THE GLOBE AND MAIL: A year after Ahmadinejad’s ‘victory,’ the resistance dares not speak, but fissures exist
This may prove to be the darkest week in Iran’s recent history. There is, it seems, nowhere to go. Yet the nature of this darkness, its awkward fit with the official meaning of the Islamic regime, may show us a way forward.
Exactly a year ago Sunday, when it became apparent that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had claimed victory in an election whose results and conditions were not at all clear, the streets of Tehran began to fill with people.
It does not really matter whether Mr. Ahmadinejad stole an election that went against him (as protesters claim) or not; what this year of protest has shown is that Iran is far more fissiparous than anyone had thought, and that only force and fear, not faith and support, keeps it conglomerated. Even if you discount the hyperbole the foreign media directed at the “green tide” last year, this was by far the largest and lengthiest uprising in the Iranian revolution’s history.
It encompassed a huge swath of society; most significantly, it involved large numbers of clerics and top leaders, including former prime ministers, who were actively involved in the 1979 revolution and whose loyalty to the state is beyond question: This could not easily be dismissed as the work of radical guerrilla groups or outside agitators salaried by the United States or Britain.
As the year has progressed, and especially after the authorities went on a killing spree in December, on the holy day of Ashura, these figures have become more antipathetic toward the regime itself: There is now an official, built-in resistance with a name and an identity.
But you will probably not be seeing much of this resistance this week. It has become far, far too dangerous. Thursday, the key leaders of the protests, former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, told people to stay home: The alternative was a slaughter. The regime’s shift from authoritarian to totalitarian – its adoption of Stasi-like practices that had not been part of its repertoire before – have rendered such demonstrations temporarily impossible. Read on and comment >>> Doug Saunders | Saturday, June 12, 2010
