Rahimi Charged with Corruption

Although almost everyone in the regime is certainly guilty of corruption, the judiciary has decided for political reasons to go after Mohammad Reza Rahimi. Rahimi is the top Vice-President and a close ally of Ahmadinejad. It seems that going after him for corruption charges is a sort of revenge by the Larijani brothers for dismissal of Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki.

It seems that the conflict within the regime now is between Ahmadinejad and the Larijani borthers (Speaker of the Majlis Ali Larijani and Judiciary Chief Sadeq Larijani). Hopefully the conflict between these members of ther regime will allow an opportunity for the Green Movement to gain power in the chaos of regime in fighting. Here is more on the conflict:


Corruption charges against one of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's most trusted political advisers provided the latest evidence of deep rifts within the Iranian president's own conservative political camp.

The challenge by Ahmadinejad's rivals — one of them the head of the judiciary — could set the tone for a bitter fight leading up to the next big political moment in Iran, parliamentary elections less than a year away.

"This case isn't going to bring down Ahmadinejad, but it may get very ugly," said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a regional political analyst at Emirates University. "It's a commentary on the troubled state of Iranian politics at the moment."

Ahmadinejad has faced a growing internal backlash from conservative leaders — including influential parliament speaker Ali Larijani. They are upset by the president's combative nature and deepening links with the vast military-economic network run by the Revolutionary Guard, Iran's most powerful force which led the crackdown on the reformist movement after Ahmadinejad's disputed re-election last year.

The political infighting escalated earlier this month when Ahmadinejad suddenly dismissed his longtime foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, a close ally of Larijani. Many lawmakers and others denounced the move as further evidence of Ahmadinejad's steamrolling style. He dumped Mottaki in apparent retaliation for disagreements that included control over foreign ministry posts.

Shortly after Mottaki's firing, the judiciary headed by Larijani's brother announced the corruption allegations against First Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi.

The charges could do more damage to Ahmadinejad and the reputation he has cultivated as aloof from Iran's powerful financial clans and foundations, many run by the Revolutionary Guard.

The developments revealed the increasingly complex political maneuvering within the Islamic Republic as it struggles with economic sanctions and growing international pressure to curb its production of nuclear fuel.

The judiciary last week said Rahimi is facing corruption charges that need to be investigated and will have to stand trial. The details of the accusations against him have not been made public since. Rahimi quickly denied the charges and was expected to present his side at a news conference, possibly later this week.

On Monday, Ahmadinejad's office came to Rahimi's defense, saying that his complaints against the accusations should be investigated, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported.

But the rumblings have been coming for months against Rahimi, whose position as the top of 12 vice presidents gives him authority to meet visiting prime ministers and other dignitaries and lead Cabinet meetings in Ahmadinejad's absence.

Some of Ahmadinejad's political foes have frequently taken pot shots at Rahimi with allegations of financial misdeeds since a major government-linked embezzlement probe opened in April. At the time, conservative lawmaker Elias Naderan calling Rahimi the "leader of the corruption circle."

Now, a full-scale investigation and possible trial could become a high-stakes proxy clash between Ahmadinejad and Larijani and his backers, who include his brother, judiciary chief Ayatollah Sadeq Larijani.

The immediate battles may be sporadic because all of Iran's political establishment is currently engrossed in painful steps to trim government subsidies, which has already pushed fuel prices up to 400 percent higher.

The economic shock has brought waves of complaints against the government from all sides. Reformists have claimed the billions saved on subsidies will be funneled back to help boost Ahmadinejad and the Revolutionary Guard. Even some hard-liners — Ahmadinejad's political base — have said the price hikes are too fast and too steep.

The rifts point to the next big political test in Iran — parliamentary elections in early 2012. The races will mark the first major balloting since the accusations of vote-rigging after Ahmadinejad's June 2009 victory plunged Iran into its worst internal chaos since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

It's still uncertain whether the opposition movement can rebound in some form for the parliamentary campaign. But there's little doubt that Larijani and his allies will make a run.

A strong showing would have the twin effect of embarrassing Ahmadinejad and sending a message to the ruling clerics, who have the final word on the candidates for the 2013 presidential election to replace lame duck Ahmadinejad.

"It is unlikely the (Rahimi) dispute will have particular repercussions in the short term," said Hamid Reza Shokouhi, a political analyst in Tehran. "But its impact will be seen in the next parliamentary elections."

It does, however, show Ahmadinejad's shrinking political coterie.

"Supporters of Ahmadinejad are ... a limited group now," said Shokouhi.

But still a very formidable one.

Ahmadinejad continues to enjoy support from the two most potent forces in Iran: the Revolutionary Guard and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who controls the theocracy and its almost limitless powers.

This has been enough to intimidate Ahmadinejad's opponents from going too far. The lines, however, keep shifting in favor of bolder political challenges.

On Sunday, former foreign minister Mottaki was praised in a statement by 260 parliament members — all but 30 — in a direct slap against Ahmadinejad. Last month, dozens of lawmakers signed a petition seeking bring Ahmadinejad into the chamber for questioning over complaints including fiscal mismanagement.

The effort apparently sputtered before getting enough signatures, but it reinforced the sense that Ahmadinejad can be pressured openly without facing the wrath of the supreme leader.

"The fact that Rahimi is being attacked so publicly by conservatives — and even some hard-liners — suggests the political temperature is heating up," said Shadi Hamid, a researcher on Gulf affairs at The Brookings Doha Center in Qatar.

A showdown over Rahimi could also feed into the claims that Ahmadinejad is increasingly embattled and trying to surround himself with staunch loyalists.

Rahimi was appointed as one of Iran's 12 vice presidents in 2005 and rose to the top spot last year. He has taken part in sensitive political meetings, such as visits by Chinese officials.

Last summer, he called the U.S. dollar and euro "dirty" after Iran threatened to stop selling oil in the currencies to protest economic sanctions. He also called Australians "a bunch of cattlemen" and said South Korea "needed to be slapped" after both nations backed sanctions.

Mousavi and Karroubi Hold Meeting

In their latest meeting, the two discuss the following:


Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi held a joint meeting. At the beginning of this meeting which was held in Mehdi Karroubi’s residence, Karroubi and Mousavi while expressing sadness and sorrow regarding the terrorist attacks which occurred last week on Tasooa (Shia religious festival) in the city of Chabahar and resulted in martyrdom of few worshipers and injuring many others, offered their deepest condolences for the families of the victims. Mousavi and Karroubi strongly condemned this terrorist attack and stressed: “The enemies of our nation must not assume that the unity and solidarity of Muslims is jeopardized by these kinds of terrorist attacks.”

Also in this meeting Mehdi Karroubi and Mir Hossein Mousavi agreed that general plan for regulating government subsides is a plan that has been discussed internationally as a “fundamental and main economic move” but demanded that its implementation be based on “experts’ research” and without any “hype”.

Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi expressed deep concern regarding the implementation of the plan to cut subsidies on fuel and basic life necessities given the current weak economy and added: “The implementation of this plan while the country is facing harsh international sanctions, the economy is in recession, unemployment is more than 30% and has spread across the country in most of the provinces, and the inflation is out of control, is a burden that its pressure will be felt by lower income and middle class layers of the society.”

Both parties emphasized: “On one hand the shutdown of factories, their inability to pay the salaries of their workers and the unemployment of workers and on the other hand losing investments due to lack of investment security in the country as well as lack of healthy competition in economy and privatization all forecast a dark future in country’s economy. This situation worsens when there is no will in the government to listen to the opinion of outstanding experts and critics. There must be an environment in the country that economy experts would be able to express their views without hesitation, instead of being confronted.”

In this meeting Mehdi Karroubi and Mir Hossein Mousavi once again expressed deep sorrow and concern regarding the dire condition of political prisoners and the made-up and unjust issued sentences against them based on the “fabricated” accusations such as “acting against national security” and added: “ The courts have issued heavy sentences against these political prisoners whom unfortunately are from the wide range of layers of society such as artist, teacher, lawyer, student, university professor, cleric, journalist and etc.; and on the other hand there have been inhuman and far from morality treatments against [political prisoners] in prisons, which leaves these political prisoners no other option but to go on hunger strike in order to protest to these actions. Here we urge the political prisoners to end their hunger strike in order to save their lives and assure them that the final victory belongs to them and to the people.”

Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi also by reviewing the foreign policy situation of the country in the international arena expressed surprise regarding the non-diplomatic actions of the administration and added: “The foreign policy has become so ridiculous that the appointed foreign minister should hear his dismissal from the president of Senegal [during a diplomatic trip]! These kinds of actions have no outcome but humiliating the country’s reputation in international arena and demonstrate the childish behaviors based on retaliation. These actions have no result but discrediting the country in eyes of international community even more than before. Unfortunately after this humiliating event now both sides of the story are accusing each other of lying, while lying is the key of all sins!”

