Iran's so-called green movement is not yet a counterrevolution, but
recent developments make clear it is heading in that direction.
Seven months after the uprising began, an opposition manifesto is
finally taking shape, and its sweeping demands would change the face
of Iran.
Three bold statements calling for reform have been
issued since Friday, one by opposition presidential candidate
Mir-Hossein Mousavi, one by a group of exiled religious
intellectuals and the third by university professors. Taken
together, they suggest that the movement will not settle for
anything short of radical change.
The statements set tough
preconditions for a political truce: resignation of the current
leadership, introduction of broad democratic freedoms, prosecution
of security forces engaged in violence against the opposition and an
end to politics in the military, universities and the clergy.
The proposed reforms would amount to a total overhaul of the
system. But they also reflect a common desire to prevent an all-out
confrontation by engaging the regime in compromise and ending the
escalating violence. The three sets of demands all accept that Iran
will remain an Islamic republic, if largely in name only.
The
three statements offer the outside world the first concrete
indication of what the opposition wants and what Iran might look
like if the opposition prevails. Just as striking is the fact that
several branches of the opposition are developing a voice despite
the increasingly brutal crackdown by an increasingly militarized
regime.
The boldest statement was issued Sunday by five
exiled religious intellectuals who founded diverse parts of the
reform movement in the 1990s. Many of today's opposition activists
are their progeny as students, colleagues, political allies and
friends.
Their 10-point manifesto begins by calling for the
resignation of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose reelection in
June sparked an outpouring of public rage over alleged fraud. It
calls for the abolishment of clerical control of the voting system
and candidate selection, replacing it with an independent voting
commission that includes the opposition and protesters. The authors
also demand the release of all political prisoners and recognition
of law-abiding political, student, nongovernmental and women's
groups as well as labor unions. They call for an independent
judiciary, including popular election of the judicial chief, and
freedom for all means of mass communication. They even demand term
limits for elected officials.
The five authors include
philosopher Abdulkarim Soroush, the father of the reform movement;
dissident cleric Mohsen Kadivar; former parliamentarian and Islamic
Guidance Minister Ataollah Mohajerani; investigative journalist
Akbar Ganji, who was imprisoned for six years for reporting on
regime corruption; and Abdolali Bazargan, an Islamic thinker and son
of a former prime minister.
They issued the manifesto on a
website run by Kadivar and Mohajerani to mark the green movement's
growing maturity, Soroush explained in an interview Monday. "The
green movement is known only for its demonstrations and protests,
not its ideas, so it was time to explain its political demands," he
said.
The manifesto also carries a message to the green
movement's widely diverse followers. "Some people expected the green
movement to do miracles, to do the impossible. We wanted to make it
clear that it's a democratic movement, and if it has a godfather, it
is Gandhi," Soroush said. "We are insisting adamantly that
democratic, nonviolent change is at the heart of this movement. That
will minimize the violence from the other side, which is ready to
engage in any kind of violence."
All five of the manifesto's
exiled authors, most of them titans of Iran's 1979 revolution and
major figures in earlier governments, remain connected to the
opposition at home.
In a separate statement, opposition
leader Mousavi, whose defeat by Ahmadinejad in the June 12
presidential election sparked the current uprising, made some of the
same demands in more general terms. "What we want is a government
and system that is honest and supportive, and is based on votes of
people, one that looks at variety in the votes and ideas of people
as an opportunity instead of a threat," he wrote Friday in a long
statement on his website.
In Iran, Mousavi called for the
government both to be held accountable "for the troubles it has
caused" and to establish wide freedoms of press, speech, assembly,
protest and independent political activity. Acknowledging new calls
for his arrest and execution, he added that he was willing to die
for the cause.
In another statement Monday, 88 professors at
Tehran University -- the country's largest and most prestigious
education center -- called on Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, to end violence against the opposition, which they
described as a sign of the regime's weakness. They also daringly
demanded that the supreme leader order the release of detained
students and called for the prosecution of those who harassed, beat,
detained or tortured in prison the protesters.
All three
statements reflected an increase in defiance on the part of the
opposition. "The hatred and resentment that has built up against the
regime in the past three decades has deep roots," warned the
manifesto from the five exiled leaders, who claim to speak for the
opposition and have written the most extensive and combative of the
statements. "The discontent has a great destructive power and can
unleash a vast wave of violence throughout society."
In
blunt terms, they also warned Iran's supreme leader -- who has the
powers of an infallible political pope -- that ignoring the
escalating demands of the opposition will only "deepen the crisis
with painful consequences" for which he would ultimately be
accountable.
Robin Wright, the author of four books on Iran,
is a senior fellow at the U.S. Institute for Peace in Washington. A
former Times diplomatic correspondent, she has been covering Iran
since 1973.
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