Encircled on all sides by its erstwhile "Great Satan", the Iranian regime is in no mood to listen to the domestic opposition. But can it afford to, wonders Mustafa El-Labbad* Two weeks of protests by Iranian students have shaken the very foundations of the Iranian regime, rocked the edifices of its domestic policy, and left gaping cracks in the ideals of the Iranian revolution. The student movement has been quashed. Yet, it may go down in history as the unfinished revolt, just as the Prague spring did. And this was not the first time for the students to take to the streets. In July 1999, protests broke out at universities in Tehran and soon engulfed other universities in the country, attracting non- student sections of society. The authorities described the latter as "extraneous saboteurs manipulated by foreign powers". The protesters objected to diminished freedom and "theocracy". The 1999 protests were the first since the Iranian revolution broke out. In 1979, it was the students who sparked off the uprising against Shah Reza Pahlavi and brought back Ayatollah Khomeini from exile to establish the Islamic Republic. The recent student demonstrations coincided with increased pressure by the US on Iran and its political system, in connection with mass destruction weapons and nuclear reactors. The Iranian regime is now facing a dilemma of new proportions. In 1999, the international situation allowed the regime to suppress the protests in just six days. State sovereignty was still something international forums and organisations heeded. Currently, the region and Iran in particular are in the spotlight. Iranian political orientation and its long track of opposition to the world's sole superpower are taking their toll, especially as the United States seems to have developed an insatiable appetite to rearrange the region and redraw its map according to its own interests. Iran's geopolitics and its oil reserves make it a perfect target for the US administration. The latter supported the protests and used them to turn up the heat on Iranian decision-makers. It was President Mohamed Khatami who unleashed reformist forces in Iran, a matter that revitalised the country but also exposed its weaknesses. The 1999 protests were clear in their intentions. The demonstrators declared their intellectual and doctrinal allegiance to the reformist movement, hoisting pictures of Khatami -- who was at the time facing challenges from the conservatives. Due to the intricate legislative structure of the Iranian state, the president of the republic does not determine the main aspects of the country's foreign or domestic policy. This task goes to the spiritual guide, upon whose shoulders rests the legitimacy of the Iranian regime. By the constitution, the spiritual guide is the cornerstone of the state, higher even than the three branches of governments, the executive, legislative, and judiciary. This puts the powers of the president on a par with those of a prime minister in presidential systems. Khatami won his first and second terms by an overwhelming majority, thanks to a loosely worded programme that is based internally on the concepts of civil society and due process and externally on openness to the region and the world. Thanks to his extensive web of elaborate alliances, Khatami succeeded in putting together a following of young and liberal-minded voters. In his first election campaign, Khatami depended on his connections with the family of Khomeini, particularly Hassan Khomeini. In the second campaign, however, Khatami succeeded in rallying support for his policy. Those who voted for him were intent on preventing the conservatives from dominating the process of political and societal change in Iran. Although Khatami's institutional powers were modest, newspapers and publishing flourished under him. The president turned the press into a major ally in his conflict with the conservatives who control the country's constitutional, security, and media organisations. The army and the judiciary are controlled by such conservatives as Ahmad Jannati, president of the Supreme Constitutional Court and Mahmoud Hashemi Shahrudi, head of the judiciary branch, as well as Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, and Ali Meshkini. Ali Larijani, a key conservative figure, runs the radio and television network. Ignoring Khatami's pleas to end the protests, the students told the president that he should protect them or resign. "Protection or resignation are our final words," was one of the famous lines the demonstrations chanted until the protests were finally quashed by force. Khatami, who is not in control of the security forces, condemned the confrontational attitude of the protesters, and actually accused them of wanting to undermine the regime. The suppression of the protests proved the effectiveness of the regime's security forces and testified to the efficient coordination among the Revolutionary Guards (Pasdaran), the volunteer forces (Pasiej), Iranian Hizbullah members, and the Islamic republic security services. It is noteworthy that the striking force of the regime is the Revolutionary Guards, mostly recruits from the underprivileged classes that migrated from the countryside to urban areas during the 1960s and 1970s and who assumed high positions in the Iranian state following the purges conducted by the revolution. They are staunch supporters of the revolution and their loyalty