At the end of this meeting both parties called the “bullying” and “intimidating” remarks and actions of some individuals affiliated with the totalitarian circle, “far from rational” and emphasized: “To this day we are standing firm on the path we have chosen and also in the future we will not retrieve from this path which is nothing but to defend the rightful demands of the people; and we have no fear from threats, insults and false accusations. For us there is no difference between this big prison that holds us to the smaller prison that unjustly holds the other political prisoners. We are hopeful that one day the true “conspirators” would be held accountable for their actions in front of the nation.”
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Jafar Panahi Sentenced and Banned from Making Films

Sadly acclaimed film Director Jafar Panahi was sentenced today to 6 years in prison and banned from making films for 20 years. Panahi has made such highly renowned films such as White Balloon and The Circle. Panahi is a stronger support of the Green Movement and has been a strong critic of the horrible actions of the regime.

Panahi is one of Iran's greatest artists whose movies rival the best directors from all around. The fact that the regime is going after him not only shows how desperate they have become, but also how they are willing to damage all aspects of Iranian life. The regime wants to control Iranian culture and destroy it to keep their corrupt hold on power. They have tried to silence a great director, but they will ultimately not succeed.

Security Presence Rise as Subsidies Fall

As the regime is forced to cut fuel subsidies due to its own economic incompetence and internation sanctions, the security presence rises to supress any unrest:

Security forces flooded Iran's capital in a warning against possible unrest as fuel prices surged 400 percent Sunday under plans to sharply cut government subsides and ease pressure on an economy struggling with international sanctions.

The so-called economic "surgery" has been planned for months, but was repeatedly delayed over worries of a repeat of gas riots in 2007 and serious political infighting during the standoff with the West over the Islamic Republic's nuclear program.

But the timing for the first painful steps — just after a first round of nuclear talks with international powers and a second planned for early next year — suggests one of the world's leading oil producers is feeling the sting of tightened sanctions. And it might open more room for possible compromises with world powers, including the United States, in exchange for easing the economic squeeze.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told Iranians in a nationally televised speech Saturday that it was finally time to begin trimming the state subsidies that lowered the costs of bread and cooking oil and gave Iran some of the cheapest fuel pump prices in the world. He also noted that he saw "positive points" in talks earlier this month with six nations that hold important sway over sanctions: the five permanent U.N. Security Council members plus Germany.

"Iran's top leadership is puzzled about the tightening sanctions and their long-term implications on Iran's economy. Ahmadinejad has labeled those sanctions a joke, but the Iranian people are not laughing," said Ehsan Ahrari, an analyst based in Alexandria, Virginia.

The overnight price rises — gas rising fourfold in some cases — follows upheaval in the heart of Ahmadinejad's government. Last week, he abruptly dismissed longtime foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, while he was on a diplomatic mission to Africa in favor of interim replacement, nuclear chief Ali Akbar Salehi.

The move sends a message that Iran's leadership had tired of Mottaki's challenges to Ahmadinejad and sought a more unified government at a critical time. In his first public comment, Mottaki on Sunday called his blindside firing "un-Islamic, undiplomatic and offensive," according to the semiofficial Mehr news agency.

In Tehran, meanwhile, riot police took up posts around the major intersections as the subsidy cuts took effect. There were loud complaints by consumers, but no signs of the violence in 2007, when the government imposed limits on the purchase of subsidized gasoline.

Under the new system, each personal car receives 60 liters (16 gallons) of subsidized fuel a month costing 40 cents a liter ($1.50 a gallon) — up from the just 10 cents a liter. Further purchases of gas would run 70 cents a liter ($2.69 a gallon), up from just 40 cents.

Tehran says it is paying some $100 billion in subsidies annually, although experts believe the amount is far lower, closer to $30 billion. Iran had planned to slash subsidies before the latest round of sanctions took effect — Ahmadinejad and his allies have long insisted the country's oil-based economy could no longer afford the largesse.

But the latest rounds of sanctions have targeted the core of Iran's economy. Some top European and Asian companies have pulled out of the Iranian market. American embargoes also seek to block the import of pump-ready fuel to Iran — a weak point in a country with vast oil riches but a shortfall in refineries.

Angry taxi drivers complained as the price of fuel rose fourfold overnight.

"I don't know what to do," said one frustrated cab driver, who did not want to be identified for fear of retribution by authorities. "I am not allowed to increase price of my service while I am paying five times more than yesterday."

A truck driver, Mansour Abbasi, said he paid 10 times more on Sunday for natural gas to fuel his vehicle — and complained he could not compensate by hiking his own transport fees.

"If I raise my prices, people will not be able to afford it. Or they may report me," said Abbasi, 43.

Despite the grumbling, there were no reports of clashes in Tehran or other major cities such as Tabriz, Kermanshah, Bandar Abbas, Kerman and Ahvaz. One resident of Ahvaz said some taxi fares doubled.

Economists say the unpopular plan to slash subsidies could stoke inflation already estimated to be more than 20 percent.

One lawmaker said he had expected the extent of price rises overnight to happen gradually over five years.

"I am surprised. We do not know what happened," the lawmaker told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment. "The price of fuel was supposed to reach about international prices within the next five years and not this year."

Ahmadinejad also said his government was paying $4 billion in bread subsidies, which will also gradually be phased out.

Ahmad Bakhshayesh, a Tehran University professor of politics, said it was too soon to gauge the public reaction to the cuts, and popular unrest could still erupt.

"We have to wait and see how inflation will affect their lives," he told AP.

Opposition websites reported an economic analyst, Fariborz Raeis Dana, was detained after claiming the subsidy cuts were intended to allow Islamic leaders to spend more money on the military and security forces. The reports could not be independently confirmed.

After Ahmadinejad announced the cuts Saturday night — calling it the "biggest surgery" on Iran's economy in 50 years — long lines of cars formed at gas stations in Tehran as Iranians rushed to fill their tanks at subsidized prices before the new ones took effect at midnight. By Sunday, the lines were gone.

Economic analyst Saeed Laylaz said the cuts were in theory a positive move since they would reduce energy consumption, which is currently costing the country a quarter of its Gross National Product.

"However it is being implemented in an incomplete fashion because it's not accompanied by a greater liberalization of the economy," he said, adding that the cuts would probably not have much positive effect.

The government says it will return part of the money obtained from increased prices to the people through cash payments. It has already paid into accounts of some 20 million families as compensation ahead of the cuts.

Every family member will now receive $80 for to help them over the next two months.

Part 19: A Fradulent Election

Figure 5.1 Provinces carried by Azeri candidate Mohsen Mehralizadeh in light green and those carried by Mehdi Karroubi in red during the 2005 Presidential Election. In the 2009 presidential election, Mir Hossein Mousavi would only win one of the light green provinces and Karroubi would win no provinces.

While my point is not to prove definitively that the election was fraudulent, it is important to note some reasons why many Iranians themselves viewed the election as completely illegitimate. According to the official results, Ahmadinejad received 63% of the vote to Mousavi’s 34% with Rezei getting 2% and Karroubi just 1%. By getting more than 50% of the vote, Ahmadinejad avoided a runoff which would have continued the campaign. Given the momentum of Mousavi’s campaign, this lopsided victory seemed intrinsically wrong and specific irregularities would reinforce this image.

The first major discrepancy was the fact that Mousavi who is an ethnic Azari, originally from the northwest of Iran, lost in the largest Azari province of East Azerbaijan to Ahmadinejad. Azaeris have traditionally voted for even minor candidates of the same ethnic group, and the fact that Mousavi lost in this province seems highly unlikely. For example in the 2005 election, Mohsen Mehralizadeh ran as a minor reformist candidate garnering just 4% of the vote nationally in the first round. Yet as an ethnic Azari, he received 29% of the vote in East Azerbaijan to Ahmadinejad’s 15% and won the other two predominantly Azari provinces. The fact that such a minor Azari candidate could dominate the region in 2005 would mean that almost everyone expected Mousavi to once again carry the region.

Another reason for skepticism was Karroubi’s unusually low vote totals even among his own ethnic group of the Lurs. While Mousavi certainly became the main candidates of reformist voters, Karroubi still had a constituency within the movement. Karroubi garnered over 5 million votes in the 2005 elections while his official vote total for 2009 was just 333,635 votes. Moreover, Karroubi is also an ethnic Lur meaning that he, like Mousavi among the Azaris, has a natural base among the Lurs of Western Iran. In 2005, Karroubi received 440,247 just in the main Lur province of Lorestan which is more than the total number of votes he got in 2009 in all of Iran. Moreover in 2009, his official vote total in Lorestan decreased to 44,036 which seems highly unlikely given his performance in 2005.

Figure 5.1 is a map of the provinces of Iran with the light green indicating the three provinces the Azari candidate Mehralizadeh carried in the first round of voting in the 2005 presidential election. The red represents the provinces Karroubi carried in the same election which shows his strength in the West of the country. In the 2009 presidential election, Mousavi would only win one of the Azeri provinces and only one other province in the rest of the country. Karroubi would carry no provinces in the whole country since his vote total was less than 10% of what it was in 2005. Clearly such irregularities would lead many in Iran to believe the election was completely fraudulent.

