Children of Paradise (48 page)

Khatami walked the usual reformist tightrope in his speech, but for an audience that had grown less convinced that it would amount to more than spectacle. He affirmed that reforming the Islamic Republic was Iran’s only true path to democracy. The regime must be preserved. “I see the defense of the revolution as my individual duty, for the sake of democracy, freedom, and liberation from foreign control,” he said. Indeed, no viable alternative existed. And yet, he added, “long-lasting tyranny is our chronic pain, and the cure for this pain is the rule of the people. We demand freedom. There is no escape.”

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A
S
P
RESIDENT
K
HATAMI HIMSELF
once put it, from the time he assumed the presidency, he confronted a crisis every nine days. It was not enough that the elected institutions—the presidency and the parliament—came under the supervision of immensely more powerful clerical ones. There was also a deep network of violence that eluded the president’s grasp. By 2003, few could avoid the conclusion that the reform movement, conceived in hope and high abstraction, had run aground on opposition more tenacious and ruthless than any of its theorists had anticipated.

From the hardline clerics of the Haghani Circle, to the purged elements of the intelligence ministry, to the office of Tehran’s chief prosecutor, to the vigilante pressure groups like Ansar-e Hezbollah and even mysterious cells like the one dispatched to kill Saeed Hajjarian, the Islamic Republic was riddled with mafia-like grids that operated in secrecy. Those who oversaw these forces, many reformists now observed, enjoyed high favor and believed in the righteousness of physically eliminating their competition. They opposed democratic reform not only opportunistically but deeply and insurmountably, in principle.

When they captured the presidency, the reformists had been united in the belief that the conservatives were amenable to compromise and that
elected positions were available and effective levers for change. They were confident—perhaps fatally so—that the people overwhelmingly supported them. But they chose to call on the people only as voters. For the populace, nearly all the reformists believed in 1997, was disorganized, potentially radical, and angry. Eruptions in the streets would only provoke brutal reprisals from the security apparatus. The Eighteenth of Tir reinforced this fear. So the reformists instead labored to hold open the windows of free expression and association just wide enough to allow Iranians to begin building civic institutions. These would eventually help channel the ambitions of the silent majority so that the people’s grievances could be heard.

But by 2003 the reformists’ consensus on tactics had shattered. The conservatives were not negotiating. Unlike the reformists, they had no ideological investment in a political process of give-and-take. And the people had begun to turn their anger on the reformists, who looked weak and conciliatory in the face of hardline coercion. What were Khatami and his allies to do?

• • •

F
IVE REFORMIST LUMINARIES
convened a seminar. The transcript of their exchange would read like the final act of an existentialist play. Five men navigate a labyrinth, only to find one another in a locked room at its end. Each has an escape plan as noble as it is futile. Even as they speak, the walls grow higher, seal tighter against the mounting uselessness of their plans.

The question before the thinkers was whether Khatami and his allies should remain in government or walk out—and, in either case, to what end. Nearly two years remained in the president’s second term, and his brain trust foundered between anguish and paralysis, cynicism and the grim logic of sunk costs.

One speaker—the journalist, activist, and former hostage taker Abbas Abdi—suggested that, as they had no prayer of realizing their goals, the morally responsible thing for the reformists to do was to walk out of
government. The other four thinkers leapt on Abdi. Imagine the repression that would surely follow! There would be no one to protect the people, and what little the reformists had achieved would be undone.

Alireza Alavitabar, a reformist social scientist who’d once headed the Center for Strategic Research’s cultural division, suggested the reformists go for all or nothing. They should propose a popular referendum on all the fundamental issues they cared about: eliminating the Guardian Council’s role in elections, amnestying political prisoners, empowering the parliament, reigning in the judiciary, freeing the press, normalizing relations with all countries but Israel. They should be prepared to resign and mount a campaign of civil disobedience when this referendum was prohibited. Their true allies lay outside the political system, not within it: “The foundation of democracy is a peaceful dialogue,” Alavitabar said, “but not with fascists.”

