by: Prof. Raymond Tanter
Source: Global Politician, 14 December 2009
Tens of thousands of peaceful Iranian protesters take to the streets and battle police on a week commemorating National Student Day in Tehran. Result? The Iranian regime cracks down on its dissidents inside Iran and orders Baghdad to do the same to those in Iraq.
But an ironic consequence of the simultaneous crackdown in Iran and Iraq is to increase the cohesion between the Iranian Street and the main opposition organization in exile-the Mujahadeen-e-Khalq (MEK). It is based in Iraq but has an extensive and growing support within Iran, in part because of regime repression, which has encouraged demonstrators to support the MEK goal of overthrowing the regime in its entirety.
As the Iranian regime cracks down on informal networks of peaceful demonstrators engaged in “street politics,” they are realizing the need for a broader coalition that includes stronger allies to balance State power. Without such partners, the 2009 cycle of protest and State violence is likely to peeter out like the cycles in Iran of 1999 and 2003 rather than the revolution of 1979.
During the 1906 Constitutional Movement and 1979 Iranian Revolution, alliances of students, workers, merchants, and clerics mobilized against unpopular regimes. In this respect, revolutionaries earned the support of the Iranian people and thereby overthrew the regimes.
In 1979, the uprising began in 1978 and culminated in the Iranian Revolution of 1979 that deposed the Shah and created the Islamic Republic. In 1999 and 2003, a similar cycle of protest and repression began, but was cut short before it could topple the regime, as a winning coalition failed to form and State power prevailed.
During the current cycle, the Iranian regime is using the same repressive tactics against both domestic activists and dissidents in Iraq. By doing so, the regime is unintentionally driving the two together and increasing the likelihood of a unified, organized opposition movement that could create a wider coalition and precipitate a 1979 outcome and avoid 1999 or 2003 results.
Crackdown on Iranian Dissidents in Iran
1978-1979
The date of September 8, 1978 became known as “Black Friday” in the wake of a cycle of demonstrations and state repression that began that day. Invoking martial law, the Shah of Iran’s Government used tanks and helicopter gunships to attack peaceful demonstrators. The regime killed about 70 in Jaleh Square on Black Friday; and in other parts of the capital, there were some 25 people killed in clashes with the Shah’s martial law forces. These civilian casualties were responsible for turning public opinion against the government and swelled the ranks of protesters to include workers in the oil sector. Another four months of demonstrations culminated in a general strike during October 1978, which closed the petroleum industry, a sector critical to the Shah’s survival.
Upon joining the Reagan-Bush White House in 1981, I helped monitor developments in Iran and was impressed by large scale demonstrations carried out by the largest opposition group, the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK). In June 1981, the MEK organized an impressive rally of about 500,000 people. This organization was at the forefront of the popular movement that brought down the Shah, but because of its secular orientation was pushed out of the Revolutionary regime by Ayatollah Khomeini and his clerical supporters. Khomeini justified his dictatorship with the religiously unprecedented ideology of Velayat-e Faqih, in which clerics take political leadership as representatives of God on earth.
1999 and 2003
After twenty years of clerical rule, students initiated a revolt against the ruling clerics during July 1999: Students threw stones at the regime’s security services, set fire to images of the Supreme Leader, and engaged in battles with the police. Regime vigilantes and riot police stormed a university dormitory on the night of July 8. The students, in turn, overreached and expanded their protests because of the destruction, casualties, and detentions following the raid.
Unlike the 1978-1979 demonstrations, the 1999 protests played into the hands of the clerics and gave the security services a pretext for a crackdown. Ayatollah Khamenei announced that, “My basiji children in particular should maintain their full alertness and through their presence everywhere they are needed, terrify and crush the wicked enemies.” The bassij are paramilitary units that are part of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the so-called guardians of the Revolution, and are used especially for domestic repression.
Because the regime was successful in winning the public relations battle and turning blame for violence to the students, the same mix of riot police and state-sponsored paramilitaries condemned for carrying out the student dormitory raid felt free to attack rioters with greater brutality during 1999.