Karroubi on Ashura

Part 18: How It Could of Happened

In any event, Mousavi became the ultimate dark horse candidate and his campaign caught fire in the short election period before the election on June 12. In many ways, Mousavi and those running his campaign had been underestimated as an organized and technologically advanced campaign started to emerge. Both the man himself and his campaign were more formidable than the conservatives could ever have imagined. There were a few reasons why Mousavi was able to gain traction and prove a viable opponent to Ahmadinejad.

Mousavi’s perceived flaw of being absent from the political scene suddenly became an asset as he became popular among younger Iranians. Nearly two-thirds of Iran’s population is under the age of 30 meaning that they have little or no memory of his time as Prime Minister. In the small inner circle of the Islamic Republic, Mousavi represented the closest thing to an outsider since a large segment of the population did not perceive him as tainted by the regime. Even popular reformist figures such as Khatami and Karroubi were recently in high positions within the Islamic Republic, but Mousavi seemed different because he had been gone for so long.

Another Mousavi asset was something new in Iranian politics: his wife Zahra Rahnavard. It was previously unheard of for the politicians’ wives to play a major role in the politics of the Islamic Republic. While there had been female members of parliament, Zahra Rahnavard became a critical part of her husband’s candidacy.

She appeared with her husband at public rallies and gave interviews about her own views. In particular, she became very popular with the young women of Iran who had few role models in the politics of the Islamic Republic. Her popularity reached a point in which she was compared to the American first lady Michelle Obama although she dismissed such comparisons, “I am not Iran's Michelle Obama. I am Zahra, the follower of Fatimah Zahra [the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad]”.

Technology also played a key role in enabling the Mousavi campaign to pose a serious challenge to Ahmadinejad. His campaign was able to quickly and cheaply mobilize people through newly emerging communication technologies that many young voters easily understood. Mousavi supporters would use text messaging to quickly organize political rallies and relay information about voting which would also be used later on to organize mass protests.

This was also the first election in the Islamic Republic in which the internet played a major role. In particular, the newly emerging social media sites of Twitter and Facebook created a new way for the opposition to organize outside of the tight control of the regime. Campaign platforms and speeches could be posted online for voters to see without first going through the filter of the regime. Mousavi’s official Facebook page would be one of the most important ways for him to communicate with his followers both before and after the election. These tactics became so successful that the regime even shut down Facebook and text messaging in the days leading up to the election in the hopes of slowing Mousavi’s momentum.

Perhaps the Mousavi campaign’s most effective strategy was also its simplest: the selection of green as the official symbol of his campaign. The campaign stated that green was an important color in Islam, but it provided an easy and quickly identifiable image which people could rally around. To the regime, it looked dangerously close to what they considered other “velvet revolutions” such as the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in which the opposition had used orange as a unifying color against the regime.

The actual campaigning for the election was the most competitive environment in the history of the Islamic Republic. For the first time, contentious debates between the candidates were held on national television with frank accusations of corruption and dictatorship hurled at Ahmadinejad. Mass rallies would be held by all side with thousands of people attending in an election campaign starting to look like those in Western democracies.

A public who had been apathetic about politics during the conservative crackdown of the 2000s suddenly found itself caught up in a competitive election. All sides mobilized their bases and long lines formed on Friday June 12, 2009 as millions of Iranians came out to exercise their right to democratically elect their president. Even though a victory for his campaign seemed impossible a few weeks ago, the surge in support seemed to suggest that Mousavi had a real chance at being the next president of the Islamic Republic of Iran. All of Iran and indeed the world anxiously awaited the results after a long day of voting, and then the results came.

Student Day Protests

This past Tuesday, there were a number of protests around Iran particularly in universities to mark Student Day and protest the regime. Here are some clips:

One Year Anniversary of Grand Ayatollah Montazeri's Passing

Although he is gone, his dream of a Free Iran will never die and someday soon will come true.

Part 17: An Underestimated Threat

The first important thing to note about the June, 12 2009 presidential election was the fact that the liberal Islamist opposition to the regime initially decided to heavily contest the election. After the failure of Khatami to change the Islamic Republic and the victory of Ahmadinejad, it appeared as if the regime’s attempt to destroy the reform movement had succeeded. Yet what remained of the reform movement sensed an opportunity to exploit Ahmadinejad’s unpopularity as a spring board to jump back into power.

Even after the conservative backlash against the reformists, the leaders of the reform movement still believed that elections mattered in the Islamic Republic. The actual counting of votes in the previous elections had been fairly accurate once candidates had been screened out. Thus reformists hoped that a well run campaign could once again mobilize Iranians to defeat the incumbent.

The first indication that the reformists were serious was on February 8, 2009 when former President Khatami declared his candidacy. Khatami had been the most successful reformist politician and remained one of the most popular political figures in the country. Yet his eight years in power were marked by shattered dreams and the ultimate victory of neo-conservatives with the election of Ahmadinejad to succeed Khatami. The announcement sent shockwaves throughout the Iranian political establishment as the reformists had seemed to find a credible challenger to Ahmadinejad.

Another shockwave occurred only a few weeks later on March 9 when former Prime Minister Mousavi declared that he too would run in the election (Sahimi 2010, np). Mousavi had previously turned down opportunities to run for president in 1997 and 2005 and had been largely absent from the political scene since he left the regime in 1989. His reemergence during this critical period was puzzling given not only his absence from politics, but also since Khatami had already declared his candidacy.

A little more than a week after Mousavi declared his candidacy; Khatami dropped out of the race on March 16 and officially endorsed Mousavi’s campaign (Najibullah 2009, np). Khatami claimed that he did not want to split the reformist vote with Mousavi given the reformist fiasco in the 2005 presidential election. In that election, two candidates split the reformist vote causing Ahmadinejad to move on to the runoff and not a reformist candidate. Whatever the reason why Khatami dropped out, it was clear that he was no longer the sole leader of the reform movement.

Mousavi was once again a major player in the Islamic Republic and was quickly getting back in the thick of things 20 years after leaving the regime. Former Majlis Speaker Karroubi had declared his candidacy before either Khatami or Mousavi and also had a significant following within the reform movement. Moreover other reformist candidates declared their candidacy, but only Mousavi and Karroubi were approved by the Guardian Council to run (British Broadcasting Coopeartion 2009, np). As the election started to tighten, there were calls for Karroubi to also drop out of the race and endorse Mousavi, but he would remain in the election until the end.

Initially, it seemed as if Ahmadinejad had a clear path to re-election even with Mousavi and Karroubi running against him. Khatami seemed like the most serious challenger because of his past popularity, but he dropped out. Former commander of the IRGC and Rafsanjani ally Mohsen Rezaei ran as a pragmatic conservative alternative to Ahmadinejad, but he lacked a base among the people. Finally, the conservative coalition remained loyal to the incumbent and threw the backing of the regime to ensure his victory.

Despite all of these things, what resulted was the most heavily contested election in the history of the Islamic Republic. At first Mousavi was largely been written off as uncharismatic and unable to energize the reform movement in order to pose a serious challenge to Ahmadinejad. He was described as a technocrat who was out of touch with the concerns of the common man and who had been absent from the regime for two decades.

This image of Mousavi and the incumbents’ natural advantages meant that the Guardian Council would approve his candidacy. The regime had previously used the Guardian Council to bar candidates from running denying reformists the chance to winning elections most prominently in 2004 parliamentary elections. The approval of candidates takes place a mere three weeks before the election making the official campaign cycle very short.

The conservatives made a critical mistake by allowing Mousavi to run in the election as they underestimated both him and the resilience of the reform movement. Moreover, they had not realized widespread dissatisfaction with the regime as their past electoral victories did not translate into popularity among the people. Had the conservatives barred reformists from running in the first place, then perhaps the mass protests that happened after the election may never have occurred.

Part 16: A New Beginning

The June 2009 presidential election was a turning point not just for the liberal and conservative factions of the Islamic Republic, but for the history of Iran. The magnitude of events unleashed by the election would pose the greatest challenge to the Islamic Republic in its 30 year history. People outside Iran would also get a front row seat to action as videos of mass protests would be posted on the internet for the world to see.

It was a new beginning for the reform movement returning from the dead and transforming into the Green Movement. It also brought the return of revolution in Iran as the opposition would look to the 1979 revolution for inspiration in brining change to the regime. For conservatives, the purge of democratic principles after the election represented the culmination of a decade’s long effort to create an authoritarian regime.

In the end, the election and its aftermath saw the final breakdown in the coalition of liberal and conservative Islamists that had maintained the Islamic Republic for 30 years. The disagreements about the dual authoritarian and democratic nature of the regime could no longer be reconciled as it had been in the past. Finally, a breaking point had been reached in which the conflicts arising for the 1979 revolution would burst back to the surface in a return of revolutionary conflict and spirit in Iran.

Faced with the prospect of losing power and their authoritarian gains, the new coalition of conservatives and neo-conservatives would no longer allow liberal Islamists to have a role within the regime or more generally tolerate any sort of dissent. Neo-conservatives led by President Ahmadinejad were at the forefront of this effort transforming the regime into what looked increasingly like a military dictatorship. For their part, traditional conservatives led by Supreme Leader Khamenei would go along with the creation of an authoritarian state viewing a possible liberal takeover of the government as a greater threat than the neo-conservatives.