But this was warfare, the other theorists protested. They would never succeed with this strategy. They would only alienate their opponents, polarize the society, and empower a strongman to right the chaos.

Mostafa Tajzadeh, the former deputy interior minister, observed that Iranian elites tended to see politics as a zero-sum game: someone won and someone lost, the losers facing total exclusion or worse. Reform was meant to break this deadlock—to allow political rivals to share power and to force the ruling system to tolerate diversity, criticism, and dissent without reprisal. The reform movement, as Tajzadeh saw it, had always been as much about its means as its end: lawfulness, decency, and nonviolence could not be achieved by resorting to their opposites. The trouble, said Tajzadeh, was that Iran’s hard-liners did not accept these terms of engagement. They did not persuade when they could coerce, and they were bent on suffocating critics out of the public sphere.

So long as Iran lacked a powerful civil society or private sector, the government was the country’s only domain of political action, and those outside it were both ineffectual and vulnerable to violence. Tajzadeh saw no virtue in the reformists’ retreating to that wilderness. He said, “Until the time when rule of law is established in our society, until the time when civil
institutions are empowered and powers of the government are restricted, and until the time we can develop capable citizens, our presence in the government is obligatory.”

And so Tajzadeh recommended that Khatami remain as president. He had a duty to the people who had elected him. The reformists should keep trying to achieve their goals. At the same time, they should use their elected positions as a base from which to expose and obstruct the violent conspiracies of their opponents.

Saeed Hajjarian, not three years after a bullet had lodged at the base of his skull, was at once social scientist and political actor, analyst and partisan. His language at the seminar was ethereally abstract, his ambitions prosaically worldly, as though he were a theoretical physicist explaining how to fix a car engine. At a moment when the movement he’d helped father was questioning the very purpose of its existence, Hajjarian opined that the Islamic Republic of Iran was what Max Weber would have called a patrimonial state, a kind of autocracy that appealed to traditional values and in which the ruler seized the military and even the economy as instruments of his personal will.

Hajjarian acknowledged that his tactic of building pressure from below while bargaining at the top had failed. He had some regrets: “We should have created hope and fear; we should have fought and compromised at the same time; we should have bargained with the heads of these [clerical] institutions. And we did none of these.” But he refused to believe, even after all he’d seen and personally suffered, that negotiation was impossible. “I firmly assure you that there are no dogmatist forces among our opponents,” he asserted. “And if our presupposition about their rationality is wrong, we have then established the Second of Khordad movement on a misunderstanding.”

Khatami had brought Iran something Hajjarian called “dual sovereignty,” by which he meant the simultaneous presence of competing political forces within the ruling establishment. Khatami had achieved this much, and the result was a system more dynamic and responsive than in
the past. The trouble was that one side of it—the theocratic one—controlled the security forces. To negotiate, the reformists needed power, too.

The reformists’ best option now was to stand very firmly for their beliefs and force the conservatives to throw them out. The reformists’ honor was at stake, along with their efficacy. To walk out, Hajjarian declared, would be an act of desertion. “In people’s opinion, it is associated with incompetence, fear, escape, instability, and abandoning.” Expulsion would give the reformists the upper hand: “It would be accompanied by imprisonment, filtration, and house arrest, which would make the reformists more active and organized, whereas walking out would be followed by a passive disengagement.”

This strategy, Hajjarian contended, would delegitimize the hardline government by exposing its intolerance: “
The state may survive the policy of walking out, but after expelling the state’s opposition—through a coup, for example—no state can survive.”

• • •

P
RESIDENT
K
HATAMI DID NOT RESIGN
. He did not introduce a referendum, he did not expose the hard-liners’ networks of violence, and he did not force the conservatives to expel him. He served out his second term, toeing a winnowing line, with fewer supporters by the day.

