XIII
Inside the Mullahs' Regime
We are now passing through the most difficult stage of our [political] life. In other countries, whoever chooses this path, it results in changing several administrations. . . Those who make these decisions themselves will be sacrificed in the process.
-Hashemi-Rafsanjani, May 28 ,19921
This book has primarily focused on the Iranian regime's foreign policy and export of fundamentalism. But what about the domestic scene? An examination of Iran's internal politics shows that the theocratic state is inherently unstable. The mullahs export ideological fundamentalism and terrorism because they cannot rule without crises.
In August 1988, when the eight-year Iran-Iraq War ended with Khomeini's acceptance of a ceasefire, observers expected that Iran would swiftly move towards economic reconstruction. Ten months later, when Khomeini died, these expectations were revived with the added hope that the mullahs would moderate their domestic and foreign policies. More than four years later, it has become clear that such expectations were unfounded.
Unable to respond to the growing needs of Iranian society, the absolutist velayat-e-faqih regime is today beset by internal crises. This situation has compelled the regime to cling ever tighter to Khomeini's spirit and to stage hollow shows of force to cover up its intrinsic weaknesses. The mullahs have stepped up repression at home and done their best to generate crises abroad.
The mullahs have made a few cosmetic changes, such as hosting an Islamic human rights seminar, appointing a presidential adviser for women's affairs, and registering a few pro-government associations. But overall the political situation in Iran has deteriorated. According to reports compiled from the regime's official press, the Rafsanjani administration's security forces in 1991 arrested 300,000 people whose "crimes" included improper veiling, addiction, wearing blue jeans, and possessing video recordings, cassette tapes of pop singers, or a pack of playing cards.2
Meanwhile, the suppression of women took on new dimensions of brutality. In 1992, officials acknowledged, 113,000 women were arrested in Tehran for "improper veiling" and "moral corruption." Scores of pregnant women were reportedly flogged in public on the same charge. Despite prevalent state censorship, the press reported several cases of stoning and beheading in public.
The number of officially announced executions in 1991 was three times the total for 1990.3 After his third visit to Iran, Reynaldo Galindo Pohl, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Iran, reported weekly increases in executions, continued suppression of religious minorities, a general atmosphere of intimidation of journalists, and self-censorship in fear of government reprisal. After two years of recommendations, Galindo Pohl concluded in his 1992 report to the Commission on Human Rights that the Iranian regime had made "no appreciable progress towards improved compliance with human rights."4
Bodies suspended from gallows are a routine sight in Iranian cities. No political party or group outside the narrow spectrum of officially sanctioned "Islamic" ideology is allowed to operate. During the elections for the Fourth Majlis, the Council of Guardians screened all the candidates both before and after the elections to verify their loyalty to the clerical establishment. At least thirty political opponents have been assassinated abroad since Khomeini's death, including Kazem Rajavi, the outstanding advocate of human rights in Iran.5
In June 1992, the mullahs' regime began a series of officially announced summary executions in different Iranian cities in retaliation for extensive antigovernment demonstrations. On the orders of emergency Islamic Revolutionary Courts in Mashad, Arak, Shiraz, and several other Iranian cities, scores of demonstrators and Mojahedin supporters were hanged. The mass executions provoked an international outcry and were condemned by, among others, the European Parliament and Amnesty International. Rafsanjani and the other leaders of the regime publicly endorsed the executions and called for harsher measures against oppositionists.
In December 1992, the United Nations General Assembly adopted its strongest ever resolution, condemning continuing human rights abuses, including summary execution, the use of torture, and suppression of women.6
Majlis deputies admit that today, some 70 to 80 percent of Iran's populace 7 and 90 percent of its state employees live below the poverty line.8 Out of every eight Iranians only one has a job earning income.9 Only five million Iranians are fully employed out of a work force of twenty-four million.10 Young people are leaving the country by the thousands to search for jobs, mostly illegal, in foreign countries such as Japan. Twenty-five million people are without homes.11 A 50 percent inflation rate and sky-high prices weigh heavily on the public.12 The monthly rent for an ordinary apartment exceeds a month's salary of a government employee.13 During the winter of 1991-92, heating oil and fuel shortages and high prices brought yet another crisis, and many lost their lives in the freezing cold. Gasoline prices soared 70 percent last year, although oil is the main source of government revenues and is the most plentiful commodity in Iran.