For the first time in the history of the Islamic Republic, large segments of the population viewed the process of counting the votes to determine the winner of an election as completely fraudulent. The widespread perception that the presidential election was completely illegitimate ended the reform movement insofar as it was a movement to change the regime through internal democratic channels.

Since there no longer seemed anyway of actually winning elections in the Islamic Republic, then there was no incentive to participate within the confines of the regime. Those liberal Islamists that wanted to bring change from within the regime now had no choice but to work outside the confines of the regime. The leaders of the liberal Islamists would organize protests and mass mobilization of the population as they had done 30 years earlier to overthrow the Shah.

In the place of the reform movement, the Green Movement modeling itself on the original revolutionary movement that created the Islamic Republic would emerge. The same slogans and tactics of the 1979 revolution would be combined with modern advances in communication technology such as text messaging and the website Twitter in the hope that change could be brought to the regime. Reviving the original revolution in the modern world would lead to one of the first truly digital revolutions in which the actions of the Green Movement could be posted on the internet for the world to see.

While its leaders, organization, and even goals were not as clear as the original revolutionary movement, the Green Movement made up any shortcomings by the passion and intensity of its participants. Given the near monopoly of force by the regime, the mass demonstrations of the Green Movement would be violently suppressed by a newly authoritarian regime. Yet the spirit of the movement would not be as easily crushed, and millions of Iranians would continue to oppose the regime in the hope of one day brining about change.

Part 15: People Stop Participating

While the relatively free elections of the late 1990s saw widespread participation among the population, the elections in the mid 2000s were marked by public apathy after conservatives clamped down on the democratic process. Public participation in the Islamic Republic plummeted as a far smaller percentage of eligible voters took part in the elections.

Figure 4.1 shows the overall downward trend of public participation in presidential, local, and parliamentary elections from 1997 to 2005 by tracking the percentage of eligible voters who actually voted in elections. The points mark the actual percentage of participation while a regression line demonstrates the overall downward trend.

Figure 4.1 Percentage of the eligible population participating in elections from 1997 to 2005

The chart demonstrates that a significantly smaller percentage of the population participated in the Islamic Republic as the conservatives began to clamp down on democratic rights ensured in the constitution. The public participated in the system in greater numbers when they believed that their votes had a real chance at changing the regime. Once conservatives made it clear that they were not going to allow the elected branches of government to bring about significant changes, the public decreased its participation in elections.

This trend means that less people would work within the confines of the regime when they believed their votes would not bring about change. The fact that large numbers of people would abandon participating in the Islamic Republic would foreshadow future protests against the regime when elections were viewed as completely meaningless. Once people believed that elections were fraudulent, then opposition to the regime would work outside of the confines of the regime to bring change by taking to the streets.

In the mean time even though segments of the reform movement had abandoned participating in the regime, a significant portion still wanted to work within the elected channels to bring change. However, they did not have enough support to override the resurgence of the conservatives ultimately losing out again in the 2006 local elections and the 2008 Majlis elections. While the reformists did not know how to respond to the clamp down by the conservatives, they did not give up contesting elections regrouping for the looming 2009 presidential election.

The Iranian people may have participated less in the electoral process once the conservatives struck back, but they still had to live with the outcome of those elections. Even with the failure of reformist electoral victories to bring change to the regime, anger at the direction of the country under Ahmadinejad meant that the public would be lured back into the electoral process.

Elections no longer had to be about changing policy in the Islamic Republic as long as they offered the possibility of changing the person who was president. This scenario would set the stage for the final showdown between a resurgent reform movement and the conservative coalition that wanted to maintain its authoritarian gains. What resulted was a complete breakdown of the Islamist coalition that had maintained the Islamic Republic for 30 years leading to the return of revolution in Iran.

Part 14: Ahmadinejad Wins the 2005 Election

The final piece of the puzzle for the conservative coalition was the 2005 presidential election. It would prove to be the most interesting elections in the history of the Islamic Republic up to that point and would set the stage for the monumental presidential election of 2009. The 2005 election showed the shifting sands of political loyalties in Iran and cemented the fault lines between different factions in the regime.

Former President Rafsanjani announced that he would once again run in the election, but he would not become the consensus candidate showing the highly fractured nature of the regime. While Rafsanjani had originally aligned himself with Khamenei and conservatives during his presidency, he had grown distant from the conservative movement with the rise of the neo-conservatives. As part of the neo-conservatives appeal, they campaigned heavily on a populist appeal to win over the pious lower classes of Iran. They heavily criticized Rafsanjani for being corrupt and for the failure of his free market approach to help the masses of Iranians. Rafsanjani would run from the middle distancing himself from the conservatives, but also not embracing the reformist cause either.

The traditional conservatives under Khamenei would not endorse Rafsanjani and instead put forth Ali Larijani as the standard bearer for the regime. The neo-conservatives would select Ahmadinejad as their candidate in the election showing an independence from the traditional conservatives and the regime’s elite. Since a majority of votes was required to be elected in the first round, the highly fractured nature of all parts of the regime meant that a runoff was inevitable. As a result, the two factions of the conservative movement could put forth different candidates, as long as they united in the runoff.

It was not just the conservative coalition that was divided; the reformists were in disarray after a series of electoral disasters. The elite of the reform movement favored Mostafa Moin as their candidate and he was nominated by the leading reformist parties. Yet former speaker of the Majlis Karroubi also ran in the reformist camp and he was the one that was able to quickly gain momentum in the race.

The various factions in the Islamic Republic had never been so divided between each other or within themselves, and this chaotic situation created the perfect storm for a dark horse candidate to emerge. Ahmadinejad had very little name recognition at the beginning of the campaign and few expected him to be a significant player in the election. Yet his campaign targeted the poor masses of Iran who cared less about political freedoms and more about basic economic concerns. He presented himself as a servant of the people from a modest background and spoke out against the corruption of regime elite embodied in Rafsanjani.

Ahmadinejad’s campaign was able to gain traction given the division within the reformists and the unpopularity of traditional conservatives among the population. After the first round of voting, Rafsanjani was first with a mere 21% of the vote, but it was Ahmadinejad who surprisingly placed second to make it to the runoff with 19% of the vote. Karroubi and Moin split the reformist vote with Karroubi’s late momentum giving him 17% of the vote to Moin’s 14%. Larijani received just 6% of the vote showing how unpopular the traditional conservatives had become among the Iranian people.

Interestingly the split within the reformist camp meant that Ahmadinejad and not Karroubi would make it to the runoff. Had the reformists agreed on one candidate, then they almost certainly would have got the most votes in the first round since Karroubi and Moin’s vote total was 31%. However, the reformist division meant that the first ever presidential runoff election in the Islamic Republic occurred between the pragmatic conservative Rafsanjani and the neo-conservative Ahmadinejad.

At first most observers gave the upstart Ahmadinejad little chance to defeat one of the most powerful men in Iran who had previously won two presidential elections. However in the short runoff campaign, Ahmadinejad attacked Rafsanjani for the widely held belief that he had attained much of his wealth through corruption. Ahmadinejad by contrast lived a humble lifestyle and played up the fact that he had little personal wealth in comparison to one of the richest men in Iran.

Reformist leaders urged their followers to vote for Rafsanjani to keep the presidency from the neo-conservatives, but Rafsanjani’s past authoritarian tendencies meant that many reformist voters would stay home on Election Day. Ahmadinejad campaigned in all parts of the country gaining momentum among rural voters who often felt that the elite of the regime had forgotten about them. Rafsanjani by comparison barely left Tehran reinforcing the image that he was the ultimate insider who knew little about the suffering of ordinary people.

In the end, Ahmadinejad scored a decisive win garnering 62% of the vote and stunning the establishment of the Islamic Republic. His victory demonstrated that the neo-conservatives were a powerful force within the regime and that they were quickly becoming the dominant party in their coalition with traditional conservatives. Rafsanjani would argue that there was electoral manipulation, but the population never backed his candidacy enough to care. “Although the conservatives had no compunction about rigging votes, Ahmadinejad’s victory could not be attributed to fraud. A largely exhausted population unimpressed with Rafsanjani’s reincarnation and disillusioned with the reform movement was willing to concede the state to the conservatives”.

UN Empty for Ahmadinejad Speech

The UN General Assembly is nearly empty as Ahmadinejad gives his speech showing that he has little support around the world.

Shouts of God is Great

Shouts of God is Great are heard in Tehran on September 20 to protest the government repression.

Part 13: The Rise of the Neo-Conservatives

Once the reformists’ efforts at change had been successfully stopped, conservatives would turn their focus on regaining control of the elected branches of the regime. At this point, a new group emerged within the regime and formed a coalition with the traditional conservatives to create an authoritarian state. They can be defined as neo-conservatives “who are ideologically Islamist, revolutionary in character, and populist in application and policy term”.

Part of their emergence has to do with increase American influence in the region in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. As the United States would first invade Afghanistan and then Iraq, Iran would be surrounded on two sides by American troops. The regime would further feel threatened by the Bush administration categorizing the Iran as part of the “Axis of Evil”. Moreover as details of the Iranian nuclear program began to emerge, tensions between Iran and the West would only continue to rise.

