29.07.1999

Thunder in a cloudy sky

Mehdi Kia looks at the Iranian students’ revolt

The nationwide protests and demonstrations by students in the Islamic Republic of Iran were not just a flash in the pan. They signalled a turning point in the mass struggle against the Islamic regime. For the first time the students and their supporters voiced slogans that targeted the Islamic Republic in its totality, and not one or other of its factions.

“Guns, tanks, basijis don’t scare us anymore!” (referring to the basij security forces), they shouted. “Khamenei, Khamenei, shame on you. Pack up and leave your throne”; “Freedom or death!”; “People join us: 20 years of silence is over”; “Free political prisoners” - and many more slogans that directly targeted the religious ruler, Ali Khamenei, or the despotic rule in its totality. It was this, as much as the burning down of banks and shops, that brought all the regime’s factions together - reformist and ultra-conservative.

Over the next six days the slogans became increasingly more radical. The regime, seeing its very roots threatened, united. President Khatami left his smiles at home: “These people have evil aims. They intend to foster violence in society and we shall stand in their way,” he said. All those who had nailed their flag to his strategy of ‘legally’ and peacefully transforming the Islamic regime joined in the chorus condemning the ‘excesses’. These “unruly elements” were not students. They were “deviants” directed from abroad. They had to be crushed. Death is the only punishment for the mohareb (fighting against god) and mofsed (corrupt). If we had not prevented them, “our brave revolutionary Muslim youth would have cut these rabble into little pieces,” screamed the cleric, Hassan Rowhani. The most serious threat to the regime’s existence since 1981 was crushed in blood.

At least 15 students died in Tehran on the first day alone. Five died in the attack on Tabriz University. The real toll is not known, as bodies were removed by the security forces. Whether or not this is the start of a revolutionary movement to topple the regime is too soon to tell. What is clear is that the movement which began with the election of Khatami to the presidency in May 1997 on a platform of reforms within the system has turned a corner. There will be no going back.

It was the students, the young and women who spearheaded the campaign to get Khatami elected in opposition to the candidate of the religious ruler, Khamenei, on the slogan of the rule of law and the creation of the organs of civil society. Khatami’s landslide victory was notable not just for the rout of the ultra-conservative candidates, but for the fact that almost 10 million voters, who had stayed away for almost two decades, went to the polls. Some of us understood this as their way of using the opening provided by the increasing factional squabbles to say no to the entire system, symbolised by the absolute power of the religious ruler. The May coalition comprised a very broad section of society, united by their desire to open up the political atmosphere. It included the so-called left ‘Imam line’, their student organisation, the Office for Securing Unity, and their paper Salam, various religious nationalist groups and the technocrats surrounding ex-president Rafsanjani and his party, Executives of Construction.

It is important to understand that the differences between the two main factions - those around the religious ruler Khamenei and the May coalition around the president - are not so much over economic policy as politics. For example within both factions there are those who subscribe to the IMF structural adjustment programme, and those who propose some form of state capitalism.

This has been a Bonapartist regime, crawling out of the cobwebs of history, trying to manage a capitalist economy, but unable to rescue it from its deep economic and social malaise. The root of the factional squabbles is the fundamental structural fault line in the political structure of the Islamic Republic: that between the ‘caliphate’ - that is, the absolute rule of the religious jurisprudence (velayate faghih), which gives a religious ruler (Khamenei) almost divine rights over the whole of society - and the ‘republic’ - that is, the right of the citizen to make laws. In simple terms it is the duality between the sovereignty of god, embodied in his representative on earth, and the sovereignty of the popular vote. The counterrevolution that rode astride a popular anti-dictatorial and egalitarian revolution in 1979 could only give birth to this twin monster. The one represented the right of the clergy to rule in perpetuity, and the other an echo of the revolution the mullahs had ridden and destroyed. Like a pair of macabre Siamese twins the two have been inseparably stuck together.

The twin pyramid of the caliphate and the republic extends right through society from top to toe, creating a totally unworkable dual structure. Throughout its 20 years the faction-ridden regime has been prevented from making a single consistent policy because of this structure pulling it in two directions. And throughout its 20 years it has been desperately trying to escape this by repeatedly purging one or other faction, only to find itself split as soon as it had to make the next decision.

In order to paper over these cracks it concentrated more and more power in the hands of the religious ruler. A united voice had to be imposed by diktat. This concentration of power started with ayatollah Khomeini himself, when it became apparent that even his authority could not paper over the factional squabbles, and became more urgent with his successor, Khamenei - a lightweight lacking Khomeini’s religious and political clout. The leadership therefore became the focus of every crisis the regime went through in the last 18 years.

The coalition that centred around president Khatami two years ago was no exception. That was, in one respect, the old battle between the caliphate and the republic. The coalition formed under one banner: no to Khamenei’s despotic rule. Yet it was also the first salvo in a new battle, one that looks beyond the Islamic Republic.