During Rafsanjani's four-year tenure, the nation's foreign debts have risen from $12 billion to $35 billion. There is a shortage of fifteen million homes, at least 150,000 classrooms and 120,000 teachers.
The instability of the clerical regime and lack of confidence in its future have frustrated the government's efforts to attract foreign investments.14 As for industry, gross and private investments dropped 3.5 and 9.2 percent respectively last year.15 One majlis deputy said that the share of industry in Iran's gross national product (GNP) is less than that of the least developed countries in Africa.16
The prospects are equally grim for agriculture. The area of land under cultivation has continuously decreased, and the country's forests and pastures are being destroyed.17 Forty percent of the villages, the traditional centers of agriculture and animal husbandry, have been abandoned.18 Out of fifty-one million hectares of cultivatable land, thirty-two million are unusable.
Statistics on the reconstruction of the war-stricken areas show that only 250,000 of Iran's four million war refugees have returned to their home towns.19 Most did so unwillingly and live in terrible conditions. These regions still do not have running water or electricity and lack minimum health and educational facilities.20 Houses remain devastated and areas are infested with uncleared mines. According to the report of the U.N. secretary general, 90 percent of what has been done for reconstruction is of a temporary nature and must be redone.21 In 1992, only $980 million, or one-fifteenth of the defense budget, was earmarked for restoring the war-stricken regions.
A new wave of popular protests has emerged since the cease-fire in the Iran-Iraq War and Khomeini's death. Although the Persian Gulf War retarded the general outpouring of discontent for a year, it has become obvious that even the enormous windfall of the mullahs during the Gulf crisis did not last long.
Until the 1988 cease-fire, followed by Khomeini's death, Iran's domestic social crises were exported abroad via war and terrorist operations. These crises, however, were bound to surface again, particularly because Rafsanjani has not been able to implement any serious economic plans in the past four years. This has in turn aggravated the living conditions, putting far more economic pressure on the public than in wartime. Since July 1991, some 1,000 demonstrations, protests, strikes, and clashes have erupted in different Iranian cities. Tehran alone has been the scene of over 200 acts of protest. Khuzistan, Azerbaijan, Kermanshah, Isfahan, Fars, Hamedan, Mazandaran, Khorassan, and Gilan provinces each witnessed some ten to thirty-five demonstrations and protests in the same period. These incidents ranged across all sectors of society. There were fifty blue-collar strikes, forty-six by students and educators, and thirty-five white-collar and government employees strikes. The rest involved other groups.
The forms of protests also varied widely, from simple slogan writing and distribution of fliers, to well-organized strikes, to violence that included the torching of government vehicles and buildings. The latter, in particular, are indicative of Iranian society's volatile state and the public's deeply rooted hatred of the clerics and willingness to take risks.
Large-scale demonstrations have erupted in several provincial capitals. On April 15, 1992 thousands of people demonstrated in Shiraz, the capital of the southern Fars Province. The protesters clashed with the security forces during the biggest antigovernment protest in that city in a decade. Shiraz residents attacked government offices, banks, and gas stations, setting many of them on fire.22 On May 5, the town of Arak, the Central Province's capital, was the scene of widespread antigovernment demonstrations. Thousands of people came out onto the streets to protest the policies of the Rafsanjani government. A state of martial law was declared and at least 200 people were arrested.23 On May 31, tens of thousands of people in Mashad, the capital of the north eastern province of Khorassan, took part in the largest antigovernment protest in the city in the past eleven years. The regime acknowledged that at least 100 government buildings, banks, and corporations, 28 municipality cars and 7 buses were destroyed or burned. Angry residents clashed with security forces and wounded a number of them. More than 3,000 people were arrested and 20 protesters swiftly executed.
