The Deadlock in

PRESSURES FROM BELOW Ramin Jahanbegloo

Ramin Jahanbegloo is head of the Department of Research on Contem- porary Thought at the Cultural Research Bureau in . His books include Conversations with (1991), Gandhi: Aux sources de la nonviolence (1998), and Iran and Modernity (2000). During 2001– 2002 he was a Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellow at the International Forum for Democratic Studies in Washington, D.C.

Predicting the outcome of the struggle for political leadership in Iran has become a popular parlor game in some circles in Washington and other Western capitals. But there is also genuine anxiety about this struggle throughout the world, quite understandably given Iran’s vital regional and international importance, along with the huge stakes involved not only for Iranians but for Americans and Europeans, not to mention Iran’s immediate neighbors. The outcome will resonate across the Middle East and have major strategic implications for the war against terrorism. Today, Iran is facing a crisis generated by fundamental contradictions in the political system that has ruled the country during the quarter- century since the Iranian Revolution and the rise of the Islamic Republic. In that time, the country has made an amazing passage from infatuation with Islamist martyrdom and fierce anti-Americanism to preoccupation with free markets, economic-growth rates, and Western ways of life. The resulting “dot Islamism” of contemporary Iran—characterized by the co- existence of a capitalist economy and clerical rule—has only disguised these contradictions. For the historical trajectory of contemporary Iran may point not only to a deepening of economic liberalization but to the implementation of genuinely democratic political reforms and an empow- ering of civil society that would threaten to end the conservative monopoly on power that has been in place from the outset of the regime. More than five years after the midranking reformist cleric Mohammad Khatami won his first landslide victory in presidential balloting, Iran’s leadership is deeply divided over the country’s future. While Khatami

Journal of Democracy Volume 14, Number 1 January 2003 Ramin Jahanbegloo 127 easily won reelection in June 2001, he has remained unable to persuade the powerful conservative clerical and internal-security establishments to embrace his reformist project of bringing dialogue, tolerance, and pluralism to Iran’s political system. The clerics and security officials still control most key power centers, including the armed forces, the intelligence agencies, and the judiciary. The reformists remain exposed to pressure and coercion from these quarters, and thus can find them- selves blocked in their efforts to take such constructive steps as reestablishing normal diplomatic relations with the United States. And yet Iranian political reality is complex and fluid in ways that cannot be reduced to a simple dichotomy between reformists and con- servatives within the regime. There is not actually a single clear-cut political struggle in Iran. Rather, the country’s domestic politics is char- acterized by multiple and competing power centers whose rivalries have created a chaotic situation in which various shades and types of “reform- ism” and “conservatism” interact in often bewildering ways—generating, for example, contradictions and inconsistencies in Iranian foreign policy that tend to baffle outside observers. Indeed, the Iranian political order is perhaps best described as a cha- otically divided political system that is now frozen in a state of institutional gridlock. The executive branch, led by President Khatami, and the 290-member parliament (Majlis) are both generally reformist. The judiciary is largely in conservative hands. Finally, there is Ayatol- lah Ali Khamenei (the successor to Ruhollah Khomeini), whose official title is Leader of the Islamic Revolution and whose prerogative it is to overrule any of the other branches. As supreme leader, Khamenei has the power to choose the head of the judiciary and the chief of the state broadcasting agency, as well as primary responsibility for military and security affairs. The combined result of this constitutional structure and the political forces inhabiting it is that the branches often work at cross- purposes and little gets done. For example, in recent years the executive branch has been handing out newspaper licenses for the purpose of pro- moting a free press and vibrant civil society, while courts and the security forces have been shutting down papers and arresting or aggressively interrogating journalists and editors. To be sure, the framers of the Islamic Republic’s 1979 Constitution meant for there to be a degree of institutional tension in the system they designed. But the tensions were supposed to be limited, while the constitutional scheme as a whole clearly presupposed a profound harmony of interests and goals among those who would fill the key posts. The reformists’ electoral pre- dominance since 1997 has plainly shown this presupposition to be faulty, polarizing Iran’s governing groups and threatening to drive the tensions beyond the point where the system can contain them. These tensions within the regime are hardly playing out in a social vacuum: After two overwhelming electoral victories for Khatami’s re- 128 Journal of Democracy formism, the genie of democratization is out of the bottle. One of the most important effects of these victories has been the spread of the lan- guage of democracy, not only among young people but throughout the population generally—no mean feat in a country with so long-estab- lished a tradition of authoritarianism. By far the most important and widely repeated slogan associated with the president and his successful campaigns for office has been “the rule of law” (hukumat-e-qanun), which draws an implicit contrast with the regime’s official call for “the rule of Islam” (hukumat-e-eslami). And since 1997, popular political discourse has set aside talk of “revolutionary charisma and divine man- date” in favor of the idea that popular election is the true basis of governmental legitimacy. Yet Khatami’s conservative foes have blocked his reform program and thrust Iran into a legitimacy crisis. The gap between the Islamists who dominate the state and the rising liberal and modern tendencies within Iranian society is fast becoming an abyss. Almost 70 percent of Iran’s population of 67 million—and more than 50 percent of the electorate (the voting age is 16)—is younger than 30. And notwithstanding the per- sistence of such phenomena as buses segregated by sex, the wearing of veils, and other superficial signs of Islamist dominance, Iran’s younger generation is today almost completely “de-Islamized.” Among the most forceful contemporary political voices are new student groups such as the Organization for Strengthening Unity, which calls for a referendum by which the popular will may determine Iran’s future. The leader of the this group, Heshmatollah Tabarzadi, recently issued a strongly worded statement charging that the conservatives had lost their legitimacy, were intellectually ossified, and had no grasp of Iran’s problems. It is no ex- aggeration to say that Tabarzadi was voicing an opinion prevalent among Iran’s young people, most of whom were born after 1979 and see the Revolution supported by their parents mainly as having failed to provide them with meaningful freedom and economic security.

