The security forces may have temporarily crushed the resistance in Iran, but the revolution is far from over. Iranians by the hundreds of thousands -- young and old, men and women, students and workers -- have taken to the streets for the last two weeks in protest of a rigged election. And no matter how many protesters the government kills or imprisons, the people know that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not the legitimately elected leader of their country.
But in the face of the Iranians' courage, President Barack Obama has offered precious little support for the democratic yearnings of Iran's people. Just last week, after some two dozen people were killed and hundreds jailed, Obama referred to the situation as a "debate" taking place in Iran. His comments echoed earlier White House statements that said the administration was "impressed by the vigorous debate and enthusiasm that this election generated, particularly among young Iranians."
Obama's actions shouldn't surprise anyone. He has made a deliberate shift on the Middle East from his predecessor's objective to promote democracy in the region. Instead, Obama has consistently reached out to the thugs who rule Iran to seek rapprochement.
The Washington Times has reported that Obama sent a secret letter to the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei prior to the election proposing "cooperation in regional and bilateral relations," an allegation the White House has not denied. Again, no surprise. This is the president, after all, who promised during last year's campaign he would sit down with anyone from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Kim Jong Il. Obama seems to believe his personal charm and charisma are enough to turn those bent on America's destruction into neutral, peace-seeking nations. For his efforts, Obama has received threats from North Korea that they will launch missiles toward Hawaii on July 4; and from Iran, election fraud and the greatest repression since the early days of the Islamic Revolution.
But despite Obama's feckless overtures to the tyrants, democracy may yet prevail in Iran. Middle East scholar Joshua Muravchik, in his important new book, "The Next Founders: Voices of Democracy in the Middle East," argues that one of the chief requisites for democracy is "democrats -- people who believe in democracy and are ready to work or fight for it." His book introduces an unfamiliar American audience to democrats in the Middle East, including Iranian Mohsen Sazegara, who began his political career as a young aide to Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979 and ended up a fierce critic of the regime.
Like many of those democrats who took to the streets in Tehran over the last few weeks, Sazegara has used the Internet to get his pro-democracy message out. Indeed the new technologies have made crackdowns on communications far more difficult, which is why it has been impossible for even a police state to stop information from spreading within Iran and to the outside world.
As Muravchik points out, "There is no reason why the democratic idea cannot have a rebirth in the Middle East. . . ." He acknowledges that the impetus must come from inside, from "the activists, journalists, politicians, feminists, dissidents, bloggers and other Middle Easterners" who are working to promote democracy. But he also reminds us that "our role as Americans is to encourage and assist them and to protect them from persecution to the extent we can."
Muravchik makes the case that the United States should not remain a bystander in promoting democracy in the Middle East and that there is much we can do, directly and indirectly, including "raising holy hell when (democrats) are persecuted. Too often our government has swallowed its words for fear of irritating the powers that be," he warns. Imagine how it must feel to those who are risking their lives now in Iran that the leader of the oldest democracy in the world has been so timid in his support of their efforts.
If Obama wishes to be the true leader of the free world, he must act like one. Iran's democrats deserve better than Obama has given.
The writer, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, based in Washington, D.C., was White House director of public liaison during the Reagan administration. Contact her at Creators Syndicate, 5777 Century Blvd. #700, Los Angeles, CA 90045.
Two weeks after the contested results of Iran’s Presidential elections led to widespread street riots and demonstrations across the country, the Islamic Republic pronounced its harshest threat yet to protesters. At the official ceremony for Friday prayers, Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, a hard-line cleric who often delivers the sermon, said those who agitate on the streets were “waging war against God,” a crime that carries the death sentence.
It was the latest example in which government forces have tightened their control over and heightened their rhetoric against opposition supporters of the defeated presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi. Demonstrations and rallies have ground to a halt as the heavy presence of police, Revolutionary Guards officers, plainclothes intelligence and paramilitary volunteer members in the streets have made it impossible for protesters to congregate.
The government also began a propaganda campaign aimed at shifting responsibility for the violence meted out by the state onto foreign powers and the protesters themselves. State television aired a program in which witnesses and experts all agreed that Neda Agha-Soltan — the 27-year-old bystander whose death was captured on YouTube, sparking sympathy worldwide and turning Neda into a martyr — was shot by foreign agents in order to intensify people’s rage. State television also broadcast another program mourning the purported deaths of eight Basijis killed by bullet wounds.
The Basij, or Basijis — the paramilitary volunteer force developed by the Islamic Republic to protect the “Islamic Revolution” from civil disturbances such as the kind that have occurred these past weeks — have had an overwhelming presence on Tehran’s streets, often setting up roadblocks to check cars and detain people they consider suspect. They have also been brought in as reinforcement for the police in dealing with demonstrators. Although they are an official subdivision of the Islamic Republic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and decked out with crowd control gear as well as small weapons in some cases, they are barely held accountable for their deeds and freer in meting out violence. The majority of recent deaths of protesters are thought to have been carried out by Basijis.
But now the question is being raise: what branch of state security is behind the violence against protesters?
Both the Basij and the Revolutionary Guards Corps (or Sepah) were founded in the first year of the Islamic Republic in 1979, following a decree by Iran’s first Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. “From the start, the Sepah was about building a popular army, one that had the duty to protect the Islamic Republic from within,” explains Moshen Sazegara, a former founder of the Revolutionary Guards, who later fell out with the regime and currently resides and works as a journalist in the United States.
Today the Sepah is estimated to have 125,000 forces, while the Basij — which by Imam Khomeini’s initial intentions was to comprise “twenty million” — numbers up to an estimated six million and is active in most cities, towns and villages across Iran. The majority of Basiji are involved in volunteer services at mosques.
Over the years, however, certain units among the Basij were trained for state control purposes. In 1999, they appeared prominently as shock troops in quelling urban dissent following student demonstrations that initially sought greater freedom for the press. “Increasingly, Sepah used the Basij as a force for indoctrination and in the role of a watchdog group on campuses, factories and even tribal units,” says Frederic Wehrey, adjunct senior policy analyst at the Rand Corporation, who has done several joint-studies on the Sepah. “The aim was to militarize civil society to prevent currents that the Islamic Republic is opposed to.”
“These past weeks,” Sazegara estimates, “the state has used about 12,000 such plainclothes forces in addition to another 28,000 official police and Sepah forces to control the dissent.”
But Sazegara sees the possibility for division. “Many of the commanders in the Sepah have children who are in their twenties and who have joined the recent protests,” he told TIME. Since Ahmadinejad took office in 2005, the Supreme Leader swapped out most wartime commanders in the Sepah, replacing them, in Sazegara’s words, “with a bunch of yes-men.”
“There are many Basijis who were in support of Mousavi,” says an Iran-based analyst who requested anonymity, himself previously an active member of the Basij. “Many Basijis are upset that the recent violence has been attributed to them.”
Former Sepah founder Sazegara concurs, adding that many of the plainclothes controlling the streets and meting out excessive violence to protesters are “intelligence personnel of the Sepah, some of them even with military degrees, but showing up in plainclothes to take on the appearance of the Basij.”
In the face of such overwhelming force, opposition leader Mousavi has held back from calling for further protests, and on Thursday, said he would file for permits for future protests.
A key Iranian dissident tells Newsmax he was stunned when he heard President Barack Obama tell reporters that, despite government’s brutal crackdown in Tehran, the Islamic Republic has time to regain “legitimacy” in the eyes of the Iranian people.
