Iran’s opposition struggles to regroup
Regime has strong hand in election
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Despite four years of non-stop pressure, arrests and intimidation, Iran’s dissidents still find ways to show their resilience.
Protest messages still ricochet around social media despite Iran’s cyber cops’ attempts to control the web. Angry graffiti pops up and then is quickly painted over by authorities. Mourners at the funeral of a dissident cleric flashed V-for-victory gestures and chanted against the state.
But just a look at the sidewalks around Tehran’s Mellat Park shows how far Iran’s opposition has fallen as the country prepares for Friday’s presidential election.
Four years ago, girls on rollerblades sped around the park delivering flyers for the reform camp’s candidate-hero Mir Hossein Mousavi. Emerald-coloured head scarves and wrist bands representing Mousavi’s Green Movement were in such demand that bloggers would list shops with available fabric.
his time, there are just a few subdued election placards for candidates considered fully in sync with Iran’s ruling clerics. Security forces and paramilitary volunteers are never far away.
Mousavi and the other opposition leader, Mahdi Karroubi, are under house arrest and hundreds more activists, bloggers and journalists have faced detention as part of relentless crackdowns since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s disputed re-election in 2009 brought accusations of vote rigging and something Iran has not seen since the 1979 Islamic Revolution: huge crowds in the streets chanting against the leadership.
Iran’s forces for reform are not so much crushed as now bottled up tightly. Now the election that marks the end of Ahmadinejad’s eightyear era also brings another moment of political transition: Whether the loose affiliation of reformists, liberals and Western-leaning activists can somehow remain relevant in a time when the guardians of the Islamic establishment are consolidating their defences.
“There is no shortage of people in Iran who would like to see a different way of being governed and a different world view from the leadership,” said Theodore Karasik, a security and political affairs analyst at the Dubaibased Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis.
“Trouble for them is that they now fragmented and disorganized. This is exactly what Iranian authorities want to see.”
The entire process has been derided by Western governments and rights groups as a farce after Iran’s election overseers — all loyal to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — blacklisted former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani from the ballot despite his lofty status as one of the architects of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
For Iran’s rulers, the relatively moderate Rafsanjani represents an unsettling force who could breathe some life into the battered opposition.
Any momentum toward a backlash over Rafsanjani’s barring quickly dissipated. He grumbled over the rebuff and Iranian reformist websites buzzed with complaints. But there have been no major street protests, suggesting — once again — there are only remote chances for a revival of the 2009 mass demonstrations. His backers have retreated to election boycott calls or drifted to other candidates who have no apparent intention to shake up the system.
The only significant public show of dissent before the election came in a coincidence of timing. Some mourners at the funeral procession of dissident Ayatollah Jalaluddin Taheri, who died last Sunday in the central city of Isfahan, used the march to revive the opposition chants from 2009 such as “death to the dictator,” according to video clips posted on the Internet. But the outburst did not seem to inspire other rallies around the country.
“There is significant opposition in Iran to a lot of things, international relations, crackdowns on the Internet, but it’s dispersed over all classes of society and without a real focus,” said Rasool Nafisi, an Iranian affairs analyst at Strayer University in Virginia. “There is opposition, but I doubt you can call it a movement.”
Opposition voters now face the choice of whether to boycott the polls or turn to whatever they see as the least objectionable candidate. So far, the top figures of the reform movement, like former president Mohammad Khatami, have not given an indication to their supporters which avenue to take — meaning a unified strategy may only emerge at the last minute, if at all.
A likely major indicator in the final vote will be how many eligible voters stayed away, in comparison to a reported 85 per cent turnout in 2009. It worries officials enough that Khamenei used one of the country’s most sombre occasions — the memorial ceremony marking the death of Islamic Revolution founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini — to say that a low turnout will only help Iran’s “enemies” such as the U.S. and Israel.
Most of the eight hopefuls cleared to run are bathed in pro-establishment credentials, including such insider figures as top nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili and Khamenei adviser Ali Akbar Velayati.
Some reformists have migrated toward former nuclear negotiator Hasan Rowhani as a sort of default, since he is closely aligned with Rafsanjani. Khatami’s former vice-president, Mohammad Reza Aref, has made a strong bid to draw reformist voters, speaking with the most passion about freedoms Wednesday during the second television debate among the eight candidates.
Others have gravitated to Tehran Mayor Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf in hopes his hands-on reputation could halt the downward slide of Iran’s sanctions-wracked economy.
But there is little sense left of the unified Green Movement that poured onto the streets in 2009 over claims that vote rigging robbed Mousavi of victory and handed re-election to Ahmadinejad.