavement. Her actions were not those of someone who wanted nothing to do with her country any longer—which validates her martyrdom in the eyes of the movement—and perhaps she had never been quite as serious about emigrating either, but there were thousands, if not millions of Nedas (and not just in Tehran) who felt that the election and the government’s response to their cries were insults they could no longer ignore. Importantly, these protesters galvanized the opposition leaders, Mousavi, Mehdi Karroubi, and Khatami, as much as those leaders galvanized their constituents. It was democratic action, and no Iranian could ignore it. Apathy among the middle class, evident in the turnout for the previous presidential election, which had brought Ahmadinejad to power, had turned into an activism unlike anything else Iran had witnessed in thirty years, and who—even young, urban youth dreaming of a better life in Los Angeles or London or Toronto—wouldn’t want to be a part of that?