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IRAN: Sanctions Aggravate Rights Situation
Analysis by Praful Bidwai*
TEHRAN, May 5 (IPS) - As economic sanctions are applied to this country
for its nuclear activities, hardliners in the government are getting
strengthened and successfully demanding even harsher curbs on individual
liberties.
The sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council, at the
behest of the United States and its allies, have done nothing to dampen
Tehran's enthusiastic pursuit of a nuclear programme, according to
analysts who insisted on anonymity.
Iran today presents a stark contrast to what it was exactly a year ago,
when this writer was here last.
Twelve months ago, Iran was struggling to break out of numerous social,
cultural and political straitjackets and evolving towards freedom and
democratisationùin halting, imperfect and paradoxical ways. Despite
detours, the direction was unmistakable.
Today, it is palpably more unfree, tense, apprehensive and insecure.
The contrast between 2006 and this year is evident in the streets, most
visibly in the official drive against the wearing of skimpy headscarves by
women, which has led to 150,000 detentions according to local reports. But
there is a less visible gathering wave of repression.
2006 saw the release of Jafar Panahi's film ‘Offside' on the female fan
who smuggles herself into a football stadium. Offside, a scathing critique
of officialdom and patriarchy, and a celebration of women's defiance, won
two prizes at the Berlin film festival.
Last year, Kiarostami - the "Poet of the Cinema", of whom Jean-Luc Godard
has luminously said, "film begins with DW Griffith and ends with Abbas
Kiarostami" -produced a documentary, an unusual genre for him.
Experimental theatre, indigenous opera, digital art, and satirical
puppetry all found growing audiences.
A new spring was in the air in Tehran. A cool semi-Bohemian sub-culture
thrived in the Iranian Artists' Forum - an enchanting institution near
Tehran's city centre, with exhibition halls, galleries and seminar rooms,
and with a liberal, plural ethos, which any democracy would be proud of -
and in student "hang-outs" like "Café 78" in Aban Street.
These were sites of sparkling conversation on music and history, Marx and
the mullahs, multiculturalism and nationhood. Tehran's living-rooms would
be abuzz with lively discussion over endless glasses of wine or liquor.
(Yes, Iranians consume alcohol with great passion, prohibition
notwithstanding.)
Iran couldn't have presented a stronger refutation of "Taliban Lite".
Debate thrived in Iran's universities and intellectual forums. Academics
talked freely - in a typically colourful, dramatic, manner, favouring
grand, totalising theories.
They would often be acerbic about President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad's
grandiloquent pronouncements, even about the wisdom of vilayat-e-faqih
(government guided by the clergy). They would debate everything from
Persian culture to tapping high oil revenues for social welfare.
Last year, Iran's growing feminist movement launched a campaign to collect
a million signatures demanding pro-gender justice amendments to the
Constitution.
Votes against Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency produced
consternation, not paranoia. Iran signalled it was ready to engage with
the world and keen to be accepted as a normal state.
However, last fortnight, "Café 78" was closed down. The Artists' Forum
witnessed tighter self-censorship - in anticipation of pressure from the
culture Ministry.
The government took other repressive measures, arresting scores of
feminists involved in the signature campaign. Schoolteachers were arrested
for agitating for higher pay. Some 28 students' unions and 47
publications have been banned.
Even worse were purges of secular university teachers, said to number at
least 40. More pro-reform publications were closed down, including the
daily "Sharq"ùbesides the 110-plus shut over six years.
Now, Tehran University for the first time has a cleric, Ayatollah
Amid-Zanjani, as its chancellor -which sparked vigorous student protests,
including the knocking off of his turban.
Fear and apprehension pervade Iran's intellectual institutions today. Some
of the scholars who spoke candidly to this correspondent a year ago did
not answer calls this time. There is resistance and angry opposition to
the repression. But the state's broad-spectrum coercion has made the task
of defending freedom and promoting democracy considerably more difficult.
What explains the present repressive climate? According to many social
scientists and political analysts, three factors are at work.
A first, short-term, cause lies in Security Council sanctions on Iran.
These have had an adverse economic impact - on top of high unemployment,
and profligate spending by Ahmedinejad, which has blown a hole through the
40 billion US dollar special fund created from oil revenues.
This has further eroded the government's popularity - as was starkly
evident in the defeat of the President's nominees in last year's important
local elections.
Even more significant than the sanctions' economic impact is their
political effect: resentment at Iran's unfair isolation for what's seen as
a legitimate nuclear programme -despite some non-disclosure and minor
infringements of International Atomic Energy Agency procedures.
Resentment and fear of victimisation have encouraged Tehran to become
more, not less, repressive.
The regime's hardliners and conservatives have drummed up a nationalist
response through the slogan of defending Iran and Islam "in peril".
Britain played straight into Iranian hardliners' hands when its sailors
entered Iran's waters in March.
Western pressure is generating the opposite of its intended effect - not
least because of Iran's bitter memories of the West's interference,
bullying and betrayal, especially the CIA's toppling of elected Prime
Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 and imposition of the Shah
dictatorship.
A second factor is the need for "regime maintenance". The strategy is to
periodically crack the whip to assert the Islamic-clerical basis of
government, and show who's boss.
This reflects a shifting balance-of-power inside Iran's multi-centred
ruling apparatus in favour of conservatives vis-à-vis reformists, who were
isolated as moderate leaders weakened their links with Left-leaning
secularists.
Third, the shift reflects a generational change. Many of the cadres who
organised the 1979 Revolution, then in their 20s, have grown into
ambitious middle-aged leaders and now demand a share in power.
The locus of their struggle has shifted from the street to high offices.
Ahmedinejad's election in 2005 represented this shift, and the growing
aspirations of the rural/semi-urban poor and lower middle classes.
These trends will be strengthened if the West intensifies its ugly
confrontation over Iran's nuclear programme by demanding its suspension.
Iran is still some years away from a nuclear weapons capability. Contrary
to the claim that it is enriching uranium on an "industrial scale" with
3,000 gas centrifuges, the IAEA estimates it only has 1,300 centrifuges of
a primitive kind and is nowhere near "industrial-scale" enrichment.
It is unlikely that Iran has stabilised these delicate, fragile machines,
which spin hexafluoride gas at enormous speeds like 1,000 revolutions per
second and can break down under the slightest strain, seismic activity or
material imbalance.
According to independent experts, Iran's gas conversion facility produces
hexafluoride with high impurities. This probably makes enrichment
near-impossible.
Iran is certain to accelerate its nuclear programme if it is threatened,
taunted, derided and targeted through low-intensity military operations at
its borders.
The world Iran sees around itself is deeply hypocritical: a handful of
states refuse to give up their nuclear weapons, or (like India, Israel and
North Korea) are rewarded for having them, amidst the more than 180
countries held down to pledges never to make them.
The U.S. encouraged the Shah's Iran to build a 23,000-Mw nuclear power
programme and even offered it fuel reprocessing facilities (which can
double up for military use). Now, "rather like confirmed alcoholics
complaining about teenage drinking", as a commentator said, Iran cannot
have enrichment even under strict IAEA inspections.
Iran is willing to negotiate nuclear restraint - without suspending its
nuclear activities or without stipulations that it enriches uranium on
foreign soil. European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana has
confirmed this.
This window of opportunity will soon slam shut. The West would be
ill-advised to miss it - out of mulishness and prejudice. The more it
corners Iran, the more intransigent will Tehran become.
(*Praful Bidwai is a New Delhi-based writer for IPS. A well-known
campaigner for international peace and nuclear disarmament he is a member
of the International Network of Engineers and Scientists against
Proliferation.)
(END/2007)
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