ISTANBUL: How many revolutions can one generation manage?
With poetic precision, angry demonstrators are challenging Iran s aging revolutionaries. Paradoxically, many are their own children, disillusioned by Khomeinism and the system of the supreme guardian.
Revolutions devour their own children. The Islamic Republic spat out its ideological offspring once in the bloody score-settling immediately after Khomeini s return to Iran and once again since the summer, when it instructed its security forces to kill, torture and sexually abuse rebellious youths, many of whom are the sons of khodis (insiders).
On Feb. 11, thousands of Green protesters were violently suppressed when they sought to march alongside a government-sanctioned demonstration marking the thirty-first anniversary of the revolution. Hijacking a pro-regime protest to publicly condemn the Islamic Republic was until recently unthinkable. It suggests that a sea change in mentality is sweeping society.
Is it too late for the current ruling system to defuse it?
The current incumbents of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi s vacated palaces have demonstrated that rather than learning from history, they repeat it. They smear their opponents with the same accusations leveled by the Shah against his own challengers: they present the protesters as an unrepresentative minority backed by foreign powers, call in the military to quell them, and summon regime loyalists for counter-rallies designed to underscore support for the status quo.
Iran s unprecedented political crisis is transforming the core of the Islamic Republic beyond recognition. Its possible collapse and the absence of a coherent opposition conjure up a nightmare scenario of conflicting agendas fragmenting the country: disparate Khomeinist Leftists struggling with returning exiles, communists, Marxists, religious nationalists, members of the MKO, royalists and ethnic secessionists all grappling with each other in a power vacuum stretching across a country the size of western Europe and hemmed in by warzones on its eastern and western flanks.
Alternatively, were the Green movement to be quashed, the militarization of political life started by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejhad when he appointed former Revolutionary Guardsmen to ministries, ambassadorships and provincial governorships will accelerate. The supreme leader s once-absolute authority will continue eroding until the position becomes honorary.
Much like the Turkic warrior castes that swept down from Central Asia from the tenth century on, first to defend the Abbasid Empire as mercenaries but eventually amassing power and spawning a dynasty, so may the supreme leadership become as irrelevant as the caliph. Valuable for the religious legitimacy vested in him as the defender of Islam, the lineage was retained to lend the state religious credibility.
Already, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei lacks the religious authority of his predecessor and founder of the Islamic Republic, Ruhollah Khomeini. He seeks to retain a measure of control over the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps through his son Mojtaba Khamenei, the product of a clerical-military environment. But the flood of current IRGC commanders suddenly making very public political statements tells another story.
Last summer, Ahmadinejhad flexed new muscles when he targeted then-Minister of Intelligence Mohsen Ejheii, a Khamenei loyalist, and criticized his handling of the crisis. After the minister resigned in protest, Ahmadinejhad appointed a stalwart to the same position with no prior experience in intelligence affairs. Along with forced resignations and the emergence of an IRGC-administered parallel intelligence body, the current ministry is reportedly a shell of its former self and packed with Revolutionary Guard veterans.
So these are two equally unappetizing visions of the future: a military dictatorship backed by China and Russia floating as an outpost of their influence in the twilight of a brief American empire, or a Hobbesian free-for-all in a country under dismemberment.
And amid the chaos, electricity blackouts, flourishing crime and insecurity, how much value will the reacquired ability of Iranian women to issue from their homes without a headscarf have?
Alternatively, the people of a country where one violent revolution gave rise to eight years of war and horrific human rights abuses may decide to push for gradual change and internal reform. The question then becomes, how prepared is the Islamic Republic to cede substantial change?
The events since this summer s elections are an eloquent reminder of what happens when the opportunity of reforming to the general benefit of society is passed up in favor of squabbling and power jostling. Iason Athanasiadis is an Istanbul-based writer and photographer who lived in Iran from 2004 to 2007. This commentary is published by Daily News Egypt in collaboration with bitterlemons-international.org.
