The Purge Begins

The Iranian hawks have left the streets. But the regime has lost its legitimacy.

The calm previously dynamited by fraudulent elections has returned to the streets of Tehran. The repression of the theocratic regime now adopts more specific shapes, those of a purge. Hundreds of activists, random citizens, journalists or human rights defenders have been detained, intimidation is the current mode, and communications have been cut. The media in service of power turns to crude records as supposed confessions of foreign agents.

The ultraconservatives have no shame in showing the revolts after July 12th – with up to two million people in the streets and claiming around twenty lives – as a plot from the West to impose a velvet revolution in Iran. That was the reason for the arrest of members of the British embassy and the threat of trial, leading to the summoning of Iranian ambassadors for consultations before the EU.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the extremist who was overwhelmingly re-elected, and maintains his position after the Guardian Council, under the orders of the Supreme Leader Ali Khameni, finally decree that the voting was transparent. But he doesn’t have all the blessings on his side: one of the main ulema [muslim scholars], one from Qom, has contested the election’s results. In the eyes of millions of Iranians, in the streets, the regime has lost its legitimacy.

Today’s Iran is not the same as it was three weeks ago, although the consequences of its change rises in different rates from those of the Western vertigo. The 12th of July has not simply ended the myth of a consensual revolutionary and theocratic power. It has also opened a pit, a multi-generational chasm, between the ones that feel deceived – and risked or lost their lives in the protests – and their rulers. The gap extends to the very old guard of the Khomeinian revolution.

Some of the notable supporters of the reformist side, like ex-president Khatami or Rafsanjani, have proclaimed their loyalty to the Islamic Republic and warn against the continuation of the protests, while they try to negotiate a compromise. Having the election turn into a struggle for power between factions, we have seen the regime’s hawks, and not those accused of being reformists, as the real instigators of the great crisis.

The main argument around which the Iranian process spins is the normalization with the U.S., a decisive step by its all-around consequences for a regime that has remained for thirty years in political self sufficiency. Neither Khameni, Ahmadinejad, nor the apparatus that covers them, was prepared to let the election of a moderate – even a tepid one like Mousavi – break the great taboo.

Barack Obama needs to take delicate care so that his plan to open to Tehran is not seen as treason by those who risked so much in the name of the most basic democratic precept and its claim that their votes were counted clearly.