Stirrings of Reform?

The repression to which students and have been sub- jected over the past six years has failed to check the spread of democratic ideas. Some of the reasons for this are negative, such as the philosophi- cal exhaustion of the conservative-theocratic and leftist alternatives, but there are positive reasons as well. These include the emergence of an ethic of individualism that is displacing the ethic of obedience to politi- cal or religious authority, and the advent of a new generation of intellectuals—including some clerics—friendly to modern democratic ideas. Meanwhile, since Khomeini’s death in 1989, some within the narrow but disproportionately influential religious establishment have come to criticize his doctrine of “the supremacy of the Islamic jurispru- Ramin Jahanbegloo 129 dent” (Velayat-e-Faqih) on religious grounds and to defend parliamen- tary democracy as consistent with Islam. The existence of this reformist camp within the clerical-religious world has forced the conservatives to defend themselves on a second front against proponents of a religious civil society (for example, Mohsen Kadivar or Abdul Karim Soroush) who call for an Iranian democracy that is based on Islam but ultimately directed by popular vote. To be sure, the reform process in Iran has recently shown signs of fatigue. The same young people who brought Khatami to power have grown frustrated by his failures. Within 18 months of his second elec- toral victory, young demonstrators were urging him to step down. With Khatami’s relevance waning, the locus of the struggle for civil liberties and human rights has shifted from the presidency to the chambers of parliament and the offices of reformist journals. In truth, the reformist record of the Majlis is scarcely more impressive than that of the execu- tive branch, but this is attributable less to the shortcomings of reformist legislators than to the clergy-dominated Guardian Council. This latter body has repeatedly exercised its constitutional prerogative to reject bills passed by parliament, and has used its control over the judiciary to bring politically motivated charges against reformist legislators, all the while obstructing any effort to secure independent appraisals of how the judiciary or other state institutions actually function. This intense conflict makes plain just how much political practice in the Islamic Republic has belied the ideology of the Islamic Revolution, which pos- tulates an absolute convergence between Islamic orthodoxy and the popular will. Today, Iran is a country where the people are rapidly turn- ing against radical Islam and toward democracy. Growing popular discontent may wind up leading to spontaneous local upheavals in such large cities as Tehran, Isfahan, Mashad, and Tabriz— largely due to the sickness of the Iranian economy. Despite rising prices for oil, Iran’s main export, the governor of the nation’s central bank announced in March 2002 that the foreign debt stood at $20 billion. Productivity is low; underemployment and outright joblessness are high; inflation ranges from 20 to 50 percent; and the living standards of most Iranians are below what people enjoyed under the Pahlavi monarchy during the oil-boom years of the 1970s. Each year, more than 750,000 Iranians enter a labor market that has been adding only about 300,000 new jobs annually. According to Iran’s labor ministry, more than four million Iranians are unemployed. For those who do have work, wages stagnate while inflation eats away at their buying power. Less-skilled workers are hit especially hard. According to a November 2001 report by the Iranian Statistics Center, a government agency, 5 percent of Ira- nians live in “absolute poverty” and the vast majority of others need to hold two jobs just to pay for basic needs. According to the reformist daily Hayat-e-No, real housing and energy costs have risen 70 percent 130 Journal of Democracy since 1998, while goods and services have grown 50 percent more ex- pensive. These harsh economic conditions have come with predictably dis- tressing social costs: marked increases in drug addiction, crime, and prostitution. A July 2000 report by Mohammad Ali Zam, a Tehran offi- cial in charge of cultural affairs, claimed that prostitution had skyrocketed in Iran between 1998 and 1999. According to a January 2002 report published in the daily Entekhab, there are now 20,000 professional pros- titutes in Tehran, mainly runaway girls who have been hired by the city’s criminal gangs. And principally because of the dramatic increases in drug addiction, crime, and prostitution, Iran now has serious problems with HIV/AIDS.