The Khatami administration had previously attempted a détente with the United States hoping for better relations, and this new hostility from the Bush administration discredited such an approach. Factions within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) would begin to criticize the reformists for their soft stance against the United States and would call for a more hostile stand.

The IRGC was created in the aftermath of the revolution as the branch of the armed services that would be loyal to Khomeini and his Islamist faction in Iran. Overtime they evolved into the most influential branch of the military with shadow operations in the rest of the government and throughout the country. The IRGC would become a breeding ground for the neo-conservatives who were militaristic in nature and who wanted a more hostile foreign policy.

American military intervention in the Middle East and threats against the Iranian regime would give the neo-conservatives the perfect opportunity to gain prominence in the regime. Compared to the traditional conservatives, the authoritarianism of the neo-conservatives would be based less on religious principles and more on the classical militarism of fascist regimes. A former IRGC member, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, would emerge as one of the new leaders of the neo-conservative movement and would lead them to the heights of power in the Islamic Republic.

This new alliance of traditional conservatives and neo-conservatives would first take aim at the 2003 local elections in an effort to turn the tide of reformist electoral victories. By this point, much of the reformists’ base in the population had become disillusioned at their inability to bring real change to the regime. Enthusiasm for the local election plummeted with 49% participation and only 12-15% turnout in the reformist strongholds of big cities such as Tehran, Isfahan, and Mashhad.

The conservative capitalized on this moment of weakness among the reformists and scored a smashing victory in the local elections. They won a majority of all the seats up for grabs around the country and were able to win 14 of the 15 seats in the pivotal Tehran City Council. This dominance in Iran’s biggest city and capital allowed the neo-conservatives to appoint Ahmadinejad as the Mayor of Tehran giving him a platform to eventually seek higher office.

Even with the vacuum of enthusiasm among the reformists’ base, the conservative coalition would use the authoritarian parts of the constitution to make victory certain in the 2004 Majlis elections. The Guardian Council would disqualify nearly 2500 reformist candidates including 80 sitting members of the Majlis. This unprecedented move shocked the reformists who contemplated a boycott, but ultimately decided against doing so as it would have handed the conservatives certain victory.

Even with the setbacks, “the participating reformists, now led by Majlis Speaker Karroubi, who had cobbled together a list of some 120 candidates, was confidently predicting a presence of some 100 seats in the Seventh Majlis”. Yet the reformists’ woefully underestimated the public’s unhappiness at both the regime and the reformists as turnout would plummet to 51% from a high of 69% in 2000 Majlis elections. Conservatives and neo-conservatives dominated the elections putting them back in control of the Majlis and dashing reformist dreams of passing progressive laws to change the regime.

Part 12: The Reformists Blink

One of the most famous victims of this effort would be the reformist intellectual Saeed Hajjarian who was the leading architect of the reformists’ electoral victories and who was himself elected to the Tehran City Council in the 1999 local elections. In March 2000, Hajjarian was shot in the face leaving him paralyzed in an attack that reformists would attribute to the paramilitary group known as the Basij. Others would also be swept up in this new round of institutionalized terror aimed at undermining the reform movement.

Prominent reformist clerics such as Abdollah Nouri, Yousefi Eshkevari, and Mohsen Kadivar would be tried and sentenced to varying time in prison for supposedly undermining the Islamic Republic (Tapper et. al 2006, 133). These clerics, with their religious critiques of the regime, posed a particularly devastating threat to a regime that based much of its legitimacy on religious credentials. The combined effects of political violence and arrests would deprive the reformists of some of their leading intellectuals just as they would need them the most.

With the takeover of the Majlis in 2000, the stage was set for a confrontation between reformists who wanted to pass progressive legislation and conservatives in the regime who wanted to stop democratic change. Reformists had an ambitious agenda to transform the Islamic Republic by passing laws to reform press freedoms, women’s rights, elections, and overall transparency within the regime. Although conservatives allowed the reformists to get their foot in the door of the elected institutions in the regime, they would use the authoritarian components of the constitution to render the reformists impotent in their attempt to change the regime.

As reformists started to introduce pieces of legislation to reform the system, Khamenei would take unprecedented steps to interfere in the elected branches of the government and undermine their efforts at reform. The defining moment would come in November 2000 when the Majlis was considering a new Press Law that would challenge conservative restrictions on the media. Khamenei sent a letter to the Speaker of the Majlis Mehdi Karroubi “urging that in the interests of stability and harmony the legislation be deferred to an unspecified later date”.

In this moment of truth, the reformists backed down and allowed Khamenei to successfully shelve the proposed law. Rarely had the Supreme Leader ever taken such direct actions to basically dictate the business of the Majlis. Given the vast powers of the Supreme Leader within the constitution, it is not clear whether he was making a request or if he had the authority to dictate what the elected branches of the government could do. In the end, Khamenei effectively was able to stop the Majlis from considering pieces of legislation meaning that the reformists’ effort to pass progressive legislation was dead.

With his legislative agenda defeated by the conservatives, Khatami went into the 2001 presidential elections with little to show for in terms of major reforms. At the same time, conservatives were even more unpopular than before precisely because they had undermined the reformists’ efforts to change the regime. Voters still wanted to have Khatami as the president and he was re-elected with 78% of the vote over token conservative opposition. Yet it was a shallow victory for Khatami and the reformists since the previous year had shown that winning elections did not translate into changing policy in the Islamic Republic.

At this point, the reformists were still willing to participate in the elections and work within the confines of the regime. While their experience in elected government had shown that real change could not be quickly brought to the regime, they were still part of that same regime. In the end, they had in an incentive to maintain the system and work from within to slowly bring about change. As the conservatives would begin their complete purge of reformists from the elected branches of government, that incentive would eventually disappear.

Part 11: The Student Protests

However, it was also a wakeup call for Khamenei and other conservatives in the regime. While they initially allowed competitive elections with the belief that the reformists would not dominate or seek radical change, it quickly became neither of these things were true. The population had become disillusioned with the conservative leadership of the Islamic Republic and turned to the reformists for another way. Moreover, the reformists were serious in their rhetoric of liberalizing the Islamic Republic and pursued fundamental changes to the regime.

Although both the reformists and conservatives were strong supporters of the concept of an Islamic Republic, they differed sharply on their visions for Iran. Both camps within the regime would claim to be following the true path of Khomeini and the 1979 revolution. The coalition of Islamists that had existed for twenty years was splintering as two irreconcilable visions of the Islamic Republic were now competing for power in Iran.

In this environment, the conservatives made the decision to clamp down on any reformist attempts to change the authoritarian bent of the regime. They would launch a campaign to regain control of the elected branches of the government using any means necessary. This also meant that the reformists would also have to decide how they would respond to the conservative backlash against their efforts to transform the regime.

One of first tests for both the reformists and the conservatives would be during the student protests of July 1999. In effect, the conservative backlash already had started with limits on freedom of speech and the closure of reformist newspapers in early 1999. In this effort, Salam newspaper which belonged to Khatami’s political party was forced to close causing widespread discontent among students at Tehran University.

They organized a peaceful protest against the closure and in support Khatami, but paramilitary groups loyal to conservatives in the regime descended on the university arresting hundreds and killing one student. This incident triggered protests among students throughout the country which was joined by other youths who were generally dissatisfied with the regime.

The 1999 student protests represented the greatest unrest in Iran up to that point since the 1979 revolution, and it would have profound consequences for both the conservatives and reformists. The conservatives’ natural inclination was to put down the protest by force and the paramilitary groups loyal to the regime were able to restore order within a week. Such a response from conservatives was expected, but the actions of Khatami and the reformists deeply disappointed those who wanted them to stand up for the protesters.

At this point in the history of the Islamic Republic, the reformists were committed to changing Iran by working within the regime in a gradual process of reform. Such a mass uprising threatened this process since conservatives might try to crush the overall reform moment if it did not disavow the protests. Moreover, the reformists still believed in the Islamic Republic and chaos on the streets might lead to a situation in which the entire concept of the regime would be threatened.

As Khatami would later say "Am I supposed to declare war against a regime that I accept in principle? I believe that if this regime is gone, it is not at all clear what will follow it - regardless of my religious belief. The people who want to change the constitution and the regime - can they guarantee that once the current regime is gone, Western-style democracy will be established here?"

Since the reformists at this point still had a role in the regime, they temporarily renewed their old alliance with conservatives to restore order in the Islamic Republic. “Despite his deeply held democratic convictions, Khatami proved too much a man of the system” and would criticize the protests as threatening the foundations of the Islamic Republic (Takeyh 2009, 193). The student protests were crushed and the youth of Iran had felt betrayed by the president they had helped to elect. Yet as the reformists were purged from the system in the years to come, they would no longer have an incentive to cooperate in the same way with conservatives to maintain the system.

The student protests was the last time that reformists and conservatives would work together so closely to maintain the Islamic Republic. Although a conservative backlash had started before the student protests, the events of July 1999 helped to galvanize conservatives to use greater authoritarian tactics to regain control of the regime. As a result, conservatives would intensify their crackdown on the reformists not just by closing newspapers, but launching a campaign of arrests and intimidation.

