The left was crushed but now the right rises in Iran

Alan Philps

• Last Updated: June 18. 2009 11:56PM UAE / June 18. 2009 7:56PM GMT

The protests now convulsing Iran are often compared to the insurrection that toppled the Shah in 1979. This is misleading: what is happening is not a revolution aimed at forcing the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, into exile in the footsteps of the Shah. Rather, it is a battle for the soul of the 30-year-old revolution, being fought openly on the street and discreetly among the senior clerics who hold ultimate power in Iran. Because this is an internal battle, with clear potential to damage the prestige of the whole regime, the state is holding back, refraining from using the full might of its security forces.

The street protests remind me not of 1979, but of the second act of the Islamic revolution, which took place in 1981. This was when the Iranian clerical elite finally clamped down on their former co-revolutionaries, the western-style liberals, the leftists and the communists who had been the vanguard of the anti-Shah movement. These forces naively thought they could manipulate the doddery old mullahs.

But the opposite happened. As the mullahs seized control, students and leftists took to the streets in the hundreds of thousands to demand their share of power. The Left was crushed, thousands were arrested, and the universities were purged. The second act was a clear victory for the mullahs, concluding in the late 1980s with the deaths of many of these dissidents in prison.

What is happening now is a third act – an attempt by a new generation of students to push the country, but in the opposite direction, towards the Right. The young people who were tear-gassed in the streets in 1981 would have called today’s protests a “bourgeois revolution”. The protesters’ defining demand is to end Iran’s isolation. Educated, ambitious and technically savvy, they want a decent life without having to emigrate to California to live among the nostalgic monarchists there. They want Iran to follow in the path of India, where hard work and education can bring money and freedom.

It would be a mistake to see the street protests as an example of “Persian people power”. Most Iranians are poor, and probably see globalisation as a threat, not an opportunity. A president such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the officially proclaimed but contested victor, who offers free food, raises civil service pay and provides cut-price loans to the poor, is far more reassuring. What we have is a class struggle: between the upwardly mobile middle class and the poor who fear that they will sink into destitution. The former may have Twitter and Facebook, but the latter – enrolled in the militia called the basji – have clubs and knives on the street, and guns in their barracks.

Periodic outbursts of street tension are inherent in Iran’s political system. The Islamic republic bequeathed by Ayatollah Khomeini is unique: it offers the people on the Right an opportunity to express their will by voting for a president and a parliament, yet the final power is reserved for the clerical elite.

This contradiction between divine and popular rule will always leave the progressives dissatisfied, for their candidates will be vetoed for being insufficiently “Islamic”. Similarly the hard-line conservatives will always chafe at the necessity to hold elections which, they feel, act only as a sounding board in the West for the secular, English-speaking North Tehran middle class. These people are, in the eyes of the hardliners, “defeated remnants” of the Shah’s regime, not representative of the country as a whole.

The battles of 1981 destroyed forever the influence of the Left. There are signs today that the hardliners would like to achieve a similar breakthrough to consolidate their power. Mehdi Karroubi, the unsuccessful reformist candidate in the presidential election, has said that the goal of the current struggle is to preserve Iran as a republic, and not let it become a dictatorship of the clergy. The reformist camp clearly fears that the hardliners want an Iran without elections, where power would lie exclusively with the ayatollahs, exercised through the institutions of the revolution – the Revolutionary Guard and the other security forces, and the great state foundations and corporations that channel the country’s oil revenues.

No one knows if this is going to happen. The only certainty comes from the fact that the clerical elite has never been fully united, and a sophisticated system of power centres is used to channel and control opinion among the mullahs. This system is now in disarray. Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, one of the key figures in the revolution, has been cast as the leader of the opposition to the hardliners, including Ayatollah Khamenei and Mr Ahmadinejad. He is apparently manoeuvring behind the scenes, perhaps to gain greater power and certainly to avoid defeat and eclipse. Powerful clerics such as Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, who was once Khomeini’s designated successor, have been cast into oblivion after falling out with the mainstream.

The current inaction of the regime is strangely mirrored by the silence of Washington. The US president Barack Obama has failed to back the reformists, arguing that the hardliners would love to be able to brand the protesting students as US-backed counter-revolutionaries. This sounds strange to many Americans, used to hearing their leader speak up for freedom of speech. There is a cynical motive here: Mr Obama’s goal is to negotiate a grand bargain with Iran and turn it into a partner, not an enemy. He would talk to whoever is in power. But at the moment any grand bargain seems far away, and perhaps more distant every day. The issue on the streets is who runs Iran, and whether they have to continue to face the electorate.

aphilps@thenational.ae