NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
COMMENTARY
July 27, 2002
Tiananmen Tehran
From what I can discern mostly through direct e-mail and Iranian websites and at second-hand from others following events the demonstrations continue in Iran though on a smaller scale from the previous two weeks. That they are potent continues to be indicated by official Iranian statements tinged with more than average paranoia and by persistent reports that the ayatollahs are employing non-Persian speaking paramilitary thugs to beat demonstrators down at least in Tehran and Isfahan. I wrote last week about the deteriorating political situation there a very big story that the Western media have not deigned to cover. (A corrected version of this piece is archived at davidwarrenonline.com under the title The end is nigh .) I ended by saying that Iran is now at a crossroads. Either the regime of the ayatollahs will lose its nerve in the face of these massive and continuing demonstrations in all of Iran's major cities -- the spread of an insurrection like the one that brought down the late Shah. Or they will do what the Shah was too decent to do in 1979 but which the Chinese politburo did in 1989 when they pulled out all the stops and actually massacred the courageous students in Tiananmen Square. Like the Chinese politburo the ayatollahs will have to call in troops from the distant provinces to do the mowing down for fear that local police and troops may take the side of the demonstrators. (The ayatollahs have been employing Tadzhiks Uzbeks Kurds and Arabs from "Palestine" and Iraq: foreigners whose own lives could be endangered if the regime falls.) However this week the Revolutionary Guards the traditional "enforcers" published and distributed a proclamation from their masters which was in effect a complaint about the behaviour of the entire Iranian people. The central accusation was that "they" (i.e. every Iranian in his right mind) were demanding the end of the Revolutionary Council (Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his fellow nutjobs) the separation of mosque and state and the institution of Western-style democracy. The accusation was as true as it was demented. It is hard to read this except as a warning of massacres to come. At a time when (in the words with which Hojjat al-Islam Hadi Ghabel addressed a crowd at Isfahan) Junior high school girls now engage in prostitution, and fathers sell their daughters to buy food; at a time of (as Jalaleddin Taheri wrote in his letter of resignation as Imam of that city) unemployment, inflation and high prices, a hellish gap between poverty and wealth, deep and daily-growing distance between the classes, stagnation and decline of national revenue, a sick economy, bureaucratic corruption, desperately weak administrators, growing flaws in the country's political structure, embezzlement, bribery and addiction -- the regime continues to spend its own soft-earned billions in oil revenue on expanding the religious police supplying the international terror network and trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction through things like the vast nuclear reactor complex the Russians have been paid to build at Bushehr. Canadian and other patrol ships in the Gulf have meanwhile recently intercepted Al Qaeda operatives en route to missions from Iran. And the intelligence agencies of several Western countries have been trying to track a much larger movement of Al Qaeda "assets" from Afghanistan apparently through Iran Iraq and Syria to staging areas in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley and against its southern border with Israel. It is almost impossible to confirm any detail but the pattern is obvious from every sighting. The threat I should add is not only to Israel but to Jordan which has formally complained against persistent Iranian meddling in that country's Muslim Brotherhood. Running perhaps the only genuinely "moderate" Arab government in the Near East (and you must walk to Oman to find the next one) Jordan's Hashemite King Abdullah II is increasingly a target for everyone in the "axis of evil". Moreover indications of expanding co-operation between Iran and Iraq were provided this week from both Western sources and A-Sharq Al Awsat a London-based pan-Arab daily. According to these reports Qusay Hussein the son of Iraq's dictator has been in Tehran to plead for the emergency transfer of intermediate-range Shihab-3 missiles and other weaponry. Details of this report and the efforts made by the Iranians to suppress it suggest to me that the ayatollahs believe they can discreetly help Iraq do damage to U.S. forces in the region without themselves getting in the line of fire. This would be another entry on the growing list of their miscalculations. All of this additional material is necessary to grasp the size of the tinderbox that sits beside the fire in Iran. The ayatollahs have caught themselves up in so many dimensions of double-dealing that the question must be asked if they even have the organizational ability to survive -- assuming as I now do that they still have the will. In the words of a retired police investigator of my acquaintance It is never wise to underestimate the abilities of a psychopath. While I think the ayatollahs are beyond the point where they can use foreign wars and terrorism to divert from a domestic political catastrophe I am much less confident that they would agree. For it is also important to remember that this is a regime now fuelled almost exclusively by an apocalyptic hatred. This wasn't the case a generation ago when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came to power; it was then a schizophrenic mixture of naive religious idealism with implacable enmities. But in the interim as we were reminded by the resignation of Imam Taheri and the earlier exposure of the true face of the "reform" president Mohammad Khatami every ounce of decency has been squeezed out of the regime. Even Sheikh Sadeq Khalkhali the notorious "hanging judge" of the 1979 revolution whose memoirs last year reminded us that Hitler was a vegetarian recently began distancing himself from the brutality of his colleagues. (He was the regime's last "populist".) It is at this moment quite impossible to predict what will emerge in the ghastly witches' brew of Iran. But the boiling swill has certainly reached the lip of the cauldron. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top