Diplomats Reject Regime

Iranian Diplomats in Europe are rejecting the regime. Here is the story:

A third Iranian diplomat upset with Tehran's post-election crackdown on dissidents has defected in Europe — this time in Belgium, an opposition group said Monday. The announcement came just hours after the No. 2 man at Iran's mission in Helsinki said he will seek asylum in Finland.

The defections are an embarrassment for Iran, which clamped down on citizens after last year's presidential election was followed by large-scale protests and accusations that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won by fraud. Numerous Iranians have been arrested in a continuing crackdown.

The Europe-based Green Wave opposition movement said Farzad Farhangian, press attache at the Iranian Embassy in Brussels, walked out Friday and flew to Oslo. The group's founder, Amir Hossein Jahanchahi, said in a statement that "other defections from diplomats abroad will follow."

It was the third known defection of an Iranian diplomat in Europe this year to protest Tehran's crackdown.

Mohammed Reza Heydari, who was granted asylum in Norway after leaving his post as an Iranian consular official there in January, confirmed that Farhangian had defected in Brussels. Heydari said Farhangian supported the opposition movement that grew out of unrest following the June 2009 election.

"He left the embassy after informing the ambassador that he was leaving and he came here without anyone (else) knowing about this," Heydari said by telephone from Oslo. "Then he contacted me."

No one at the Iranian Embassy in Brussels could be reached for comment after office hours Monday.

Earlier Monday, Iranian diplomat Hossein Alizadeh, who resigned last week from the embassy in Finland, told reporters that he will apply for political asylum in the Nordic country.

"I cannot accept, tolerate this fraud election. The situation got worse because ... my people are being killed still," Alizadeh said in Helsinki. He added that he was no longer a diplomat but "a political dissident," and that he has no political ambitions except to be a member of the opposition.

The Iranian Embassy in Helsinki said in a statement that Alizadeh's term of office had been terminated on Aug. 20. The Finnish Foreign Ministry said that Alizadeh had worked at the embassy in Helsinki since October 2007 and still had diplomatic status. It declined further comment.

"Ahmadinejad is not any more the Iranian leader and he doesn't represent Iran," the 45-year-old Alizadeh said. "Do not take him seriously. He (does) not have any popularity among the Iranians."

He said that since the growth of the opposition after the 2009 election, he "felt confident" that he has "been followed and bugged." His criticism of the regime also led him to worry about the safety of his wife and family who live with him in Finland, including two sons and an eight-year-old daughter.

"Using this language puts me in a situation to look for shelter for myself. I am going to request political asylum from the Finnish government, and here are my passports," he said throwing four of them on a table. "I am going to leave these passports to whoever lets me stay here."

About 2,500 Iranian immigrants live in Finland. Some 300 were granted political asylum in 2008 and 2009, according to official immigration statistics.

Part 10: The Reofrmists Truimph at the Ballot Box

Before 1997, no presidential election in the history of the Islamic Republic had seen anyone other than the regime’s handpicked choice get elected. President Rafsanjani, who won easy re-election in the 1993, was not eligible to run for a third term due to term limits. The standard bearer candidate for the regime elite was conservative cleric Ali Akbar Nategh-Nouri who was the Speaker of the Majlis. Behind the scenes, Khamenei endorsed Nategh-Nouri and threw the support of the regime to get him elected. Given the conservative domination of both the elected and unelected institutions of the regime, it seemed a given that Nategh-Nouri would easily be elected the next president of the Islamic Republic.

The 1997 election was the first time that the reform movement would make a serious effort to win the presidency of the Islamic Republic. The first choice of the reformists to run in the election was former Prime Minister Mousavi who had led the radical faction within the regime in the 1980s. Yet, Mousavi refused to run depriving the reformists of a big name who had previously held a senior position within the regime. Instead, the reformists turned to Khatami who had previously implemented limited liberalization as Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance during the early therimdor period.

Although Khatami needed approval by the Guardian Council to run in the election, few within the regime thought that he could pose a credible challenge to Nategh-Nouri (Takeyh 2009, 185). He was given approval since he was supposed to have no chance of winning and his token opposition would give the regime a sense of competitiveness. Moreover Khatami talked about creating a more liberal regime, but he did not advocate a radical break from the current regime and was a strong supporter of the Islamic Republic.

Things would not go the way conservatives expected as Khatami’s candidacy quickly gained support among a population yearning for change. He emphasized the rule of law and the constitution in a not too subtle criticism of the conservative leaders who had long ignored liberal components of the constitution. Khatami was a fresh face offering something new and different to a population who were used to the same cast of characters being in charge of the Islamic Republic since the revolution.

The reformists reached out to Iran’s youth who had little memory of the 1979 revolution and instead wanted greater social and cultural freedoms. In particular, the reformists tried to win over young women voters who wanted greater rights in the social and economic spheres. Khatami also appealed to the newly emerging urban middle class who wanted greater political freedoms arguing “economic development must be accompanied by political development”. Khatami’s message was also able to appeal to religious segments in the population given his credentials as a cleric and reformist religious critiques of the regime. This wide ranging coalition made Khatami a credible contender for the presidency and showed the reformists mobilizing large segments of population to fundamentally change the regime.

The extent of Khatami’s landslide victory cannot be overstated as he won 70% of the vote carrying nearly every province and municipality in the country. He received almost three times as many votes as his conservative opponent garnering more than 20 million votes to Nateq-Nouri’s 7 million. Khatami won the greatest number of votes in the history of the Islamic Republic and got twice as many votes as Rafsanjani’s 1993 election victory of 10 million votes.

Moreover, Khatami’s landslide was even more remarkable given the large percentage of the population that participated in the election. One of the reformists’ fundamental arguments was that change could come if the population was be adequately mobilized under the slogan, “pressure from below, negotiations from the top”. Khatami successfully engaged the Iranian population in the electoral process as there was an 83% turnout rate of eligible voters compared to a mere 50% in the 1993 election. This rate was remarkably high for a regime that was supposed to be dominated by authoritarian conservatives and easily exceeded turn out rates in almost all Western democracies.

In 1999, the electoral success of the reformists would continue in the first ever local elections in the Islamic Republic to select representatives for municipal city councils. Unlike presidential and parliamentary elections, local elections do not have the normal Guardian Council screening process to approve candidates. As a result, the reformists were free to put forward the candidates they wanted who went on to be elected to vast numbers. When the votes were counted, the reformists won nearly 75% of the 25 million votes with a turn out rate of 62%.

The reformists capped their series of electoral victories with the 2000 Majlis elections where reformist parties dominated. The Guardian Council allowed many reformists candidates to stand in the election making it one of the most open and free parliamentary elections in the history of the modern Middle East. Again there were high levels of participation with 69% of eligible voters turning out and reformist parties winning 215 of the 290 seats in the Majlis. With this final electoral domination, the reformists completed their takeover of the elected components of the Islamic Republic and seemed poised to deliver on their goal of creating a more democratic regime.

These elections show a pattern of high public participation in competitive elections when the regime was at the peak of its political openness during the thirmidor period. Essentially, the reformists and the population in general would work within the electoral channels of the regime when elections were relatively free and competitive. This pattern reversed once conservatives clamped down on the reformists and limited the freedom of elections. Yet at the time, Khatami’s presidency and subsequent reformist electoral victories were an earthquake in Iranian politics representing a triumph for the reform movement.

Part 9: Reformists Vs. Conservatives

Once the intellectual foundations of the reform movement had been laid out, it was time to puts these theories to use in the Islamic Republic. The reformists had created a civil society to develop their vision of a new Islamic Republic, but they still had to find a way to implement this vision. The elections at the end of the 1990s would give the reformists an opportunity to capture the elected branches of government and bring change.

Yet the possibility of major change to the regime would upset conservatives who saw a challenge to their dominance and to their belief in an authoritarian regime. The conservatives would launch a campaign to stop the reformists from actually making the changes that they had theorized. Ironically, the thermidor period would set the Islamist coalition on a path towards conflict since the regime would soon not be big enough for the both of them.

Conservatives and liberals Islamists still believed in the Islamic Republic, but their conception of what that meant started to drastically drift. While they would continue to compete for power within the same regime, it would become increasingly difficult for them to peacefully coexist with each other. In place of the Islamist coalition, a new coalition would rise within the regime to challenge the liberal threat made up of conservatives who wanted to create an authoritarian regime.

The election of a little known cleric, Muhammad Khatami, to the presidency of the Islamic Republic in 1997 sent shockwaves throughout Iran and the world. For the first time in its history, a candidate not handpicked by the elite of the regime had reached the highest elected position in the Islamic Republic. Moreover, his election with nearly 70% of the vote demonstrated widespread dissatisfaction with the direction of the regime and its authoritarian tendencies.

Khatami’s election was a triumph for the reform movement and marked the culmination of the thermidor period. The period of moderation after the reign of terror allowed liberal Islamists within the regime to challenge its authoritarian bent through contesting elections. Reformist sweeps in the local elections of 1999 and the 2000 Majlis elections would give further credence to their argument that change could come from within the regime.