“I was hoping President Obama would lead the world and start a boycott of Iranian oil,” said former presidential candidate and opposition activist Mohsen Sazegara. “This is the best way to save the lives of the Iranian people.”
Instead, Sazegara told Newsmax, he listened to Obama’s news conference on Tuesday with a sense of disbelief.
It’s “not too late for the Iranian government to see there is a peaceful path that leads to legitimacy in the eyes of the Iranian people,” Obama told reporters when asked for his reaction to the violence in Iran.
Sazegara, who was involved in the reform movement in the 1990s but eventually left Iran after the reformist government jailed him, said he listened to Obama with a sense of “deep, deep, deep regret. I never expected President Obama to say something like that.”
“I had been expecting Obama to say we promise the people of Iran we won’t deal or negotiate with any government that does not represent the majority of the people in Iran. I had expected him to be very clear.”
For two years, Sazegara has had a weekly televised commentary on the Persian Service of Voice of America, which VOA polling shows is the most widely respected and listened to segment in its lineup.
When reports began to emerge from Iran of massive demonstrations 10 days ago, Sazegara began getting 1,400 e-mails a day from inside Iran, begging him to appear more regularly to comment on events.
“I was a window into Iran from the outside,” he said. With the crackdown on protest leaders — about 800 of Sazegara’s friends and former colleagues are now in jail — the Voice of America was a key conduit for getting information from inside Iran to the West, and vice versa.
Sazegara went to VOA editor Alex Belida, who initially agreed to put him on air. But after consulting with a Persian-speaking deputy, Belida called him back to say no.
The de facto banning of Sazegara from the VOA airwaves is not the first time Persian-speaking editors at VOA have attempted to suppress information that might be embarrassing to the hard-line government in Tehran.
On Saturday, for example, sources in Iran emailed VOA and Sazegara dramatic video footage that showed the brutal cold-blooded murder of a young Iranian woman in Tehran.
The deputy editor of the Farsi service, Ali Sajadi, refused to air it, saying it was too graphic.
But when overseas media, including the BBC’s Farsi service, aired the footage, Sajadi allowed broadcasters to show a short segment of the footage, which has now become famous around the world.
During Obama’s news conference today, he described the slaying of the young woman, Neda Soltani, as “a problem.”
And last week, when top aides to presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi received a standing ovation from the European Parliament in Strasbourg, VOA refused to give the event coverage on its broadcasts into Iran.
Protesters in Tehran have begun holding up signs in English, asking the United States to increase sanctions on the Iranian regime and to condemn the Islamic Republic.
“Obama claims to be like President Lincoln,” Sazegara said. “Then he should uphold the principles of Lincoln.”
Instead, during his news conference, the president reiterated his fears that the U.S. would become a “tool” in the hands of the regime, who would blame the CIA for orchestrating the demonstrations, Sazegara said.
“But that is already happening,” Sazegara said. “Keyhan daily, which is the organ of the leader, ran a huge front page story recently saying that the U.S. had allocated a $400 million budget to support riots in Iran. And I’ve been receiving reports from inside Iran that the regime is planning to stage televised confessions of people they have tortured with hot irons in prison to get them to say they’ve been paid by the United States.”
Sazegara told Newsmax he plans to write an open letter to Congress that it appears to be the “policy of President of Obama” to prevent Voice of America from airing broadcasters who are close to the pro-democracy protesters inside Iran.
Two months ago, Sazegara spoke with State Department Iran desk officers and urged them to focus more closely on Iranian human rights abuses and to support European efforts to monitor the presidential election to ensure that it was fair.
“They told me that was the policy of Bush, and that they were going for engagement first, and would only talk about human rights and freedom later,” Sazegara said.
Sazegara, who was tortured during long months in Iranian prisons in the late 1990s, warned the State Department that it was making “a bigger mistake than during the 1953 coup.”
“Now the Iranian people love you,” he said. “But if you make this kind of mistake, that could turn to hatred.”
Need to Know: The "calm of the grave" is how one person interviewed by the BBC's Jeremy Bowen — still in Iran — described the scene in Tehran on Friday. There was also little in the way of official announcements, although official commentary flew thick and fast: President Barack Obama praised the bravery of Iranians who protested against a disputed election in the face of "outrageous" violence, while a hardline Iranian cleric called for the execution of leading "rioters."
One of the founders of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, who's also a former deputy prime minister, has told NPR that what has happened in Iran amounts to a "military coup." Mohsen Sazegara also claims authorities know the election was rigged. Listen to that fascinating interview here.
Former Revolutionary Guard Member: 'Military Coup' Underway In Iran
By Mark Memmott
One of the founders of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, who's also a former deputy prime minister, tells Weekend Edition's Scott Simon that what amounts to a "military coup" has occurred in his country. And he claims authorities know the election was rigged.
According to Mohsen Sazegara:
Right after the election, 11 o'clock at night, was a military coup because they went to (presidential candidate Mir Hossein) Mousavi's headquarters -- five persons from the Revolutionary Guard -- and told him that, 'Yes, the leader says that this is true, you have won the election, you are the elected president, but you can't be the president. (Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad should remain in the position.'
"And then they started to invent those fake numbers in Ministry of Interior. And right after that they started to arrest the people, to disconnect the country, to dismiss the reporters, and that is the reason that we call it a military coup."
Here's Scott's interview of Sazegara, who became a leading dissident in Iran -- leading to his arrest in 2003 -- and now lives in the United States:
Mojtaba Khamenei is being positioned to succeed his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but he lacks the stature to overcome any opposition from a key panel, analysts say.
By Jeffrey Fleishman
June 25, 2009
Reporting from Cairo - There are few anecdotes about him, and pictures, at least ones that have appeared in public, are scarce. But Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of Iran's supreme leader, wields considerable power and is a key figure in orchestrating the crackdown against anti-government protesters, analysts say.
The younger Khamenei operates tucked behind an elaborate security structure, an overlapping world that stretches from Iran's Revolutionary Guard corps to the motorcycle-riding Basiji militiamen.
Analysts and former dissidents describe him as the gatekeeper for his father, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a reclusive son whose political instincts were sharpened in a post-revolutionary Iran where affiliations with security and intelligence services were just as important as Islamic ideology.
The anxiety in the streets of Tehran today goes deeper than the outrage over the June 12 election that authorities say was won by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- it is the newest round in a struggle between hard-liners and reformists that began more than 20 years ago over the legacy of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
And at the center, or at least very close to it, is Mojtaba Khamenei. Analysts say the ultraconservative cleric is being positioned to succeed his father but would face tough opposition.
Revered figures of the Islamic Revolution such as Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Hossein Ali Montazeri years ago deemed the senior Khamenei's religious and political resumes insufficient for him to succeed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini when he died 20 years ago. However, they found themselves outflanked.
Ali Khamenei gradually has created a bureaucracy to consolidate his power over Iran's military, intelligence and foreign policy. The younger Khamenei, who is believed to be in his 40s or early 50s, working deep inside a political system that is difficult for outsiders to crack, has emerged as a force in that bureaucracy.
