08.01.2004

Crumbling like powder

Mehdi Kia, co-editor of 'Iran Bulletin' - Middle East Forum, on the Iranian earthquake and the fate of the islamic regime

The death or injury of almost half the population of Bam, and the total destruction of this city, one of the most beautiful in Iran, fills one with a deep, deep sadness. And a rising anger at the needless loss of life. The earthquake itself may have been beyond human control, but the collapsing roofs and walls are witness to a regime criminally incompetent and negligent.

This was one more example, if an example were needed, of the corruption of a regime that came out of a revolution but totally betrayed its every wish. Only a few days earlier, another 'act of god' of similar magnitude in a populated area of California caused three deaths. Yet in Bam, a city two millennia old, ten thousand times as many lost their lives.

Why this discrepancy? The roofs and walls of Bam just crumbled - not just in the old city and citadel, but houses built by the regime of mullahs to accommodate some of the millions who had deserted the countryside with its vanishing jobs for the urban centres. In a city straddling one of the world's most active faults, even the puny municipal legislation for more robust architecture was ignored: "On my last trip to Iran," says professor Mohsen Aboutorabi of the University of Central England, "I banged two bricks together and they became like powder" (The Guardian December 27).

The entire expansion of the town was built by the so-called 'build and sell' merchants - for a pittance. Anyone living in Iran knows that nothing can be done without municipal permits. Greasing palm after palm is the name of the game in a regime that has made the shah's plunder look like petty theft. Yet we are talking about a country with the third largest oil deposits in the world and with a regime that at one time had the trust of a vast section of the population.

But it is not just the sickening architectural wasteland that evokes anger. This is a country criss-crossed with fault lines, where earthquakes are a way of life. And this is a regime which has enough technology to eavesdrop on most telephone conversations, to keep the airwaves clear of opposition radio transmissions and to build a nuclear warhead, but had to beg in the international marketplace for equipment to detect life buried beneath the rubble it was responsible for in the first place. To watch this incompetence in a country that has witnessed three major earthquakes in the last decade is nauseating.

And what do you make of a state that sits on the world's largest gas reserve and yet insist on building an atomic reactor in Bushehr, not far from the Bam earthquake? I believe this calamity will add to the rage of the vast majority of the people of the country for whom the regime has lost even the last vestiges of legitimacy. They showed their disgust with the entire regime - reformists and all - when they almost completely boycotted the municipal elections earlier this year. It is clear that they will do so again in the elections to the parliament (majles) next summer. The reformists are panicking at the thought, almost begging the people to give them another chance.

The people of Iran, however, have in recent years used the reformists as a shield behind which they have been formulating their own demands - political freedom, democracy, the right to assembly, the right to self-determination for the nationalities, and the separation of state and religion being high on the list. Now that the reformists have conquered all that is conquerable through the ballot box with little result, the people have discarded that shield and are beginning to take on the entire regime. They have initiated the first and largest mass movement for a secular state in any islamic country in history.

In 1978 the mullahs ruling Iran today were able to use another 'act of god' - the huge earthquake which flattened the desert town of Tabas - to increase their credibility with the revolutionary masses and take over the leadership of the revolution. Soon after that Khomeini's face was, to use a popular expression, "visible on the moon" and the rest, as they say, is history. Well, history has a way of repeating itself - in this case another tragedy giving rise to another historic twist. The people of Iran will soon 'bang' the two parts of this regime together and watch it 'become like powder' - just like the bricks in Bam.