He must have known that his popularity was waning. But with the press censored, political parties all but illegal, and opinion polls marred by surveillance and distrust, the Iranian people were a cipher to those who would rule them. In the years to come, popular discontent at the end of Khatami’s presidency would be ascribed to economic malaise or political suffocation, impatience with reform or rejection of it, isolation from the West or domination by it, hostility or yearning. Starting in 2004, election results, too, concealed mysteries, as the candidates were ever more selectively approved and the voters ever more politically self-selected.

The reformist Sixth Parliament staggered to the end of a term during which it was virtually paralyzed by the Guardian Council, which made liberal use of its veto power. In September of 2002, Khatami introduced two
sweeping reform bills that together would have empowered the presidency and the elected government at the expense of the judiciary and Guardian Council. The Guardian Council, unsurprisingly, vetoed both. So much, then, for enduring structural change.

The Guardian Council was done fighting with the parliament. Before the seventh parliamentary election rolled around in February 2004, the council disqualified more than two thousand candidates from running. Of 290 seats, reformists—including 87 incumbents—were effectively forbidden to contest 200. The council had never before exercised its supervisory power with quite such heavy-handed partisanship.

The reformists in the parliament did not wait for Khatami to tell them what to do. After a three-week sit-in, 125 of them resigned. Their statement compared Iran’s religious government to the Taliban’s in neighboring Afghanistan. “We cannot continue to be present in a parliament that is not capable of defending the rights of the people,” they proclaimed. Some thirty governors and twelve cabinet ministers submitted their resignations, too. The interior minister proclaimed that he would not hold the election on its scheduled date. Even the cautious Mehdi Karroubi admonished the Guardian Council: “Now we see that a couple of old men want to run the country.”

But Khatami could not be persuaded to take a stand. To the disgust and bewilderment of many of his advisers, he rejected the resignations of the ministers and governors, and he insisted on holding the election as scheduled on February 20, 2004.

Khatami, his critics railed, had endorsed the legitimacy of an engineered election that was really a political putsch. The reformists imagined that Iranian voters would stay home, but they did not. Nationwide, the turnout was lower than in the previous parliamentary election, but wholly respectable, and certainly higher than the reformists had imagined possible without their presence in the field. In Tehran, where the turnout was low, the faction that called itself Abadgaran and identified strongly with the mayor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, swept all thirty seats. The parliament went to the conservatives, and Khatami was now a lame duck.

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A
KBAR
G
ANJI HAD SPENT
much of Khatami’s presidency in prison. Just one line for his freedom, an interrogator liked to tell him: “I made a mistake.” Ganji resolved that if they kept him in prison for fifty years, he would say no such thing. He endured six years without breaking, and he would later reflect that he did it by telling himself that nobody cared. He was alone, responsible for his own actions, and accountable to his own convictions. He was hospitalized more than once on account of his hunger strikes, one of which lasted more than eighty days. His body would never be the same.

“
The goal of the system is to break and destroy me,” Ganji wrote in one of his “Letters to the Free World,” smuggled from Evin in 2005. “This body is on the verge of complete deterioration, but since I believe in the conjectures I have made (all of my opinions), I see no reason to deny their truth.” He called on Popper, though not by name: “It is a trivial fact that all these conjectures must be tested with the sword of falsification. Commitment to ‘critical rationality’ is different from ‘giving up our beliefs by force of prison.’”

Ganji’s first book-length Republican Manifesto was smuggled from Evin in 2002. In it, he broke radically from the reformists, arguing for a secular liberal republic in which religion would have no official privilege. None of the hedged reformist strategies would produce such a state—certainly not Hajjarian’s “dual sovereignty.”
Velayat-e faqih
simply could not be reconciled with a republic.

Ganji believed that the trouble with Iranian political thought harked back to the Constitutional Revolution of 1905. That movement forced the Qajar kings to make Iran a constitutional monarchy. But it should have abolished monarchy instead. Perhaps then Iran would have not fallen into this trap of believing that a small measure of power could be wrested from absolute rule. Dual sovereignty, constitutionalism—these were the blandishments of inertia that dissipated Iran’s republican energies such that they never truly threatened autocratic rule.