Mojtaba Khamenei's influence became evident when he gave key support to Ahmadinejad in the 2005 presidential election. Ahmadinejad, who analysts say shares the messianic rhetoric and Islamic fervor of the younger Khamenei, unexpectedly defeated two leading conservative candidates as well as Rafsanjani. The Khameneis are now backing Ahmadinejad against Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the opposition leader who says the June 12 election was fraudulent and should be annulled.
The Guardian Council, which oversees the electoral process, has said the outcome will stand but also announced that it will continue to investigate the disputed vote count through Monday. The street protests and violence that erupted over the last week -- state news media have reported that 10 to 19 people have died -- were in part the result of a crackdown by forces close to Mojtaba Khamanei.
"This coup taking place is a political liquidation against the old guard by reckless people like Mojtaba and Ahmadinejad," said Mehdi Khalaji, an expert on Iran with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "But I don't think they will win. Power that relies only on the military and doesn't care about social or religious institutions cannot last long."
Mojtaba Khamenei is a secretive man who doesn't want to "be on people's tongues," said Mohsen Sazegara, an Iranian journalist and former government official whose reformist views led to his brief imprisonment in 2003. "Nobody knows much about him."
The younger Khamenei is the "most influential person in his father's court," said Ali Afshari, a dissident and reformist who spent three years in jail for running pro-democracy programs. "The question is, what happens when his father is gone? Mojtaba needs to hold on to the security apparatus."
Khalaji, who studied in Iran's holy city of Qom, said Mojtaba Khamenei "was raised in a house surrounded by intelligence services. He doesn't have [prominent] clerical credentials, despite the fact that he wears robes and a clerical uniform."
He added that the son's background is much different from his father's. The supreme leader, in his younger years, immersed himself in literature, novels and music, was friends with intellectuals and spent time in jail with Marxists. The younger Khamenei, said Khalaji, "grew up in a very different atmosphere, a post-revolutionary generation."
Much of that generation is not grounded in the personalities and passions that underpinned the 1979 revolt.
Analysts say Mojtaba Khamenei lacks the religious and political stature to overcome the opposition he would face in the Assembly of Experts, the body charged with selecting the supreme leader. His 69-year-old father is believed to have influence over about half of the assembly's 86 seats, but the board is headed by Rafsanjani and includes other reformists who probably would block a bid by the younger Khamenei to succeed his father.
The power struggle that spilled out into the streets after the election may affect how important clerics view the younger Khamenei, and his chances of succeeding his father.
So far, the ayatollahs in Qom have been relatively quiet over the contested election and the demonstrations. But that could change if Ahmadinejad and the supreme leader press on with harsh police tactics.
"Neither Ayatollah Ali Khamenei nor Ahmadinejad are popular in Qom," Ali Ansari, the head of Iranian studies at St. Andrews University in Scotland, wrote in the newspaper the Observer. He added that Ahmadinejad is "regarded with contempt by most senior clerics, while Khamenei has never been accepted as a scholar of note. The clerics may bide their time, but their intervention, which may come sooner rather than later, especially if violence spreads, could be decisive."
Such a scenario would reduce Mojtaba Khamenei's prospects of rising to supreme leader.
"Mojtaba's hands are well into the [Revolutionary Guard] hierarchy," said Said Idriss, an Iranian expert with Cairo's Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. "Like all conservatives, he is keen not to let any reformers reach power because then many questions will be raised regarding the financial management of the country and the billions of dollars conservatives use to support their regional political agenda.
"But I don't agree that [the younger Khamenei] is the figure behind his father's strong support for Ahmadinejad because even if Ahmadinejad is restored, it will not be easy for Khamenei to one day unveil his son as the new supreme leader."
Mojtaba Khamenei is not the only son of a supreme leader to have had political ambitions.
Ahmad Khomeini, Khomeini's son and chief of staff in the 1980s, was often regarded as a favored choice to become president. But after Khomeini's death in 1989, his son lost a power struggle with Rafsanjani, then speaker of parliament. Rafsanjani was elected president, and Ahmad Khomeini was named to the Supreme National Security Council and became caretaker of his father's mausoleum.
The younger Khomeini died of a heart attack in 1995.
Mohsen Sazegara was one of the youngest figures near the helm of Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979. Serving first as a press attaché to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in his exile command center outside of Paris, Sazegara went on to hold a series of high positions in the early revolutionary government — chief of national radio, commander of the Revolutionary Guard, cabinet aide, and head of the Industrial Development and Renovation Organization — all while still in his twenties. However, he got caught in the wheels of internal power jockeying and was accused falsely of being a secret agent of the Mojahedin-e Khalq, an Islamo-Marxist group that lost out to Khomeini for control of the new regime. Trying to clear his name, he agreed to surrender for interrogation.
Mohsen arrived early at Evin Prison, where he was blindfolded, although not handcuffed, and . . . led by the hand down a long and wide corridor. He could see from under the blindfold, and what he saw was “a very sad scene.” As they passed various interrogation rooms he heard shouting, and the corridor was lined with young male and female prisoners awaiting their turns. The young women looked particularly pitiful.
These frightened prisoners reminded him of the baby chicks he had raised in boyhood “when they get cold or become ill and they don’t move.” He recalls the feeling that came over him:
That was a turning point of my life. I said to myself, what is going on? Is this what we wanted to create — these prisoners, this atmosphere, that interrogator? I knew that I would be released because of pressure outside Evin. But what about these young people?
I had heard several things about tortures, killings, executions. I had told myself that the opposition groups exaggerate. Lajevardi [the warden of Evin] is cruel but not that cruel.
Now he wondered if all the terrible things he had heard were indeed accurate. Then he witnessed something that chilled him to the bone:
While I was looking at that sad scene, an interrogator came out from one of the rooms and shouted, “Guard, come take this [bitch] to be beaten more; more lashes.” She was young and blindfolded, and she started to cry. I heard her say, “I cannot bear more lashes.” And the interrogator said . . . “Hah, you cannot tolerate a few lashes in this room? How can you tolerate the God’s eternal punishment? In the next life you will be in hell.” And they took her away.
Mohsen recalls, “That really shocked me. I asked myself, ‘Who persuaded this interrogator that he is an agent of God?’ A person who believes he has a mission from God can easily torture, kill, or do anything.”
That evening one of the interrogators told him that he was going to be released “because your friends have lied to Imam Khomeini, but rest assured you will be back here. We’ll be waiting for you.” He was turned over to a guard who led him outside the building, where he was allowed to remove the blindfold, and suddenly roles seemed to revert to normal. As they waited for a car to the prison gate, the guard said, “Mr. Sazegara, I know you are the head of the automotive industries. I’m trying to buy a van. Can you help me?” Mohsen declined.
The next morning, Mohsen went directly to the office of Minister Nabavi, his friend and patron, to review the previous day’s events. Nabavi told him that he had enlisted the help of Ardebili, the head of the Judicial Authority, and that the two of them had won over Ahmad Khomeini, the usually hard-line son of the Imam, who in turn went to his father and secured an order for Mohsen’s release.
Mohsen told Nabavi of the disturbing things he had seen and heard in Evin. “I have to tell Ayatollah Khomeini what is going on,” he said. Nabavi phoned Ahmad Khomeini and asked if they could come to see his father, and somewhat to their surprise, they were given an appointment for later that morning at the Ayatollah’s home in Jamaran, a northern suburb of Tehran (where he had moved from the holy city of Qom).