to the conservatives is unwavering. The conservatives can count among their supporters the bazaar merchants, who played a leading role in Iran's recent economic and political history. They have their own league, led by Hassan Amani, who is known to be close to the conservative wing. Due to the support of the business classes, the conservatives have gained control of the judiciary, the official media, and various state institutions. The conservatives may not be popular with the general public, but their political and institutional clout is considerable. The recent wave of protests has left the students disillusioned, to say the least. They are unlikely to forgive Khatami for the suppression of their protests, unlike the case four years ago. The romantic attachment the students maintained with Khatami and his reformist movement is disappearing like foliage in autumn, for they now recognise the institutional impotence of Khatami and the reformers. Aspirations as extensive as the grounds of the Tehran University campus have come crashing down. The students now see the conservatives and reformists as indistinguishable parts of the same system. The ability of the conservatives to undermine reformist policies has been a disappointment to the student movement. "Same plate, same soup", goes the Iranian saying that aptly describes how the students feel about the country's two rival camps. It can be fairly stated that Khatami and his reformist camp have suffered a clear loss in the recent events, for the tidal wave of popular support they had up to the moment the protests broke out has just ebbed. The conservatives are hardly in better shape. Theirs is likely to be a Pyrrhic victory, for the reformists provided the fig leaf that gave the system credibility and excused some of its worse mishaps. Khatami may be the legitimate son of the Iranian revolution, but now he has lost the sympathy of the students. Both conservatives and reformists may have lost their last chance to replace the legitimacy of the revolution with that of the state. Iran is now at crossroads. It needs to decide on the path it should take in the face of international threat, regional change, and domestic discontent. Internally, the conservatives need to abandon some of their power to the reformists and thereby mend the rift and fortify the regime against domestic and foreign challenges. The rules of the political game in Iran have to change. Otherwise, the continued monopoly of the conservatives over power would alienate the opposition and force it to search for release outside the perimeters of the existing regime, if this hasn't already happened. On the regional plane, Iranian leaders are in an unenviable position. Since the occupation of Iraq, regional geopolitics has taken a turn unseen since the Sykes-Picot agreement, secretly drawn up by Britain and France during World War I to divide the region between them. By occupying Iraq, the United States has virtually encircled Iran. It maintains a military presence, ranging from bases to occupation forces, in Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan to the north, Turkey and Iraq to the West, Afghanistan in the southeast, and Pakistan in the southwest. This makes the Iranian room for manoeuvre narrower than was the case even during the Iraq-Iran war, narrower indeed than at anytime since the Iranian revolution in 1979. The remaining regional cards that the Iranian regime can play are the Shi'ites in Iraq and Hizbullah in Lebanon, but even those are getting harder to use considering the current regional mood and the uncertainty caused by the occupation of Iraq. On the international level, the US administration has mostly wiggled free from any commitment to international norms. Since 11 September 2001, the United States has been determined to reshape the region and control its wealth, and it has been met with little resistance so far. The occupation of Iraq has proved that international alliances not including the United States amount to little. Furthermore, the United States is clearly eager to exploit the domestic situation in any country for its own purposes. During the recent student protests, President George W Bush voiced support for the protesters. Iran is the next target of the US administration, most observers agree. But the shape of US action or "vision" of the required change in Iran is yet unclear. The question is: Will Iran be sucked into the diplomatic and media "whirlwind" that Iraq once experienced? It was only last November that Iraq accepted the return of the arms inspectors. Five months later, the Baghdad regime disappeared. Or, will Iran be kept by the Bush administration as a card to be played in the coming US elections? In which case, the administration may refrain from taking military action against Iran for sometime, but would maintain political and media pressure on Tehran. The answer to these questions may take shape during the coming two weeks. What is certain, however, is that the student protests have changed things in Iran. The Iranian regime now needs to do more than just bow to the storm, as it so nimbly did during the Gulf War and the Afghanistan war. The Americans may not have said their last word yet, but the Iranian students definitely have. * The writer is an Iran expert and the editor of the journal Sharq Nameh, dealing with Iran, Turkey and Central Asia, and issued in Cairo by Dar Al- Mustaqbal Al-Arabi.