The government blamed the Mojahedin for organizing these protests. In Mashad, for example, the mayor acknowledged that the "Mojahedin" took part in the protest "in an organized way."24 Perhaps the most telling characteristic of the growing trend of protests is the government's inability to stop them, despite a brutal clampdown and wide, spread arrests and executions.25
The following account by a reporter from the Economist shows how concerned the regime was about the Mojahedin's role in the Mashad protests: "'Did you meet with any members of the Mujahideen when in Mashad?' the army officer kept asking. On the way home from a visit to Mashhad, where the riots had exploded on May 30th, your correspondent was arrested, strip' searched and interrogated for ten hours. The questions concentrated on the People's Mujahideen, the armed Iranian opposition quartered in Iraq. . ."26
During the elections for the Fourth Majlis in April and May 1992, the overwhelming majority of Iranians stayed away, registering their resounding rejection of the ruling regime. Although officials had lowered the minimum age to 15, boosting the number of eligible voters to 30 million during the first round in April, only 4.5 million (or 15 percent) went to the polls. During the second round in May only 2.5 million (or 8 percent) voted. Those who voted did so to get the election stamp on their identity cards, vital for everything from leaving the country to gaining admittance to the university.27
The election results were interpreted by some abroad as a clear-cut victory for Rafsanjani's "moderate policies." But the nationwide boycott demonstrated that for the average citizen in the street, the differences between the ruling factions have to do more with style than substance. Khomeini's son, Ahmad, was quite unequivocal on this matter during an audience with a group of majlis deputies. "At the Council for the Determination of the Exigencies of the State and at the Supreme National Security Council, I personally witness that the greater majority of the views and votes of both currents are the same," he said.28
Far from being a choice between reform-minded leaders and the old guard, the majlis elections marked an end to the power-sharing arrangement Khomeini had so delicately knitted. Unable to maintain the tenuous balance of power that his mentor so skillfully manipulated, Rafsanjani had no choice but to deny his allies a share of power. It was as if he had to amputate one of the two legs upon which the entire system was standing. The elections, therefore, weakened the regime as a whole because the losing side no longer felt compelled to safeguard or respect the political process from which it was so mercilessly excluded. What is more, in the months ahead, as social unrest and economic perils heighten, Rafsanjani will have no one to blame. For the first time during his four-year tenure, he has to personally shoulder the responsibility for his failures.
When Khomeini "drank the chalice of the poison of the cease-fire" in 1988, he deprived his regime of a very effective scapegoat upon which he blamed the country's entire problems: the war. Ironically, it seems that four years after Khomeini, his protege has found himself facing much the same predicament: to purge the so-called radical faction, also known as the Imam's Line, and thereby deprive the entire regime of one of its major components, or accept the status quo and the daily infightings which have crippled both the cabinet and the majlis.
As the events of subsequent months demonstrated, the purging of the "hard liners" from the majlis did not have any impact on growing popular discontent. The unrest in Mashad in late May 1992 gave new impetus to eruption of protests elsewhere throughout the country. Although these have to a large extent been smaller, they are frequent. An irreversible trend has begun, which the mullahs take very seriously as a warning of things to come.
On June 28, some 30,000 people demonstrated in Tabriz, capital of the north-western province of Azerbaijan, to protest the razing of their homes. Clashes with security forces led to the arrests of more than 100 people. On July 23, more than 1,000 teachers and students in the city of Javanrood, in western Kermanshah Province, disrupted a speech by the city's majlis deputy and clashed with security forces.29 On July 5, huge explosions rocked ammunition depots at the Allaho-Akbar barracks near Kermanshah, killing hundreds of Guard Corps members.30
The atmosphere has also been reported tense in Isfahan in central Iran, where a de facto curfew is in effect in many districts in the evenings. The situation is also tense in Rasht in northern Iran, where people have frequently clashed with the police. Demonstrations and clashes erupted in July in south Tehran townships of Golshahr, Islamshahr, Safarabad, Moussa-Abad, Robat Karim, and Khalij. The appearance of demolition crews usually sparked the clashes, yet in none of these incidents did the story end there; chants of "death to Rafsanjani" and "death to Khamenei" soon followed.
