Who is damaging the Islamic republic?
This question pits two increasingly irreconcilable camps against each other as the debate continues to heat up in Tehran.
To hard-liners, the answer is clear: it is the reformists, who are accused of plotting a “velvet coup.” To reformists, it is the hard-liners themselves, whose actions undermine the very system they seek to preserve.
As the Machiavellian plots continue to unfold in the power structures of Iran, one thing remains certain: the quiet that we are experiencing right now from the people does not mean that they have been silenced. Far from it, this is the quiet before the storm. The Green Movement is alive and well and in waiting for the next opportunity to put a stick in the eye of this regime.
On the surface, “order” has been enforced. But only on the surface. Inside Iran, public anger still burns, flaring up wherever opportunity presents. At the core of the Islamic regime, a struggle has been unleashed that — by stepping off his pedestal into the thick of the fray — the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, has lost his once- undisputed power to bring under control. Far from subsiding, dissent is shaking the regime to its roots.
The leaders of Iran’s opposition movement sent an open letter of protest to the country’s highest religious authorities on Saturday, complaining that the state had used “illegal, immoral and irreligious methods” in the crackdown following last month’s disputed presidential election and calling for the release of hundreds of people arrested since.
On February 1, 1979, Khomeini returned to Iran from France, accompanied by various supporters and western media personalities like Peter Jennings. Millions showed up at the airport to welcome him.
On the airplane returning to Iran, Peter Jennings asked him, “What do you feel in returning to Iran?”
Khomeini did not express any elation. His foreboding reply was, “Hichi.” Hichi is the Farsi word for, Nothing.
It was probably at this moment that some in Iran started to question what they were getting themselves into. Iranians are fiercely proud of their 2500 years of history and heritage. Hichi, is simply not acceptable as the feeling that most of them have towards their national and cultural identity.
Little did most Iranians know what Khomeini’s return would herald. A dark era had begun.
Sometimes, when reading the words various leaders, you can almost feel an undercurrent to what they really meant to say. I had one of these moments when I read the following quote from President-select Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently (source: Reuters): “They [arrogant western powers] should wait as a new wave of revolutionary thinking … from the [...]
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned senior officials on Monday not to help Tehran’s enemies after two former presidents expressed defiant opposition to the result of June’s disputed presidential poll.
Clashes erupted between police and reformist protesters for the first time in weeks in Tehran on Friday after former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani declared the Islamic Republic in crisis and said there were doubts about the election result.
So the line I take away from the important Friday sermon of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the two-time former president who believes that the Islamic Republic’s future lies in compromise rather than endless confrontation, is this one: “We shouldn’t let our enemies laugh at us because we’ve imprisoned our own people.”
Mr. Khatami’s comments amounted to a bold challenge to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has dismissed the opposition’s claims that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s landslide victory on June 12 was rigged, and has ordered protesters to accept it.
The people have not sat idly by, and in the past month a clear distinction has been made between the people on one-side, and the regime on the other. The world has seen the people’s aspirations for freedom, and their bravery in the face of terror and the tyranny of a false theocracy. The world has also seen the last shred of legitimacy that the government of Iran may have held disappear to reveal what can be safely described as a government structured like a mafia that sees itself as God’s representative on earth with the right to butcher its own people. It can’t be more clear than that.
The price has been paid in blood by the Iranian people. And blood has been spilled across every facet of Iranian society.
The costs are steadily mounting for the regime. Just one day before the June 12 presidential election, the Islamic republic had never been so powerful. Tehran had not only survived three decades of diplomatic isolation and economic sanctions but had emerged a regional superpower, rivaled only by Israel. Its influence shaped conflicts and politics from Afghanistan to Lebanon.
But the day after the election, the Islamic republic had never appeared so vulnerable. The virtual militarization of the state has failed to contain the uprising, and its tactics have further alienated and polarized society. It has also shifted the focus from the election to Iran’s leadership.
They used the enormous power and wealth of the Iranian nation and instead of focusing on improving the lives of its citizens thereby proving that it was possible to have the word “Islamic” next to “Republic” in the name they had bestowed upon Iran, they focused this immense energy at their disposal on crushing the concept of Islamic Republic. They obliterated it.
International media is reporting that Mojtaba Khamenei – the son of Ayatollah Khamenei – has taken direct control of Iran’s militia group (Basij) in order to suppress the Sea of Green. They also report that officials within other security forces, along with the powerful clergy, are not happy with the situation. However, solid confirmations from our Iranian sources have yet to be confirmed.
Khatami criticized the government in a new, harsher tone that suggested outright contempt today. He called the elections a “coup d’état against democracy.” He asked, “How can the Iranian people calm down when their votes were stolen? When their blood is and has been shed? When they are being hauled away and arrested en masse? When the government and media blatantly ignore them?” He asked, “How is a National reconciliation even remotely possible in a country that is turning into a police state?” He went on to say that what’s happening now in Iran “is a direct violation of the very rights people are promised in the constitution.” He accused the media of attempting to provoke further unrest and violence and denounced the governments’ attempts at censorship. He predicted that Regime’s establishment would fail if this were to continue.
A tyrannical triumvirate, one that is led by Ayatollah Khamenei and supported by the military might of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the street presence of gangs with ranks numbering at least a few million, seems hell-bent on forcing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on the reluctant and still-resisting people of Iran.
Maziar Bahari was forced to confess at a press conference that the protests were pre-planned and organized from abroad. Bahari is an adroit Iranian-Canadian Journalist and filmmaker, who has written for Newsweek and the New Statesman. Meanwhile,the torture of university students continues in the Ministry of Interior. Some Iranians traveling to Iran for the holidays have been taken in for questioning directly at the airport as they tried to leave the country. They were questioned because of updated information on their Facebook accounts.
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