This, however, was not enough to make Mohsen feel whole again. After what he had seen in Evin, Mohsen says:
Something was broken inside me, and I was not the same person. Put it this way: You have raised a child and you like him very much. But one day, you see that he is doing something very bad, a crime. Something will break inside you. Still, you love him; this is your son. But you do not like what he is doing. I had such a feeling. I still loved the revolution. I was about 30 years old. I had spent so far 13 years of my life from early morning until late at night on it. And I really loved the movement that we made, that great victory. But now, I did not like that face of the revolution, the face of this new child.
Now, I began to believe many things that I had heard. Before that, I told myself, “No, they are exaggerating.” But now, I believed everything.
Mohsen . . . submitted his resignation, . . . signing on as an adviser to a few companies. Altogether this work required about 25 hours a week, and most of the rest of his hours he spent reading, or rather rereading. He began with the works of Ayatollah Khomeini, at the center of which lay the theory of Velayat-e Faqih, the rule of the religious jurisprudent. Mohsen recalls:
When I read that book the first time, I was 20. I did not notice the main idea of Ayatollah Khomeini. What was wonderful for me was his language against the U.S., the Shah, and Israel. This time, I did not care about the slogans. I was looking for the main ideas. And I said to myself, “Wow, what kind of political philosophy is this? So much authority for one person without any control, and a divine mission. This is despotism.”
It was, moreover, a despotism whose scowl Mohsen realized he had seen with his own eyes on the face of the heartless interrogator who thought he was acting for God when he ordered more lashes.
— The preceding is an excerpt from The Next Founders: Voices of Democracy in the Middle East, by Joshua Muravchik, just released by Encounter Books.
PARIS - The angel of history lives in Iran - even though Manichean progressives of all stripes, especially in the United States, insist on believing the overwhelming popular uprising in Iran is nothing but one more US Central Intelligence Agency-engineered "color" revolution.
Confronted with this, Iranian journalists and the diaspora in Paris, including people just arriving from Tehran, are puzzled: how hard is it to understand, they say, that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has in fact ceased to be an arbiter and has legitimized a coup, steering the regime towards totalitarianism, striking off "republic" from "Islamic Republic" and, in a Brechtian twist, virtually abolishing the people?
As an Iranian businessman who goes back and forth between
Tehran and Paris puts it, "People in the West don't seem to understand that the political struggle in Iran is not about liberals versus conservatives, but conservatives against a fascist tendency uniting some sectors of the clergy, and this state within the state which are the Pasdaran [IRGC - Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps]. Both the nuclear program and the missiles are under the control of the Pasdaran. And who are they? They are former fighters in the Iran-Iraq war [of the 1908s], the religious police ... They control everything, they have informants in every building, every street, every neighborhood, like the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s."
Mir Hossein Mousavi, hurled by the breakneck pace of events to the status of channel for the angel of history (in spite of himself), refuses to go away - even if he has done the unthinkable (in Islamic Republic terms): to challenge the supreme leader in public. Ali Larijani, former nuclear negotiator, supreme leader protege, is wavering; he has accused the Guardians Council of bias towards re-elected President Mahmud Ahmadinejad. The Council of Experts, in the holy city of Qom, may be wavering. But Paris-based Iranian journalists don't believe former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, although hyper-connected, would have enough votes to at least force an investigation of the actions of the supreme leader, who has peppered the council with his own proteges.
The all-powerful IRGC is definitely not wavering. It obeys to the hilt the directives of General Ali Jafari, the former head of the IRGC Strategic Studies Center, the man put in charge by the supreme leader in 2007 to crack the code of possible Western-engineered color revolutions. The special, anti-riot al-Zahra and Ashura brigades, mixed with the paramilitary Basiji, simply took over the streets. The repression is massive. Newly arrived Iranians confirm one can't even breathe in the capital.
Noted commentator Masoud Behnoud, in his blog, can't bring himself to fire off his customary darts of irony. He writes, "The Council of Guardians could have played a role to stop the degradation of the situation. The problem is everything depends on Ayatollah [Ahmad] Jannati, its president. Well, he follows for more than 20 years now the road map of the fundamentalist right." Iranian cartoonist Nikahang Kowsar reads the popular mind immortalizing the 2009 Iranian remix of China's crackdown in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Khamenei, the new Saddam
Mohsen Sazegara, president of the Washington-based Research Institute for Contemporary Iran, was one of the founders of the IRGC, in the earliest stages after the 1979 revolution. He does not mince his words. For him, Khamenei "made the biggest mistake of is life"; "he thought that with the Revolutionary Guards and the Ministry of Interior he could conquer a nation". Sazegara stresses, "for the first time in 120 years, Iranians mobilize themselves without religious help and with no religious motivation".
As for the regime's repression machine, he points out that "those who kill the protesters, those we call the 'white shirts', are Revolutionary Guards, they belong to a special brigade of the intelligence division [he's referring to the above-mentioned Ashura brigade]. They look like civilians, but they have knives, iron bars and weapons".
Sazegara qualifies the nearly 120,000 Revolutionary Guards as "an army, an intelligence service and a huge enterprise. Khamenei marginalized some of the founders and war heroes and replaced them with underlings". It's hard to estimate how popular the IRGC really is. Sazegara heard insistent rumors on the arrest of seven generals. One of his friends, also a general, told him the majority of the IRGC, does not agree with what many Iranians are branding as "the coup".
Sazegara insists Khamenei's regime "is already security obsessed and militarized. There's no turning back for such a brutal regime. For last Friday's prayers, he mobilized his supporters all over the country. I was expecting to see 500,000 people, but according to our friends, there were no more than 50,000. Many of his partisans remain neutral, or are ashamed. If he manages to repress the Iranian people, he'll become a military dictator like Saddam Hussein. He'll be the king of a cemetery."
Reza Baraheni, author of Les Mysteres de Mon Pays (The Mysteries of My Country), published this year in France, feels that the confrontation between the government and the people gives him an impression of deja vu. But he's optimistic; "A generation of sons face off against a generation of fathers. Just as the previous generation took power off the hands of the Shah, it won't be long before the Islamic power goes to those who oppose it. The solutions to similar problems are not always identical. But the cruelty of both regimes is identical - as well as their incapacity to assimilate the modernity embodied by democracy, and their fear of a different future for them and for the country they control."
Philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo, from the University of Toronto, frames the crisis as rooted "between the popular thirst for democratization of state and society and the conservative reaction". Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi believed that "the Islamic nomenklatura would leave some place for reform". And yet, "the protesters are not revolutionaries. These young people remind us that a monolithic image of the country does not necessarily reflect the state of mind of the 70% of the population that is less than 30 years old. The fracture between state and people has never been greater".
So this is a "political fight between the republican nature of Iran and its religious oligarchy. The republican instinct consists in paying almost exclusive attention to the legitimacy of public space, while the religious establishment refuses to concede a minimum of legitimacy to the judgment of public opinion". That's why "Iran is immersed in a crisis of legitimacy without precedent in its political history."
Azadeh Kian, professor of sociology at the University of Paris VII, stresses the composition of Mousavi's electoral front: "They belong to the structured social groups, notably the middle classes, workers, traders and entrepreneurs who suffer, more than others, the consequences of a soaring monopolization of the economy for political ends, of an inflation between 27% and 30%, of a huge unemployment rate (between 30% and 50% amidst the young, according to estimates), and the flight of Iranian and foreign capital. No jobs are being created for the 800,00 young people who enter the Iranian job market every year".
