Iran's tarnished silver: Democracy is still elusive

By Knight Ridder Newspapers and The Christian Science Monitor

	Mohammad Khatami
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TEHRAN, Iran — As a student 25 years ago, Mohsen Mirdamadi helped launch a revolution that he said went awry. As a student today, Massoud Dehghan said he yearns to steer that revolution back on course.

	KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS Massoud Dehghan, a pro-reform student at Amir Kabir University in Tehran, says he's less interested in who leads Iran than in getting its leaders to respond to people's demands for civil liberties and a better life.

Each is eyeing with reservations today's silver jubilee of the Islamic revolution, which overthrew the shah of Iran, a U.S. ally, and installed a fundamentalist theocracy. Each is uninspired by the millions of festive lights and banners draped across this capital city that congratulate citizens on the "25th spring" of their deliverance from despotism.

With the economy lagging and the movement for greater political and social freedoms stalled, many Iranians like Mirdamadi, 48, and Dehghan, 21, say they don't feel much like celebrating.

How to improve the Islamic Republic without destroying it perplexes Mirdamadi, a senior member of Iran's parliament. He said ultimate power over the country's affairs is wielded by a handful of unelected clerics who remind him of the late shah he helped oust in 1979.

"None of us in the revolution believed Iran would ever have an autocratic regime again. Yet here we are," said Mirdamadi, one of the student leaders of the takeover of the U.S. Embassy, where 52 U.S. citizens were held hostage for 444 days.

Iran, then and now 1979: Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, pro-Western and close to the United States, is removed in a February uprising. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini establishes an Islamic theocracy. Nine months later, student militants seize the U.S. Embassy. 2004: Hard-line religious leaders rule the Islamic republic, under Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. President Mohammad Khatami and other democratic reformers are likely to lose control of parliament in Feb. 20 elections. 1979: Iran is at the height of its military and economic power, though many live in poverty. Iran's GDP is estimated at $76.7 billion. Iran accounts for about 18 percent of total OPEC oil-export revenues. Per-capita income is $1,986. 2004: Iran agrees to bring its nuclear program under international scrutiny. Iran's population has doubled to nearly 70 million, and the country is beset by high unemployment and inflation. But estimated GDP is $458 billion. Per-capita income: $7,000. Iran accounts for about 10 percent of total OPEC net oil-export revenues. The U.S. economic embargo, enacted during the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, is still in place. 1979: Half of Iranians are illiterate. 2004: Literacy is at about 80 percent. 1979: Miniskirts are the rage, and, though seen as offensive to some, sexy cinema posters are ubiquitous in Tehran. Alcohol is available. 2004: Women must cover themselves from head to foot in public; there are no racy advertisements, and alcohol consumption is prohibited. Source: The Associated Press, Energy Information Administration, The World Almanac 1980, Central Intelligence Agency

Dehghan, a devout Muslim and student leader majoring in metallurgy at Mirdamadi's alma mater, Amir Kabir University, said he's less interested in who leads the country than in getting leaders to improve civil liberties and offer people better lives.

Dehghan organizes frequent pro-democracy sit-ins and rallies and gives voice to the forbidden demand for a constitutional referendum to pare back the power of religious authorities. He also risks imprisonment — a fate that has befallen dozens of his colleagues.

Yet few Iranians say they regret being part of the Islamic Middle East's first real attempt at popular rule.

"In the past, the main decisions about Iran were made by foreigners," said Mohsen Kadivar, a reformist cleric and former adviser to President Mohammad Khatami who was jailed for his outspoken views on democratization. "Now the decisions are made by the Iranians themselves. Some of these decisions might be wrong, but at least they are being made by Iranians."

Now that hard-liners have largely banned reform candidates from standing in this month's parliamentary elections and rendered President Khatami inconsequential, reform advocates are pondering the next steps.

"The solution to our problems is not pouring into the streets," Kadivar said. Instead, it can be accomplished by working within the legal framework of the Islamic Republic, he and other key reformers say.

It's a far cry from the gusto with which they launched their revolution 25 years ago.

At the time, Iran's heartland was populated by villagers who were pious, poor and uneducated, subjected to Shah Reza Pahlavi's modernization efforts. Many were forced to the cities to earn a living, breaking up the tribal tradition that dominated Iranian culture. Women were pressured to lay aside their religious head-to-toe black veil, or chador, and Islamic expression was largely forced underground.