The recent student riots were not the first. Riots had broken out in Mashad, Arak, Ghazvin, Kermanshah, and Shiraz in 1995, and more recently in Eslam Abad, a poor suburb of Tehran. Anti-government slogans had been shouted, banks and shops had been burnt and troops and helicopter gunships had been sent to quell them. Last year saw an unprecedented escalation of labour strikes, mostly in response to workers not being paid for months. They took to the streets and blocked roads. Many strikes were suppressed by force. Then there was the nationwide protest by the oilworkers, unique in its organisation. For the first time on May Day, large number of workers organised their own marches - without permit. In Sanandaj, Kurdistan, the whole town erupted in riots and was placed under martial law.

Smarting from the staggering defeat at the presidential elections, the Khamenei faction turned the screw. It was well placed through its control of the judiciary, all the organs of repression and the state-owned radio-television. Khamenei used the victory of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the murder of a number of Iranian diplomats to fan war hysteria. His faction unleashed an unprecedented campaign against the writers - the first group who had declared their resolve to create an association independent of the state. At least six died under mysterious circumstances. One reformist newspaper after another was closed.

It was in such a climate that the elections to the Assembly of Experts, which chooses the religious ruler, was held last year. The caliphate used its control of the organ that vets candidates to exclude virtually all the candidates of the May coalition. It then launched a desperate campaign to draw the people to the polls. It was to be an endorsement of the regime as a whole. It even roped in Khatami, whose candidates had been barred, to plea for the electorate to vote. They stayed away in their millions. Khatami had weakened under pressure when the system as a whole was under question. He was to repeat this again last month.

By ignoring the president’s call the people showed their political maturity. It was clear that a year before they had not voted for the person of Khatami. They had only voted for his slogans of more freedom and a government of law. The boycott showed that the people were looking beyond the Islamic Republic, though most observers abroad chose to ignore this. Khamenei did not. His allies did everything to stop the first municipal council elections from taking place and, when thwarted by pressure from below, to stop ‘reformists’ from getting in. In the event they failed in that too and the Khatami faction won an overwhelming majority.

But in Tehran Khatami’s compromises over the candidates caused the people to stay away in large numbers. Only 40% voted in the capital. While Khamenei’s men did not win a single seat in Tehran, the president’s faction got in on a minority vote. Again the people had made it clear that it was not the singer they were interested in, but his song. For Khamenei the municipal election results were catastrophic. In the capital the number of votes cast for his candidates were even less than the number of revolutionary guards stationed in Tehran. With the parliamentary elections due next spring there was no time to lose.

He used the tool he had an abundance of - terror. A wave of political killings of dissident politicians and activists of the writers’ union took place last winter - Dariush Foruhar and his wife Parvahneh Eskandari, the writers Mohammad Mokhtari, Mohammad-Jafar Pouyandeh and Majid Sharif were murdered. Student meetings were disrupted by knife- and club-wielding thugs under the sympathetic eyes of the security organs. Reformist politicians were beaten up and their papers closed down. Rumours of a coup circulated.

However, the people were not cowed. The Foruhars’ funeral was attended by tens of thousands. Slogans of “Taliban, have some shame, stop your rule” clearly pointed the finger at Khamenei. The Khamenei faction wavered. Some saw the writing on the wall and the wave of murders was stopped. Many more were on the list of those to be liquidated. People demanded to know who had ordered the killings. Allegations were getting too close to the person of the supreme religious ruler.

A tactical retreat was called for. A conspiracy by rogue elements from the ministry of information was ‘uncovered’ and an unspecified number of people arrested. Student organisations asked for the resignation of the minister of information. They got it after a fight. They went on to insist that the committee set up by the president to investigate the murders report its findings. It dragged its feet. The rulers hoped that time would blunt memories and demands for the truth. Then suddenly in June the regime announced that the chief suspect in the killings, Said Emami, had committed suicide in prison - or, as one opposition commentator put it, “was suicided”. Clearly he knew too much. And he could point to those who gave the orders - ayatollah Khamenei, the caliph himself.

This episode, followed soon by the passage of a law designed to strangle the relatively free press, was the trigger for the student demonstrations. Prior to this the authorities shut a number of pro-presidential papers. The closure of Salam, which immediately followed the new press law, was the final straw. Several hundreds staged a sit-in at the university student quarters. They were savagely attacked by armed thugs supported by the police. At least 14 were killed, some thrown out of windows, hundreds injured and many arrested. Eight hundred dorms were burnt. Despite a ban on demonstrations the students took to the streets in a nationwide movement. Armed thugs attacked Tabriz University, killing at least five.

Students were joined by bystanders sympathetic to their cause. In the capital at least two other, separate, demonstrations took place: one in the square housing the old parliament building, the scene of many previous battles over the last century; and the other by the railway station, where a crowd of tens of thousands marched from the poorer quarters of south Tehran. It was not just student demonstrations. It was a popular uprising.

The revolution that toppled the monarchy to a great extent began in the universities. In the two previous decades the universities had been the centre of opposition to the monarchy and supplied many of the cadres that erected the new revolutionary movement on the ashes of the old. During the revolution they provided the organising force for the mass street demonstrations and public gatherings. They also formed an important link between the popular revolution and the working class - whose general strike finally broke the back of the shah’s regime.