Kian points out how "many economists, including two former directors of the Central Bank who had resigned", are sure that "Ahmadinejad has ruined the country". He squandered all the reserves accumulated during the Khatami presidency; some as handouts for the poor, while his machine recruited masses of rural, unemployed youngsters for the Basiji.
For Kian, "conservatives, and their base in the traditional middle classes, the grand bazaaris and the majority of Qom clerics, they are not allied with the president anymore". Newly arrived Iranians corroborate it, insisting Ahmadinejad will have a very rough ride.
The agony of illegitimacy
Journalist Nairi Nahapetian, author of Qui a tue l'Ayatollah Kanooni? (Who killed Ayatollah Kannoni?), hints at what strategies may lie ahead, stressing, "An educated, largely urban population, in a country with efficient infrastructure, continues to live under an Islamic law, sometimes mocking it and always finding a way around it, including in the fringes that are not part of the Westernized bourgeoisie."
He makes it clear: "Since the early 20th century, Iran faces important movements of popular revolt every 30 to 40 years. In 1906-1911, it was a constitutional revolution. In 1951, under [premier Mohammad] Mossadegh, it was the aborted attempt to nationalize oil. In 1979, the toppling of the shah, perceived as a US puppet. It's as if every generation tried at a particular time to take the destiny of the country in its hands, and the management of the oil revenues in particular."
Nahapetian inevitably blasts "Ahmadinejad's policy of massive subventions to pacify the popular classes". He says he "increased an already uncontrollable inflation and did nothing to reduce the Iranian economy's dependency of oil".
The Iranian intelligentsia and those commuting from Tehran are unanimous: the legitimacy of the regime as a whole is in play. The regime can't allow the genie of democracy to get out of the lamp, for it would open a Pandora's box of dreams.
And people power may have lost the street - facing a massive repression machine; but people are not afraid anymore. They believe another Iran is possible. All hopes lie on a protracted, creative, subversive, underground and parallel movement of civil disobedience, with strikes and mourning ceremonies, up and down, with lulls and crescendos.
The 1978/1979 Iranian revolution lasted, back to back, roughly one year. The seeds of the next one have already been planted. The angel of history silently surveys it all.
Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).
He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.
(Copyright 2009 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
A key Iranian dissident tells Newsmax he was stunned to listen to President Barack Obama tell reporters on Tuesday that despite the brutal crackdown by security forces in Tehran, the Islamic Republic still has time to regain “legitimacy” in the eyes of the Iranian people.
“I was hoping President Obama would lead the world and start a boycott of Iranian oil,” said former presidential candidate and opposition activist, Mohsen Sazegara. “This is the best way to save the lives of the Iranian people.”
Instead, Sazegara told Newsmax, he listened to Obama’s news conference on Tuesday with a sense of disbelief.
“[I]t's not too late for the Iranian government to see there is a peaceful path that leads to legitimacy in the eyes of the Iranian people,” Obama told reporters, when asked his reaction to the violence in Iran.
Sazegara, who was involved in the reform movement in the 1990s but was later jailed by the reformist government and left Iran, says he listened to Obama with a sense of “deep, deep, deep regret. I never expected President Obama to say something like that.”
“I had been expecting Obama to say we promise the people of Iran we won’t deal or negotiate with any government that does not represent the majority of the people in Iran. I had expected him to be very clear.”
For the past two years, Sazegara has had a weekly televised commentary on the Persian Service of Voice of America, which VOA polling shows is the most widely respected and listened to segment in their line-up.
When reports began to emerge from Iran of massive demonstrations ten days ago, Sazegara began getting 1,400 emails a day from inside Iran, begging him to appear more regularly to comment on events.
“I was a window into Iran from the outside,” he said. With the crackdown on protest leaders – some 800 of Sazegara’s friends and former colleagues are now in jail – the Voice of America was a key conduit for getting information from inside Iran to the West, and vice versa.
Sazegara went to VOA editor Alex Belida, who initially agreed to put him on air. But after consulting with a Persian-speaking deputy, Belida called him back to say no.
The de facto banning of Sazegara from the VOA airwaves is not the first time Persian-speaking editors at VOA have attempted to suppress information that might be embarrassing to the hard-line government in Tehran.
Last Saturday, for example, sources in Iran emailed VOA and Sazegara dramatic video footage that showed the brutal cold-blooded murder of a young Iranian woman in Tehran.
The deputy editor of the Farsi service, Ali Sajadi, refused to air it, saying it was too graphic.
But when overseas media, including the BBC’s Farsi service aired the footage, Sajadi allowed broadcasters to show a short segment of the footage, which has now become famous around the world. In his press conference today, President Obama called the slaying of the young woman, Neda Soltani, “a problem.”
And last week, when top aids to presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi received a standing ovation from the European Parliament in Strasbourg, VOA also refused to give the event coverage in its broadcasts into Iran.
Protesters in Tehran have begun holding up signs in English, asking the United States to increase sanctions on the Iranian regime and to condemn the Islamic Republic.
“Obama claims to be like President Lincoln,” Sazegara said. “Then he should uphold the principles of Lincoln”
Instead, the President at his press conference today reiterated his fears that the U.S. would become a “tool” in the hands of the regime, who would blame the CIA for orchestrating the demonstrations.
“But that is already happening,” Sazegara said. “Keyhan daily, which is the organ of the leader, ran a huge front page story recently saying that the U.S. had allocated a $400 million budget to support riots in Iran. And I’ve been receiving reports from inside Iran that the regime is planning to stage televised confessions of people they have tortured with hot irons in prison, to get them to say they’ve been paid by the United States.”
Sazegara told Newsmax he plans to write an open letter to Congress that it appears to be the “policy of President of Obama” to prevent Voice of America for airing broadcasters who are close to the pro-democracy protesters inside Iran.
Two months ago, Sazegara spoke with State Department Iran desk officers and urged them to focus more closely on human rights abuses by the regime and to support European efforts to monitor the upcoming elections to ensure they were fair.
“They told me that was the policy of Bush, and that they were going for engagement first, and would only talk about human rights and freedom later,” Sazegara said.
Sazegara, who was tortured during long months in Iranian prisons in the late 1990s warned the State Department they were making “a bigger mistake than during the 1953 coup.
“Now the Iranian people love you,” he said. “But if you make this kind of mistake, that could turn to hatred.”
Talking to Al Jazeera International from his Washington DC residence, former deputy prime minister of Iran, Mohsen Sazegara, now one of the leaders of the Iranian dissident communities in exile, deplored what he defined the lack of courage on the part of the US administration to step up support for the diaspora organizations of Iranian dissidents in their attempt to overthrow the government in Iran. Sazegara's acknowledgement of Iranian dissident organizations abroad acting within the frame of a Western policy aimed at pushing for regime change in Iran fits into statements from some European countries, foremost Italy and Sweden, that they might be willing to open their embassies in Teheran to protesters seeking protection against the police.
In the meantime however, as some influential Western countries, urged by a host of Western political parties and organiztions, are mulling more provocative steps against the Iranian government, Iran's Western-allied Arab neighbours and NATO-member Turkey are warning against any further outside interference in Iranian internal affairs. Media outlets in several Arab countries allied with the US and in Turkey are warning against the serious repercussions a policy of destabilizing towards Teheran would inevitably have on their own stability.
