Moussavi is maintaining the pressure on the clerical regime with a direct challenge to the state crackdown on protests. There is no doubt that Moussavi has mobilized very significant numbers of people.
His ‘control mechanism’, to sustain momentum without excessive provocation, is to turn the protests into a day of mourning for those killed earlier in the crisis. The redirection of protest towards the mosques today might also be seen as a tactical attempt to overawe clerics on the day before Friday prayers.
The depth of the division in Iranian society, a division that undoubtedly needs some compromise from the clerical establishment, is indicated by the three Iranian international footballers who wore green wristbands in a World Cup qualifying match.
It was equally interesting that the rest of the team, whether for reasons of conviction, indifference or fear, did not.
Information Controls
As for the regime itself, it has not yet engaged in an attempt at direct suppression but it has been going beyond attempts to control the media, and the feed-back of domestic news into the Iranian system from overseas, towards targeted arrests of presumed ring-leaders and influential figures.
No doubt, at this stage, this is a warning of what may come. The State, possibly too late and clearly ineffectively, has been trying to shut down or limit the use of mobile and text messaging, internet and social networking as revolutionary tools.
In a provocative act, the State Department asked Twitter to delay a planned break in service to permit the flow of information that was helping to enable protest to proceed. For the record, Facebook and Friendfeed appear to have been blocked. Twitter seems to have continued in operation.
Foreign journalists have also been placed under effective office arrest which outrages these foreigners but is a logical response on the part of the authorities, given not wholly unjustified fears about the Western media’s agenda.
This means, of course, that we can no longer make considered judgements on who is protesting and with how much support. Official TV evidence suggested a significant street presence emerging for Ahmedinejad. Reports from the reformers have countered this with similar claims.
Neither side is reliable but photographic evidence suggests that the reformers and their opponents can both muster significant support in the street but that the regime is having more difficulties in doing so, perhaps for geographical reasons.
The warnings against those encouraging demonstrations are, however, ratcheting up. The assumption must be that the authorities have not yet decided what to do but that Friday, the day for mosque attendance, has to be a point at which we may see either some form of compromise or a crackdown ...
... or the beginnings of an actual revolution. Current signals suggest that Khamenei and the leadership are still working towards a peaceful resolution of the crisis. We can only guess at the content of the debate within the ruling elite.
The Mosques Versus Twitter
The newspapers usefully provide considerable detail on the constitutional structures of the Islamic Republic – Guardian Council, Expediency Council and Assembly of Experts.
The bottom line is that there is plenty of room for the tensions in the street to be expressed equally well within the institutional structures of the Republic, with Rafsanjani, although not entirely secure in his position, possibly playing a major role in challenging the clerics on their own turf.
The reformists have Twitter, blogs and mobile phones but the Iranian establishment has the mosques and tomorrow brings the opportunity for the clerics to make their voice heard in ‘advisories’ that will reach the poorer, rural and more working class areas.
Command of new media technologies only goes so far. There are two issues here – the reach of the mosque (is the population still in thrall to its religious identity?) and the will of the clerics to cohere around a specific message.
On analogy with other cultures at a similar level of development, it is probable that the mosque cannot command but it can influence profoundly by reference to authority and order and that the ‘faithful’ (as in Catholic or Jewish cultures) will find a shared culture that is not directly political but has political effects.
The real issue is what the clerical establishment (which is not monolithic) wishes to say. Our best guess is that the effort will be directed at the importance of the restoration of order and maintenance of calm.
In opposition to this, the new technologies are driving those sections of the public with access to them into something almost Dionysian – a frenzy of righteous protest where pure reason as long since been lost to a new form of faith in spontaneous action.
This 'spontaneity' is being ordered to a degree by a leadership that we have already characterized as riding a tiger. The problem here is that the ordering instincts of the regime also contain the seeds of their own frenzy – at which point we may fear the ‘white terror’ of every failed revolution.
The Basij And The Students
The central figure remains Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In essence, unless there is an actual revolution, he will make any final decision on any intractable problem and maintaining order surely appears to be an intractable problem now.
Little has been coming out of his office other than initial support for Ahmedinejad and the later commitment to support a recount in key provinces. The protests must partly be interpreted as an attempt to gain his attention and to suggest that failure to act might bring regime change.
The other element in society that is regarded as critical is the Basij, the Islamic militia, whose portrayal in the media is often as some sort of brown-shirted ‘Sturm Abteilung’ servicing the streets, just as the Pasdarans service the regime at a higher level.
The events which led to the deaths near Azadi Square are as uncertain as everything else happening in this crisis. No doubt the dead will become inspiring revolutionary martyrs in the way of such things but this violent conflict between Basij and students is worrying.
The Basij now appear to be partially self-mobilising against the students in an escalation of the situation. From their point of view, this revolt is an attempt to overturn the Islamic revolution that they have sworn to protect.
In some respects, given their history, we should be puzzled at their lack of action which shows either deliberate restraint imposed from above or that they are much weaker than expected. Many informed sources see the Basij in a different light – as a milder youth movement than the SA image permits.
The ‘other side’ is not, of course, just made up of university students yet students are easily the driving force of activism on the ground. In this, they are not playing a new role – ideology may have changed but the mechanism is similar to that which created the 1979 revolution.
The conflict between the students and the Basij may, however, have class elements. It almost certainly has elements of ‘ressentiment’ by the poorer (and not necessarily less intelligent) Basij against the better heeled.
International Reactions
The Iranian crisis is becoming, internationally, not only a struggle within Iran but a implicit one between the West and the Rest.
Sarkozy has broken the largely self-imposed restraint amongst the Western powers with a denunciation of the election, still without formal evidence, as ‘fraud’, while the leaders of Russia and China personally welcomed Ahmedinejad as rightful leader of his country in Moscow on June 16th.
The problem for Obama is that media hysteria has been driving his domestic opinion towards a stronger stance, no doubt fuelled by the pro-Israel lobby. He has compromised not by condemning the election but by condemning the suppression of opinion.
The problem for Obama (clearly of less consequence to Sarkozy) is that shooting his mouth off would assist in the presentation of the reformists as pro-Western coup-mongers and it could make subsequent negotiations difficult if Ahmedinejad was confirmed as President.
The other major player in the game is the conservative establishment in the Arab world whose street, if it has a prejudice, will tend to see the reformists as engaged in a Western-directed plot against a regime that they may not like but which they admire for standing up to the West.
The Arab Governments, on the other hand, dearly want Iran brought back into the international fold, ostensibly for security reasons but as much for its potentially destabilizing effect on their own discontented populations.
After all, what the West has been alleged to have done in Iran, Iran is feared could do amongst the Shia of the Gulf states or, by shifting policy, in Iraq, Lebanon or Palestine – or even Egypt in alliance with Sunni radicals like the Muslim Brotherhood. At least that is the fear, whether credible or not.
From this perspective, the West is playing a dangerous game and the first instinct of the Arab Governments, cautious in any case because of their long-held principle of non-interference in sovereign affairs, is simply not to comment.
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Tuesday 30 June 2009 at 10:58