One of the regime's officials warned in a confidential report that Tehran's suburbs, especially Islamshahr, are a "hotbed of protests." The official described potential uprisings as "more important than those in Mashad." "Tehran is different from other cities, and [whatever happens there] would bear grave consequences," he noted. Despite the transfer of two Guards Corps divisions to Tehran and a state of full alert in the capital's barracks, officials are concerned that "if unrest simultaneously breaks out in several parts of the capital, the number of available forces is not sufficient to control the situation." To counter the spreading wave of protests, the regime has formed antiriot battalions and brigades and staged numerous urban maneuvers in Tehran and other cities.
Khamenei and Rafsanjani have both emphasized in unambiguous terms the need for an active and continued presence of the Bassij forces in "all scenes," as well as the need for the Bassij "to be entrusted with maintaining the national security." Rafsanjani called upon the repressive forces to protect the security of "streets and borders," and to "undertake; as an integrated and concentrated force, their momentous task of protecting the security and welfare of the society."31 Stressing the need for further clampdown, Khamenei said: "The offences in question are not those of individuals. The worst offences are those which destabilize the foundations of the state. . . Youths are covertly dragged into corruption as grouplets under the enemy's direction. This is vice, moral vice, political vice, and economic vice."32
Brutal crackdown, however, has failed to quell antigovernment demonstrations and protests throughout the country, in the cities, factories, schools, businesses, the military, and so on. The People's Mojahedin Command Headquarters inside Iran recorded at least 114 protests in August and September 1992 alone, 47 of which occurred in Tehran. In October, three bombs heavily damaged Khomeini's tomb 33 and a powerful bomb destroyed several buildings of the Guards Corps Command Headquarters in Afsarieh district in east Tehran.34 For three consecutive days in November, residents in the industrial city of Arak (central Iran) staged antigovernment demonstrations and clashed with security forces. In December, hundreds of workers of Mobarakeh Steel Industries in Isfahan went on strike to protest low wages and dismal living conditions. On February 18, 1993, 3,000 workers in Tabriz Tractor Manufacturing Complex in the north-western Azerbaijan Province went on strike, protesting the deteriorating living conditions and increasing pressures and intimidation by the regime. A series of explosions and fires erupted in Iran's southern oilfields in Khuzistan Province, prompting Ali Fallahian, the minister of intelligence, to dismiss the province's intelligence chief and personally visit the oilfields in late February.35 These follow strikes a few months earlier by some 100,000 oil industry workers in Tehran, Isfahan, and Abadan refineries. The state-controlled media on occasions reported some of these protests, although in a distorted manner.
The mullahs have blamed the Mojahedin for organizing these activities. In a stark revelation and a sharp departure from along-standing policy of news black-out on the Mojahedin, Rafsanjani said during a Friday prayer sermon in June in Tehran, "We still have an enemy both inside the country and abroad. . . . We have an organized enemy abroad and they have contacts with each other [at home and abroad]; they have organizational or periodic and single contacts both [in Iran and abroad]. "36
Before the Fourth Majlis elections in April, Rafsanjani blamed his failures on the rival factions. Since the April purge, however, the entire responsibility for the catastrophic economic situation rests squarely on his own shoulders. Time is finally running out on Khomeini's heirs, who are engulfed in crises from all sides. Arrests, harassment, and other repressive measures cannot reverse the trend that has already begun. As the old Iranian saying goes: "Floodwater never returns to the stream." *
