Iran at the tipping point
Antonia Felix
Saturday, June 20, 2009
ALL EYES are on Iran as another so-called democratic election brings hundreds of thousands of protesters to the streets.
According to Iranian American friends I have been in touch with this week, the tide is turning in a way that no one imagined possible.
Demonstrators are using the election sham as an opportunity to show the regime that they have had enough of a devastated economy, bullying over the nuclear program, inhumane laws, unwarranted arrests, torture of dissidents and hundreds of executions every year, including those of juveniles.
Emboldened by their numbers, the protesters have begun using slogans like “No more dictator!” to transform their message into an all-out protest against the regime.
Eight people have already been killed by the paramilitary police, but in spite of the risks people are expanding their message. And apparently the steady stream of protests has forced the leaders in Tehran to improvise.
One of my contacts, Ana Sami, an Iranian-American woman who is a specialist on human and women’s rights issues in Iran, has learned that the regime is “hiring out” to supplement their forces this week in light of the ongoing demonstrations:
“Reports coming out of Iran from ordinary citizens,” she wrote in an e-mail to me on Thursday, “stated that some of those who were beating students couldn’t speak Farsi, that they spoke Arabic or other languages in the region, showing that the Iranian regime’s intelligence was not enough to secure their stronghold; they have resorted to hiring foreigners.”
Sami added that this reveals a drastic shift in the government’s leverage to address the demonstrations: “Although I cannot predict how soon or what type of strategy the regime will take up in the coming weeks, I now see a large dent in the Iranian regime’s rule that simply was not present before.”
She and others believe that the outpouring of hundreds of thousands of people in cities and towns across Iran this week represent their overall disdain with the regime. The election was the pretext for coming out in droves with a legitimate outcry against the purported fraud.
By stepping up its attacks on all types of dissent prior to the election, the Iranian regime revealed that it anticipated some level of public upheaval. In February, Amnesty International announced that it had learned of “reports of waves of arbitrary arrests and harassment, directed particularly against members of Iran’s religious and ethnic minority communities, students, trade unionists and women’s rights activists. These measures may in part be intended to stifle debate and to silence critics of the authorities in advance of the forthcoming presidential election in June 2009.”
Forced to hire foreigners to help control the demonstrations, the regime clearly did not anticipate the massive scale of protest that has continued since Monday. Nor did they foresee losing the loyalty of some their own forces. The Cyrus News Agency reported that 16 senior members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps were arrested on Tuesday for efforts “to join the people’s movement.”
The government has decades of experience in putting down dissent, but none of that prepared them for the events that are making history this week. By exposing this chink in their armor, Tehran’s rulers may soon find themselves backed into a corner from which they cannot arrest, torture or shoot their way out.
We may be witnessing the last days of fundamentalist clerical leadership in Iran. The regime has only paid lip service to its democratic approach to elections, and the size and consistency of the protests show that Iranians are fed up with the hypocrisy. There is nothing democratic about an election in which the candidates are not chosen by the people but by a government entity. As usual, the 12-man Council of Guardians — Supreme Leader Khamenei’s gatekeepers of Islamic law — disqualified hundreds of presidential candidates at a stroke and chose three to face the incumbent. Every woman was crossed out as a matter of course.
Neither is there anything democratic about a system in which free speech is routinely suppressed. This week, the ruling clerics blocked TV signals, cell phone service and Internet access and banned the foreign press from reporting on the demonstrations. This follows a 30-year history of intolerance — during Ahmadinejad’s four years in office alone the regime shut down hundreds of newspapers, journals and Web sites that expressed anything other than state-held views.
More devastating have been the arrests and executions of dissenters. The slaughter of approximately 30,000 political prisoners in 1988 is fresh in Sami’s memory and in those of every Iranian I have met. The entire history of the regime is filled with a Stalinesque approach to killing the opposition.
What has moved me the most in my observations about Iran is the bravery of those who refuse to stop speaking out — especially women — regardless of the deadly consequences. Women have been at the heart of some of the country’s largest opposition activities as they continually put their lives on the line to reverse discrimination against women and minorities in Iran’s legal system.
The latest big push in the Iranian women’s movement came in 2006 with the launch of the One Million Signatures Campaign, which collects signatures for a petition that will be presented to the parliament. The activists hope to reform laws that discriminate against women in terms of marriage, divorce, age of criminal responsibility, inheritance rights and others.
The latest crackdown on this campaign took place last month, when about 20 women were arrested. One of them, Jelveh Javaheri, was held until last week after being charged with “acting against national security . . . and with the aim of disrupting public order and security.” Javaheri was arrested at her home without an arrest warrant — a typical tactic in Iran.
The largest Iranian opposition movement, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), headquartered in Paris, considers women’s and all human rights the central issue in reversing the tyrannical system in Iran. They view gender, ethnic and religious equality the cornerstone of democracy and seek to replace the fundamentalist Islamic regime with a secular democracy based on those principles. Putting their ideals into practice, their president-elect is a Tehran-born woman, Maryam Rajavi, who has become the face and voice of Iran’s pro-democracy movement around the world. Rajavi knows first-hand that high price of such democratic ideals in Iran; she lost two sisters and a brother-in-law to the resistance cause.
As we watch events unfold on the 24-hour news networks, we must keep in mind that the demonstrations in Iran go far beyond a “domestic power struggle” between two political factions. The Iranian people are demanding radical change in a government that has brutally oppressed and failed them.
Antonia Felix moderated a U.S. Senate briefing about the state of women’s rights in Iran last year. She lives in Emporia.
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SHAHRAM (anonymous) says...
I hope the policy makers read it too. It is a great article,
June 29, 2009 at 11 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )