THE NEW YORKER
November 8 1999
The extraordinary changing voices of Iran's revolution.
BY ROBIN WRIGHT
TEHRAN is a busy place on Thursday nights, the eve of the Muslim Sabbath, On Africa Boulevard, a street lined with boutiques and fast-food joints, teen-agers and twenty-somethings in colorful Japanese and Korean compacts drive slowly back and Barth for hours. Car radios blare the Backstreet Boys, Ricky Martin, and a rhapsodic Iranian version of New Age. A young man in a Nissan sport-utility vehicle entertains two male passengers by repeatedly gunning the engine, only to squeal to a halt after a few feet, because of bumper-to-bumper traffic. And everyone seems to be talking, if not to other passengers, then on cell phones, and often—to judge by sonic of the glances exchanged across the lanes—to other motorists cruising the strip. Around the city, ads for Cartier watches and Nokia mobile phones flank billboards heralding the hundredth birthday of Ayatollah Khomeini. In movie theatres, boys dare to put their arms around their girlfriends. "Bay-watch" and American soap operas come in over illegal satellite. Chicago Bulls T-shirts are a commonplace. Leonardo DiCaprio is a heartthrob.
THE REVOLUTIONARY
IBRAHLM ASGHARZADEH is, at forty-four, a man with a sense of style—something rare since the 1979 revolution covered women from head to toe in mournful black, condemned the neck-- tie as a symbol of Western cultural dominance, and, because centuries ago some clerics discouraged shaving, made beards a statement of support for the world's only modern theocracy. At a recent dinner party, given by husband-and-wife professors at Teheran University, Asgharzadeh was discordantly fashionable. Fie wore a blue checked shirt, a sports coat of muted cream‑and-brown checks, and deep-brown trousers and deep-brown socks. (Shoes had been left at the door—the practice in traditional Iranian homes.) His thick silver hair was impeccably cut, and his designer eyeglasses shone like crystal. He didn't wear a tie—only doctors, and waiters at certain new restaurants, wear ties—but he was clean-shaven.
I'd wanted to meet Asgharzadeh since 1981, when I stood on the tarmac of the Algiers international airport and watched fifty-two exhausted American hostages disembark from an Air Al-Ole plane. Throughout the hostage crisis—which lasted more than four hundred days, introduced the yellow ribbon as a national symbol, cost eight American lives in a failed rescue attempt, ostracized one of the world's largest oil producers, redefined both diplomacy and terrorism, ended an American Presidency, and gave us "Nightline"—Asgharzadeh had been the primary spokesman for Students Following the Imam's Line. Twenty years ago, the once obscure group became the world's most famous student body when four hundred of its young members scrambled over a brick wall and stormed the American Embassy in Teheran. At the time, Asgharzadeh was a scruffy student of industrial engineering at Iran's top technical university--his most distinguishing feature was a heavy beard—and he was full of fury. "This takeover is not a game!" he told reporters massed outside the Embassy on the day of the takeover. "This is a den of spies." The term stuck. For years, the American Embassy was popularly known as the "den of spies."
A couple of Iranian papers once hinted that it was Asgharzadeh who had actually conceived the notion of taking over the Embassy, so at the dinner I asked him if it was true that he was the mastermind. He paused, and confessed that he’d been on of three students, all engineering majors at Teheran universi• ties, who'd originally made the decision to attack the Embassy. "But we promised each other that we'd never publicly disclose which one of us first proposed it," he said. "Probably it's better not to say too much." Then a smile broke across his face.
Asgharzadeh did admit to coining the name Students Following the Imam's Line. "We were trying to catch the Imam's attention," he explained, referring to Ayatollah Khomeini, the religious leader who guided the revolution. Asgharzadeh was also candid about the planning. "The critical phase was getting three pieces of information," he recalled. "The most important was an inside plan of the Embassy. Two student apartments were across the street, so we used different rooms to draw maps."
The sprawling American compound, occupying twenty-seven acres of prime property on Taleghani Street, in downtown Teheran, included an imposing brick diplomatic chancery, a separate consulate to process the thousands of visas that were issued to Iranians each year, the Ambassador's residence, several staff homes, and a massive warehouse, whose dark, windowless cellar was later nicknamed the Mushroom Inn by hostages who were confined there. The Embassy symbolized not only the American presence but also Iran's importance to the United States—as a buffer to the Soviet Union, a pillar of Mideast policy, a frontier on both Turkey and turbulent South Asia, and the longest coast on the Persian Gulf, through which forty per cent of the West's oil was shipped.
"We also had to find out about the staff, so we kept a log on the personnel," Asgharzadeh continued. "Students were posted around the clock to watch how many there were and who went in and out. We wanted all the Americans inside when we took it.
"Finally, we had to know the security situation inside. We had to do this all ourselves, and we were just students. But, in the end, we had really good information on the Marine guards."
Looking back, Asgharzadeh recalled that little had gone as the students had expected. "We didn't intend to keep the Americans for a long time—maybe three to five days," he told me. "We went inside the compound just as a protest. Then we did get the Imam's attention—and his blessing. The masses demanded that we continue, something we didn't anticipate. It became a very complicated situation, one that was out of our hands."
The impact of the Embassy takeover was, in fact, more profound on Iran than on the United States, for it forced a denouement in a debate over the revolution's future; namely; the role of the clergy. The first provisional government that had been set up after the Shah fled was led by secular technocrats who favored a strong President as the ultimate power, the revolutionary, mullahs wanted a religious Supreme Leader. Angered by the clergy's endorsement of the takeover, the members of the provisional government resigned, and the clerics took their place and engineered a constitution that created a theocracy. Today, all branches of the Islamic Republic of Iran's government are shadowed, and sometimes superseded, by religious institutions. The two-hundred-and-seventy-person Parliament is shadowed by the twelve-man Council of Guardians, which has veto power over legislation and over political. candidates. The civil and criminal courts are shadowed by Revolutionary Courts, which can summon any person or institution for "un-Islamic activities," and which hold in-camera trials and admit no appeal. And the President is shadowed by the Supreme Leader, who is commander-in-chief, and who appoints the three critical chiefs—of intelligence, the judiciary, and the military and has the last word on any subject. Khomeini was Iran's first unchallenged Supreme Leader. Since his death, in 1989, the job has been held by Ali Khamenei, a staunch traditionalist who lacks Khomeini's stature and influence. The President is limited to two four-year terms, but the Supreme Leader, who is chosen by an assembly of clerics, rules for life.
The dual power structure has lately led to increasingly raucous political turmoil. It pits a new generation of democratic reformers, who want elected officials to have primary power, against the theocrats, who want the clerics to remain guardians of the state—and, in some cases, above the state. This fall, that rivalry is playing out over issues ranging from the closure of four newspapers to the fate of thirteen Iranian Jews charged with espionage, and, especially, over the question of who will be allowed to run in next February's Parliamentary elections—a contest that will he pivotal in determining the outcome of the power struggle.
Asgharzadeh is now making something of a political comeback. Earlier this year, Iran held its first city-council elections. The first four Presidents had never got around to them, despite a constitutional mandate, because the clerics and the conservative elite objected. But the upset election of President Mohammad Khatami, in 1997, opened a new chapter in Iran’s political life. Khatami wewars the black turban of descendants of the Prophet, and he is the son and grandson of ayatollahs, but he is a reformer. He was named Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance in 1982, but resigned a decade later, after being acused of “negligence” and “liberalism.” In 1997, he ran as a dark horse, and the conservative theocrats who controlled the main levers of power openly opposed him, but seventy percent of the voters endorsed his agenda of reform. Since Khatami took office, the local elections have been his biggest accomplishment – again in defiance of the theocrats. Overnight, Iran went from having fewer than four hundred elected officials, all concentrated in the capital, to having almost two hundred thousand, dispersed throughout the country. Asgharzadeh won a seat on Teheran’s fifteen-member city council. Conservatives fought to have him disqualified, for “unrevolutionary behavior.” At a rally last year at the American Embassy, which has been used as a vocational school for the Revolutionary Guards since the hostages were freed, Asgharzadeh told the crowd, “Our dealings with the hostages were not directed against the American people, and not even against the hostages themselves. Today, we invite all the hostages to return to Iran, as our guests. We have a new language for the the new world. We defend human rights. And we’ll try to make Islam such that it won’t contradict democracy.”
Asgharzadch has paid a price for his change in rhetoric. Throughout his speech, a vigilante group of young conservatives calling themselves the Helpers of the Party of God taunted him by shouting "Mary beer Amrika," or "Death to America," the slogan that he had shouted twenty years before. Last December, he was so badly beaten that he was hospitalized.
Because of his new position, Asgharzadeh thinks the Council of Guardians will disqualify him from numing in the February Parliamentary elections. With another coy smile, however, he told me that he still hoped to have influence. His wife, Tahereh Rezazadeh, who is also a reformer, will run instead. The couple met during the hostage crisis. She was one of the female students who stormed the Embassy.
“Asgharzadeh looks quite Presidential, doesn't he?" Hadi Semati, an American-educated political-science professor, remarked to me at the dinner party "You know, it could he. Someday,. Strange things happen here."
Since his election to the city council, though, the former revolutionary has been preoccupied with other matters. Over dinner, he dutifully recounted the hostage history as a courtesy to a curious guest, but he became animated only when the conversation turned to his recent municipal duties, which he attends to with the diligence of a burgher. "The first issue that attracted me was traffic," he said. "This city put a lot of money into highways, but they didn't turn out to be all that helpful, because most people don't use them. For example, when young couples want to get married, there's a tradition that they have two candelabra and a mirror. Well, people believe they have to go to the bazaar downtown to get them, even though candelabras and mirrors are now available all over the city. The new chain stores haven't solved this problem—simply because of habit. Iran is full of traditions like this. So we have to understand and deal with these traditions in order to make people change. Another example—the military barracks!"
Asgharzadeh was clearly excited, and his fists punched the air for emphasis. "The Shah thought he'd protect himself by putting the barracks all around him. But the barracks are in the city center and in the way of construction. Plus, they don't pay taxes! One of my campaign slogans was to get rid of them and put them outside the city. I'm now more worried about the impact of high-rises that might replace them, which would bring more traffic and more pollution to the city."
Both are already almost unmanageable. Pollution produced by traffic and local industries has recently forced the government to close schools and urge old people and the ailing to leave the capital, for days at a time. As a public service, new billboards around Teheran provide hourly readings on six different pollutant gases.
"Traffic, pollution, sewage—ninety-five per cent of my time is now spent trying to solve the issues of ordinary people's lives," Asgharzadeh said. "I've learned that people's world view is changed more by dealing with the small problems of life—the issues they care about. And, unfortunately, ideology can't solve them."
THE KIDS
IN the revolution's early years, the clerics called on Iranian women to breed an Islamic generation. They did. The theocracy's decision, early on, to lower the age of maturity for females, from fifteen to nine, contributed mightily. Between 1980 and 1985, the average Iranian woman had more than six pregnancies. By 1999, Iran's population had soared to seventy million--more than double the thirty-four million at the time of the revolution.
Eventually, however, the mullahs recognized the staggering costs of their dictates, and in the early nineties they launched one of the most extensive birth-control programs in the world.
Today, no one can get a marriage license in Iran without passing a family-planning course, and everything from condoms to Norplant to vasectomies is free—no questions asked about marital status.
Yet Iran is stuck with a massive demographic bulge: sixty per cent of the population is under twenty-five. With the voting age at fifteen, the revolution's second generation is transforming Iranian society—in potentially more dramatic ways than the impact of the first generation. The youth vote was the biggest single factor in President Khatami's election, and in the birth of a reform movement. Within a decade, voters under thirty will be the majority.
The revolution's successes have added to the challenge. Over the past twenty years, the Islamic Republic has produced the largest educated class of young people in Iranian history. Despite shortcomings, such as double-shift schools, literacy has shot up from fifty-eight per cent to eighty-two per cent, according to government statistics. The number of university graduates has soared from four hundred and thirty thousand to more than four million. All of them feel entitled to good jobs and material comforts.
The result is overwhelming the system. Eight hundred thousand young people are entering the job market every year—in an economy that can produce fewer than three hundred thousand jobs. This fall, a staggering seventy per cent of Iran's unemployed were between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four. And those lucky enough to find employment face the prospect of a per-capita income that is only a quarter of what it was on the eve of the revolution. Not surprisingly, unrest among today's generation of students is growing.
The Office to Foster Islamic Unity, a coalition representing Iranian university students that is the descendant of Students Following the Imam's Line, has its headquarters in a rundown house on Shahid Rajab Begi Street. Shahid means "martyr," and, like everything front highways to health clinics in Iran, the street was named for a soldier killed in the 1980-88 war with Iraq, in which more than -a hundred thousand Iranian lives were lost. The office is furnished with desks, chairs, filing cabinets, and other equipment, all now somewhat worn, from the American Embassy.
"They're still quite serviceable," said Farhad, a slightly built, amiable student in his twenties who gave me a brief tour of the American inventory one afternoon this fall, and, like most students I spoke with, asked that I not use his surname. "The file cabinets are particularly good," he told me. The Embassy must have been well stocked, because the students are still using its stationery, with a bald-eagle watermark, in their copier.
The house was donated by Ayatollah Ali Fdlamenei, Khomeini's successor, in order to revive a student movement that had been dormant during the war years. In the nineties, the new Supreme Leader apparently viewed students as a way to widen his power base and keep the original vision of the revolution on course. He seems to have miscalculated.
"Students today are pressing hard for individual rights, an open press, freedom to form parties and run for office, and a civil society," Farhad explained. "We're now on the front line of the struggle for democracy These are critical times for Iran."
Last July, the worst unrest since the revolution erupted. Thousands of students, Farhad among them, started demonstrating at Teheran University after a Revolutionary Court banned a reformist newspaper, on charges of "attempting to create turmoil and instability." Over the next five days, the protests escalated into violent clashes with police and, more important to the theocrats, a humiliating public heckling of the system. "The demonstrations let people say things that they didn't dare say for twenty years," Farhad recalled, smiling with excitement. "And it was real democracy! No one was exempt from criticism."
The students even dared to taunt the Supreme Leader. An attempt to read a statement from his office was greeted by shouts of "Down with the religious dictator!" and "Commanderin-chief, resign!" By the time the trouble was over, students reported that five youths had been killed and hundreds injured. Police said that more than fourteen hundred had been arrested. Four have since been sentenced to death by Revolutionary Courts. Further trials are pending.
This fall, Iran had a bad case of the jitters when school resumed. But on the day that I visited the university's downtown campus the only rumblings were beneath the surface. Like the revolution's first generation of young activists, including many of the hostage-takers, the most politically engaged students today are engineers. They're also the most fashionable. A noticeable number at the Engineering College either were clean-shaven or had neatly trimmed mustaches and goatees.
"Everything in Iran is political," explained a senior named Mehdi, who wore a goatee and chuckled when I asked him why the young are shaving again. "Beards were the way of the revolution. Shaving is the way of the reformers. We're showing that we've moved on—and that we don't follow limitations imposed on society."
The new generation's challenge to the regime had a particular claim to legitimacy, because many of the protesters were the offspring of the original revolutionaries. Iran's higher-education system gives preference to applicants with Islamic credentials—the children of revolutionaries, civil servants, clerics, and the poor. These students don't necessarily want to abandon the Islamic system; they just want Iran to be more of a republic.
Outside the Amirabad dormitories, where the July unrest began, I met a muscular third-year premed student named Mohammad, who was wearing jeans. "1 come from a traditional religious family," he told me. "My father demonstrated during the revolution, and he worked for the government, in the Agriculture Ministry, for many years. But students on this campus are familiar with George Orwell's 'Animal Farm,' and we know revolutions don't give you everything you want. So I demonstrated in July to demand reforms. So did all my friends."
The new generation sees the challenge not from beyond Iran's borders but from within. The previous generation attacked the American Embassy; as an outpost of the Great Satan; this one feels that it is a victim of its own system. Nowhere is that more conspicuous than at the Office to Foster Islamic Unity, where I asked the students how they felt about the United States and about its critics.
"These people abuse the anti-American slogans of the past," Behrooz, a twentyfive-year-old industrial-management major with an unusually square face and a short haircut, told me. "They're hypocrites. Most of them are like everyone else. They're ready for relations with America again. America may have created some of our problems in the past. But dealing with America again is one way to get out of our problems today On different terms than before, of course—this time as equals. But if a candidate says something against America, he won't get the students' voter
THE PHILOSOPHER
ADULKARLM SOROOSH is a diminutive, almost meek, man. He speaks in a slow, deliberate whisper, and in a land of raven-haired people his most distinguishing feature is a neat, soft-brown beard. Often, just before embarking on an important point, he pulls off his wire-rimmed glasses and cleans them with a handkerchief, or pushes them up on his forehead and rubs his eyes.
"I'm just a writer and a thinker," he told me five years ago, with a self-deprecating laugh. "I'm not such an important man." Soroosh has emerged, however, as Iran's boldest contemporary philosopher, a man increasingly described, by both supporters and critics, as the Martin Luther of Islam. I visited him this fall at the Serat Institute, an adjunct of the Institute for Epistemological Research, a think tank that Soroosh directs. The Serat occupies a few small whitewashed rooms near a dusty back alley not far from Teheran University; and it publishes most of his work.
For a long time, Soroosh was one of the revolution's own. lie was born Hossein Dabbagh, in 1945. A follower of Ayatollah Khomeini from childhood—since an uncle took him to see the Imam on the day of his release from the Shah's jail, in 1963—Soroosh was horn to the kind of family that formed the revolution's backbone. His mother, Batoul, who was named after one of the Prophet's daughters, never abandoned the chador, even when the monarchy banned it. His father, a grocer, refused to buy a radio to listen to the Shah's state-controlled news. Soroosh and his three siblings grew up in the old part of Teheran, where the mud-brick homes usually had one or two large rooms, little furniture, and no bathroom. Soroosh was the first in his family to go to the university and live in the West. When he was a student in London, he visited Khomeini in Paris during the last phase of the Ayatollah's exile. After the revolution, the Imam appointed him to the Committee of the Cultural Revolution, whose purpose was to make university curriculums consistent with the teachings of Islam. Soroosh still comes under bitter criticism today from exiles and others who were purged during those years. But in the late eighties Soroosh began to view the Imam as an instrument of transition rather than as the personification of the revolution's ultimate goal.
Of the many challenges Iran's theocrats face on the revolution's twentieth anniversary; Soroosh may well represent the most profound. At a critical juncture for Iran's unique political system, he has provided a philosophical framework for reconciling Islam with democracy. In the broader Islamic world, he has helped popularize an Islamic Reformation—with repercussions as sweeping as the Christian Reformation. Soroosh's achievements may be the Islamic Republic's most enduring legacies—far more so than its theocratic form of government, which is now struggling to survive.
"There are two pillars," Soroosh once explained to me. "First, in order to be a true believer one must be free. To become a believer under pressure or coercion isn't true belief. This basic freedom to believe is also the basis of democracy. It's the seed from which all other freedoms grow."
The second pillar, he said, is based on human imperfection. "The essence of religion will always be sacred, but its interpretation by fallible human beings is not sacred—and therefore it can be criticized, modified, refined, and redefined. What single person can say what God meant? Any fixed version would effectively smother religion. It would block the rich exploration of the sacred texts. Interpretations are also influenced by the age you live in, by the conditions and mores of the era, and by other branches of knowledge. So there's no single, inflexible, infallible, or absolute interpretation of Islam for all time.” In other words, it's O.K. to alter, or even abandon, practices that have prevailed for centuries.
"Islam is organic and dynamic, and can easily be adapted to present conditions," Soroosh said, with a trace of excitement in his voice. `And Islamic law is expandable. You can't imagine the extent of its flexibility! In an Islamic democracy, you can realize all its potential."
Soroosh had originally been something of a recluse, shying away from the press and allowing other intellectuals and clergymen sympathetic to his ideas to apply them to the specifics of Iran's labyrinthine political scene. Eventually, to protect his family from sporadic physical attacks and anonymous death threats, he permanently adopted a pseudonym that he once used only for writing poetry "Soroosh" means "angel of revelation."
Today, Soroosh has a huge following among Iran's students. When we first met, he taught at three universities, and he invited me to attend one of his classes. Students acted starstruck when he showed up for a seminar at Teheran University's School of Theology: they stood in the hallway just to watch him walk to class. The theocrats have since forced him out of all three posts, but his influence has only increased. This fall, students at the Office to Foster Islamic Unity told me that they looked to two leaders as their models—President Klatami and Soroosh. Many of the reformist newspapers and magazines are published or edited by Soroosh followers. Then-agers, businessmen, and housewives pack the Wednesday-evening lectures he now gives in a private home. And in the theological center of (.29m, an hour and a half's drive from Teheran, Soroosh's work is one of the hottest topics among young clerics. His influence, Iranians tell me, has only begun to be felt.
Since the mid-nineties, Iran's clerical establishment has made Soroosh a target. In 1995, during a speech commemorating the American Embassy seizure, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned, "Interpreting religion isn't something that can be carried out by just anyone. If someone confronts the clergy, he gladdens the Zionists and the Americans more than anything else… because they’ve set their heart on destruction of the clergy. Well, the Islamic system will slap these people hard in the face!"
Over the past year, however, Soroosh has become bolder, as if he senses that the Islamic Republic has reached a precipice. "This is totalitarian rule," he said to me this fall. "And they are totalitarian rulers. That is a harsh thing to say, but it's the truth. The regime can't survive the way it is."
Soroosh paused. "You know," he said a moment later, "our revolution was a haphazard, chaotic, and theoryless revolution, in the sense that it really wasn't well thought out—not by the Leader, not by the people. For the Imam, Islam was everything. He wanted everyone to topple the Shah in order to apply Islam. But he didn't elaborate on any of these points. So now it's the intellectuals' job to provide a theory for the revolution, to rethink it and to offer a new logic for it. And the outcome will be not another revolution but reform. Because—two revolutions in one generation? Well, really! It's too much!" He laughed softly.
Soroosh's most recent views have a potentially far-reaching impact on. Iran's place in the world—even on its relations with the United States. Soroosh selected the name Serat for his institute because it means "path," and he believes that there is more than one path.
"Every day, Muslims recite a prayer ten times entreating God to guide us to the right path," he explained. "Some say the only right path is Islam, and the rest stray or are on a deviant path. But I argue that there are many right paths. I try to justify a pluralistic view of religions—the internal sects of Sunni, Shia, and others, and also the great religions, like Christianity, Judaism, and the rest.
"We think they go to Hell, and they think we go to Hell," he said, a smile crossing his face, as if the idea were amusing in its smallness. "But I'm trying to say that Christians and members of other religions are well guided and good servants of God. All are equally rightful in what they believe. To some, this sounds like heresy," he said, the smile widening. "But this, too, has found listening cars in our society."
_____
Monday, November 8, 1999
Monday, September 1, 1997
U.S. AND IRAN: AN OFFER THEY CAN'T REFUSE?
FOREIGN POLICY MAGAZINE
Fall 1997 Issue 108
By Robin Wright and Shaul Bakhash
Last May, Iranians went to the polls and elected a new president. In a stunning upset, former minister of culture Mohammed Khatami swept almost 70 percent of the vote in a poll that produced a 90 percent turnout, the highest since the Islamic Republic's earliest elections. He defeated front-runner and Speaker of Parliament Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, who had strong backing from the regime's top clergy. President Khatami campaigned on a platform stressing pluralism and the rule of law, and his victory represented an unmistakable and overwhelming mandate for change, underlining the desire of Iranians from all classes for an easing of state restrictions on social and cultural life, for a greater say in political affairs, and for a better economy.
Given the history of U.S.-Iran relations, the idea that Khatami's election might lead to a rapprochement between Washington and Tehran is understandably being treated with skepticism. The election of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani as president in 1989 was greeted with similar expectations of improved relations. "Moderate is no longer a dirty word in Iran," declared a headline in Business Week, while the New York Times quoted a long list of experts who predicted that Tehran's new leader would pursue "more pragmatic domestic and foreign policies" and seek to "normalize Iran's relations with the West."
In fact, Rafsanjani succeeded in tempering Iran's policies both at home and abroad. But his success has been limited, and on the issues of greatest importance to the United States, he has little altered the course of Iranian policy. However, Khatami comes to office with a resounding public man' date. He has put together a team of advisers who understand that Iran needs to break out of its fitful isolation and attract foreign investment. In August, he convinced the Iranian parliament to approve all 22 of his cabinet ministers, including Ataollah Mohajerani, his choice for culture minister, who had provoked the wrath of hardliners when he proposed direct negotiations with Washington six years ago. Khatami's election provides a window of opportunity; the opening is not large, but it is worth pursuing.
Besides, Iran is a country that the United States can no longer afford to ignore. There are simply too many vital interests at stake. Economically, Iran's gas reserves are second in the world, and its significant oil resources make it a pivotal player in the energy markets. Before the 1979 revolution, the United States was one of the Islamic Republic's top three trading partners--a relationship that supported thousands of U.S. jobs and $2.7 billion in annual export revenues for America. Up until the early 1990s, the United States was still among the top five purchasers of Iranian oil. Today, Iran represents a potentially important market for American goods and technology, particularly in the oil, aviation, and computer industries, which could again produce billions of dollars of income. Iran also offers some of the most economically viable transit routes for oil and gas pipelines from Central Asia and the Caucasus, now freed from Soviet control.
Strategically, Iran straddles the crossroads of three vital and often volatile regions--the Middle East, South Asia, and the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. Almost one-third of these countries have, or are developing, nuclear weapons. Outside of the Western powers, this arena accounts for the largest array of countries with weapons of mass destruction in the world. In more favorable circumstances, the Islamic Republic could help underwrite Persian Gulf security, as it did during the reign of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, and assist in advancing a peaceful solution to the Afghanistan conflict. It has already played a constructive role in containing Iraqi president Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War, and it recently helped negotiate an end to the Tajik civil war.
Despite Khatami's election, obstacles to U.S.-Iran dialogue remain formidable. Both the new Khatami team and the Clinton administration face the common problem of conservative and recalcitrant legislatures. In Washington, Congress now sets the pace on Iran policy. President Bill Clinton sought to head off more extensive congressional measures when he imposed a comprehensive ban on all U.S. trade with Iran in May 1995. Last year, Congress passed and Clinton signed a bill requiring the president to impose secondary sanctions on foreign companies investing more than $40 million annually in Iran's oil and gas industry. Proof of Iranian involvement in the 1996 Khobar bombing in Saudi Arabia. which killed 19 Americans, could also preempt or destroy efforts to better relations, and could spark demands from Congress and other key quarters to retaliate either overtly or covertly.
In Tehran, a significant bloc of deputies in the unicameral Majlis is hostile to the "Great Satan" and is bound to try to stymie attempts to improve relations between the United States and Iran. Khatami has the added problem of not being Iran's highest authority, a role reserved for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader. Khamenei, who believes his legitimacy derives in part from his anti-American stance, and who has often set the tone for Iran's anti-American rhetoric, is likely to be suspicious of U.S. motives. He has also taken the lead in opposing the Arab-Israeli peace process and in defining Israel as an "illegitimate" state. If there is to be any change in Iran's policy toward the United States, Khamenei must be brought on board.
Both countries are also prisoners of a generation of threatening rhetoric that has often been as useful for advancing domestic political purposes as it has been for confronting each other.
Undoing the damage will be difficult. Previous attempts have backfired, beginning with the disastrous 1985-86 arms-for-hostage swap that burned both sides. Tehran was also angered when two subsequent overtures--helping to free hostages in Lebanon in response to President George Bush's inaugural pledge that "goodwill begets goodwill") and a deal to allow the Texas-based company Conoco to develop offshore oil and gas fields--were spumed by Washington. In other words, for these two countries, changing minds at home could be as difficult as convincing each other that the moment has come for cooperation.
Yet Iran's election surprise comes at a time of the most extensive policy rethinking on both sides since the 1979-81 hostage crisis--an event that has subsequently clouded every aspect of U.S.-Iran relations. Several former senior U.S. officials--both Republican and Democrat--from the National Security Council, the State Department, and the Central Intelligence Agency have publicly urged Washington to test the waters of constructive engagement through either European allies or direct dialogue. A growing consensus now argues that containment of any nation, especially one with petrodollars, is increasingly difficult in an era of globalization when borders are more porous and competition for markets unprecedented. Sanctions have had limited success in blocking Tehran's access to foreign investment or technology: France's Total SA quickly agreed to develop the oil and gas fields that America's Conoco was forced by presidential order to refuse, and Russia and China both stepped in to develop nuclear reactors when Germany declined to finish a facility started during the reign of the shah. Meanwhile, containment has had no appreciable effect on Iranian behavior in the areas Washington deems most critical--weapons of mass destruction, the Arab-Israeli peace process, and support for extremist Islamic movements.
In a speech two weeks after his election, Khatami called for "removing tensions" with other countries and establishing relations of "peace and tranquillity" that safeguard the rights, interests, and independence of all nations. Khatami is expected to work closely with Rafsanjani, who in the past has appeared to favor dialogue with Washington. The outgoing president still retains considerable clout in Iranian politics, having been appointed to head the Expediency Council, which has been entrusted with the new responsibility of setting the broad policies of the Islamic Republic. In the meantime, officials from neighboring Arab states, who once felt more vulnerable to Iranian mischief, have launched their own rapprochement with Tehran. Saudi Arabia is high on the list. In May, Rafsanjani and Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah agreed to exchange visits. In this context, a series of specific steps over the next four years--during Khatami's first four-year term and Clinton's final term--could begin the process of reengagement.
PHASE ONE: THE OPENING ROUND
Both parties in this impasse have indicated that they are waiting for the other side to make a meaningful first move. During his first postelection press conference, Khatami argued that when it came to improved relations with the United States, the "key to the problem is in their hands, not ours." And the State Department duly noted that now "the ball is in Iran's court."
For the process to work, both sides will have to take difficult steps that break down roughly into four phases. Simply laying out these measures underscores the enormity of the task. The first phase would almost certainly have to be informal, with the focus on building confidence and establishing bonafides to lay the groundwork for addressing more substantive issues. To get the process going, leaders on both sides should implement three steps:
Lower the decibel level and frequency of rhetoric.
Tehran should end references to the "Great Satan" and other cliched accusations about the United States that appear in the speeches of its top officials and its daily press. And in referring to Iran, Washington should stop using terms such as "outlaw" or "rogue" state and should also discourage the tendency to link acts of violence or even accidents, such as the explosion of TWA 800, to Iran before solid evidence is available.
Ease restrictions on travel and contacts.
Contacts between Iranians and Americans can help establish "track two" diplomacy to create an informal dialogue. Both sides could indirectly facilitate contacts by allowing visits or exchanges by scholars; representatives of cultural, professional, and nongovernmental organizations; and individuals with government contacts. American visa restrictions remain particularly severe, requiring a four-to-six-week waiting period and two trips to an American consulate abroad. "Track two" can never replace real talks, but such contacts could help change public opinion and improve the general atmosphere.
Differentiate between threats and unacceptable actions.
Both sides need to distinguish between actions that are genuinely threatening and policies that are merely uncomfortable or disagreeable. Iran may object to the American military presence in the Persian Gulf, but it must recognize that the United States has legitimate interests to protect--most notably, safeguarding the flow of oil and enforcing sanctions against Saddam Hussein. The United States may have just cause to be concerned about Iranian efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction, but must acknowledge Iran's valid need for conventional weapons, especially after losing 40 percent of its war materiel in the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. (Despite Iraq's subsequent conflict over Kuwait, it remains better armed today than Iran.)
PHASE TWO: THE HURDLES
A second phase should begin with an agreement--negotiated either through third parties or directly--on a structure that encompasses a series of steps and countersteps to deal with the practices and policies most offensive to the other country. The Clinton administration has stated that it would enter into direct talks with Iran, so long as the Islamic Republic is prepared to address three "areas of concern": the development of weapons of mass destruction, the sponsorship of terrorism, and the sabotage of the Arab-Israeli peace process. But so far the United States has offered little in return, other than a vague promise to restore diplomatic and economic relations. The U.S. approach is all stick but no carrot. Moreover, linking these issues together and seeking to address them simultaneously allows little room for maneuverability on either side. Iran has not indicated that it will respond in a meaningful way to engagement or to easing of sanctions, for which Europe has repeatedly lobbied Washington.
A framework of reciprocal measures would provide a road map, however roughly sketched, of engagement's ultimate goals. It would allow each side to test the other's good intentions before proceeding and would provide incentives to continue. Such an approach would embody a valuable lesson learned from the Oslo peace process--if both parties are truly committed to rapprochement, then implementing gradual confidence-building measures offers a better chance of success than tackling difficult, divisive issues all at once. This strategy would avoid the kind of confusion generated by Iran's proposed Conoco deal, which Tehran did not describe as an overture to Washington until after the White House had rejected it. Both sides need to understand that these actions would be part of an ongoing process rather than isolated gestures. Phase two, which could stretch for as long as two years, would be the hardest phase, for neither side is likely to change easily. Yet nothing will happen unless these steps are taken.
Iran
End support and sponsorship of terrorism. Iran has long denied its involvement in extremist activities, despite the recent conviction in Thailand of an Iranian agent who intended to bomb the Israeli embassy in Bangkok, and strong intelligence data on other cases. The Khatami regime will have to erase even the perception that it is involved in targeting and sabotaging foreign governments and personnel. Tehran will also need to block terrorist acts by surrogates, stop training Arab dissidents who seek to harm the United States and Western allies, and bring its security agencies under control. Iran's behavior, in other words, should begin conforming to international standards and the rule of law. This process includes ending the assassination of its own dissidents abroad, the kind of act for which a German court recently implicated the regime's highest officials. Likewise, Tehran will have to do more than reassure European officials that it will not send a hit squad to murder novelist Salman Rushdie. It must also deal with a small religious foundation that has pledged a $2.5 million reward for his death.
Stop sabotaging the Arab-Israeli peace process. Tehran is unlikely to return to the kind of close cooperation with Israel that prevailed during the reign of the shah, nor is it likely to change its opposition to the current detente between Israel and the Arab world. But it must end attempts to undo the peace process by training, equipping, or financing--directly or indirectly--organizations such as Islamic Jihad, which has claimed responsibility for suicide bombings of Israeli civilian targets. Iran will also have to distance itself from extremist groups targeting Arab governments that have begun to engage with Israel.
The United States
In exchange for these steps by Iran, the United States will need to take simultaneous actions. These will be the incentives for Iran to continue the process, although the Islamic Republic will not be rewarded for its actions until U.S. intelligence can verify that Tehran's behavior has changed significantly.
Expedite closure on Iran's frozen assets. Returning assets frozen by the United States since the hostage crisis has long been a key Iranian condition for bettering relations and a yardstick by which Tehran says it will judge American intentions. A joint U.S.-Iran tribunal that meets in the Hague has resolved most of the 4,000 financial claims and counterclaims, but a major, multibillion-dollar dispute remains over the value and billing of arms that Tehran paid for before the revolution, most of which were never delivered.
Support a European Union offer to promote constructive engagement. Washington should accept a bid by its European allies to prove that constructive engagement is a more effective tool for changing Iranian behavior. The initiative should be tied to a specified time frame, perhaps coinciding with Khatami's consolidation of his government. As progress is made during this roughly two-year period, the United States should suspend pressure on Europe and Japan to isolate Iran, and it should at least temporarily end opposition to Western economic credits designed to boost Iranian development. Washington should also promote diplomatic ministerial contact between its allies and Tehran. In exchange, the European Union should meet Washington halfway. The EU could be urged to respond to verified acts of Iranian misbehavior by implementing limited, punitive sanctions. Europe might favor such an approach for two reasons. First, it is part of a broad, earnest campaign to engage Iran. Second, it represents a strategy of "proportional response," which would involve limited and selective sanctions as opposed to the comprehensive penalties that U.S. policymakers advocate.
Regain control of U.S. policy on Iran. To have any flexibility in dealing with Tehran, the administration needs to bring Congress and public opinion along from an early stage. Clinton could build bipartisan consensus for these policies by mustering the public support of Republican heavy-hitters like former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft, who recently pushed for a new approach to U.S.-Iran relations. Such a tactic served the president well during his tough battle with Senate hardliners over ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention. Likewise, the growing backlash against sanctions by American business leaders could give the administration considerable clout when dealing with Congress, as was made apparent during the recent debate over granting most-favored-nation trading status to China. Whenever possible, the administration should emphasize that America stands to reap substantial benefits from engagement, both in terms of creating jobs at home and guaranteeing security abroad.
PHASE THREE: DIRECT ENGAGEMENT
The third stage would allow a series of contacts on issues of mutual concern over perhaps a year or two. It would amount to phased engagement.
Direct contact on neutral turf. American and Iranian officials should make a concerted effort to discuss and emphasize areas of common ground at international forums and at meetings with representatives of financial institutions and regional bodies. Many issues, from regional environmental problems and drug proliferation, to Afghanistan's instability and Bosnia's future, would benefit from direct U.S.-Iran contact. Some of these problems are becoming increasingly urgent. With NATO troops expected to withdraw from Bosnia in less than a year, the United States can no longer ignore the fact that Tehran's ties to Bosnian Muslims will make it a long-term player in the politics of that troubled region. The United States and Iran could design engagement so as to address less problematic issues first and more contentious ones later. Despite the enormous changes in Iran's political system, many of its foreign policy goals have not changed since the era of the shah. Defusing regional conflicts, attracting foreign investment, and gaining access to Western markets are as much priorities today as they were 20 years ago.
Tentative commercial contacts. As contacts expand, commercial links between Iran and the United States could begin again, albeit gradually. For example, the U.S. government could lift legal restraints to allow U.S. companies to transship Iranian oil to Europe, help to develop Iran's oil and gas facilities, or sell oil-drilling equipment to Iran--projects that generate jobs and income for Americans. Other constraints on importing handicrafts and rugs, which primarily helps Iran's economy, could also be lifted eventually. But restoration of full U.S.-Iran commercial ties would need to await more significant diplomatic progress.
Opening talks on security issues. Last but not least, Iranian and U.S. Officials will need to address in bilateral talks a range of security concerns, from broad issues in the Pesian Gulf to arms proliferation throughout the Middle East and South Asia. Iran will not even discuss its conventional arms buildup or its pursuit of unconventional weapons unless its own legitimate defense and security concerns--including endemic instability along several borders, regional arms proliferation, and America's significant military presence in the Gulf--are also addressed. At this stage, both sides should strive for common ground, such as containing Saddam Hussein or securing the free flow of oil. The two sides could reassure each other about their long-term intentions and craft a broader context for eventually resolving their differences on, for instance, the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Tehran would be more likely to abandon its pursuit of a nuclear capability if it felt secure about the United States, Iraq, and other neighbors. Washington, in turn, might find Iran's conventional weapons acquisition more tolerable if it felt more confident that Iran did not intend to use them against the United States or its allies.
THE ENDGAME
Given the history of tensions between Iran and the United States, this deliberately paced sequence of steps may be the best that either side can hope to achieve over the next four years. Yet the current confluence of factors--Iran's pivotal election, growing American skepticism about U.S. policy on Iran, the Gulf monarchies' rapprochement with Tehran, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's declaration this year that Washington will not deal with Iraq as long as Saddam Hussein stays in power--offers the best opportunity for a major policy change by both sides in many years. Clinton is also the first U.S. president since Iran's revolution not to have American hostages held either by Iranians or pro-Iranian extremists in Lebanon. In the past, the two governments were generally out of sync on everything from regional goals to leadership cycles. The next four years, in contrast, represent a unique juncture.
Tehran will have to launch the process. Khatami must create the conditions for change by performing these specific steps, by cleaning up Iran's human rights record, and by removing the perpetrators of Iranian mischief--a process he has begun by changing the ministers of intelligence and interior. Initially, he will almost certainly have to begin by taking small steps, but Washington will have to be alert to these shifts and help to accelerate them by responding appropriately. In the past the United States has failed to acknowledge such changes, as in the early 1990s when Rafsanjani squeezed from power several high-ranking radicals associated with hostage seizures and anti-American attacks. The United States may not be able to bend dramatically at first either, but it will need to extend a hand. Now in his final term, Clinton also has more leverage to act and perhaps even more interest as he seeks to create a legacy.
The final issues--restoring full commercial ties and diplomatic relations--will probably have to wait until Khatami's second term, pending his reelection, and a new U.S. administration. Somewhat like his counterpart in the Oval Office, Khatami's first order of business will be to build a viable political coalition that will allow him to implement the ambitious domestic platform upon which he was elected. Bringing Khamenei along, in particular, is likely to require time, heavy persuasion, and verification on the Iranian side that the cost-benefit ratio of a dramatic policy shift is worth the adjustment. Khatami will strengthen his argument if he can show the Supreme Leader that a shift in Iran's foreign policy will produce the desirable response, including the access to Western technology, credit, and investment that Tehran needs, particularly for its oil and gas industries.
During the endgame--which will also be the time to deal with the thorny problem of weapons of mass destruction--Iran and the United States should at least attempt to reach specific understandings over security issues so that there is no need or threat that leads to acquisition or use of the deadliest weapons. Throughout the engagement process, the obstacles are enormous; the chances of a new impasse or of the effort's collapse are high. But as daunting as the risks in changing course may seem, the bigger risk is to make no effort to defuse one of the world's most volatile relationships--or prevent it from getting worse.
Fall 1997 Issue 108
By Robin Wright and Shaul Bakhash
Last May, Iranians went to the polls and elected a new president. In a stunning upset, former minister of culture Mohammed Khatami swept almost 70 percent of the vote in a poll that produced a 90 percent turnout, the highest since the Islamic Republic's earliest elections. He defeated front-runner and Speaker of Parliament Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, who had strong backing from the regime's top clergy. President Khatami campaigned on a platform stressing pluralism and the rule of law, and his victory represented an unmistakable and overwhelming mandate for change, underlining the desire of Iranians from all classes for an easing of state restrictions on social and cultural life, for a greater say in political affairs, and for a better economy.
Given the history of U.S.-Iran relations, the idea that Khatami's election might lead to a rapprochement between Washington and Tehran is understandably being treated with skepticism. The election of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani as president in 1989 was greeted with similar expectations of improved relations. "Moderate is no longer a dirty word in Iran," declared a headline in Business Week, while the New York Times quoted a long list of experts who predicted that Tehran's new leader would pursue "more pragmatic domestic and foreign policies" and seek to "normalize Iran's relations with the West."
In fact, Rafsanjani succeeded in tempering Iran's policies both at home and abroad. But his success has been limited, and on the issues of greatest importance to the United States, he has little altered the course of Iranian policy. However, Khatami comes to office with a resounding public man' date. He has put together a team of advisers who understand that Iran needs to break out of its fitful isolation and attract foreign investment. In August, he convinced the Iranian parliament to approve all 22 of his cabinet ministers, including Ataollah Mohajerani, his choice for culture minister, who had provoked the wrath of hardliners when he proposed direct negotiations with Washington six years ago. Khatami's election provides a window of opportunity; the opening is not large, but it is worth pursuing.
Besides, Iran is a country that the United States can no longer afford to ignore. There are simply too many vital interests at stake. Economically, Iran's gas reserves are second in the world, and its significant oil resources make it a pivotal player in the energy markets. Before the 1979 revolution, the United States was one of the Islamic Republic's top three trading partners--a relationship that supported thousands of U.S. jobs and $2.7 billion in annual export revenues for America. Up until the early 1990s, the United States was still among the top five purchasers of Iranian oil. Today, Iran represents a potentially important market for American goods and technology, particularly in the oil, aviation, and computer industries, which could again produce billions of dollars of income. Iran also offers some of the most economically viable transit routes for oil and gas pipelines from Central Asia and the Caucasus, now freed from Soviet control.
Strategically, Iran straddles the crossroads of three vital and often volatile regions--the Middle East, South Asia, and the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. Almost one-third of these countries have, or are developing, nuclear weapons. Outside of the Western powers, this arena accounts for the largest array of countries with weapons of mass destruction in the world. In more favorable circumstances, the Islamic Republic could help underwrite Persian Gulf security, as it did during the reign of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, and assist in advancing a peaceful solution to the Afghanistan conflict. It has already played a constructive role in containing Iraqi president Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War, and it recently helped negotiate an end to the Tajik civil war.
Despite Khatami's election, obstacles to U.S.-Iran dialogue remain formidable. Both the new Khatami team and the Clinton administration face the common problem of conservative and recalcitrant legislatures. In Washington, Congress now sets the pace on Iran policy. President Bill Clinton sought to head off more extensive congressional measures when he imposed a comprehensive ban on all U.S. trade with Iran in May 1995. Last year, Congress passed and Clinton signed a bill requiring the president to impose secondary sanctions on foreign companies investing more than $40 million annually in Iran's oil and gas industry. Proof of Iranian involvement in the 1996 Khobar bombing in Saudi Arabia. which killed 19 Americans, could also preempt or destroy efforts to better relations, and could spark demands from Congress and other key quarters to retaliate either overtly or covertly.
In Tehran, a significant bloc of deputies in the unicameral Majlis is hostile to the "Great Satan" and is bound to try to stymie attempts to improve relations between the United States and Iran. Khatami has the added problem of not being Iran's highest authority, a role reserved for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader. Khamenei, who believes his legitimacy derives in part from his anti-American stance, and who has often set the tone for Iran's anti-American rhetoric, is likely to be suspicious of U.S. motives. He has also taken the lead in opposing the Arab-Israeli peace process and in defining Israel as an "illegitimate" state. If there is to be any change in Iran's policy toward the United States, Khamenei must be brought on board.
Both countries are also prisoners of a generation of threatening rhetoric that has often been as useful for advancing domestic political purposes as it has been for confronting each other.
Undoing the damage will be difficult. Previous attempts have backfired, beginning with the disastrous 1985-86 arms-for-hostage swap that burned both sides. Tehran was also angered when two subsequent overtures--helping to free hostages in Lebanon in response to President George Bush's inaugural pledge that "goodwill begets goodwill") and a deal to allow the Texas-based company Conoco to develop offshore oil and gas fields--were spumed by Washington. In other words, for these two countries, changing minds at home could be as difficult as convincing each other that the moment has come for cooperation.
Yet Iran's election surprise comes at a time of the most extensive policy rethinking on both sides since the 1979-81 hostage crisis--an event that has subsequently clouded every aspect of U.S.-Iran relations. Several former senior U.S. officials--both Republican and Democrat--from the National Security Council, the State Department, and the Central Intelligence Agency have publicly urged Washington to test the waters of constructive engagement through either European allies or direct dialogue. A growing consensus now argues that containment of any nation, especially one with petrodollars, is increasingly difficult in an era of globalization when borders are more porous and competition for markets unprecedented. Sanctions have had limited success in blocking Tehran's access to foreign investment or technology: France's Total SA quickly agreed to develop the oil and gas fields that America's Conoco was forced by presidential order to refuse, and Russia and China both stepped in to develop nuclear reactors when Germany declined to finish a facility started during the reign of the shah. Meanwhile, containment has had no appreciable effect on Iranian behavior in the areas Washington deems most critical--weapons of mass destruction, the Arab-Israeli peace process, and support for extremist Islamic movements.
In a speech two weeks after his election, Khatami called for "removing tensions" with other countries and establishing relations of "peace and tranquillity" that safeguard the rights, interests, and independence of all nations. Khatami is expected to work closely with Rafsanjani, who in the past has appeared to favor dialogue with Washington. The outgoing president still retains considerable clout in Iranian politics, having been appointed to head the Expediency Council, which has been entrusted with the new responsibility of setting the broad policies of the Islamic Republic. In the meantime, officials from neighboring Arab states, who once felt more vulnerable to Iranian mischief, have launched their own rapprochement with Tehran. Saudi Arabia is high on the list. In May, Rafsanjani and Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah agreed to exchange visits. In this context, a series of specific steps over the next four years--during Khatami's first four-year term and Clinton's final term--could begin the process of reengagement.
PHASE ONE: THE OPENING ROUND
Both parties in this impasse have indicated that they are waiting for the other side to make a meaningful first move. During his first postelection press conference, Khatami argued that when it came to improved relations with the United States, the "key to the problem is in their hands, not ours." And the State Department duly noted that now "the ball is in Iran's court."
For the process to work, both sides will have to take difficult steps that break down roughly into four phases. Simply laying out these measures underscores the enormity of the task. The first phase would almost certainly have to be informal, with the focus on building confidence and establishing bonafides to lay the groundwork for addressing more substantive issues. To get the process going, leaders on both sides should implement three steps:
Lower the decibel level and frequency of rhetoric.
Tehran should end references to the "Great Satan" and other cliched accusations about the United States that appear in the speeches of its top officials and its daily press. And in referring to Iran, Washington should stop using terms such as "outlaw" or "rogue" state and should also discourage the tendency to link acts of violence or even accidents, such as the explosion of TWA 800, to Iran before solid evidence is available.
Ease restrictions on travel and contacts.
Contacts between Iranians and Americans can help establish "track two" diplomacy to create an informal dialogue. Both sides could indirectly facilitate contacts by allowing visits or exchanges by scholars; representatives of cultural, professional, and nongovernmental organizations; and individuals with government contacts. American visa restrictions remain particularly severe, requiring a four-to-six-week waiting period and two trips to an American consulate abroad. "Track two" can never replace real talks, but such contacts could help change public opinion and improve the general atmosphere.
Differentiate between threats and unacceptable actions.
Both sides need to distinguish between actions that are genuinely threatening and policies that are merely uncomfortable or disagreeable. Iran may object to the American military presence in the Persian Gulf, but it must recognize that the United States has legitimate interests to protect--most notably, safeguarding the flow of oil and enforcing sanctions against Saddam Hussein. The United States may have just cause to be concerned about Iranian efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction, but must acknowledge Iran's valid need for conventional weapons, especially after losing 40 percent of its war materiel in the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. (Despite Iraq's subsequent conflict over Kuwait, it remains better armed today than Iran.)
PHASE TWO: THE HURDLES
A second phase should begin with an agreement--negotiated either through third parties or directly--on a structure that encompasses a series of steps and countersteps to deal with the practices and policies most offensive to the other country. The Clinton administration has stated that it would enter into direct talks with Iran, so long as the Islamic Republic is prepared to address three "areas of concern": the development of weapons of mass destruction, the sponsorship of terrorism, and the sabotage of the Arab-Israeli peace process. But so far the United States has offered little in return, other than a vague promise to restore diplomatic and economic relations. The U.S. approach is all stick but no carrot. Moreover, linking these issues together and seeking to address them simultaneously allows little room for maneuverability on either side. Iran has not indicated that it will respond in a meaningful way to engagement or to easing of sanctions, for which Europe has repeatedly lobbied Washington.
A framework of reciprocal measures would provide a road map, however roughly sketched, of engagement's ultimate goals. It would allow each side to test the other's good intentions before proceeding and would provide incentives to continue. Such an approach would embody a valuable lesson learned from the Oslo peace process--if both parties are truly committed to rapprochement, then implementing gradual confidence-building measures offers a better chance of success than tackling difficult, divisive issues all at once. This strategy would avoid the kind of confusion generated by Iran's proposed Conoco deal, which Tehran did not describe as an overture to Washington until after the White House had rejected it. Both sides need to understand that these actions would be part of an ongoing process rather than isolated gestures. Phase two, which could stretch for as long as two years, would be the hardest phase, for neither side is likely to change easily. Yet nothing will happen unless these steps are taken.
Iran
End support and sponsorship of terrorism. Iran has long denied its involvement in extremist activities, despite the recent conviction in Thailand of an Iranian agent who intended to bomb the Israeli embassy in Bangkok, and strong intelligence data on other cases. The Khatami regime will have to erase even the perception that it is involved in targeting and sabotaging foreign governments and personnel. Tehran will also need to block terrorist acts by surrogates, stop training Arab dissidents who seek to harm the United States and Western allies, and bring its security agencies under control. Iran's behavior, in other words, should begin conforming to international standards and the rule of law. This process includes ending the assassination of its own dissidents abroad, the kind of act for which a German court recently implicated the regime's highest officials. Likewise, Tehran will have to do more than reassure European officials that it will not send a hit squad to murder novelist Salman Rushdie. It must also deal with a small religious foundation that has pledged a $2.5 million reward for his death.
Stop sabotaging the Arab-Israeli peace process. Tehran is unlikely to return to the kind of close cooperation with Israel that prevailed during the reign of the shah, nor is it likely to change its opposition to the current detente between Israel and the Arab world. But it must end attempts to undo the peace process by training, equipping, or financing--directly or indirectly--organizations such as Islamic Jihad, which has claimed responsibility for suicide bombings of Israeli civilian targets. Iran will also have to distance itself from extremist groups targeting Arab governments that have begun to engage with Israel.
The United States
In exchange for these steps by Iran, the United States will need to take simultaneous actions. These will be the incentives for Iran to continue the process, although the Islamic Republic will not be rewarded for its actions until U.S. intelligence can verify that Tehran's behavior has changed significantly.
Expedite closure on Iran's frozen assets. Returning assets frozen by the United States since the hostage crisis has long been a key Iranian condition for bettering relations and a yardstick by which Tehran says it will judge American intentions. A joint U.S.-Iran tribunal that meets in the Hague has resolved most of the 4,000 financial claims and counterclaims, but a major, multibillion-dollar dispute remains over the value and billing of arms that Tehran paid for before the revolution, most of which were never delivered.
Support a European Union offer to promote constructive engagement. Washington should accept a bid by its European allies to prove that constructive engagement is a more effective tool for changing Iranian behavior. The initiative should be tied to a specified time frame, perhaps coinciding with Khatami's consolidation of his government. As progress is made during this roughly two-year period, the United States should suspend pressure on Europe and Japan to isolate Iran, and it should at least temporarily end opposition to Western economic credits designed to boost Iranian development. Washington should also promote diplomatic ministerial contact between its allies and Tehran. In exchange, the European Union should meet Washington halfway. The EU could be urged to respond to verified acts of Iranian misbehavior by implementing limited, punitive sanctions. Europe might favor such an approach for two reasons. First, it is part of a broad, earnest campaign to engage Iran. Second, it represents a strategy of "proportional response," which would involve limited and selective sanctions as opposed to the comprehensive penalties that U.S. policymakers advocate.
Regain control of U.S. policy on Iran. To have any flexibility in dealing with Tehran, the administration needs to bring Congress and public opinion along from an early stage. Clinton could build bipartisan consensus for these policies by mustering the public support of Republican heavy-hitters like former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft, who recently pushed for a new approach to U.S.-Iran relations. Such a tactic served the president well during his tough battle with Senate hardliners over ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention. Likewise, the growing backlash against sanctions by American business leaders could give the administration considerable clout when dealing with Congress, as was made apparent during the recent debate over granting most-favored-nation trading status to China. Whenever possible, the administration should emphasize that America stands to reap substantial benefits from engagement, both in terms of creating jobs at home and guaranteeing security abroad.
PHASE THREE: DIRECT ENGAGEMENT
The third stage would allow a series of contacts on issues of mutual concern over perhaps a year or two. It would amount to phased engagement.
Direct contact on neutral turf. American and Iranian officials should make a concerted effort to discuss and emphasize areas of common ground at international forums and at meetings with representatives of financial institutions and regional bodies. Many issues, from regional environmental problems and drug proliferation, to Afghanistan's instability and Bosnia's future, would benefit from direct U.S.-Iran contact. Some of these problems are becoming increasingly urgent. With NATO troops expected to withdraw from Bosnia in less than a year, the United States can no longer ignore the fact that Tehran's ties to Bosnian Muslims will make it a long-term player in the politics of that troubled region. The United States and Iran could design engagement so as to address less problematic issues first and more contentious ones later. Despite the enormous changes in Iran's political system, many of its foreign policy goals have not changed since the era of the shah. Defusing regional conflicts, attracting foreign investment, and gaining access to Western markets are as much priorities today as they were 20 years ago.
Tentative commercial contacts. As contacts expand, commercial links between Iran and the United States could begin again, albeit gradually. For example, the U.S. government could lift legal restraints to allow U.S. companies to transship Iranian oil to Europe, help to develop Iran's oil and gas facilities, or sell oil-drilling equipment to Iran--projects that generate jobs and income for Americans. Other constraints on importing handicrafts and rugs, which primarily helps Iran's economy, could also be lifted eventually. But restoration of full U.S.-Iran commercial ties would need to await more significant diplomatic progress.
Opening talks on security issues. Last but not least, Iranian and U.S. Officials will need to address in bilateral talks a range of security concerns, from broad issues in the Pesian Gulf to arms proliferation throughout the Middle East and South Asia. Iran will not even discuss its conventional arms buildup or its pursuit of unconventional weapons unless its own legitimate defense and security concerns--including endemic instability along several borders, regional arms proliferation, and America's significant military presence in the Gulf--are also addressed. At this stage, both sides should strive for common ground, such as containing Saddam Hussein or securing the free flow of oil. The two sides could reassure each other about their long-term intentions and craft a broader context for eventually resolving their differences on, for instance, the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Tehran would be more likely to abandon its pursuit of a nuclear capability if it felt secure about the United States, Iraq, and other neighbors. Washington, in turn, might find Iran's conventional weapons acquisition more tolerable if it felt more confident that Iran did not intend to use them against the United States or its allies.
THE ENDGAME
Given the history of tensions between Iran and the United States, this deliberately paced sequence of steps may be the best that either side can hope to achieve over the next four years. Yet the current confluence of factors--Iran's pivotal election, growing American skepticism about U.S. policy on Iran, the Gulf monarchies' rapprochement with Tehran, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's declaration this year that Washington will not deal with Iraq as long as Saddam Hussein stays in power--offers the best opportunity for a major policy change by both sides in many years. Clinton is also the first U.S. president since Iran's revolution not to have American hostages held either by Iranians or pro-Iranian extremists in Lebanon. In the past, the two governments were generally out of sync on everything from regional goals to leadership cycles. The next four years, in contrast, represent a unique juncture.
Tehran will have to launch the process. Khatami must create the conditions for change by performing these specific steps, by cleaning up Iran's human rights record, and by removing the perpetrators of Iranian mischief--a process he has begun by changing the ministers of intelligence and interior. Initially, he will almost certainly have to begin by taking small steps, but Washington will have to be alert to these shifts and help to accelerate them by responding appropriately. In the past the United States has failed to acknowledge such changes, as in the early 1990s when Rafsanjani squeezed from power several high-ranking radicals associated with hostage seizures and anti-American attacks. The United States may not be able to bend dramatically at first either, but it will need to extend a hand. Now in his final term, Clinton also has more leverage to act and perhaps even more interest as he seeks to create a legacy.
The final issues--restoring full commercial ties and diplomatic relations--will probably have to wait until Khatami's second term, pending his reelection, and a new U.S. administration. Somewhat like his counterpart in the Oval Office, Khatami's first order of business will be to build a viable political coalition that will allow him to implement the ambitious domestic platform upon which he was elected. Bringing Khamenei along, in particular, is likely to require time, heavy persuasion, and verification on the Iranian side that the cost-benefit ratio of a dramatic policy shift is worth the adjustment. Khatami will strengthen his argument if he can show the Supreme Leader that a shift in Iran's foreign policy will produce the desirable response, including the access to Western technology, credit, and investment that Tehran needs, particularly for its oil and gas industries.
During the endgame--which will also be the time to deal with the thorny problem of weapons of mass destruction--Iran and the United States should at least attempt to reach specific understandings over security issues so that there is no need or threat that leads to acquisition or use of the deadliest weapons. Throughout the engagement process, the obstacles are enormous; the chances of a new impasse or of the effort's collapse are high. But as daunting as the risks in changing course may seem, the bigger risk is to make no effort to defuse one of the world's most volatile relationships--or prevent it from getting worse.
Saturday, June 1, 1996
DATELINE TEHRAN: A REVOLUTION IMPLODES
FOREIGN POLICY
Summer 1996
By Robin Wright
Almost a generation after its Islamic revolution reshaped Middle Eastern politics, Iran has reached a critical juncture. At stake is its survival as the world's only modern theocracy. The odds are now almost decisively against Tehran--though not because of U.S. policy. Indeed, the latest congressional schemes and White House sanctions have once again provided rallying points around which to mobilize nationalist passions in a fiercely proud and millennia-old society.
Many of Iran's problems since the 1979 revolution have indeed centered on tensions with the outside world: Western economic sanctions after the 1979 American embassy seizure; Iraq's 1980 invasion and the subsequent eight-year war; widespread disdain by Arab world leaders of their militant Persian brethren; and isolation from the United States, the world's most important political power and, for an oil-producer, economic market. Many of these problems endure. Its rich natural resources and petrodollars continue to give Tehran access to most comers of the globe, but, because of Iran's record of extremist tactics and goals, it cannot count on a single country as a genuine ally.
But the real challenge facing the Islamic Republic in the mid-1990s is instead internal. The revolution is imploding.
The process is gradual, unlike the dramatic upheaval that forced Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi from the Peacock Throne and ended a monarchical system dating back 2,500 years. The climax is not yet in sight, and it will not necessarily mean total collapse of the system. Nevertheless, the problems are now so fundamental and pervasive that the Islamic regime can no longer hope to survive over the long term under the economic and political system established after the 1979 revolution. Like the Soviet Union, Iran literally can no longer afford its ideology. It has reached a juncture where it must change, one way or another.
ANGER, DISSENT, AND NEW IDEAS
The signs of decay are multifaceted. In an era when power is increasingly based on financial strength rather than military might, the most fundamental problems Iran faces are economic.
The first challenge centers on oil, specifically plunging prices and rising operational costs.
The pivotal fact is that petrodollar income is down to almost one-third of what it was just before the revolution. Iran's oil industry, which has not been modernized in almost two decades, also badly needs an overhaul. If nothing is done over the next five years, Tehran faces the prospect of declining production. The worst-case scenario is that Iran, which is currently the second-largest producer among the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), could actually become a net oil-importer within the next quarter-century if it does not update its equipment soon. Though unlikely, this prediction by Western diplomats and oil analysts underscores the potential long-term vulnerability of Iran's leading source of income.
The oil crisis reflects the broader wear and tear on Iran's infrastructure. For the revolution's first 18 months, the regime used its oil wealth to bring some measure of modernity to the poor and to parts of the country unchanged for centuries. The "Construction Jihad" introduced electricity, running water, and schools to hundreds of thousands of Iranians. But the effort slowed abruptly when Iraq invaded. The Islamic Republic diverted billions into the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war and into postwar rearming, as the military had lost nearly 40 per cent of the national arsenal to the war. Neighboring Iraq's military remains larger and better armed, even after the devastating punishment of Operation Desert Storm, and Baghdad has repeatedly balked at accepting a formal peace with Tehran, so the ruling theocrats still feel vulnerable. As oil wealth has gone toward defense over the past 17 years, industry and development have stagnated. Up to two-thirds of Iran's factories run at limited capacity due to the chronic shortage of raw materials and the need for spare parts and new equipment--or a total overhaul.
The downward spiral in oil prices since the mid-1980s has in turn led to repeated budget shortfalls--up to 20 per cent in the Islamic year ending in March 1994. Iran also faces a burgeoning debt since it went on an uncontrolled postwar shopping binge for billions of dollars worth of foreign consumer goods to placate a war-weary society. This strategy was costly. One of the revolution's proudest accomplishments, as the mullahs often boasted, was paying back the shah's $8.4 billion debt and freeing Iran from Western creditors. In 1990, Iran still owed virtually nothing, but estimates of Tehran's external debt in 1996 run as high as a record $33 billion. At least one-quarter of oil revenues this year will go into servicing the foreign debt.
A second problem centers on population and poverty. According to statistics in Iran, Iran's population has almost doubled in 17 years, from 34 million to 64.7 million. During the same period, oil income has fallen by almost two-thirds. The population growth rate is further sapping the resources of an already fragile infrastructure. The number of primary school students has nearly tripled, from 7 million to more than 19 million since the revolution, forcing schools to run double and triple shifts. Despite vast agricultural lands, Iran has increasingly had to import basic foodstuffs. Most costly are the direct and indirect subsidies for food and fuel that absorb more than $6 billion annually--or almost half of Iran's oil revenues.
The average Iranian has been particularly hard hit since Tehran floated its artificially overvalued currency after the war. The American dollar, stuck officially for a decade at around 70 rials, rose to more than 3,000 rials in the mid-1990s. As a result, the cost of most items soared, while incomes are less than half what they were before the revolution. And annual inflation on basic items now ranges from 40 to 200 per cent.
The economic system is generally stretched thin. Unemployment has climbed to 30 per cent or more; economists and diplomats in Tehran estimate that, of those who have work, underemployment has reached 75 per cent. In the early 1990s, rising business costs and declining revenues led professionals, from lawyers to architects, to close up shop and work at home. Many others were forced to take on second jobs. A 1993 Iran Air crash that killed 132 people elicited letters to Tehran newspapers blaming a troubled economy that forced air controllers to moonlight as cab drivers to make ends meet. By 1995, many Iranians felt compelled to take on third jobs. Iran's Chamber of Commerce admits that up to 40 per cent of Iranians live below the poverty line or barely above it; diplomats peg the figure closer to 60 per cent.
Tehran, teeming with more than 12 million residents by some estimates, is representative of the crisis. It has become one of the world's megacities--overpopulated, polluted, and, because of war refugees and rural migrants, increasingly poor. Despite the stiff Islamic penal code, crime has soared; even foreign diplomats have been victimized at their guarded residences.
A third problem is corruption and mismanagement of resources, which are difficult to estimate but widely considered to be rampant. Both have impeded efforts to liberalize and privatize the economy. Iranians at all levels complain that payoff demands are far larger and made by a wider array of personnel in both the public and private sectors than they were during the monarchy. A related problem is the network of foundations that actually hold the largest single share of Iran's wealth. Key foundations, which provide everything from food to college scholarships and which control large businesses and industries, have in effect become private fiefdoms often beyond government control.
The bottom line is that the vast majority of Iranians are much worse off after 17 years of theocratic rule than they were during the shah's era. Many of the regime's most ardent supporters believe the Islamic leadership has left them behind. Three groups vital to the regime's survival--the young, the middle class, and the mostazafin, the oppressed in whose name the revolution was undertaken--have soured on the revolution. Unemployment among those aged 15 to 24, for example, is double the national average--staggering in light of the fact that 70 per cent of Iran's population is under 25 and half is under 15. The mullahs may regret their decision to lower the voting age to 15.
Another increasingly alienated pillar of Iranian society is the bazaar, a term loosely applied to the traditional merchant class. The bazaar's decision to go on strike was a turning point in the shah's ouster. Relations between the bazaaris and the current regime are also rocky--for many of the same reasons: The mullahs may be profiting, but many bazaaris clearly are not. Bazaaris are traditionally religious, but the costs of the revolution have cut deeply into or impeded their profit margins. New restrictions in 1995 limiting access to foreign exchange to import raw materials and requiring that foreign profits from exports be remitted to Iran have heightened tensions.
Public disillusionment is visible in several ways. Since 1992, sporadic riots have erupted in major cities such as Tehran, Mashhad, Shiraz, Qazvin, and Arak. Thousands have been involved in pockets of unrest over prices and housing shortages--flash points still not defused. Violence, however, remains unusual.
More telling over the past two years has been the daring and stinging criticism from a cross section of highly placed or respected public figures in fields ranging from the arts to the military. Azizollah Amir Rahimi, a former general who firmly backed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and headed the military police after the revolution, for example, charged in a privately circulated letter (which later made its way back into Iran via foreign radio broadcasts) that the clerics are responsible for the misery in Iran. "The nation is in poverty and the country is on the verge of explosion," he wrote in 1994. At the same time, a group of 134 writers and publishers issued an open letter calling for an end to intimidation and censorship. In June 1995, 214 actors and directors petitioned the regime to end "straitjacket regulations and complicated methods of supervision" over everything from plots to production.
In this climate of criticism, new ideas have emerged to further challenge the regime. Abdol Karim Soroush, Iran's leading philosopher and one of the revolution's early supporters, has become the focal point of a new movement trying to reconcile Islam and democracy. In a series of magazine essays and books since 1991, Soroush has argued that Islam should not be used as a modem ideology, for it is too likely to become totalitarian. The alternative is an Islamic democracy not imposed from the top but chosen by the majority of the people, both believers and nonbelievers. He has also argued that the rights of the clergy should be no greater than the privileges of anyone else and that the mullahs have no a priori right to role. He argues further that secularism is not the enemy or rival of religion, but its complement. Soroush has such a large following that leading Iranian officials now openly attack his ideas in public speeches. At last year's annual commemoration of the American embassy seizure, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme jurisprudent and successor to Khomeini, devoted as much time condemning Soroush's writing as he did the United States and Israel.
The anger, dissent, and new ideas are not, however, limited to elites or intellectuals. Tehran taxi drivers often refuse rides to the clergy, and some even run fingers across their throats to show contempt. Jokes about the mullahs are rampant and irreverent. In 1994, the master of ceremonies at a Tehran wedding did a lengthy routine ridiculing the clergy--in the presence of several clerics.
FROM DECONSTRUCTION TO RECONSTRUCTION
The regime is not unaware of the mounting backlash. President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani in particular has attempted to deal with economic problems and societal malaise. Indeed, his leadership has differed significantly from the Khomeini decade. The period between the imam's triumphant return in 1979 and his sudden death in 1989 represented deconstruction--of the monarchy, of the "Westoxic" influences that flavored everything from education and business priorities to fashion, of the regional balance of power, and of long-standing diplomatic and economic alliances.
The Rafsanjani era, by contrast, has been marked by a rush to reconstruct everything from the physical and psychological damage of the war with Iraq to the tattered economy. When he was elected president a month after Khomeini's death in mid-1989, Rafsanjani wanted not only to move on; in key areas, he actually tried to reverse course. He recognized that the original passions fueling the revolution died long before the imam's passing.
In his first term, Rafsanjani's boldest moves were economic. As the former communist regimes of Eastern Europe and the ex-dictatorships of Latin America and Africa moved to liberalize their markets, Iran also launched major reforms. Rafsanjani, son of a pistachio farmer and entrepreneur, is a free market mullah who pushed private ownership of business and subsidy cutbacks.
Under his direction, several companies that were nationalized after the revolution were again privatized. The stock market launched by the shah was revived; several clerics even became investors. Foreign investment laws were gradually amended until they actually became more favorable to foreigners than they were during the monarchy. In top economic jobs, Rafsanjani replaced clergy or their followers with Western-educated technocrats. Tehran even began obtaining credits and borrowing millions again from the West, including countries it once condemned, and from the World Bank.
The dramatic shift was best reflected in policy on population growth. In the early 1980s, the mullahs had called on Iranian women to breed an Islamic generation--and they complied. In the early 1990s, the government launched a massive campaign that mobilized thousands of women to go door-to-door to promote birth control. Clinics offered for free everything from tubal ligations and vasectomies to the pill, condoms, and Norplant. Food and other subsidies were cut after the third child. A leading mullah even issued a fatwa, or religious decree, calling for limiting the number of children per family. Iran brought the fertility rate down from an average of seven births per woman in 1986 to 3.6 births in 1993--almost half the rate before the revolution. Iran's progress in family planning was even recognized by the U.S.-based organization Population Action International.
At the onset of Rafsanjani's first four-year presidential term, the tenor inside the country relaxed significantly. The music of Beethoven and Mozart returned to Tehran concert halls and the plays of Anton Chekov and Arthur Miller to its theaters. Chess, banned as a form of gambling, became permissible, as did pale shades of nail polish and more fashionable Islamic dress. Iran's movie industry turned from themes of war and revolution to those of love and adventure. Magazines and newspapers, including publications critical of the government, proliferated. Many of the excesses synonymous with the revolution's early years were checked. Even the activities of the neighborhood komitehs were reined in when they were merged with the police force. The komitehs had monitored moral conduct through means ranging from observing public places and rifling through garbage in search of outlawed liquor bottles to checking cars for unmarried couples at impromptu roadblocks.
Rafsanjani also tried to relax tensions with the outside world. In fits and starts, he began patching up relations with the Gulf Arabs, notably Saudi Arabia, who had sided with Iraq during the 1980-88 war. After Baghdad's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Rafsanjani's government had a de facto understanding with the U.S.-led coalition that Iran would not meddle with Operation Desert Storm, and Tehran seized more than 100 Iraqi military and civilian aircraft dispatched to safer turf in Iran. Afterward, Rafsanjani intervened personally to help achieve the release of the last American and European hostages held by pro-Iranian militias in Lebanon.
By the early 1990s, the revolution appeared to be settling down. Rafsanjani was representative of the clerics who, never before having run a country during the 13 centuries of Islam, learned during the difficult Khomeini decade about the exigencies of a state. After the hostage release--a response to President George Bush's pledge that "good will begets good will"--many in Tehran, including officials, even thought rapprochement with the "Great Satan" was around the corner. They thought that renewing ties with the United States--even if by piecemeal--would be a psychological boon to the economy and public morale.
But some of Rafsanjani's steps in the direction of liberalization contributed to his undoing. In an attempt to rein in hardliners and develop new domestic and foreign policy options, he orchestrated what amounted to a purge. He manipulated the 1992 parliamentary elections so that the best-known extremists--including the mentor to the students who had seized the American embassy and a former ambassador to Syria tied to the bombings of U.S. diplomatic and military facilities in Lebanon--were either eliminated from candidates' lists or faced serious disadvantages in running for office. A new vetting system found many candidates, including incumbents, unqualified to run for office. The most militant revolutionaries were swept from power.
But Rafsanjani's attempts to marginalize the radicals only produced another challenge. In their place came a new group of social conservatives who reined in the president's reform efforts. Iran's version of shock therapy was put on hold, and many subsidies were restored. The new parliament, or Majlis, led by Speaker Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, changed direction.
Once the heart of the revolution, especially when Rafsanjani was its speaker in the 1980s, Iran's Majlis passed no major or defining legislation between 1992 and 1996. It was diverted instead by secondary issues such as the impact of satellite dishes and videos on social mores. In 1995, despite Rafsanjani's opposition, the Majlis outlawed satellite dishes that had brought everything from CNN to "The Oprah Winfrey Show" into Iran. In 1993, the Majlis agreed to allow the import and distribution of "Islamically correct" videos, but the statute also made distributors of pornographic videos liable for the death penalty after repeated convictions.
THE POLITICAL CHALLENGE
The various splits reflect the growing fragmentation within the Islamic government. Despite outside skepticism about moderates or militants, a full spectrum of beliefs has emerged in Iranian politics over the past decade. It has also led to serious stalemates. Ironically, over the past three years, Rafsanjani, Iran's shrewdest politician, has faced challenges similar to those faced by President Bill Clinton: His reformist agenda and themes of change have been obstructed by a conservative and feisty parliament that has forced him to fight for his political life. As a result, his second term has seen little movement, and the Rafsanjani presidency generally has not ushered in the anticipated era of normalcy or progress in the regime's relations with its own constituents or with the outside world.
The voices of the revolution are also changing as Rafsanjani has increasingly been drowned out by others who have their own agendas. Three are particularly prominent. Ayatollah Khamenei is a former president (before an executive presidency was introduced in 1989) whose status was quickly elevated in 1989 so he could succeed the Ayatollah Khomeini. He has been struggling ever since to prove his widely questioned credentials as both Iran's "supreme guide" and a leader of the Shiite world. Although he is a less-adept politician who traditionally took a backseat to Rafsanjani, Khamenei has in recent years staked out bold and hard-line positions to establish his own identity and power base. Parliamentary speaker Nateq-Nouri is an ambitious, xenophobic conservative who still uses the revolution's early rhetoric. He is already campaigning hard to succeed Rafsanjani when the president's second and final term expires next year. Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati is a senior and outspoken member of the Council of Guardians whose angry militancy seems determined to keep the clergy in control of government and to prevent any compromising of the revolution.
The tension among various government branches and personnel reflects the broader political challenge to the Islamic Republic. For all its shortcomings, Iran's revolution did begin with a democratic veneer--with the emphasis on veneer. Disparate elements from the Islamic Right to the socialist Left and many groups in between banded together to end more than two millennia of dynastic rule; in no small part, they wanted a greater say in controlling their lives. Even after the revolution was commandeered by Khomeini's followers, the new constitution was republican. All major religious groups--including Jews, assorted Christian sects, and Zoroastrians--are represented proportionately in parliament. The one exception has been the Baha'i faith, which is excluded and whose members are often persecuted because they are viewed as heretics and because many were employed by the monarchy (due to their high levels of education). As hard as it may be to believe, history one day may look back on Iran's revolution as a harbinger of the struggle to reconcile democracy and Islam in the Middle East.
Over the past 17 years, however, Tehran's Islamic system has been manipulated and corrupted so that it deviates dangerously from its original form--and from any semblance of democracy. For the first round of parliamentary elections in March 1996, for example, 44 per cent of the 5,121 candidates who registered to run were disqualified by a religious council. Officials claim that only those linked to outlawed opposition groups or who are illiterate or drug addicts were barred, but in reality the system is driven by politics.
Iran's constitution provides for political parties, but the government effectively excludes them. This year, election officials barred most of the 15 members of a coalition made up of the Freedom Movement, a group of liberal Islamists headed by a former foreign minister who quit after the American embassy was seized, nationalists from the National Front, and independents. Rejection letters never specified why they were barred. Security forces broke up a press conference the coalition had organized to announce its withdrawal. "Parliamentary elections could represent a real contest for power in Iran's political system--but only if arbitrary bans on candidates and other constraints on political life are lifted," Human Rights Watch/Middle East reported after an unprecedented tour of Iran in early 1996.
Other constitutional guarantees have been flagrantly ignored, violated, or rewritten. The right of free expression was undermined by a subsequent law requiring the press "to enjoin the good and forbid the evil." Repressive conduct through subtle harassment or overt action has also returned. At least seven publications have been ordered to close down since January 1995; others stopped publication after government subsidies for paper were revoked. Several journalists have been charged with or imprisoned for actions that boil down to offending Islam.
In recent years, vigilantes linked to political or religious factions have attacked individuals or groups who dare to question the regime. Twice last year, Soroush was beaten up in university lecture halls by hizbollahi (or pro-regime) vigilantes, forcing him to flee. Many of the 134 writers who asked for an end to censorship received death threats. In 1994, noted writer Ali Akbar Saidi Sirjani died mysteriously in detention, where he had been placed after writing satirical and questioning essays about the regime; his widow is reportedly destitute, because the government froze their bank accounts. Rahimi was detained after his letter was broadcast on the BBC and Voice of America, although the pretext for his detention was alleged opium addiction. The government of God has effectively declared its monopoly on the truth. And the tentative openings of the late 1980s and carry 1990s have ended.
The growing repression and brutality mixed with the pervasive sense of lost mission have cost the regime much of its legitimacy. Hardships and clampdowns during the revolution's first decade had the cover of a hard-fought war; now there are no credible excuses. Some Iranians who once staunchly opposed the monarchy now talk longingly of the days of the shah--though not of the Pahlavi dynasty. They instead want a return to a multifaceted society and a respected state; proud Iranians hate being considered pariahs and terrorists by the outside world.
Such sentiments extend beyond the lay public. The Islamic Republic never had the support of many mullahs; as the failure of the system threatens to taint Islam, discontent and dissidence among mullahs appear to be growing. The most dynamic--and controversial--debate in Tehran today centers on whether or not the clerics should basically go back to the seminaries and their original roles as interpreters of God's word. The other side of the coin is whether the running of the state should be turned over to the technocrats. Although there are no opinion surveys, several indicators--from debates among young clerics and in seminaries to discussions among members of parliament--suggest that large numbers of clerics think it is time to get out of government.
POLICY OPTIONS FOR AMERICA
In some ways, Iran's Islamic revolution was virtually destined for a big fall from the outset. The regime's use of religion as a political idiom elevated expectations to utopian heights that no state, much less a developing nation, even if it does have oil, could ever hope to achieve. Besides its inherent vulnerability, the revolution's various constituencies had independent visions of Iran after the shah. Iranian unity has been an illusion ever since just one of those visions strong-armed its way to the top. And since then, the inner circle of mullahs who once rallied together around Khomeini has deeply divided; clerical politicians turn out to be no different from their secular counterparts. Any semblance of solidarity is largely a byproduct of challenges from regional and international parties that allowed the theocrats to lay blame elsewhere or to appeal to national pride. The latest such challenge is House speaker Newt Gingrich's call for a $20 million U.S. intelligence program to overthrow the regime--an idea doomed from the outset anyway. Virtually no overt or covert action short of a full-scale military invasion has any chance of succeeding. Even Iranians who dislike this regime do not want foreigners influencing or dictating their future. So the odds are against the success of any military actions.
For several reasons, there are no easy options in dealing with Iran. First, the international community has been just as fragmented as Tehran's leadership. A case in point was the Clinton administration's decision in 1995 to impose new sanctions eliminating the last vestiges of U.S. trade with or investment in Iran--at a cost of millions in income and thousands of American jobs. The threat of even stiffer congressional action--because Iran is usually an easy political target on the Hill--had forced the administration's hand, but the move generally fit in with U.S. strategy to "contain" Iran and neighboring Iraq. The American action pushed U.S. allies to make a choice: work with Washington to squeeze Tehran to stop its nuclear programs and end its alleged terrorism or continue to trade with Iran. Not a single government was willing to cut economic links with Iran to side with the United States. Each opted to follow a carrot-and-stick approach that amounts to constructive engagement.
Second, rapprochement between the United States and Iran is not an option anytime soon. Both have repeatedly and stubbornly resisted opportunities to repair relations. As a Western ambassador in Tehran noted recently, Americans play football while Iranians play chess, a difference that also plays out diplomatically. For the time being, the two states are destined to be locked into conflict, because they have different visions of how to conduct the business of state and more fundamentally how to enact priorities. The United States holds Iran accountable for aiding and abetting Hamas and Islamic Ji-had in the occupied territories as well as having ties with Damascus-based rejectionist groups, plus assorted attacks on Iranian dissidents abroad. Tehran has also been the most outspoken critic of the U.S.-brokered Mideast peace process. Iran, in turn, holds the United States responsible for offering refuge to its main rivals, including the shah's son and the Mujahadeen-e Khalq, or People's Holy Warriors, who are held responsible for assassinating a former president, prime minister, several members of the Majlis, and many civilians during the early 1980s. The CIA has reportedly funded broadcasts by the shah's son into Iran, and the Mujahadeen runs a large lobbying effort out of its Washington office.
Third, and despite all its problems, the regime still faces no external opposition force capable of ousting it. The Mujahadeen-e Khalq, which has an agenda best described as Islamic socialism, lacks domestic support even among the regime's toughest opponents, in no small part because it is based in rival Iraq. The group now amounts to little more than an irregular irritant. A return to the monarchy also has no significant support. To succeed and have legitimacy, change must come from within--either by the regime's actions or by inaction that offers opportunities to others. But aiding or intervening on behalf of the new internal forces could well undermine or taint these forces rather than encouraging evolutionary change.
An activist American foreign policy--bailing out Haiti and Bosnia, trying to bring peace to the Middle East and Northern Ireland--can be both effective and healthy. But with a host of economic and political sanctions already in place in Iran, it may be time for Washington to step back. For one thing, the American record of intervention in Iran to prop up or bring down leaders, in 1953 and 1979, respectively, ought to offer a potent lesson: The United States has little hope of determining who rules Iran. Trying to dictate the course of history too often backfires--there and elsewhere. With a boost from freely flowing information, which has penetrated Iran even more pervasively than it did communist Eastern Europe or Latin America's military dictatorships, the better way to undermine those responsible for repression at home and extremism abroad may be to let them do it to themselves. They are already well on their way.
~~~~~~~~
ROBIN WRIGHT, a former Middle East correspondent for the Sunday Times of London, is the author of Sacred Rage: The Wrath of Militant Islam (Simon and Schuster, 1985) and In the Name of God: The Khomeini Decade (Simon and Schuster, 1989). She covers global issues for the Los Angeles Times and travels frequently to Iran.
Summer 1996
By Robin Wright
Almost a generation after its Islamic revolution reshaped Middle Eastern politics, Iran has reached a critical juncture. At stake is its survival as the world's only modern theocracy. The odds are now almost decisively against Tehran--though not because of U.S. policy. Indeed, the latest congressional schemes and White House sanctions have once again provided rallying points around which to mobilize nationalist passions in a fiercely proud and millennia-old society.
Many of Iran's problems since the 1979 revolution have indeed centered on tensions with the outside world: Western economic sanctions after the 1979 American embassy seizure; Iraq's 1980 invasion and the subsequent eight-year war; widespread disdain by Arab world leaders of their militant Persian brethren; and isolation from the United States, the world's most important political power and, for an oil-producer, economic market. Many of these problems endure. Its rich natural resources and petrodollars continue to give Tehran access to most comers of the globe, but, because of Iran's record of extremist tactics and goals, it cannot count on a single country as a genuine ally.
But the real challenge facing the Islamic Republic in the mid-1990s is instead internal. The revolution is imploding.
The process is gradual, unlike the dramatic upheaval that forced Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi from the Peacock Throne and ended a monarchical system dating back 2,500 years. The climax is not yet in sight, and it will not necessarily mean total collapse of the system. Nevertheless, the problems are now so fundamental and pervasive that the Islamic regime can no longer hope to survive over the long term under the economic and political system established after the 1979 revolution. Like the Soviet Union, Iran literally can no longer afford its ideology. It has reached a juncture where it must change, one way or another.
ANGER, DISSENT, AND NEW IDEAS
The signs of decay are multifaceted. In an era when power is increasingly based on financial strength rather than military might, the most fundamental problems Iran faces are economic.
The first challenge centers on oil, specifically plunging prices and rising operational costs.
The pivotal fact is that petrodollar income is down to almost one-third of what it was just before the revolution. Iran's oil industry, which has not been modernized in almost two decades, also badly needs an overhaul. If nothing is done over the next five years, Tehran faces the prospect of declining production. The worst-case scenario is that Iran, which is currently the second-largest producer among the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), could actually become a net oil-importer within the next quarter-century if it does not update its equipment soon. Though unlikely, this prediction by Western diplomats and oil analysts underscores the potential long-term vulnerability of Iran's leading source of income.
The oil crisis reflects the broader wear and tear on Iran's infrastructure. For the revolution's first 18 months, the regime used its oil wealth to bring some measure of modernity to the poor and to parts of the country unchanged for centuries. The "Construction Jihad" introduced electricity, running water, and schools to hundreds of thousands of Iranians. But the effort slowed abruptly when Iraq invaded. The Islamic Republic diverted billions into the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war and into postwar rearming, as the military had lost nearly 40 per cent of the national arsenal to the war. Neighboring Iraq's military remains larger and better armed, even after the devastating punishment of Operation Desert Storm, and Baghdad has repeatedly balked at accepting a formal peace with Tehran, so the ruling theocrats still feel vulnerable. As oil wealth has gone toward defense over the past 17 years, industry and development have stagnated. Up to two-thirds of Iran's factories run at limited capacity due to the chronic shortage of raw materials and the need for spare parts and new equipment--or a total overhaul.
The downward spiral in oil prices since the mid-1980s has in turn led to repeated budget shortfalls--up to 20 per cent in the Islamic year ending in March 1994. Iran also faces a burgeoning debt since it went on an uncontrolled postwar shopping binge for billions of dollars worth of foreign consumer goods to placate a war-weary society. This strategy was costly. One of the revolution's proudest accomplishments, as the mullahs often boasted, was paying back the shah's $8.4 billion debt and freeing Iran from Western creditors. In 1990, Iran still owed virtually nothing, but estimates of Tehran's external debt in 1996 run as high as a record $33 billion. At least one-quarter of oil revenues this year will go into servicing the foreign debt.
A second problem centers on population and poverty. According to statistics in Iran, Iran's population has almost doubled in 17 years, from 34 million to 64.7 million. During the same period, oil income has fallen by almost two-thirds. The population growth rate is further sapping the resources of an already fragile infrastructure. The number of primary school students has nearly tripled, from 7 million to more than 19 million since the revolution, forcing schools to run double and triple shifts. Despite vast agricultural lands, Iran has increasingly had to import basic foodstuffs. Most costly are the direct and indirect subsidies for food and fuel that absorb more than $6 billion annually--or almost half of Iran's oil revenues.
The average Iranian has been particularly hard hit since Tehran floated its artificially overvalued currency after the war. The American dollar, stuck officially for a decade at around 70 rials, rose to more than 3,000 rials in the mid-1990s. As a result, the cost of most items soared, while incomes are less than half what they were before the revolution. And annual inflation on basic items now ranges from 40 to 200 per cent.
The economic system is generally stretched thin. Unemployment has climbed to 30 per cent or more; economists and diplomats in Tehran estimate that, of those who have work, underemployment has reached 75 per cent. In the early 1990s, rising business costs and declining revenues led professionals, from lawyers to architects, to close up shop and work at home. Many others were forced to take on second jobs. A 1993 Iran Air crash that killed 132 people elicited letters to Tehran newspapers blaming a troubled economy that forced air controllers to moonlight as cab drivers to make ends meet. By 1995, many Iranians felt compelled to take on third jobs. Iran's Chamber of Commerce admits that up to 40 per cent of Iranians live below the poverty line or barely above it; diplomats peg the figure closer to 60 per cent.
Tehran, teeming with more than 12 million residents by some estimates, is representative of the crisis. It has become one of the world's megacities--overpopulated, polluted, and, because of war refugees and rural migrants, increasingly poor. Despite the stiff Islamic penal code, crime has soared; even foreign diplomats have been victimized at their guarded residences.
A third problem is corruption and mismanagement of resources, which are difficult to estimate but widely considered to be rampant. Both have impeded efforts to liberalize and privatize the economy. Iranians at all levels complain that payoff demands are far larger and made by a wider array of personnel in both the public and private sectors than they were during the monarchy. A related problem is the network of foundations that actually hold the largest single share of Iran's wealth. Key foundations, which provide everything from food to college scholarships and which control large businesses and industries, have in effect become private fiefdoms often beyond government control.
The bottom line is that the vast majority of Iranians are much worse off after 17 years of theocratic rule than they were during the shah's era. Many of the regime's most ardent supporters believe the Islamic leadership has left them behind. Three groups vital to the regime's survival--the young, the middle class, and the mostazafin, the oppressed in whose name the revolution was undertaken--have soured on the revolution. Unemployment among those aged 15 to 24, for example, is double the national average--staggering in light of the fact that 70 per cent of Iran's population is under 25 and half is under 15. The mullahs may regret their decision to lower the voting age to 15.
Another increasingly alienated pillar of Iranian society is the bazaar, a term loosely applied to the traditional merchant class. The bazaar's decision to go on strike was a turning point in the shah's ouster. Relations between the bazaaris and the current regime are also rocky--for many of the same reasons: The mullahs may be profiting, but many bazaaris clearly are not. Bazaaris are traditionally religious, but the costs of the revolution have cut deeply into or impeded their profit margins. New restrictions in 1995 limiting access to foreign exchange to import raw materials and requiring that foreign profits from exports be remitted to Iran have heightened tensions.
Public disillusionment is visible in several ways. Since 1992, sporadic riots have erupted in major cities such as Tehran, Mashhad, Shiraz, Qazvin, and Arak. Thousands have been involved in pockets of unrest over prices and housing shortages--flash points still not defused. Violence, however, remains unusual.
More telling over the past two years has been the daring and stinging criticism from a cross section of highly placed or respected public figures in fields ranging from the arts to the military. Azizollah Amir Rahimi, a former general who firmly backed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and headed the military police after the revolution, for example, charged in a privately circulated letter (which later made its way back into Iran via foreign radio broadcasts) that the clerics are responsible for the misery in Iran. "The nation is in poverty and the country is on the verge of explosion," he wrote in 1994. At the same time, a group of 134 writers and publishers issued an open letter calling for an end to intimidation and censorship. In June 1995, 214 actors and directors petitioned the regime to end "straitjacket regulations and complicated methods of supervision" over everything from plots to production.
In this climate of criticism, new ideas have emerged to further challenge the regime. Abdol Karim Soroush, Iran's leading philosopher and one of the revolution's early supporters, has become the focal point of a new movement trying to reconcile Islam and democracy. In a series of magazine essays and books since 1991, Soroush has argued that Islam should not be used as a modem ideology, for it is too likely to become totalitarian. The alternative is an Islamic democracy not imposed from the top but chosen by the majority of the people, both believers and nonbelievers. He has also argued that the rights of the clergy should be no greater than the privileges of anyone else and that the mullahs have no a priori right to role. He argues further that secularism is not the enemy or rival of religion, but its complement. Soroush has such a large following that leading Iranian officials now openly attack his ideas in public speeches. At last year's annual commemoration of the American embassy seizure, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme jurisprudent and successor to Khomeini, devoted as much time condemning Soroush's writing as he did the United States and Israel.
The anger, dissent, and new ideas are not, however, limited to elites or intellectuals. Tehran taxi drivers often refuse rides to the clergy, and some even run fingers across their throats to show contempt. Jokes about the mullahs are rampant and irreverent. In 1994, the master of ceremonies at a Tehran wedding did a lengthy routine ridiculing the clergy--in the presence of several clerics.
FROM DECONSTRUCTION TO RECONSTRUCTION
The regime is not unaware of the mounting backlash. President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani in particular has attempted to deal with economic problems and societal malaise. Indeed, his leadership has differed significantly from the Khomeini decade. The period between the imam's triumphant return in 1979 and his sudden death in 1989 represented deconstruction--of the monarchy, of the "Westoxic" influences that flavored everything from education and business priorities to fashion, of the regional balance of power, and of long-standing diplomatic and economic alliances.
The Rafsanjani era, by contrast, has been marked by a rush to reconstruct everything from the physical and psychological damage of the war with Iraq to the tattered economy. When he was elected president a month after Khomeini's death in mid-1989, Rafsanjani wanted not only to move on; in key areas, he actually tried to reverse course. He recognized that the original passions fueling the revolution died long before the imam's passing.
In his first term, Rafsanjani's boldest moves were economic. As the former communist regimes of Eastern Europe and the ex-dictatorships of Latin America and Africa moved to liberalize their markets, Iran also launched major reforms. Rafsanjani, son of a pistachio farmer and entrepreneur, is a free market mullah who pushed private ownership of business and subsidy cutbacks.
Under his direction, several companies that were nationalized after the revolution were again privatized. The stock market launched by the shah was revived; several clerics even became investors. Foreign investment laws were gradually amended until they actually became more favorable to foreigners than they were during the monarchy. In top economic jobs, Rafsanjani replaced clergy or their followers with Western-educated technocrats. Tehran even began obtaining credits and borrowing millions again from the West, including countries it once condemned, and from the World Bank.
The dramatic shift was best reflected in policy on population growth. In the early 1980s, the mullahs had called on Iranian women to breed an Islamic generation--and they complied. In the early 1990s, the government launched a massive campaign that mobilized thousands of women to go door-to-door to promote birth control. Clinics offered for free everything from tubal ligations and vasectomies to the pill, condoms, and Norplant. Food and other subsidies were cut after the third child. A leading mullah even issued a fatwa, or religious decree, calling for limiting the number of children per family. Iran brought the fertility rate down from an average of seven births per woman in 1986 to 3.6 births in 1993--almost half the rate before the revolution. Iran's progress in family planning was even recognized by the U.S.-based organization Population Action International.
At the onset of Rafsanjani's first four-year presidential term, the tenor inside the country relaxed significantly. The music of Beethoven and Mozart returned to Tehran concert halls and the plays of Anton Chekov and Arthur Miller to its theaters. Chess, banned as a form of gambling, became permissible, as did pale shades of nail polish and more fashionable Islamic dress. Iran's movie industry turned from themes of war and revolution to those of love and adventure. Magazines and newspapers, including publications critical of the government, proliferated. Many of the excesses synonymous with the revolution's early years were checked. Even the activities of the neighborhood komitehs were reined in when they were merged with the police force. The komitehs had monitored moral conduct through means ranging from observing public places and rifling through garbage in search of outlawed liquor bottles to checking cars for unmarried couples at impromptu roadblocks.
Rafsanjani also tried to relax tensions with the outside world. In fits and starts, he began patching up relations with the Gulf Arabs, notably Saudi Arabia, who had sided with Iraq during the 1980-88 war. After Baghdad's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Rafsanjani's government had a de facto understanding with the U.S.-led coalition that Iran would not meddle with Operation Desert Storm, and Tehran seized more than 100 Iraqi military and civilian aircraft dispatched to safer turf in Iran. Afterward, Rafsanjani intervened personally to help achieve the release of the last American and European hostages held by pro-Iranian militias in Lebanon.
By the early 1990s, the revolution appeared to be settling down. Rafsanjani was representative of the clerics who, never before having run a country during the 13 centuries of Islam, learned during the difficult Khomeini decade about the exigencies of a state. After the hostage release--a response to President George Bush's pledge that "good will begets good will"--many in Tehran, including officials, even thought rapprochement with the "Great Satan" was around the corner. They thought that renewing ties with the United States--even if by piecemeal--would be a psychological boon to the economy and public morale.
But some of Rafsanjani's steps in the direction of liberalization contributed to his undoing. In an attempt to rein in hardliners and develop new domestic and foreign policy options, he orchestrated what amounted to a purge. He manipulated the 1992 parliamentary elections so that the best-known extremists--including the mentor to the students who had seized the American embassy and a former ambassador to Syria tied to the bombings of U.S. diplomatic and military facilities in Lebanon--were either eliminated from candidates' lists or faced serious disadvantages in running for office. A new vetting system found many candidates, including incumbents, unqualified to run for office. The most militant revolutionaries were swept from power.
But Rafsanjani's attempts to marginalize the radicals only produced another challenge. In their place came a new group of social conservatives who reined in the president's reform efforts. Iran's version of shock therapy was put on hold, and many subsidies were restored. The new parliament, or Majlis, led by Speaker Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, changed direction.
Once the heart of the revolution, especially when Rafsanjani was its speaker in the 1980s, Iran's Majlis passed no major or defining legislation between 1992 and 1996. It was diverted instead by secondary issues such as the impact of satellite dishes and videos on social mores. In 1995, despite Rafsanjani's opposition, the Majlis outlawed satellite dishes that had brought everything from CNN to "The Oprah Winfrey Show" into Iran. In 1993, the Majlis agreed to allow the import and distribution of "Islamically correct" videos, but the statute also made distributors of pornographic videos liable for the death penalty after repeated convictions.
THE POLITICAL CHALLENGE
The various splits reflect the growing fragmentation within the Islamic government. Despite outside skepticism about moderates or militants, a full spectrum of beliefs has emerged in Iranian politics over the past decade. It has also led to serious stalemates. Ironically, over the past three years, Rafsanjani, Iran's shrewdest politician, has faced challenges similar to those faced by President Bill Clinton: His reformist agenda and themes of change have been obstructed by a conservative and feisty parliament that has forced him to fight for his political life. As a result, his second term has seen little movement, and the Rafsanjani presidency generally has not ushered in the anticipated era of normalcy or progress in the regime's relations with its own constituents or with the outside world.
The voices of the revolution are also changing as Rafsanjani has increasingly been drowned out by others who have their own agendas. Three are particularly prominent. Ayatollah Khamenei is a former president (before an executive presidency was introduced in 1989) whose status was quickly elevated in 1989 so he could succeed the Ayatollah Khomeini. He has been struggling ever since to prove his widely questioned credentials as both Iran's "supreme guide" and a leader of the Shiite world. Although he is a less-adept politician who traditionally took a backseat to Rafsanjani, Khamenei has in recent years staked out bold and hard-line positions to establish his own identity and power base. Parliamentary speaker Nateq-Nouri is an ambitious, xenophobic conservative who still uses the revolution's early rhetoric. He is already campaigning hard to succeed Rafsanjani when the president's second and final term expires next year. Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati is a senior and outspoken member of the Council of Guardians whose angry militancy seems determined to keep the clergy in control of government and to prevent any compromising of the revolution.
The tension among various government branches and personnel reflects the broader political challenge to the Islamic Republic. For all its shortcomings, Iran's revolution did begin with a democratic veneer--with the emphasis on veneer. Disparate elements from the Islamic Right to the socialist Left and many groups in between banded together to end more than two millennia of dynastic rule; in no small part, they wanted a greater say in controlling their lives. Even after the revolution was commandeered by Khomeini's followers, the new constitution was republican. All major religious groups--including Jews, assorted Christian sects, and Zoroastrians--are represented proportionately in parliament. The one exception has been the Baha'i faith, which is excluded and whose members are often persecuted because they are viewed as heretics and because many were employed by the monarchy (due to their high levels of education). As hard as it may be to believe, history one day may look back on Iran's revolution as a harbinger of the struggle to reconcile democracy and Islam in the Middle East.
Over the past 17 years, however, Tehran's Islamic system has been manipulated and corrupted so that it deviates dangerously from its original form--and from any semblance of democracy. For the first round of parliamentary elections in March 1996, for example, 44 per cent of the 5,121 candidates who registered to run were disqualified by a religious council. Officials claim that only those linked to outlawed opposition groups or who are illiterate or drug addicts were barred, but in reality the system is driven by politics.
Iran's constitution provides for political parties, but the government effectively excludes them. This year, election officials barred most of the 15 members of a coalition made up of the Freedom Movement, a group of liberal Islamists headed by a former foreign minister who quit after the American embassy was seized, nationalists from the National Front, and independents. Rejection letters never specified why they were barred. Security forces broke up a press conference the coalition had organized to announce its withdrawal. "Parliamentary elections could represent a real contest for power in Iran's political system--but only if arbitrary bans on candidates and other constraints on political life are lifted," Human Rights Watch/Middle East reported after an unprecedented tour of Iran in early 1996.
Other constitutional guarantees have been flagrantly ignored, violated, or rewritten. The right of free expression was undermined by a subsequent law requiring the press "to enjoin the good and forbid the evil." Repressive conduct through subtle harassment or overt action has also returned. At least seven publications have been ordered to close down since January 1995; others stopped publication after government subsidies for paper were revoked. Several journalists have been charged with or imprisoned for actions that boil down to offending Islam.
In recent years, vigilantes linked to political or religious factions have attacked individuals or groups who dare to question the regime. Twice last year, Soroush was beaten up in university lecture halls by hizbollahi (or pro-regime) vigilantes, forcing him to flee. Many of the 134 writers who asked for an end to censorship received death threats. In 1994, noted writer Ali Akbar Saidi Sirjani died mysteriously in detention, where he had been placed after writing satirical and questioning essays about the regime; his widow is reportedly destitute, because the government froze their bank accounts. Rahimi was detained after his letter was broadcast on the BBC and Voice of America, although the pretext for his detention was alleged opium addiction. The government of God has effectively declared its monopoly on the truth. And the tentative openings of the late 1980s and carry 1990s have ended.
The growing repression and brutality mixed with the pervasive sense of lost mission have cost the regime much of its legitimacy. Hardships and clampdowns during the revolution's first decade had the cover of a hard-fought war; now there are no credible excuses. Some Iranians who once staunchly opposed the monarchy now talk longingly of the days of the shah--though not of the Pahlavi dynasty. They instead want a return to a multifaceted society and a respected state; proud Iranians hate being considered pariahs and terrorists by the outside world.
Such sentiments extend beyond the lay public. The Islamic Republic never had the support of many mullahs; as the failure of the system threatens to taint Islam, discontent and dissidence among mullahs appear to be growing. The most dynamic--and controversial--debate in Tehran today centers on whether or not the clerics should basically go back to the seminaries and their original roles as interpreters of God's word. The other side of the coin is whether the running of the state should be turned over to the technocrats. Although there are no opinion surveys, several indicators--from debates among young clerics and in seminaries to discussions among members of parliament--suggest that large numbers of clerics think it is time to get out of government.
POLICY OPTIONS FOR AMERICA
In some ways, Iran's Islamic revolution was virtually destined for a big fall from the outset. The regime's use of religion as a political idiom elevated expectations to utopian heights that no state, much less a developing nation, even if it does have oil, could ever hope to achieve. Besides its inherent vulnerability, the revolution's various constituencies had independent visions of Iran after the shah. Iranian unity has been an illusion ever since just one of those visions strong-armed its way to the top. And since then, the inner circle of mullahs who once rallied together around Khomeini has deeply divided; clerical politicians turn out to be no different from their secular counterparts. Any semblance of solidarity is largely a byproduct of challenges from regional and international parties that allowed the theocrats to lay blame elsewhere or to appeal to national pride. The latest such challenge is House speaker Newt Gingrich's call for a $20 million U.S. intelligence program to overthrow the regime--an idea doomed from the outset anyway. Virtually no overt or covert action short of a full-scale military invasion has any chance of succeeding. Even Iranians who dislike this regime do not want foreigners influencing or dictating their future. So the odds are against the success of any military actions.
For several reasons, there are no easy options in dealing with Iran. First, the international community has been just as fragmented as Tehran's leadership. A case in point was the Clinton administration's decision in 1995 to impose new sanctions eliminating the last vestiges of U.S. trade with or investment in Iran--at a cost of millions in income and thousands of American jobs. The threat of even stiffer congressional action--because Iran is usually an easy political target on the Hill--had forced the administration's hand, but the move generally fit in with U.S. strategy to "contain" Iran and neighboring Iraq. The American action pushed U.S. allies to make a choice: work with Washington to squeeze Tehran to stop its nuclear programs and end its alleged terrorism or continue to trade with Iran. Not a single government was willing to cut economic links with Iran to side with the United States. Each opted to follow a carrot-and-stick approach that amounts to constructive engagement.
Second, rapprochement between the United States and Iran is not an option anytime soon. Both have repeatedly and stubbornly resisted opportunities to repair relations. As a Western ambassador in Tehran noted recently, Americans play football while Iranians play chess, a difference that also plays out diplomatically. For the time being, the two states are destined to be locked into conflict, because they have different visions of how to conduct the business of state and more fundamentally how to enact priorities. The United States holds Iran accountable for aiding and abetting Hamas and Islamic Ji-had in the occupied territories as well as having ties with Damascus-based rejectionist groups, plus assorted attacks on Iranian dissidents abroad. Tehran has also been the most outspoken critic of the U.S.-brokered Mideast peace process. Iran, in turn, holds the United States responsible for offering refuge to its main rivals, including the shah's son and the Mujahadeen-e Khalq, or People's Holy Warriors, who are held responsible for assassinating a former president, prime minister, several members of the Majlis, and many civilians during the early 1980s. The CIA has reportedly funded broadcasts by the shah's son into Iran, and the Mujahadeen runs a large lobbying effort out of its Washington office.
Third, and despite all its problems, the regime still faces no external opposition force capable of ousting it. The Mujahadeen-e Khalq, which has an agenda best described as Islamic socialism, lacks domestic support even among the regime's toughest opponents, in no small part because it is based in rival Iraq. The group now amounts to little more than an irregular irritant. A return to the monarchy also has no significant support. To succeed and have legitimacy, change must come from within--either by the regime's actions or by inaction that offers opportunities to others. But aiding or intervening on behalf of the new internal forces could well undermine or taint these forces rather than encouraging evolutionary change.
An activist American foreign policy--bailing out Haiti and Bosnia, trying to bring peace to the Middle East and Northern Ireland--can be both effective and healthy. But with a host of economic and political sanctions already in place in Iran, it may be time for Washington to step back. For one thing, the American record of intervention in Iran to prop up or bring down leaders, in 1953 and 1979, respectively, ought to offer a potent lesson: The United States has little hope of determining who rules Iran. Trying to dictate the course of history too often backfires--there and elsewhere. With a boost from freely flowing information, which has penetrated Iran even more pervasively than it did communist Eastern Europe or Latin America's military dictatorships, the better way to undermine those responsible for repression at home and extremism abroad may be to let them do it to themselves. They are already well on their way.
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ROBIN WRIGHT, a former Middle East correspondent for the Sunday Times of London, is the author of Sacred Rage: The Wrath of Militant Islam (Simon and Schuster, 1985) and In the Name of God: The Khomeini Decade (Simon and Schuster, 1989). She covers global issues for the Los Angeles Times and travels frequently to Iran.
Friday, July 1, 1994
What Would the World Be Like Without Him?
The Atlantic
Pope John Paul II helped to free Eastern Europe from communism—a historic achievement for the man and his Church. Now he has turned his moral scrutiny on capitalism.
July 1994
by Robin Wright
As always, Papa boarded last. While his entourage headed to Rome's international airport, Pope John Paul II was still at the Vatican, finishing mass in his private chapel. This time, as he prepared to set foot in the remnants of the Soviet Union, mass was in Lithuanian—his fourteenth language.
After conferring with aides about last-minute trip details and work to be done in his absence, he boarded a helicopter for the ride across town to join the cardinals and bishops, Vatican staff, and press traveling with him to the three Baltic states. Most of us were already on board the plane by the time he arrived. It is protocol for the Pontiff to board last. But since the early 1980s the Holy See has relied heavily on a helipad in the farthest corner behind Saint Peter's Basilica and its manicured gardens, as a concession to the Pope's incessant globe-trotting, for security reasons after two assassination attempts, and because the Holy Father tends to run late.
"It's not that he's a poor planner—he's very organized," a Vatican official had told me a few days before the trip. "It's just that he uses every minute to the maximum. And sometimes one minute spills over into the next."
After he arrived, Papa Wojtyla—as he is known around Rome, papa being the Italian word for Pope—came back to wish the accompanying press a good trip. Now seventy-four, the Pope has visibly aged since I first traveled with him, early in his papacy. The firm skin around his chiseled Slavic face has softened, and the gray hair has turned white. His stoop is more pronounced, and the talk around the Vatican is that life would probably be easier for him—and his staff—if he tried glasses and a hearing aid. Members of his inner circle used to boast that the Pope got up at 5:00 A.M., said first mass at seven, hosted guests at all three meals, read the last briefing paper from his Secretary of State late into the night and on weekends walked, skied, hiked, or swam. Now the same hours and habits worry them. John Paul's one concession to age has been to add a papal afternoon nap to the Holy See schedule, even during his trips. Health setbacks—two bullets in the 1981 assassination attempt, pre-cancerous colon surgery in 1992, a broken arm and dislocated shoulder in 1993, and a broken leg and hip surgery this year—haven't helped. He has been to Rome's Gemelli Hospital so often that when he arrived by ambulance after his latest injury, from a fall in the bathroom, he reportedly joked to the medical staff, "You have to admire my loyalty." His aides vaguely, and inadequately, refer to the Pontiff's medical history when pressed about his left arm, which now often visibly shakes. Sometimes the Pope holds the arm with his other hand, although that rarely suffices anymore.
Yet John Paul, who has surely been seen by more people than anyone else in history, is still a magnet. Like many otherwise irreverent journalists assigned to the Holy See, I found that my initial lack of interest eventually gave way to a certain fascination. The real interest wasn't in the endearing persona—giving his papal ring to the Brazilian poor, or wearing white sneakers with yellow laces (the Holy See's colors), a gift from the kids at Denver's World Youth Day. And it wasn't in the controversial moral writings from history's most prolific Pontiff—the latest, last October, banning not only abortion, contraception, divorce, and homosexuality but also the mere questioning of those bans. What fascinated me was instead the way that this obscure Pole, elected on the eighth ballot to head the world's smallest state, has gone on, with a mixture of cunning and daring, to become a global leader—and not just among the Catholic faithful. Although John Paul II vehemently eschews political involvement, his reign—already almost twice as long as the papal average of eight years—is likely to be remembered most for the way he has helped reshape the world.
I had been told that John Paul had never worked harder or waited longer for any other of his sixty-one trips, which together have accounted for more than a year away from the Vatican, than he had for this Baltic tour. The only place he wanted to go to more was Moscow. The Vatican had historically acted most often in behalf of the Baltics among all the former Soviet republics—particularly Lithuania, which was a Catholic bastion in the Russian empire and is the Church's northern most stronghold in Europe. Lithuania's Church was the only institution to challenge Communist rule consistently after the Baltics were annexed by Stalin in 1940. For their efforts hundreds of priests and thousands of the faithful were deported to Siberia. After John Paul's election, in 1978, the Holy See's interest increased. The Pope once disclosed that immediately after his selection he had gone to Saint Peter's crypt, around which the Vatican was built, to pray for Lithuania.
His interest, and the trip, had a personal angle. John Paul's mother was of Lithuanian descent. She died when he was nine—an event that some papophiles contend contributed to his devotion to the Virgin Mary, whose initial is on the lower right quadrant of his coat of arms and who is a constant theme of this papacy.
But papal interest and pressure seemed to avail little. At least twice in the 1980s Soviet authorities formally denied the Pontiff permission to visit Lithuania. Several informal feelers were rebuffed too. Throughout its rule of the Baltics, Moscow rarely acknowledged, much less acceded to, requests, appeals, or protests from the Holy See. Stalin once mockingly commented, "How many divisions does the Pope have?"
On this trip, a half century later, the papacy replied.
In keeping with Northern European reserve, John Paul's reception in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, was decidedly low-key by comparison with the fanfare and the high-tech, televised glitz surrounding his Denver trip. Despite the blustery cold already settling over Lithuania in September, a time when Rome is still balmy, Vilnius, a city of 600,000, had no heat. Because the country couldn't afford the foreign exchange required by Russia to pay for oil, Lithuanians had hot water only one week a month. The average monthly salary was then only $35, but in the new free markets prices have soared. The price of bread had quadrupled in a year. Whether it involved leaving work, traveling, or spending limited income, going to see the Pope ranked almost as a luxury.
Yet the people came, by the tens of thousands. In just over three days at least 10 percent of Lithuania's population of 3.7 million turned out for the masses and meetings John Paul held in four cities. In Vilnius a frigid, pelting rain fell during his open-air mass, yet I met people who said they had begun assembling on the dark, muddy field as early as 2:00 A M About 100,000 stuck it out for the three hour service, which included token baptisms and confirmations as well as communion for all assembled, many of them served by the Pope.
Two people were particularly helpful to me in understanding John Paul's impact in Lithuania. The first was Nijole Sadunaite, an effusively energetic woman of fifty-five with an unadorned face, blue eyes, and big, active hands. She is well known in Lithuania as one of the heroes of the anti-Soviet resistance. In 1975 she was sentenced to three years at hard labor and three in exile in Siberia, for "duplicating and disseminating" the Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania. The Chronicle, which recipients with access to a typewriter would retype, with up to ten carbons at a time, for wider distribution, recorded human rights abuses and acts of defiance. It was the longest-running underground publication in any of the fifteen Soviet republics. "I had typed six pages when I was caught, so I effectively got one year for every page," Sadunaite told me, laughing at the absurdities of the Soviet system.
Sadunaite's imprisonment included a stay at a psychiatric hospital, torture, and prolonged solitary confinement. Two years after her release, in 1980, the Soviet secret police began looking for her again, and she went underground for five years. During that period, in disguise, she took a train to Moscow to deliver a memoir detailing her secret life and the trials and imprisonment of other prisoners of conscience she had known in the Soviet gulag, to be smuggled out of the Soviet Union. In 1987 A Radiance in the Gulag was published in the United States.
Yet for three decades—while Sadunaite worked in factories, with abandoned children, and then, while she was in exile, as a charwoman—only a few family members and friends knew her real secret. In 1956, at the age of eighteen, she had entered a clandestine convent and secretly become a nun. In the late 1980s she finally emerged from the underground as a leader in two demonstrations. Both were turning points for Lithuania, the first and most active republic in trying to break away from the Soviet empire.
On August 23, 1987, about a thousand Lithuanians turned out to protest the 1939 treaty between Stalin and Hitler which ultimately allowed Moscow to absorb the Baltic states. The KGB quickly broke up the demonstration, and again Sadunaite came under surveillance. Six months later she and other former political prisoners organized a second demonstration, on the seventieth anniversary of Lithuania's declaration of independence from Russia, in 1918. After services at two Catholic churches, protesters were supposed to march quietly through Vilnius to the main cathedral, then being used as an art gallery. Once again the secret police interfered, this time more brutally. Sadunaite didn't make it to her own demonstration; the KGB had arrested her that morning.
But the public resistance emboldened others, particularly the founders of Sajudis, the first mass pro-democracy movement, which emerged over the six months following. By the time the next anniversary of the Stalin-Hitler accord rolled around, in 1988, at least 250,000 people were willing to march in public. A year later two million Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians formed a human chain from Vilnius to Tallinn, the Estonian capital, to protest the pact. It was the largest outpouring in Baltic history. In early 1990 Lithuania held the first democratic elections to take place in any Soviet republic, and then unilaterally declared its independence.
I asked Sadunaite what had motivated her to come out in the open, especially after all she'd been through.
"The Holy Father was always an inspiration for me to be more active. I knew he had attended an underground seminary in Poland, which encouraged many of us not to be afraid to be active and to work in our own underground, whatever the dangers or hardships. We were also inspired because the Pope was someone who had escaped from the same system that was oppressing us.
"Even a person who has the greatest good will but hasn't lived under that system can't understand its nuances or what we went through. But this Pope did. He knew what kind of things we were being told. The State kept telling us, for example, that only insane people went to prison for resisting the system. But the Pope contradicted that message. He kept telling us that it was good to resist, that those who resisted represented the future of the nation and the Church.
"I remember hearing one sermon he gave on Easter, sometime in the mid-1980s, when I was underground. He said that people who fight and die for their country are not only martyrs but may be holy. We took that to mean that the Pope understood what we were doing, and that we should do whatever it took to free our land. He said it again and again. He made me want to be strong and courageous too, even when I was afraid."
During one of the breaks in the papal schedule, I stopped by the old KGB headquarters, an imposing four-story stone building, where Sadunaite had frequently been confined. It's now a museum, and the director took me on a tour of its underground prison: through the tiny green cells that once held up to twenty prisoners each and still had reeking urination pails in the corner; through the dark and dank isolation chamber; through the KGB officers' room, still stocked with books on Marxist theory and venereal disease; through the guardroom, with its sprawling map of the entire Soviet prison network; and, finally, through the torture chamber, still covered with dried blood and thickly padded to stifle sound, a black straitjacket hanging on its wall. Over half a century, the director told me, thousands had been executed in this facility. Most were shot; some were hanged. But he was reluctant even to guess how many had been imprisoned here or had passed through en route to the gulag.
Only one thing had been added since the prison was closed down, in 1991. Above the old KGB computer in the director's office was a poster of John Paul.
The other person who offered me perspective was Vytautas Landsbergis, the musicologist and Sajudis leader who became independent Lithuania's first President, in 1990. He lost the job last year, after the former local Communist Party leader was elected President, largely in reaction to economic hardships. Landsbergis now leads the opposition. Although he invited John Paul to Lithuania, he is not Catholic. We met in Vilnius's modern glass-and-concrete Parliament, where I asked him about the Pope's impact.
"I can say that the liberation of Lithuania and the other Baltic countries is a result in great part of the policy of the Pope," he replied, in measured, deliberate English. "The policy of the Holy See was very subtle in methods and levels. His policy was very, very important in the scale of mankind, and especially, of course, for these captive nations."
But on the same level as the United States?
"Perhaps not less," he said, and chuckled. "Perhaps not less."
The United States represented the physical power challenging Moscow, but the Vatican was the only European capital that continued to recognize Lithuania's independent diplomatic representation, he explained. The rest of Europe accepted the Baltics as part of the Soviet Union. And internally the Catholic underground, supported by the Pope and the Holy See, was the primary instrument of defiance.
I reminded Landsbergis of Stalin's sardonic comment about the Pope's divisions.
"The Pope has no armies, of course, but he has the greatest spiritual army," Landsbergis replied, stroking his dark blonde moustache and short goatee. "And our liberation was based on spiritual values and virtues. We had no arms, only this support and the feeling we have of this great European Christian culture."
Landsbergis also said that the Pope's visit played a critical role in the crisis over lingering Russian troops, a key issue for all former Soviet republics. After pledging, shortly before the Pope's arrival, to withdraw the final contingent, Moscow had balked at the last minute. The United States called on Russia to pull out and on both sides to renew talk—and said that $700 million in aid was at stake if the troops stayed too long. Yet when the dispute was settled, Lithuanians widely credited the Pope.
"In the end Moscow realized it would be worse for them," Landsbergis said, chuckling again, "especially since the Pope was coming. I'm sure it helped Russian leaders decide to finish this withdrawal process."
Four days before John Paul arrived, the last Russian troops had left Vilnius. Lithuania became the first of the fifteen former Soviet republics to be free of Stalin's divisions.
In the 1 990s the question for John Paul is not how many divisions he has but whether he can still make much of a difference. The first Slavic Pope—and the first non-Italian one in almost half a millennium—was elected in the context of the Cold War, and his first decade in office coincided with rhetoric about the "evil empire." His personal background —fighting first fascism and then communism—no longer seems as relevant as it once did.
But in the Baltics, John Paul attempted to address the post-Cold War world. The next stop on the papal tour was Latvia, a country that appeared during the Pontiff's visit to be doing far better than poor Lithuania. Since independence, in 1991, Riga's quaint old downtown had been revived, courtesy of capitalism. The brick alleys and streets were lined with newly privatized antique and handicraft shops, chic boutiques, and open-air art stalls. Drivers could shop at Fiat and Mercedes dealerships, and diners had a range of quality European restaurants and new fast-food joints from which to choose. But as dusk set in, hookers with peroxided hair and thigh-high leather boots turned out on many corners, while young Russians peddled everything from Soviet military caps and medals to handpainted wooden nesting dolls from their backpacks. For the first time beggars, including tiny children, were on the streets, often late into the night and often hanging out near flashy casinos reputed to have links to a new Baltic mafia. And for everyone crime had become a chronic problem. Although a few are prospering economically, the vast majority of Latvians are now worse off than they were under Soviet rule. It was an appropriate setting for the Pope's message.
In Riga, John Paul took on capitalism. The Church, he pronounced, regarded the system now dominant in the world as responsible for "grave social injustices." In its worst form it was ultimately responsible for creating the totalitarian and authoritarian alternatives that had divided the world for most of the twentieth century.
"The needs from which [socialism] had historically arisen were real and serious," he said. "The situation of exploitation to which an inhumane capitalism had subjected the proletariat since the beginning of industrialized society was indeed an evil. This, basically, was Marxism's kernel of truth, which enabled it to present itself as an attractive reality to Western society."
The implication, of course, was that it could happen again in fragile and volatile new democracies. Perhaps ironically, two weeks after the Baltic tour the Pontiff's native Poland elected a new parliament. Having pledged to slow the rapid and inequitable transformation brought on by free markets, former Communists won. Just as the first decade of John Paul's papacy was synonymous with an unrelenting confrontation of Eastern communism, so the second decade is shaping up as an equally bold challenge to the inequities and excesses of capitalism, the abuses of liberty, and what the Pope sees as a return to the law of the jungle. Though John Paul had issued similar warnings on earlier trips, the Cold War's end had brought this theme to the top of his agenda. He has warned the new democracies of the world about catching "the virus" of Western consumerism. In a 1990 visit to Czechoslovakia he warned against replacing communism with "secularism, indifference, hedonistic consumerism, [and] practical materialism."
"The dangers that regaining contacts with the West can bring," he told the Czechoslovakian clergy, "must not be underestimated." John Paul went even further with a sweeping statement that he made in his last Latvian speech. He gave this speech to one of the smallest crowds, composed mainly of writers, thinkers, professors, and cultural leaders, dressed in gowns and draped with academic colors, at the University of Riga. In contrast to the passions displayed in other settings, the atmosphere was scholarly. In an elegant auditorium with gray-white stone walls and lofty ceilings, the Pope gave a landmark address outlining his vision of an ideal society. Although he kept denying that he was defining the long-elusive "third way" between the twentieth century's two dominant ideologies, he presented six principles that were effectively a model, even the basis of a manifesto, for a new era.
The ideal state, he declared, is based on law that guarantees everyone an orderly existence and assures the most vulnerable of enough support to avoid falling prey to "the arrogance and indifference of the powerful." The ideal democracy is always in the service of the common good. But, above and beyond its rules, it also has "a soul made up of the fundamental values without which it easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism."
Within this ideal democratic state the distribution of goods is "universal" and based on "solidarity." Private property is recognized, but in the context of its social rather than its economic purpose. Work, critical to human dignity, must never reduce the individual "to a commodity or a mere cog in the machinery of production." And all systems must promote "human ecology, implying respect for every person from conception to natural death."
Although John Paul's utopia is enlightened, bold, and ambitious, understanding, let alone
achieving, it is probably beyond the reach of most of the nearly one billion Catholic faithful. The largest segment of the Church is now in Latin America, and the fastest-growing segment is in Africa. Neither region has sufficient goods to distribute, much less the resources to support the weak or vulnerable. Nor do they have enough menial jobs, much less dignifying employment, to offer. At one point, as the Pope sat on a green leather chair, looking a bit tired, I wondered how far beyond this cavernous auditorium in northern Europe his message would even be heard.
During my conversation with former President Landsbergis, I asked about the Pope's role in the post-Cold War world. Like the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev—with whom the Pontiff began a regular correspondence after their first meeting, in 1989—hadn't John Paul been relegated to the sidelines of history by his successes and the proliferation of political and economic freedoms?
"Oh, no," Landsbergis replied. "First, I don't think communism is finished. Communism is merely changing its face. You know that Satan or evil can have many faces. This evil could be named something else, like 'fascism.' It's the same hatred of human beings. It's the worship of force and violence, not of love and brotherhood. Then the names, such as 'communism,' are not so important. This name could also be 'New World Order.' And we must look what is this New World Order? What is coming by this name?"
Second, he said, eliminating communism was only part of the job. The harder part, building new societies, has just begun.
"I have said sometimes that it seems all Western leaders are Marxists," Landsbergis said, with his ironic chuckle. "No one, with very small exception, is speaking about spiritual problems, about spiritual values. The only sphere of problems is economic effectiveness, zones of influence and control in a rather materialistic way of being."
But is there really a practical role for spirituality or religious values in a world of thoroughly secular ideologies?
"Spiritual values are basic to the restoration of democracy," Landsbergis protested. "The more important side of spiritual values or morality, of behavior, and of the attitudes of one human person to another, to society, to work, to responsibility—all of this must be restored now in post-communist countries."
So this Pope could still have an impact?
"What," he responded, "would the world be like without him?"
Pope John Paul II helped to free Eastern Europe from communism—a historic achievement for the man and his Church. Now he has turned his moral scrutiny on capitalism.
July 1994
by Robin Wright
As always, Papa boarded last. While his entourage headed to Rome's international airport, Pope John Paul II was still at the Vatican, finishing mass in his private chapel. This time, as he prepared to set foot in the remnants of the Soviet Union, mass was in Lithuanian—his fourteenth language.
After conferring with aides about last-minute trip details and work to be done in his absence, he boarded a helicopter for the ride across town to join the cardinals and bishops, Vatican staff, and press traveling with him to the three Baltic states. Most of us were already on board the plane by the time he arrived. It is protocol for the Pontiff to board last. But since the early 1980s the Holy See has relied heavily on a helipad in the farthest corner behind Saint Peter's Basilica and its manicured gardens, as a concession to the Pope's incessant globe-trotting, for security reasons after two assassination attempts, and because the Holy Father tends to run late.
"It's not that he's a poor planner—he's very organized," a Vatican official had told me a few days before the trip. "It's just that he uses every minute to the maximum. And sometimes one minute spills over into the next."
After he arrived, Papa Wojtyla—as he is known around Rome, papa being the Italian word for Pope—came back to wish the accompanying press a good trip. Now seventy-four, the Pope has visibly aged since I first traveled with him, early in his papacy. The firm skin around his chiseled Slavic face has softened, and the gray hair has turned white. His stoop is more pronounced, and the talk around the Vatican is that life would probably be easier for him—and his staff—if he tried glasses and a hearing aid. Members of his inner circle used to boast that the Pope got up at 5:00 A.M., said first mass at seven, hosted guests at all three meals, read the last briefing paper from his Secretary of State late into the night and on weekends walked, skied, hiked, or swam. Now the same hours and habits worry them. John Paul's one concession to age has been to add a papal afternoon nap to the Holy See schedule, even during his trips. Health setbacks—two bullets in the 1981 assassination attempt, pre-cancerous colon surgery in 1992, a broken arm and dislocated shoulder in 1993, and a broken leg and hip surgery this year—haven't helped. He has been to Rome's Gemelli Hospital so often that when he arrived by ambulance after his latest injury, from a fall in the bathroom, he reportedly joked to the medical staff, "You have to admire my loyalty." His aides vaguely, and inadequately, refer to the Pontiff's medical history when pressed about his left arm, which now often visibly shakes. Sometimes the Pope holds the arm with his other hand, although that rarely suffices anymore.
Yet John Paul, who has surely been seen by more people than anyone else in history, is still a magnet. Like many otherwise irreverent journalists assigned to the Holy See, I found that my initial lack of interest eventually gave way to a certain fascination. The real interest wasn't in the endearing persona—giving his papal ring to the Brazilian poor, or wearing white sneakers with yellow laces (the Holy See's colors), a gift from the kids at Denver's World Youth Day. And it wasn't in the controversial moral writings from history's most prolific Pontiff—the latest, last October, banning not only abortion, contraception, divorce, and homosexuality but also the mere questioning of those bans. What fascinated me was instead the way that this obscure Pole, elected on the eighth ballot to head the world's smallest state, has gone on, with a mixture of cunning and daring, to become a global leader—and not just among the Catholic faithful. Although John Paul II vehemently eschews political involvement, his reign—already almost twice as long as the papal average of eight years—is likely to be remembered most for the way he has helped reshape the world.
I had been told that John Paul had never worked harder or waited longer for any other of his sixty-one trips, which together have accounted for more than a year away from the Vatican, than he had for this Baltic tour. The only place he wanted to go to more was Moscow. The Vatican had historically acted most often in behalf of the Baltics among all the former Soviet republics—particularly Lithuania, which was a Catholic bastion in the Russian empire and is the Church's northern most stronghold in Europe. Lithuania's Church was the only institution to challenge Communist rule consistently after the Baltics were annexed by Stalin in 1940. For their efforts hundreds of priests and thousands of the faithful were deported to Siberia. After John Paul's election, in 1978, the Holy See's interest increased. The Pope once disclosed that immediately after his selection he had gone to Saint Peter's crypt, around which the Vatican was built, to pray for Lithuania.
His interest, and the trip, had a personal angle. John Paul's mother was of Lithuanian descent. She died when he was nine—an event that some papophiles contend contributed to his devotion to the Virgin Mary, whose initial is on the lower right quadrant of his coat of arms and who is a constant theme of this papacy.
But papal interest and pressure seemed to avail little. At least twice in the 1980s Soviet authorities formally denied the Pontiff permission to visit Lithuania. Several informal feelers were rebuffed too. Throughout its rule of the Baltics, Moscow rarely acknowledged, much less acceded to, requests, appeals, or protests from the Holy See. Stalin once mockingly commented, "How many divisions does the Pope have?"
On this trip, a half century later, the papacy replied.
In keeping with Northern European reserve, John Paul's reception in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, was decidedly low-key by comparison with the fanfare and the high-tech, televised glitz surrounding his Denver trip. Despite the blustery cold already settling over Lithuania in September, a time when Rome is still balmy, Vilnius, a city of 600,000, had no heat. Because the country couldn't afford the foreign exchange required by Russia to pay for oil, Lithuanians had hot water only one week a month. The average monthly salary was then only $35, but in the new free markets prices have soared. The price of bread had quadrupled in a year. Whether it involved leaving work, traveling, or spending limited income, going to see the Pope ranked almost as a luxury.
Yet the people came, by the tens of thousands. In just over three days at least 10 percent of Lithuania's population of 3.7 million turned out for the masses and meetings John Paul held in four cities. In Vilnius a frigid, pelting rain fell during his open-air mass, yet I met people who said they had begun assembling on the dark, muddy field as early as 2:00 A M About 100,000 stuck it out for the three hour service, which included token baptisms and confirmations as well as communion for all assembled, many of them served by the Pope.
Two people were particularly helpful to me in understanding John Paul's impact in Lithuania. The first was Nijole Sadunaite, an effusively energetic woman of fifty-five with an unadorned face, blue eyes, and big, active hands. She is well known in Lithuania as one of the heroes of the anti-Soviet resistance. In 1975 she was sentenced to three years at hard labor and three in exile in Siberia, for "duplicating and disseminating" the Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania. The Chronicle, which recipients with access to a typewriter would retype, with up to ten carbons at a time, for wider distribution, recorded human rights abuses and acts of defiance. It was the longest-running underground publication in any of the fifteen Soviet republics. "I had typed six pages when I was caught, so I effectively got one year for every page," Sadunaite told me, laughing at the absurdities of the Soviet system.
Sadunaite's imprisonment included a stay at a psychiatric hospital, torture, and prolonged solitary confinement. Two years after her release, in 1980, the Soviet secret police began looking for her again, and she went underground for five years. During that period, in disguise, she took a train to Moscow to deliver a memoir detailing her secret life and the trials and imprisonment of other prisoners of conscience she had known in the Soviet gulag, to be smuggled out of the Soviet Union. In 1987 A Radiance in the Gulag was published in the United States.
Yet for three decades—while Sadunaite worked in factories, with abandoned children, and then, while she was in exile, as a charwoman—only a few family members and friends knew her real secret. In 1956, at the age of eighteen, she had entered a clandestine convent and secretly become a nun. In the late 1980s she finally emerged from the underground as a leader in two demonstrations. Both were turning points for Lithuania, the first and most active republic in trying to break away from the Soviet empire.
On August 23, 1987, about a thousand Lithuanians turned out to protest the 1939 treaty between Stalin and Hitler which ultimately allowed Moscow to absorb the Baltic states. The KGB quickly broke up the demonstration, and again Sadunaite came under surveillance. Six months later she and other former political prisoners organized a second demonstration, on the seventieth anniversary of Lithuania's declaration of independence from Russia, in 1918. After services at two Catholic churches, protesters were supposed to march quietly through Vilnius to the main cathedral, then being used as an art gallery. Once again the secret police interfered, this time more brutally. Sadunaite didn't make it to her own demonstration; the KGB had arrested her that morning.
But the public resistance emboldened others, particularly the founders of Sajudis, the first mass pro-democracy movement, which emerged over the six months following. By the time the next anniversary of the Stalin-Hitler accord rolled around, in 1988, at least 250,000 people were willing to march in public. A year later two million Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians formed a human chain from Vilnius to Tallinn, the Estonian capital, to protest the pact. It was the largest outpouring in Baltic history. In early 1990 Lithuania held the first democratic elections to take place in any Soviet republic, and then unilaterally declared its independence.
I asked Sadunaite what had motivated her to come out in the open, especially after all she'd been through.
"The Holy Father was always an inspiration for me to be more active. I knew he had attended an underground seminary in Poland, which encouraged many of us not to be afraid to be active and to work in our own underground, whatever the dangers or hardships. We were also inspired because the Pope was someone who had escaped from the same system that was oppressing us.
"Even a person who has the greatest good will but hasn't lived under that system can't understand its nuances or what we went through. But this Pope did. He knew what kind of things we were being told. The State kept telling us, for example, that only insane people went to prison for resisting the system. But the Pope contradicted that message. He kept telling us that it was good to resist, that those who resisted represented the future of the nation and the Church.
"I remember hearing one sermon he gave on Easter, sometime in the mid-1980s, when I was underground. He said that people who fight and die for their country are not only martyrs but may be holy. We took that to mean that the Pope understood what we were doing, and that we should do whatever it took to free our land. He said it again and again. He made me want to be strong and courageous too, even when I was afraid."
During one of the breaks in the papal schedule, I stopped by the old KGB headquarters, an imposing four-story stone building, where Sadunaite had frequently been confined. It's now a museum, and the director took me on a tour of its underground prison: through the tiny green cells that once held up to twenty prisoners each and still had reeking urination pails in the corner; through the dark and dank isolation chamber; through the KGB officers' room, still stocked with books on Marxist theory and venereal disease; through the guardroom, with its sprawling map of the entire Soviet prison network; and, finally, through the torture chamber, still covered with dried blood and thickly padded to stifle sound, a black straitjacket hanging on its wall. Over half a century, the director told me, thousands had been executed in this facility. Most were shot; some were hanged. But he was reluctant even to guess how many had been imprisoned here or had passed through en route to the gulag.
Only one thing had been added since the prison was closed down, in 1991. Above the old KGB computer in the director's office was a poster of John Paul.
The other person who offered me perspective was Vytautas Landsbergis, the musicologist and Sajudis leader who became independent Lithuania's first President, in 1990. He lost the job last year, after the former local Communist Party leader was elected President, largely in reaction to economic hardships. Landsbergis now leads the opposition. Although he invited John Paul to Lithuania, he is not Catholic. We met in Vilnius's modern glass-and-concrete Parliament, where I asked him about the Pope's impact.
"I can say that the liberation of Lithuania and the other Baltic countries is a result in great part of the policy of the Pope," he replied, in measured, deliberate English. "The policy of the Holy See was very subtle in methods and levels. His policy was very, very important in the scale of mankind, and especially, of course, for these captive nations."
But on the same level as the United States?
"Perhaps not less," he said, and chuckled. "Perhaps not less."
The United States represented the physical power challenging Moscow, but the Vatican was the only European capital that continued to recognize Lithuania's independent diplomatic representation, he explained. The rest of Europe accepted the Baltics as part of the Soviet Union. And internally the Catholic underground, supported by the Pope and the Holy See, was the primary instrument of defiance.
I reminded Landsbergis of Stalin's sardonic comment about the Pope's divisions.
"The Pope has no armies, of course, but he has the greatest spiritual army," Landsbergis replied, stroking his dark blonde moustache and short goatee. "And our liberation was based on spiritual values and virtues. We had no arms, only this support and the feeling we have of this great European Christian culture."
Landsbergis also said that the Pope's visit played a critical role in the crisis over lingering Russian troops, a key issue for all former Soviet republics. After pledging, shortly before the Pope's arrival, to withdraw the final contingent, Moscow had balked at the last minute. The United States called on Russia to pull out and on both sides to renew talk—and said that $700 million in aid was at stake if the troops stayed too long. Yet when the dispute was settled, Lithuanians widely credited the Pope.
"In the end Moscow realized it would be worse for them," Landsbergis said, chuckling again, "especially since the Pope was coming. I'm sure it helped Russian leaders decide to finish this withdrawal process."
Four days before John Paul arrived, the last Russian troops had left Vilnius. Lithuania became the first of the fifteen former Soviet republics to be free of Stalin's divisions.
In the 1 990s the question for John Paul is not how many divisions he has but whether he can still make much of a difference. The first Slavic Pope—and the first non-Italian one in almost half a millennium—was elected in the context of the Cold War, and his first decade in office coincided with rhetoric about the "evil empire." His personal background —fighting first fascism and then communism—no longer seems as relevant as it once did.
But in the Baltics, John Paul attempted to address the post-Cold War world. The next stop on the papal tour was Latvia, a country that appeared during the Pontiff's visit to be doing far better than poor Lithuania. Since independence, in 1991, Riga's quaint old downtown had been revived, courtesy of capitalism. The brick alleys and streets were lined with newly privatized antique and handicraft shops, chic boutiques, and open-air art stalls. Drivers could shop at Fiat and Mercedes dealerships, and diners had a range of quality European restaurants and new fast-food joints from which to choose. But as dusk set in, hookers with peroxided hair and thigh-high leather boots turned out on many corners, while young Russians peddled everything from Soviet military caps and medals to handpainted wooden nesting dolls from their backpacks. For the first time beggars, including tiny children, were on the streets, often late into the night and often hanging out near flashy casinos reputed to have links to a new Baltic mafia. And for everyone crime had become a chronic problem. Although a few are prospering economically, the vast majority of Latvians are now worse off than they were under Soviet rule. It was an appropriate setting for the Pope's message.
In Riga, John Paul took on capitalism. The Church, he pronounced, regarded the system now dominant in the world as responsible for "grave social injustices." In its worst form it was ultimately responsible for creating the totalitarian and authoritarian alternatives that had divided the world for most of the twentieth century.
"The needs from which [socialism] had historically arisen were real and serious," he said. "The situation of exploitation to which an inhumane capitalism had subjected the proletariat since the beginning of industrialized society was indeed an evil. This, basically, was Marxism's kernel of truth, which enabled it to present itself as an attractive reality to Western society."
The implication, of course, was that it could happen again in fragile and volatile new democracies. Perhaps ironically, two weeks after the Baltic tour the Pontiff's native Poland elected a new parliament. Having pledged to slow the rapid and inequitable transformation brought on by free markets, former Communists won. Just as the first decade of John Paul's papacy was synonymous with an unrelenting confrontation of Eastern communism, so the second decade is shaping up as an equally bold challenge to the inequities and excesses of capitalism, the abuses of liberty, and what the Pope sees as a return to the law of the jungle. Though John Paul had issued similar warnings on earlier trips, the Cold War's end had brought this theme to the top of his agenda. He has warned the new democracies of the world about catching "the virus" of Western consumerism. In a 1990 visit to Czechoslovakia he warned against replacing communism with "secularism, indifference, hedonistic consumerism, [and] practical materialism."
"The dangers that regaining contacts with the West can bring," he told the Czechoslovakian clergy, "must not be underestimated." John Paul went even further with a sweeping statement that he made in his last Latvian speech. He gave this speech to one of the smallest crowds, composed mainly of writers, thinkers, professors, and cultural leaders, dressed in gowns and draped with academic colors, at the University of Riga. In contrast to the passions displayed in other settings, the atmosphere was scholarly. In an elegant auditorium with gray-white stone walls and lofty ceilings, the Pope gave a landmark address outlining his vision of an ideal society. Although he kept denying that he was defining the long-elusive "third way" between the twentieth century's two dominant ideologies, he presented six principles that were effectively a model, even the basis of a manifesto, for a new era.
The ideal state, he declared, is based on law that guarantees everyone an orderly existence and assures the most vulnerable of enough support to avoid falling prey to "the arrogance and indifference of the powerful." The ideal democracy is always in the service of the common good. But, above and beyond its rules, it also has "a soul made up of the fundamental values without which it easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism."
Within this ideal democratic state the distribution of goods is "universal" and based on "solidarity." Private property is recognized, but in the context of its social rather than its economic purpose. Work, critical to human dignity, must never reduce the individual "to a commodity or a mere cog in the machinery of production." And all systems must promote "human ecology, implying respect for every person from conception to natural death."
Although John Paul's utopia is enlightened, bold, and ambitious, understanding, let alone
achieving, it is probably beyond the reach of most of the nearly one billion Catholic faithful. The largest segment of the Church is now in Latin America, and the fastest-growing segment is in Africa. Neither region has sufficient goods to distribute, much less the resources to support the weak or vulnerable. Nor do they have enough menial jobs, much less dignifying employment, to offer. At one point, as the Pope sat on a green leather chair, looking a bit tired, I wondered how far beyond this cavernous auditorium in northern Europe his message would even be heard.
During my conversation with former President Landsbergis, I asked about the Pope's role in the post-Cold War world. Like the former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev—with whom the Pontiff began a regular correspondence after their first meeting, in 1989—hadn't John Paul been relegated to the sidelines of history by his successes and the proliferation of political and economic freedoms?
"Oh, no," Landsbergis replied. "First, I don't think communism is finished. Communism is merely changing its face. You know that Satan or evil can have many faces. This evil could be named something else, like 'fascism.' It's the same hatred of human beings. It's the worship of force and violence, not of love and brotherhood. Then the names, such as 'communism,' are not so important. This name could also be 'New World Order.' And we must look what is this New World Order? What is coming by this name?"
Second, he said, eliminating communism was only part of the job. The harder part, building new societies, has just begun.
"I have said sometimes that it seems all Western leaders are Marxists," Landsbergis said, with his ironic chuckle. "No one, with very small exception, is speaking about spiritual problems, about spiritual values. The only sphere of problems is economic effectiveness, zones of influence and control in a rather materialistic way of being."
But is there really a practical role for spirituality or religious values in a world of thoroughly secular ideologies?
"Spiritual values are basic to the restoration of democracy," Landsbergis protested. "The more important side of spiritual values or morality, of behavior, and of the attitudes of one human person to another, to society, to work, to responsibility—all of this must be restored now in post-communist countries."
So this Pope could still have an impact?
"What," he responded, "would the world be like without him?"
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