Last not least, the leaders of the so-called reformist movement in Iran are not appearing to be willing to let things get out of hand by permitting the reformist movement to be steered from the outside. Mir Hossein Mousavi , in a statement posted on his website yesterday, said he would stand by the protesters, but he would "never allow anybody's life to be endangered because of my actions”. He also defined the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, charged with restoring order on the streets, as “our brothers ... and protectors of our revolution and regime”, urging the some one thousand protesters on the streets to refrain from violence and to show self-restraint. In addition, a close collaborator of Mir Hossein Mousavi, Qorban Behzadian Nejad, denied Mousavi had ever said he was ready for martyrdom in his political struggle, as had been stated by various Western media outlets.
Also today, right on schedule the Iranian air force began military exercises in the Gulf and the Sea of Oman, showing that an internal policy problem, to whatever extent it might affect the power balance inside the establishment of the Islamic Republic in the short term, does not tune down Iran's ambition to consolidate its position as a major regional power. Iran has the strongest navy in the Gulf, deploying ships to international waters such as the Gulf of Aden near Yemen and has carried out numerous long-range missile tests.
A Nokia-Seimens joint venture supplied the key surveillance tech to the Iranian government that is being used to spot and bust protestors, subjecting them to massive human rights violations and endangering their lives. Seimens says it's all Nokia's fault, and a spokesman says they did nothing wrong because spying on and torturing dissidents is legal in Iran.
Meanwhile, Cisco and every other "western" network tech company is busily selling spyware, censorware, and other surveillance crap to every repressive government in the world, and also raking in big bucks selling unconstitutional wiretap tools to the US government for use on domestic populations (including, it turns out, former presidents).
Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), a joint venture between the Finnish cell-phone giant Nokia and German powerhouse Siemens, delivered what is known as a monitoring center to Irantelecom, Iran's state-owned telephone company.
A spokesman for NSN said the servers were sold for "lawful intercept functionality," a technical term used by the cell-phone industry to refer to law enforcement's ability to tap phones, read e-mails and surveil electronic data on communications networks.
In Iran, a country that frequently jails dissidents and where regime opponents rely heavily on Web-based communication with the outside world, a monitoring center that can archive these intercepts could provide a valuable tool to intensify repression...
Ben Roome, a spokesman for NSN, said, "We provide these systems to be used under the applicable laws in their countries and make sure we are abiding by U.N. and [European Union] export regulations and code of conduct. We provided the monitoring center to Irantelecom. We are not going to comment on the use of it. It is there to record lawful intercepts." ...
"My first reaction is, 'Wow! Why do they do this?' Don't they know that this will be used against the people of Iran?" said Mr. Sazegara, who now lives in the United States.
"They facilitate a regime which easily violates human rights in Iran and the privacy of the people of Iran. They have facilitated the regime with a high technology that allows them to monitor every student activist, every women's rights activist, every labor activist and every ordinary person.
Iran on the edge
Riots and violence have followed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s controversial election victory. now, with protesters’ reprisals and an imposed media blackout, tehran is teetering on the brink of chaos. By Trevor Royle, Diplomatic Editor
WITH A relentlessness that seems all the more brutal in view of the optimism which accompanied last weekend's flawed election, Iran's religious leaders are slowly trying to squeeze the life out of their country's short-lived "velvet revolution". Dreams that the moderate Mir Hussein Mousavi might take over from the hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have slowly crumbled into ashes, leaving the country involved in a bitter power struggle as the pro-democracy supporters continue to occupy the streets of Tehran despite a stark warning from the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei that they will be violently repressed.
Yesterday's demonstrations were declared to be illegal and the authorities promised that they would deal with them more severely than they had previously. "I should emphasise that all protests held in the past week were illegal and beginning today any gathering critical of the election would be illegal," deputy national police commander Ahmad Reza Radan told the semi-official Fars news agency. "And police will deal with it firmly and with determination."
Most critics of the regime believe that the situation will only get worse. In 1979, Mohsen Sazegara was a founder of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and later became deputy prime minister for political affairs; six years ago he went into exile and is now a prominent Middle East analyst in Washington. On Friday, he issued a stark warning that a violent crackdown on Mousavi's supporters is now inevitable.
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"People are going to be killed in the streets defending the rights of the people to have their own will to choose their government," he said.
Sazegara's warnings have been echoed by independent witnesses who cannot be named because of the threat of retribution by the authorities. Many of them argue that it is only a matter of time before more extreme violence is used to crush the revolution once and for all - "crackdowns and arrests are coming soon," said one who has managed to leave the country.
As an extraordinary week unfolded in Tehran, the pro-democracy supporters were brutally repressed - 13 of their number are reported to have been killed, although that tally could be higher. Then the Ayatollahs turned their attention to creating a news blackout. Reporting restrictions are now the most oppressive seen in any country since the Chinese government silenced their own people in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacres 20 years ago.
Just as Winston Churchill envisaged the Soviet Union creating a monstrous metal screen to throttle the aspirations of eastern Europe after the second world war, so too has the west been forced to stand by and watch helplessly as Iran's Ayatollahs rob their people of their democratic rights by cutting off the country from the rest of the world.
This is not just a regional problem - the crushing of Iran's velvet revolution has global implications. The country is a major oil producer and is on the point of developing its own nuclear facilities; weapon production will soon not be an impossibility. It is ruled by a supreme council of conservative religious theorists, yet, as the recent election campaign proved all too clearly, it is also home to hundreds of thousands of people, many of them young, who want to embrace the modern world and yearn to live in peace with countries like the US which the Ayatollahs damn as the "Great Satan".
Hardly surprisingly the alarm bells are already ringing loudly in Washington where the US State Department is on the high alert in an attempt to understand what is happening in Iran and, if possible, to counter its worst effects. When Barack Obama came to power earlier this year, the new president offered to hold out the hand of friendship to Iran in an attempt to encourage it to return to the international fold.
His efforts were rebuffed by Khamenei and his protege President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, both of whom are playing the central roles in ensuring the election vote is accepted. Now Obama is under pressure to respond more forcefully, but despite Republican jibes that he has been "tepid", sources close to the president say that he is not going to be pressurised into a hasty or intemperate response and is unlikely to offer unequivocal support to the demonstrators.
"Obama is wisely showing restraint for now," argues Robin Wright, of the Woodrow Wilson Center, a Washington think-tank. "Maybe down the road he needs to say something, but the minute we weigh in, the minute we say the things that we obviously feel, is the moment that the regime blames us for everything."
Just over a week ago it seemed almost certain that there would be a change of government in Iran and a swing towards a more balanced form of rule. That changed when the results came in last Sunday, giving the victory to Ahmadinejad. Undeterred, the protesters claimed that the vote had been rigged and they remained on the streets to demand a rerun of a clearly unsound election. What followed next was almost pre-ordained. The authorities angrily denied the claims and used violence to silence the protesters. Slowly but surely the means of communications were shut down and Iran became an island isolated from the rest of the world.
Its leaders also made it clear that they have no intention of meeting the demonstrators' requests for an investigation in the electoral flaws, far less their demands for a re-run of the national vote. On Friday, Ayatollah Khamenei addressed the country with a prayer sermon to tell them that the vote would stand and that the demonstrators were part of a western-Zionist conspiracy.