But secularization didn't bring democracy, leading the country's students and intellectuals to join the ranks of the discontented. Banned tapes of speeches by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and other exiled and jailed clerics became popular fodder for the shah's opponents. It was a heady mix: religion, democracy, nationalism and revolution.

Repeated crackdowns by the shah's much-hated secret police, Savak, bolstered the ranks of his opponents, as did the memory of the U.S.- and British-backed coup d'etat against Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 that left the shah firmly in charge.

In the fall of 1978, protesters poured into the street. After a short, bloody resistance, Pahlavi and his family fled in January 1979.

With the shah gone and the charismatic Khomeini at the helm, most Iranians reveled in their newfound independence. An overwhelming majority went to the polls and turned Iran into an Islamic republic with a constitution that emphasized democracy but acquiesced to Khomeini's final authority.

A year later, Iranians were thrust into an eight-year war with Iraq sparked by a territorial dispute. The bloodshed strengthened religious rulers' control as they sought to bolster a people who were being slaughtered by a technologically advanced enemy backed by the Soviet Union, the United States and Europe.

After Khomeini's death a year after the war ended, people began to notice the hard-liners' attempts to enhance their powers, including vetoes over the elected parliament. Anyone who opposed them was denounced as a threat to Islam.

	Shah Reva Pahlavi

Khomeini himself had warned against handing political power to clerics, and banned them from running in the first two post-revolution presidential races. But in the Shiite branch of Islam — to which nearly all Iranians adhere — political and religious rule have always been entwined.

It was the charismatic Khomeini who determined that final say in all matters should rest with the position of Velayat-e-faqih, the Guardian Theologian seen among Iranian believers as God's deputy on Earth. Khomeini assumed that position. Since his death in 1989, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has filled the role.

"To supervise the state is Shia tradition, but to run the state itself is different, and was new with Khomeini," said one Western diplomat.

"The most important factor in distributing political power is the vote of the people — that is Khomeini's famous standard," said Morad Veisi, editor of the reformist Yas-e-No newspaper.

The public responded to the hard-liners' moves by overwhelmingly electing the reformist Khatami to office twice in the past seven years. The backbone of his support was Dehghan's generation, who make up 60 percent of Iran's 70 million people. But Khatami compromised on his message of political and social freedom in hopes the clerics would soften their stance. They didn't, leaving the public disillusioned with reformers.

Khatami has warned that Iran is veering toward religious despotism and "dictatorship," though he also supports the Islamic system. Contrary to Iran's constitution, many other reformers are shifting toward a far more secular view — one likely reason many were disqualified from the upcoming vote.

Reformers have been left with little recourse. The main reform party, the Islamic Iran Participation Front, lead by the president's own brother, has declared that it will boycott the Feb. 20 vote — a move that will almost certainly hand control of parliament to conservatives. But the president's smaller League of Combatant Clerics party told Reuters yesterday that it will participate.

If voter turnout is less than 35 percent nationwide, conservatives will "have a real problem, because it will be clear that people are abandoning the system, and the legitimacy question will come into play," the Western diplomat said. "It already exists in people's minds, but it will be on the table."

"If the new generation asks me what was the mistake or what went wrong with the Iranian revolution, I would say that no one discussed what we wanted," said Ebrahim Yazdi, the foreign minister under Khomeini who now heads an outlawed pro-reform political party, the Freedom Movement of Iran. "We insisted only on what we didn't want: the shah."

Yazdi prays that frustrated young Iranians won't repeat their parents' mistakes. "The only safe and sure way for change is step by step, not drastic revolutionary changes," he said.

Many Iranians today share Yazdi's view. They say the Islamic Republic and its constitution still offer the path to change without an upheaval. Like Mirdamadi and Dehghan, most here say they aren't looking to oust clerics, merely to ensure ordinary Iranians can, through free and fair elections, run their country's affairs.

They are optimistic that day will come, even if the Feb. 20 elections allow the ruling clerics to regain control of parliament as is widely expected.

"Even they will come to realize they cannot govern or rule an aware people by force," Kadivar said. "The rate of education is doubled or tripled compared to the past before the revolution. It's really very difficult to rule without having the vote of the majority people of the country."

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company