After the revolution the universities remained the centre of opposition to the new established clerical rule until their forcible closure in 1980, with many casualties. It was students who bore the main brunt of the counterrevolution’s wrath in the massacres of 1981 and again 1988. On the side of the regime, it was the universities which formed the main arena where it was legitimised ideologically. Not for nothing did the mullahs endlessly praise the university-seminary axis and unity.

But what is special about the current student movement is that the majority are the children of this revolution. Over 60% of the population are under 25; more than half below 20. This is the frustrated generation, with little to do in the stifling atmosphere of the Islamic Republic. The abysmal state of the Iranian economy and the high unemployment means that the future too is bleak. No leisure, no work and no prospects. As for the women, who now outnumber men in higher education, there are the added strictures of sexual apartheid. This is an explosive mix.

There are at present over 2.6 million students in higher education. Some undoubtedly are children of the elite. But increasingly the students come from lower class families. This development was helped by places being reserved for the family of ‘martyrs’, and by new universities springing up all over the place. The Open University alone has branches in 70 cities and over 600,000 students. For this reason the student movement is not only significant in itself, but is potentially tied in with the working class movement, the neighbourhood associations and the uprisings in the poor quarters. This, in addition to the radical demands of the students, places the student movement, alongside the women’s movement, at the centre of democratic developments in Iran.

Currently there are four official student organisations in the country. The largest, the Office for Securing Unity, is close to the so-called left faction within the May (president’s) coalition. Some student organisations have ties with the various religious-nationalist groupings - such as the National Association of Students. Some have called for the supreme religious ruler to be elected. An increasing number are voicing the need to separate religion and state. Some have used words such as ‘social democracy’ - anathema in the Islamic Republic. They elected a council which directed the sit-ins and demonstrations.

The Khamenei faction used the radicalisation of the demonstrations to browbeat Khatami into joining it in a call for law and order. The repressive machinery was set in motion. A counter-demonstration of Khamenei supporters was organised, mostly by state employees and security personnel. Martial law prevailed in the streets of the capital and many major cities. In Tehran alone, over 1,400 students were arrested. According to the Council of Student Protesters, the arrested students, many wounded, were forced to name other student protesters. Before being released they had to sign a prepared statement that they had acted at the instigation of foreign forces.

In time-honoured fashion a number of leaders have been brought before television cameras to read out confessions. Manuchehr Mohammadi and Malus Radnia (Maryam Shansi), belonging to the National Association of Students, have admitted meeting opposition organisations during their (perfectly open and legal) trip abroad last year and “regularly giving false news to foreign media”. Their lives, as well as those of many others - such as student leaders Ali-Reza Mohajeri-Nejad and Heshmatollah Tabarzadi, who was arrested before the protests and his paper Self-Identity closed - are in danger. Many leaders of the Party of the Iranian Nation have also been arrested. Arrests continue as I write. Former political prisoners have been called for questioning. Some have been detained. Thousands remain in custody. And despite Khatami’s ‘good behaviour’ another paper supporting him was shut down last week.

Can we do anything abroad? Despite the gloom of some commentators there is no doubt that a properly organised broad campaign of support abroad can secure the release of prisoners and reduce the pressure on detainees: a campaign calling for the immediate release of detainees and pressure on western governments to suspend trade with the country pending the unconditional release of those arrested, alongside a campaign to send representatives from Amnesty International, the Red Cross or any independent committee into Iran to oversee the treatment of detainees. On a broader canvas there is an urgent need for an international campaign to support the struggles of the Iranian people for their democratic rights, including the right to independent association, trade unions, equality of men and women, and the rights of nationalities.

The revolutionary movement in Iran cannot succeed without the working class being organised as a class. An opening of the political atmosphere is the oxygen this movement needs. The fact that the establishment of a writers’ union has been imposed on the regime, after the death of so many writers, is a valuable first step. This is the first independent association, outside the state, since the clampdown of 1981. Last year we saw the nationwide move by the oilworkers - again unique in its organisational sophistication before it was ferociously suppressed.

International support is also vital in the campaign to bring the perpetrators of the crimes against the people of Iran before an international tribunal: a global movement from below, in the spirit of Russell’s Vietnam tribunal of the 60s (see Iran Bulletin winter 1998 and spring/summer 1999).

The left in Iran remains fragmented and weak. To the general global reasons for the weakening of the left must be added the specific mistakes the Iranian left made during and after the 1979 revolution. Perhaps the most important was that the left ignored democracy. Take away the democratic core, and the egalitarian slogans of the left overlapped with those of the demagogic mullahs. Now the regime is discredited, some of those slogans also appear to be discredited in the minds of the public. The left has much work to do in order to make clear the difference between its slogans and those of the mullahs. They need to emphasise a democratic core.

Once the religious ogre is toppled, the left may well face a new-found nationalism. It needs to prepare for this. More than anything it needs to organise the class to which it belongs. The future of Iran, and of the whole Middle East region, is closely tied to the fortunes of this class.

For this to happen the success of the student and the women’s movement are crucial. And for these young shoots to grow we need international support.