"I am urging them to end street protests, otherwise they will be responsible for its consequences, and consequences of any chaos," he said. "The result of the election comes out of the ballot box, not from the street. If there is any bloodshed, leaders of the protests will be held directly responsible."
This was the first heavy-handed hint that the demonstrators are on a hiding to nothing and that unless the crowds disperse the state will unleash the full apparatus of its security services. Units of the secretive Basiji vigilantes have already shown their capabilities by beating up demonstrators and then merging back into the crowds.
Formed in the 1990s as quasi-official street-enforcers, the Basiji do not wear any uniform but their role is to maintain law and order and, like other secretive groups such as Ansar Hezbollah, they receive training from the Republican Guard. As they seem to answer directly to the Ayatollahs, there is good reason for Iranians to fear that they could be used to restore order by using maximum force.
The violence has not all been one-way traffic. In the past, Basiji vigilantes have been able to operate at will, usually targeting students suspected of entertaining pro-western values, but the sheer weight of numbers has made it difficult for them to function. In several incidents, the crowd turned on the Basiji and beat up the vigilantes or burned their trademark motorbikes. This kind of confrontational behaviour could inflame the situation further as the police or paramilitary forces will not stand by while their fellow law enforcers are given a beating.
If the violence were to spin out of control, it would create a new and dangerous situation - the sight of thousands of innocent, ordinary people being repressed by a government which has no legitimacy - and it would place an enormous burden on the rest of the world, especially the US, to do something. Already rumours have been heard on the streets of Tehran that the US has cut a deal with Khamenei over the nuclear issue and there is a growing feeling among the demonstrators that the US cannot stand by and fail to act.
Ever since President George W Bush named Iran as one of the pillars of the axis of evil, hardliners in Washington have been adamant about the necessity of preventing Iran becoming a nuclear state. At the same time, hardliners in Tehran have been equally inflexible about their country's right to develop whatever systems it feels necessary for their economic well-being and defensive priorities.
In turn, this encouraged Khamenei and his supporters to believe that the US was using the nuclear issue to provoke unrest which would bring down the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Ever since Ahmadinejad came to power four years ago, their argument has been that Bush and Obama are intent on creating ferment in Iran in an attempt to bring them down and install a more amenable government.
Taking lessons learned from recent history, Khamenei argued that the situation would be similar to the overthrow of the Czech government in 1989 when a seemingly impregnable administration succumbed to a "velvet revolution". In the aftermath, the incoming president Vaclev Havel praised the part played by clandestine US support and the memory of those days clearly inspired Khamenei to take the battle back to Washington when he addressed his people at the end of the week.
"American officials' remarks about human rights and limitations on people are not acceptable because they have no idea about human rights after what they have done in Afghanistan and Iraq and other parts of the world. We do not need advice over human rights from them," he warned.
The irony is that this time round, the hands of the US are largely clean. In the Bush administration there were attempts to encourage opposition to the Ayatollahs, but these were abandoned in 2005 when the election of Ahmadinejad showed that the policy was counter-productive. Instead, Mousavi's election campaign seems to have been bank-rolled by a group of more moderate Ayatollahs, led by Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjahni, who is also a wealthy businessman with a wide range of financial activities, many of them shadowy. Until 1997, he was president of Iran and played the part of kingmaker in Khamenei's election to the supreme leadership.
For reasons that are not apparent, the two men are now estranged, leaving Khamenei in a difficult position. He cannot afford to leave Mousavi unfettered as the presence of his supporters on the streets would lead to chaos. They could be cleared quickly and brutally by the Republican Guards, but even a modest death toll would cause outrage in the rest of the world. As Khamenei showed on Friday, his best defence is attack and his speech to the nation made it clear that he would neither yield to the protesters nor, in a coded warning to Rafsanjahni, would he allow any assaults on his personal integrity.
Khamenei's one hope is that the demonstrators will eventually leave the streets of their own accord and that his rival Ayatollahs will throttle back their criticism and not proceed with threats to unseat him as supreme leader. Either way, he is in a difficult position, attempting to run a fractured country which is defying all his efforts to silence it. "We are in for a long summer," says professor Ali Ansari of St Andrews University, who has been much in demand as an Iranian analyst. "The problem is that he will get short-term stability for long-term insecurity."
l colloquio Uno dei fondatori dei Guardiani della Rivoluzione, ora esule in America, intravede crepe nel regime
«Ma anche tra i pasdaran serpeggia lo scontento»
Mohsen Sazegara aveva 24 anni quando tornò dall’esilio a Teheran con l’ayatollah Khomeini, il 1 febbraio 1979. Per lui fondò i Guardiani della rivoluzione (o pasdaran), milizia che risponde direttamente alla Guida Suprema e che controlla i basiji, forza paramilitare di volontari, usata per il «lavoro sporco ». Queste forze sono state usate insieme alla polizia per reprimere le proteste degli ultimi giorni. Sazegara parla al cellulare da Washington, dove si è stabilito dopo aver lasciato l’Iran nel 2003. Diventato un riformista, scontratosi con Khamenei, era stato rinchiuso in prigione per mesi. Di sottofondo, si sentono slogan contro il governo iraniano. Sazegara sta marciando con un migliaio di persone dalla Sezione di Interessi iraniana fino alla Casa Bianca.
Come vengono usati i pasdaran e i basiji contro le proteste?
«Sono la macchina della repressione dell’ayatollah Khamenei, li ha usati per anni contro il movimento riformista. Ogni volta che c’è una manifestazione o una marcia pacifica, mobilizza i basiji. Nell’ultima settimana, uomini in camicie bianche, in motocicletta o a piedi, hanno sparato alla gente dai palazzi e picchiato i manifestanti con catene, coltelli, manganelli. Le "camicie bianche" sono brigate sotto il comando del dipartimento dell’intelligence dei Guardiani della rivoluzione. Alcuni manifestanti hanno messo le loro foto su Facebook e altri siti, in certi casi hanno scoperto nomi e grado militare. Uno di loro è un maggiore dell’intelligence dei Guardiani. In una foto picchia una ragazza, in un’altra sfila in un corteo pro-Ahmadinejad. Ma hanno difficoltà ad attaccare la folla, spesso cercano le persone separatamente, quando scende la notte. Se continuano a uccidere la gente, i manifestanti li identificheranno, li troveranno».
I manifestanti risponderanno alla violenza con la violenza?
«Il rischio adesso è che le proteste pacifiche diventino violente. E’ colpa di Khamenei. Ha appoggiato Ahmadinejad e minacciato il popolo. La rabbia è una reazione naturale dopo che ha fatto attaccare la marcia pacifica in piazza Enghelab. Due giorni fa ho sentito che un gruppo di manifestanti ha attaccato un edificio dei basiji, ma poi l’ha lasciato. D’ora in poi, quando attaccheranno i palazzi dei basiji o del governo, forse li distruggeranno».
E la repressione si farà sempre più brutale?
«Il gioco di Khamenei è rischioso. I Guardiani della Rivoluzione e i basiji non possono essere usati per reprimere il popolo a lungo, perché anche loro sono il popolo. Alcuni dei miei amici pasdaran, tra i quali un ex generale, mi hanno chiamato per dirmi che non sono affatto d’accordo con gli ordini dei loro comandanti».
Si rischia una guerra civile?