Demonstrations and Popular Mobilization

It is not surprising, then, that in the last decade Iran has seen growing unrest and a greater number of antigovernment demonstrations through- out the country. Most recently, in November 2002, a death sentence for blasphemy imposed on Hashem Aghajari—a history professor from the west-central city of Hamadan—angered a wide spectrum of Iranians, prompting a week of student protests in Tehran and raising the tempera- ture of the power struggle between reformists and hard-liners. To quell the tension, Ayatollah Khamenei ordered the judiciary to review the case against Aghajari, while warning the students to stand down lest “the forces of the people” intervene against them. Fistfights broke out between the students and several hundred vigilantes aligned with the ayatollah. Although the scope of each of these demonstrations was lim- ited, taken together they indicate a general dissatisfaction with the performance of the Iranian government among the population as a whole and among young people in particular. Popular mobilization around these issues has led to a widespread and deeply felt yearning among the people at large for greater reform and democracy. Despite the intensity of their desire for change, however, relatively few Iranians favor violent confrontation with the regime, and it seems unlikely that a full-scale national popular uprising will take place in the next few years. The Islamic Republic, unlike the shah’s regime, enjoys real support from significant sectors of the Iranian power pyramid, including the paramilitary Bassij force (otherwise known as “the Guardians of the Revolution”) and even reformists, such as Khatami or Abbas Abdi (the fomer hostage-taker and the editor-in-chief of the daily Salam), who feel that their politics of “active calm” (as their move- ment understands its modus operandi) is not working very well. Overall, the struggle for power between reformists and their foes is going nowhere, and it is likely that the deadlock will continue until Khatami’s tenure ends in 2005 (he is constitutionally barred from run- Ramin Jahanbegloo 131 ning again). Equally important, relations with the United States remain poor, with domestic challenges and contradictions often blocking a genu- ine desire for normalization. That said, the failure of the reform movement and the growing dis- satisfaction of the Iranian people suggest three other possible scenarios for the near-term future. In the first, the hard-liners, acting with Khamenei’s blessing, try to stop the reform movement in its tracks by mounting a coup against Khatami. In the second, a series of violent and sporadic outbursts against the regime have cumulative effects that crack the foundations of the current power structure and lead to a takeover by elements of the security services acting in league with organized crimi- nal gangs in the major cities. In the third scenario—which is simultaneously the most optimistic and the least probable—the democratic movement of students and intel- lectuals topples the forces of repression and leads Iran toward freedom and democracy. But perhaps this last and most hopeful scenario is not so far-fetched. For even if political events remain hard to predict and even if the current political forms continue to defy abolition, it is cer- tain that the vitality of Iranian and artistic life is asserting itself and winning the war of ideas against radical Islam and a militant but sclerotic fundamentalism. Connected to this and equally certain is the change that is taking hold in the hearts and minds of Iran’s vast numbers of young people. Here indeed may lie the greatest challenge— and the greatest opportunity—for Iranian society, since as Gandhi says: “The spirit of democracy is not a mechanical thing to be adjusted by abolition of forms. It requires change of the heart.”1

NOTE

1. Richard Attenborough, ed., The Words of Gandhi (New York: Newmarket, 1999), 19.