Indeed, these relatively free elections along with the victory of opposition candidates seemed to demonstrate that Iran had something approaching one of the few pluralistic governments in the Middle East. The period of 1997 to 2000 marked a period in which the regime allowed unprecedented amounts of competitiveness in the electoral system and this resulted in high levels of participation by the opposition and the overall population. Since it seemed like change could come through elections, the reform movement decided to work within the confines of the regime.

Yet Khatami’s election and other reformist victories set off the inevitable backlash from factions within the regime that feared possible liberalization. As a result, the coalition between liberal and conservative Islamists forged in the 1980s to save the Islamic Republic would become strained leading to its eventual collapse. In its place, a new coalition would emerge composed of traditional conservatives and neo-conservatives united in their goal of defeating the reformists and creating a more authoritarian regime.

The conservatives would strike back by vetoing laws and barring candidates from running in elections to undermine reformist efforts at liberalization. The reformists were unable to deliver on their promise of substantive change and the regime largely maintained its authoritarian bent. The masses who had hoped for real change became disillusioned with the reformists and public participation in elections declined considerably after the regime began its crackdown. Under these conditions, the conservatives were able to regain control of regime culminating with the election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

While the hardliners were able to stop internal attempts to change the regime, they could not quell the mass public discontentment that had spurred reformist electoral success. The stage was set for another showdown between liberal and conservative Islamists in the 2009 presidential election leading to the complete collapse of the coalition that had maintained the Islamic Republic for 30 years. This period of reformist electoral success and the conservative backlash marks the beginning of the crackdown that would eventually lead to the creation of a fully authoritarian regime in 2009.

Esfandiar Rahim Mashai and Division in the Islamic Republic

Great article that details the division within the Islamic Republic in particular regarding Ahmadinejad's crony Esfandiar Rahim Mashai:

IN THE summer of 2009 Iran’s divided conservatives came together to save the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, after his disputed re-election provoked huge street protests by the reformist Green Movement. To have lost Mr Ahmadinejad to a liberal “plot” would, they judged, have imperilled the Islamic Republic which succours them all.

All the same, many conservatives are far from enamoured of Iran’s president. Challenging him, however, is turning out to be a different matter. Barely a year into his second and constitutionally final term, his future is again the object of dark speculation, only this time by people who once professed to be his friends. His immediate entourage, in particular, is being castigated and none more so than the man whom, it is thought, Mr Ahmadinejad would like to succeed him: his old friend and relation by marriage, Esfandiar Rahim Mashai.

As the president’s closest adviser, the slim, handsome, self-confident Mr Mashai has come to represent all that traditionalists in Shia Iran find odious about Mr Ahmadinejad’s presidency. The Islamic Republic was founded on the idea that the Muslim community awaits the reappearance of the hidden “12th imam”, a messianic leader who was “occulted”—hidden by God—in the ninth century; in the meantime it is up to the clergy to run human affairs, under an arrangement known as the Guardianship of the Jurist. Mr Mashai, it is strongly rumoured, believes himself to have a direct link to the hidden imam, and hence regards the intercession of Iran’s clergy as superfluous. He is also said to have encouraged the president’s well-known millenarian tendencies.

For long, Mr Mashai’s critics have expressed their fears sotto voce. Over the course of the summer, however, several conservatives openly raised fears of a campaign among Mr Ahmadinejad’s closest allies to drive the clergy from public life. Last month, a conservative parliamentarian, Hamid Rasai, revealed that the country’s current “guardian-jurist”, the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had spoken to him and a few other deputies about a “new plot” carrying even greater danger than last year’s protests. Mr Rasai hinted that Mr Mashai and the Green Movement, albeit now much diminished, may be working in sinister concert; after all, he pointed out, both are “uncommitted to the Guardianship of the Jurist”.

Reverence for the hidden imam has long been an accepted part of Shia Islam, but millenarian zeal has produced schismatics in the past—the Bahais, for instance, who are now banned and persecuted. From a position of ostentatious piety, Mr Mashai clearly feels he has the licence to behave provocatively. He has renounced hostility for the people of Israel (for which he received a dressing down from Mr Khamenei), suggested that Iran is incapable of dealing with modern challenges, and flirted impiously with a famous actress. Were he a reformist, it is likely that he would have been silenced months ago.

In August Mr Mashai caused perhaps his biggest rumpus to date, when he urged hundreds of expatriate Iranians, who had been invited to Tehran at government expense, to act as propagandists for a national ideology, as opposed to an Islamic one. Lacing his address with references to Iran’s pre-Islamic history and claiming that Iran had saved Islam from Arab parochialism, Mr Mashai’s patriotic theme provoked a storm of recrimination from members of the religious establishment. “If someone turns away from Islam,” warned Ayatollah Muhammad Taqi Mesbah Yazdi, a longtime leading government supporter, “we warn him, and then, if that does not work, we beat him.”

In the eyes of his enemies, Mr Mashai’s position at the heart of the government, and his repeated protestations of loyalty to the Guardianship of the Jurist, make him all the more threatening. Last summer Mr Khamenei stripped Mr Mashai of the vice-presidency he had just been awarded, only for the unrepentant Mr Ahmadinejad to appoint him his chief of staff. Nowadays Mr Mashai is more likely to be seen hobnobbing with foreign heads of state in his role as the president’s representative on Middle Eastern affairs.

Mr Mashai is a member of a new diplomatic team that Mr Ahmadinejad has set up independently of the foreign ministry, which is controlled by the supreme leader. The president’s “experts” are not known for their subtlety; his senior vice-president recently called the British “a bunch of imbeciles” and the Australians “cowherds.” The foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, is at odds with some of these presidential experts. In any event, they have a serious intent: to exploit what they believe to be Iran’s enhanced position in the world and to use it to their advantage back home.

In Mr Ahmadinejad’s view, Iran’s refusal to buckle under increasing international sanctions aimed at halting its progress towards becoming a nuclear power qualifies it as a world player on a level with the old enemy, the United States. Last month Iran passed its latest milestone with the fuelling of its first power-generating reactor, set up long ago by the Russians at Bushehr. Iran’s president has challenged Barack Obama to join him before the media for a “man to man” debate on “world issues” when the two attend the UN’s General Assembly in New York later this month.

Mr Obama is unlikely to give him satisfaction but Mr Ahmadinejad’s opponents fear any sign that the Americans regard him as a possible interlocutor, thereby raising his prestige at home. A senior ayatollah recently denounced those who are “trying to beat a path to negotiations with America”. Mr Mashai, who usually accompanies the president on his trips to New York, has also been accused of meeting a former American ambassador to Israel.

Whatever his ambitions abroad, Mr Ahmadinejad is playing a high-risk game at home. He has offended conservatives by appearing to condone less-than-Islamic dress for women, and has presided over a breakdown in co-operation between the government and parliament. Sanctions are starting to hurt, with investment dropping in key sectors, including oil and gas. The most painful of the president’s cuts in subsidies has yet to come into effect.

This dispute at the heart of Iran’s ruling establishment may seem arcane. After all, both Mr Ahmadinejad and his traditionalist opponents agree on the need to repress the Green Movement and to press on towards nuclear self-sufficiency. But the president fits uncomfortably into the country’s power structure, which rewards collegiate effort under the supreme leader’s benevolent tutelage. Although the president professes his undying loyalty to Mr Khamenei, his own patent ambition and his friend’s theology have led him perilously close to open defiance.

From the American and Western point of view, the very opacity of Iran’s leadership structure—and the continuing feuds within it—have made diplomacy harder. Indeed, it is unclear who indisputably runs the show, though the supreme leader still has the final say. It is plainly more complex than a struggle between conservatives and reformers.

Ayatollah Khamenei has tried his best to end the infighting, but his authority is limited by his record of support for Mr Ahmadinejad, which may be all that stops parliament from impeaching him. However according to Mr Mashai, it is only a matter of time before “certain people are calling Ahmadinejad an apostate.”

Part 8: Challenging Velayat-e Faqih

Some of the most daring assaults on the regime came from clerics who challenged the theological foundations of the state especially Khomeini’s vision of Velayat-e Faqih. These intellectual clerics included Yousefi Eshkevari, Mohsen Kadivar, Abdollah Nouri, and others who supported a democratic version of Islam. They argued that the idea of unlimited power in the hands of one man was not only wrong, but it was actually against the basic tenets of Shii Islam.

Mohsen Kadivar was a cleric and a disciple of Montazeri who delved into the theolotical foundations of Velayat-e Faqih. He argued that Velayat-e Faqih had no precedent in Shii Islam and was not consistent with the teachings of the faith. Kadviar’s arguments would be expounded upon by other clerics who said it was blasphemy for anyone to claim to rule in the manner of the 12th Imam.

Even though the clerics had knowledge about Islam, they were not the Imams and thus were basically the same as everyone else. Since they were fallible like everyone else, it does not make sense for them to have absolute power such as in the authoritarianism of Velayat-e Faqih. Kadivar argues that “there is no blueprint for the management of the society during the time of occultation. No one has a special mission or authority to guide the society”.