«Mi aspetto scontri e battaglie nelle strade in tutte le città iraniane. Ma dopo un po’ emergeranno sempre più chiare le spaccature all’interno dei Guardiani della Rivoluzione e dei basiji, tra ranghi più bassi e comandanti ».
Se i cortei pacifici diventano proteste violente, questo non rischia di ridurre le simpatie nei loro confronti in Iran e fuori? Non potrebbe rientrare nel disegno di Khamenei?
«E’ possibile, è ragionevole. Se i manifestanti diventano dei pazzi e dei violenti, se vanno oltre la volontà dei loro leader e se perdiamo delle vite nelle strade... Perciò dobbiamo cercare di far sì che le proteste restino pacifiche».
One of the more dramatic video clips from Iran this week showed a man in an upper-floor window firing onto demonstrators outside a building near Tehran's Azadi Square, killing at least one and wounding others.
The building was a base for the Basij, a semiofficial force of volunteers on whom the government has relied for years to enforce a variety of laws and religious codes. Protesters have accused them of committing much of this week's violence, saying they have raided university dorms, beaten women and smashed their way into private homes. Many said they fear the Basij will be used to carry out even worse violence as the protests continue.
But although the Basiji loom large in the minds of their countrymen, Iranians and analysts interviewed said it is hard to pin down the number of members, their precise activities and whether they are all as loyal to hard-line government factions as many believe.
Joining the Basij can be as simple as going to a local mosque and receiving a membership card. Training and membership are often informal, said Gary Sick, an Iran expert at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, adding that some who carry out activities associated with the Basij may not be official members. "If the Basiji are given a job, like to go break up a dormitory, and they call up their friends and say 'Let's go hit those sissy college kids,' it wouldn't surprise me a bit," he said.
The term, which means "mobilization," originally referred to people too young or too old to join the army during Iran's eight-year war against Iraq. Then-leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called for 20 million Iranians -- half the country's population at the time -- to volunteer. Many were preteens and teenagers who, swept up in a religion-infused passion, famously walked onto minefields, unarmed, allegedly with plastic keys to heaven around their necks.
After the war, they became known for enforcing moral codes. For years, the word "Basiji" has struck fear into the hearts of more secularized Iranians, who know them as young men who stop them on the street for failing to follow the dress code or fraternizing with the opposite sex.
Like the Revolutionary Guard Corps, the religious militia with which they are affiliated, the Basiji are "people who can get their rifles and guns to come and defend the revolution" if necessary, said Mohsen Sazegara, a co-founder of the Revolutionary Guard and now president of the Washington-based Research Institute for Contemporary Iran. Sazegara said that although the Basij claims 12 million members, he thinks the number is around 500,000.
Critics of the Basiji say they are largely poor, uneducated and motivated in part by envy of their wealthier or more successful compatriots.
But that characterization is not always true, said Afshin Molavi, a Washington-based Iran analyst at the New America Foundation who spent time with Basiji while researching a book.
"The Basiji volunteer militia . . . are not monolithic," he said, adding that while some fit the more hard-core and violent pattern, others become involved more casually. "They're religious, that they have certain ways of dressing, like you never tuck your shirt in, or you wear Palestinian-style kaffiyeh, and it's kind of a social identity."
"Some of the finest people I met in Iran were members of the Basiji, and some of the worst people I met in Iran were members of the Basiji," he said. "But among the more hard-core there is a core intolerance for Iranians who have adopted a more modern and secular lifestyle that they view as Western."
The less hard-core members may be a wild card in upcoming days, Sazegara said.
He said many were "ordinary young people" who may feel conflicted about this week's events. Some of them, he said, may have voted for Mir Hossein Mousavi, the defeated presidential candidate who has called on his supporters to protest the election, while still believing strongly in the country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The conflict extends beyond the Basij, he said, adding that former colleagues in the Revolutionary Guard have called him expressing misgivings about the election.
Sazegara also cautioned against confusing the Basij with other, more professional and organized, militia, including those associated with the Ministry of Intelligence.
"Many of their friends and family are on the other side," he said. "If the regime thinks they can use them to suppress the people and kill the people, they are going to have a hard time."
ON FRIDAY, my fellow Iranians will cast their vote for the Islamic Republic's next president. If some of the polls are to be believed, the victor may very well be a reformist, either former prime minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi or former Parliament speaker Mehdi Karroubi.
A reformist victory would bring a thankful end to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's presidency, but there ought not be any illusions about the impact Mousavi or Karroubi could have on Iranian society. As was made clear during the presidency of Ahmadinejad's reformist predecessor, Mohammad Khatami, the conservative establishment does not go quietly into the opposition when its candidates lose.
For all the reforms made during the Khatami era, real power in Iran never left the hands of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The supreme leader's conservative allies retained control over the security forces, as well as the judiciary and the media, and simply circumvented the rule of law when their stranglehold on the country was challenged.
The violation of Iranian and international law by Khamenei loyalists was rampant between 1997 and 2005. Throughout Khatami's presidency, a vast parallel intelligence apparatus operated beyond the authority of the government, brutally intimidating and silencing those viewed as critical of the regime.
Few in the West will probably have heard of this shadow intelligence world. Though the existence of clandestine agents was not a secret in Iran, there is little official documentation of their activities or identities. Yet I can say that I know of what I speak.
In 2003, I was one of their victims. I was illegally detained by agents and held captive in notorious Section 325 of Tehran's Evin Prison for 114 days, 56 of them in solitary confinement.
Many fellow Iranians suffered through similar ordeals, or worse. That much has been made clear in the many stories told to the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, which has made a laudable effort to record the abuses committed in Section 325 and other secret detention facilities.
Violent treatment was a staple of the clandestine agents' interrogation methods, and was designed to coerce victims into confessing to contrived criminal charges. Torture, however, was not the only tactic used by parallel intelligence units. In addition to running at least half a dozen illegal detention facilities, agents also conducted warrantless investigations, surveillance, arrests, and searches and seizures of property.
As is now clear, the clandestine agents were far from rogue operatives. The testimonies collected by the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center point to the organizational and operational involvement of a number of agencies controlled by the Office of the Supreme Leader.
The Revolutionary Guard, which I helped establish 30 years ago, was involved. So, too, were the Iranian Army, Khamenei-allied police units, and the Basij and Ansar-i Hizbullah paramilitary groups. The ranks of the parallel intelligence apparatus also included Khamenei loyalists in the Ministry of Intelligence, Ministry of Defense, judiciary, and state-run media. With these agencies effectively controlled by the Office of the Supreme Leader, the conservative establishment simply circumvented the Khatami government in its brutal campaign to silence the voices of reform.
In 2005 the clandestine intelligence activities were sharply curtailed, but the return to the rule of law was hardly the result of a change in policy. With a fellow hard-liner in the president's office, Khamenei and his allies could pursue their agenda through the halls of power, and had little need for the illegal parallel intelligence apparatus.
That may very well change if Mahmoud Ahmedinajad is voted out of office. One can only wonder what may transpire if a reformist slate is indeed victorious in the upcoming elections.
I would not presume to know the thoughts of Ali Khamenei, but I do know what the supreme leader's henchmen are capable of - and it is that knowledge that makes me shudder at the prospect of a Mousavi or Karroubi presidency.
Mohsen Sazegara co-founded the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and served the Islamic Republic in a number of government positions, including deputy prime minister for political affairs.
