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In
some media reports it has been claimed that reformists
in Iran hope to see the country replace Saudi Arabia
as a strategic partner of the West. While this must
ring ominous for those on the Left trying to campaign
against Western support for only those regimes that
suit its own purpose, be they governed by the needs
of capital in a globalised world or by the imperatives
of power and security in a world of competing nation
states, the dynamics behind Iranian unrest should
not be reduced to a mere struggle between competing
power elites. In a country with a population of 70
million, 65 per cent of which is under 25, it is hardly
abnormal to find that young people are part of a wider
pro-republic movement that is opposed to the diktat
of the theocrats. Their involvement is made more pronounced
by the repression employed against them. A year ago
Lara Marlowe in the Irish Times reported that
a ‘lack of freedom is a constant refrain among
Iranian young people.’
Current
instability in the country is reflected in the constitution
which according to an article penned by Behzad Yaghmaian
in Counter Punch is the product of 'a historic
battle between tradition and modernity, the past and
the future, and religion and secularism in Iran. The
collage is unstable, tenuous, and transient by nature.
It cannot be sustained.' This is suggestive of a shift
in the balance of power within Iran, of which there
appears to have been two defining moments. The first
was the 1997 ascendancy to the presidency of Mohammad
Khatami. He came to the office as a result of a strong
autonomous current running through Iranian civil society
which was largely secular and grassroots. The second
was the student protests of 1999 which were crushed
by force and saw ten students sentenced to death.
Significantly, the theocrats hesitated in the face
of widespread public anger and refrained from carrying
out the executions.
President
Mohammad Khatami's efforts to enhance regime flexibility
have been curbed by the wrath of strong conservative
elements. Last month at a Tehran university Islamic
militia men known as the Basij, attacked pro-reform
students who were demanding the release of the country’s
political prisoners. These students are part of a
much broader swathe of dissident young people and
others which over the years has, according to Yaghmaian:
became
emboldened; and challenged the Islamic Republic
and its constitution through unorganised ruptures
of collective action, everyday practice, and acts
of cultural defiance ... All that was forbidden
and scorned were committed by the defiant youth.
Defiant and determined, marching shoulder to shoulder,
young men and women announced the death of the old
order. All taboos were broken .... it includes the
schoolgirls challenging and ridiculing their religious
teachers; teenagers wearing loud lipsticks and makeup
under the watchful eyes of the moral police; and
older women demanding respect and recognition from
men in the streets, shops, and the workplace ...
actions against the state and all that it represented:
the imposition of the Islamic hijab, gender separation
in universities, outlawing contacts between men
and women, banning music and all instruments of
joy and worldly desires, political repression, and
the denial of people's most basic human rights.
Nor
it seems can the Left claim any of the credit for
this increasing secularisation: many of those taking
part in resistance to the theocracy are not, in the
view of Yaghmaian, the old ideologues of leftist parties
… (but are) … young men and women with no
political history, ideology, or affiliation:
Dressed
in modern western outfits, reading Pablo Neruda
and Milan Kundera, drinking homemade alcohol, escaping
the pressures of the state with the music of The
Pink Floyd, and Guns and Roses - they are the children
of MTV, satellite dishes, Hollywood movies, the
Internet and email.
This
may prompt fears amongst those who term themselves
‘anti-imperialist’ that US capitalism is
merely colonising Iranian society with its own Western
consumerist values. While there is undoubtedly merit
in this claim, and while Yaghmaian may be too benign
in his view of the cultural effects of globalisation
by claiming that the protest of the youth ‘proved
the non-viability, in the long run, of the Islamicization
of politics and the society in the age of global communications',
the choice of what to listen to, wear, read or whom
to have as leaders must ultimately lie with the youth
rather than the thought police.
According
to an Irish Times report by Margaret Preston,
Top of the student agenda is "freedom in general".
They are frustrated at having every aspect of their
lives 'scrutinised and controlled'. They rebel against
and subvert the official prohibition of satellite
TV and alcohol; they oppose the restricted internet
access and strict censorship. Students had been jailed
for writing a play, the Judiciary Committee of Guidance
has fined parents because their daughter had been
seen in a car with her boyfriend, the behaviour committee
were threatening young people for wearing punk attire.
Alongside
the youth women are also coming out from behind the
veil to become a formidable force for dissent. Fatameh
Kadivar, a language graduate slammed the theocratic
fascists claiming that:
Those
clerics who hold the power in this country are not
religious men. They are interested only in gaining
more power for themselves. They have sold whatever
they could get hold of for their own short-term
interests and without thought for the future of
the country. They are not interested in the people.
This
type of sentiment has found sympathy among even some
senior clerics. Ayatollah Jalaluddin Taheri, who resigned
in protest at the behaviour of the theocratic fascists
accused the system of being 'deeply corrupt, self-serving,
hypocritical and repressive’.
Secularism
has all too often brought with it a crass selfishness
whereas religion on occasion has promoted a spirit
of altruism. But the choice of a secular lifestyle
is a basic human right wheras the imposition of a
religious diktat is a denial of the very same right.
Those young people who march against theocratic fascism,
perhaps motivated in some instances by what they have
read in Kundera rather than Marx — Sabina, for
example who in The Unbearable Lightness of Being
“would not keep ranks. She refused to
keep ranks” — are poking fascism in the
eye. Finding inspiration in their example others may
finish the job and blind it altogether.
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