Instead, the reformists presented a vision of Shii Islam that highlighted the democratic principles of the religion. They argued that the idea of justice and opposition to tyranny was critical in Shii Islam going back to the martyrdom of the third Imam Hossein. According to this vision, Hossein and the other Imams dedicated their lives to trying to build a just society in the face of the tyrants of their day.

This version of Shii Islam had been developed before the 1979 revolution by Ali Shariati and other Islamic intellectuals, but reformists would argue that the current Islamic Republic did not reflect these principles. As Khatami would say, “long-lasting tyranny is our chronic pain, and the cure for this chronic pain is the rule of the people. We demand freedom”.

The reformists believed that the only type of government that would be compatible with Shii Islam is democracy. Since Shii Islam opposes tyranny and seeks justice, a democratic government ensures that tyranny cannot take hold and gives justice for all. Elected institutions make sure no one becomes a tyrant and makes everyone equal under God. In essence, the reformists were arguing for a guardianship of the state until the return of the 12th Imam as opposed to a Guardianship of the Jurist. Grand-Ayatollah Montazeri endorsed the reformists’ vision for the state and supported opposition to the regime, “I believe that Islam and democracy can coexist because Islam supports freedom. What the conservative leaders are practicing today is not Islam and I oppose it”.

Clearly the reformists’ critique of Velayat-e Faqih was particularly dangerous to a regime because it came from clerics and made strong Islamic arguments against the current manifestation of the Islamic Republic. The reform movement was beginning to look like an Islamic movement advocating a vision of Islam parallel to the official regime version. It hit the regime at its very source of legitimacy and threatened to take the regime’s base of pious Iranians. As the reform movement gained strength, it would crackdown by throwing Kadivar, Eshkevari, Nouri, and other reformists in prison.

Perhaps the most provocative critique of the regime came from an intellectual who initially led the university purges in the early days of the revolution. Abdolkarim Soroush was one of the leading Islamic intellectuals at the beginning of the revolution and was tapped by the regime to help transform the troublesome universities. In the Iranian Cultural Revolution, Soroush played a key role in purging the universities of Western influence even while facing tremendous backlashes from professors and students.

Ironically once Soroush himself retreated into academia, his pursuit of philosophy and religious studies led to become one of the regime’s fiercest critics. Where reformist clerics argued that Shii Islam mandates a democratic form of government, Soroush took the next step and argued that Islam could mean whatever a society wanted it to mean. “In contrast to revivalists’ Islamic ideology, which interprets the finality of Islam as a sign of its exhaustive rigidity, Soroush contended that Islam’s finality signifies its indeterminate fluidity. The finality of Islam means that every generation experiences revelation anew”.

Soroush was making an argument that applied not to Islam, but a broader observation on all the world’s religions. He viewed religion as something that was constantly changing depending on the historical context. In this theological reality, the best government should be implemented as opposed to a government that religion supposedly mandates. Souroush would advocate democratic government as the best for Iran in the absence of any religiously mandated form of government.

Regardless of how they got to the conclusion, the various reformists all agreed that democracy and an open society was what Iran needed. It was also clear that the current regime was not dedicated to achieving this goal. Given this reality, the reformists would have to figure out how to achieve their desired Iran.

They believed that the democratic components of the constitution were a good starting point and a base from which to build the free society they envisioned. At the same time, the constitution and its elected branches of government allowed a way through which the reformists could reach their goals. Thus the reformists were not advocating an overthrow of the Islamic Republic, but rather a gradual shift in its policies through existing state mechanisms.

Part 7: The Birth of the Reform Movement

The radicals would go head to head with the conservatives at the ballot box during the 1992 Majlis elections. Although fully fledged political parties had not yet developed, two blocs emerged for the Majlis election. One group was closely aligned to Rafsanjani and his policies of economic liberalization. They also had the support of Khamenei and supported his authoritarian political views. The other groups consisted of the radicals who wanted greater state intervention in the economy and believed in a more open society.

In the Iranian electoral system, candidates must be approved by the Guardian Council in order to run in elections. Behind the scenes, Khamenei and the regime threw the regime’s support behind the conservative bloc and actively worked to get these candidates elected. 2000 candidates were approved for the parliamentary elections, but the radicals complained that nearly 1000 of their candidates were not allowed to run. In a tactic perfected in years to come, the regime began to manipulate elections even while still holding them thereby maintaining a façade of democracy.

Yet the fact that elections even took place and some opposition candidates were allowed to stand for election and be elected shows that Iran at this point was not a classic authoritarian state. Despite Khamenei and the conservative bloc’s absolutist pretensions, as well as their manipulation of the Islamic Republic’s processes, Iran did not become a typical totalitarian state such as Saddam’s Iraq. The constitutional structure that still invested some power in elected bodies ensure the Iranian people and their representatives would have a voice in the state’s deliberations. This period of moderation with somewhat competitive elections would not last forever as Iran was slowly drifting towards authoritarianism.

The 1992 parliamentary elections was a disaster for the radicals as the conservative bloc swept the elections. While the radicals would claim that the regime’s intervention spelled their defeat, the reality was that their views were unpopular with the public (Moslem 2002, 181). Rafsanjani promised to rebuild the Iranian economy in the aftermath of the Iran-Iraq war by unleashing the power of the market. The radicals simply repackaged old ideas of a state controlled economy when the population wanted to enjoy the prospect of capitalist materialism after of years rationing and scarcity during the war.

Perhaps most importantly, the 1992 parliamentary elections sent the radicals further into the political wilderness emerging eventually as the reform movement. “The 1992 election debacle proved to be a watershed event, as many of the disqualified candidates retreated into private order to reevaluate their dogma and identity”. The elections may not have changed the regime as the radical had hoped, but it changed the radicals leading to future electoral success as the reform movement.

It is important to note that the regime’s opposition was still willing to work within the confines of the regime even though they believed the conservatives influenced the electoral results. Instead of becoming an outside protest movement in the Islamic Republic, the opposition focused on its message and prepared for the next round of elections. This strategy of changing the regime through elections was only viable if the opposition believed it could win future elections. Once it became clear in 2009 that it was impossible for the opposition to win elections, then there no longer would be incentive to remain within the regime.

Although Rafsanjani largely endorsed Khamenei’s authoritarian view of the state, he was much more of a pragmatist than the Supreme Leader. He realized that people would need greater political rights in order to achieve better economic results. Greater freedom and choice in the economic realm would mean that people would expect similar rights when it came to politics. Moreover if there was less political tension within the country, the population could devout more of its energy to achieving the best possible economic results.

To that end, Rafsanjani appointed as Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance a cleric named Muhammad Khatami who started to slowly implement political liberalization. Khatami’s ministry had discretion over the amount of government censorship and also the amount of freedom the media could enjoy. Khatami held a more democratic vision of Islam and believed that the revolution had been fought to secure basic rights stating, “freedom of thought and respect for intellectual honor are among the prime goals of the revolution”.

While Khatami had a limit to the amount of freedom he could grant, the regime certainly did become more open to debate and increased political speech during this time. For example, the regime allowed more journals and newspapers to exist with the number increasing from 102 in 1988 to 370 in 1992. This political opening gave Islamists who opposed the authoritarian policies of the regime greater flexibility to publically discuss and debate their beliefs. The relatively open political environment created the conditions for intellectual and academic debate which would be critical for the creation of the reform movement.

The end of the Iran-Iraq war also had a significant influence on the development of the reform movement. While the 1992 electoral debacle made the opposition reflect on their own failures, the Iran-Iraq war made them think about the regime’s failures. The war had cost Iran nearly one million causalities and drained the nation’s coffers and resources. The end result was the pre-war status quo and a failure to export the revolution to Shii majority Iraq. This caused many of the most steadfast Islamic supporters of the revolution to question the regime’s actions and the direction it was taking.

One of the most important objectives of the revolution was to remove foreign influence from Iran since it was believed that it was the cause of many of the country’s fundamental problems. Yet with the removal of foreign elements complete, Iran still had many of the problems that it faced during foreign intervention in the country. While some reverted to blaming traditional foreign imperialists for these failures, a group of intellectuals began to look within for the source of Iran’s problems.

The end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1989 inaugurated a moment of self-reflection among emerging intellectuals who no longer sought to identify the roots of Iranian political, social, and economic problems in its colonial history. For many, the time had come to put internal dynamics rather than external interventions, at the center of the debate over the predicament of modernity and social change in Iran.

As a result, the reform movement was born out of an intellectual revolution among Islamists who began to question the direction of the Islamic Republic. Reflecting on the authoritarian drift of the regime and their own place within the system, the former radicals began to rethink the original purpose of the revolution. They started to view the revolution not just as a struggle to once again make Iran Islamic, but rather as a social justice movement meant to ensure equality and freedom for the Iranian people. In other words Islam was not an end in itself, but it was supposed to be the means that would create the end of a free and just society. The realization that the current regime did not live up to these ideals meant that the reformists would delve into the foundations of the Islamic Republic and more deeply into the very meaning of Islam.