Student demonstrations in 2003 also failed to attract a wide coalition to bring down the regime. Again, protests began with students, but did not include enough workers and others; hence, 2003 failed to spread to the general populace. Even more striking was the relative silence of the so-called reformist parties, which represent Iran’s “loyal” opposition and proved to be too cautious to support the students. This noticeable silence from mainstream political organizations helped to doom the 2003 protests. Although President George W. Bush made favorable statements regarding the students, such support was not sufficient to turn the tide within Iran and create a widespread coalition in favor of them.
2009
The 2009 demonstrations began with an obviously fraudulent election of June 13, which re-elected President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The next weeks saw hundreds of thousands of protesters in the streets across Iran. The Iranian regime responded with particular brutality on June 16, killing some 20 protesters throughout Iran. Dozens more were murdered during the June 20 demonstration when a huge crowd defied the Supreme leader’s entreaty and took to the streets. One young woman, Neda, whose murder by regime agents was caught on video, became a rallying point for oppositionists within Iran and those in Iraq.
Initially, protests revolved around support for Ahmadinejad’s main electoral rival, Mir Hossein Mousavi, who is part of Iran’s “loyal opposition,” in the sense that he in no way opposed the legitimacy of the clerical regime. As protests turned violent, though, activists became less enamored of Mousavi and began protesting against the entire system, not only the fraudulent election, and became a “disloyal opposition” movement with no more use for Mousavi. Some went as far as to burn photos of not only the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, but also the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini, thus breaking an untouchable taboo. Such disloyal actions brought the spontaneous street protesters more in line with opposition groups that had long questioned the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic, such as the MEK.
As compared with prior cases, the 2009 protests in at least a dozen cities and towns across Iran were much broader than the ones that shook Iran in 1999.
Crackdown on Iranian dissidents in Iraq
As the Iranian regime was cracking down on dissidents in the streets of Tehran and other cities, it was also directing its allies in the Government of Iraq to attack Iranian oppositionists on the Iraqi side of the border. The MEK, the same Iranian opposition group that fell out with Ayatollah Khomeini after the 1979 Revolution, is based at Camp Ashraf, Iraq. In July 2009, seven months after Iraqi Security Forces took control of Camp Ashraf from the U.S. military, an ensuing raid killed 11 and wounded hundreds more. Iraq seized dozens as hostages and only released them after weeks of worldwide hunger strikes.
There are several indications of collusion between Baghdad and Tehran: The state-controlled Iranian press celebrated and congratulated Baghdad for its suppressive actions; the speaker of Iran’s parliament stated that, “Even though it is rather late, the action by the Iraqi government is praiseworthy;” and Iran’s ambassador to Iraq welcomed news that Baghdad was seriously pursuing a policy of expulsion of the Iranian dissidents.
Crackdown and Cohesion
Simultaneous pressure on dissidents inside and outside of Iran repeated during the first week of December 2009, when National Student day events brought tens of thousands of protesters to the streets in clashes with police. Expect additional demonstrations during the 10-day Shiite religious festival of Ashura, which begins 18 December and climaxes 27 December. Ashura commemorates the death of Imam Hussein, a grandson of the Prophet of Islam. Hussein was killed in Karbala, Iraq, during the 7th century.
Just as demonstrations and Iranian regime reprisals are bound to escalate in Iran during Ashura, Baghdad prepares to crackdown on Iranian dissidents in Iraq by forcibly removing them from their camp Tuesday, December 15, a few days prior to Ashura. Passive resistance by the Iranian dissidents in the face of forcible Iraqi eviction is very likely to result in a humanitarian disaster.
The United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) expressed concern regarding the human rights situation at Camp Ashraf. Ad Malkert, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Iraq, voiced his unease, and a UNAMI press release declares, “The UN continues to advocate that Camp Ashraf residents be protected from forcible deportation, expulsion or repatriation.” Also Amnesty International stated it “fears that forced removals of the residents of Camp Ashraf would put them at risk of arbitrary arrest, torture or other forms of ill-treatment, and unlawful killing.”
Within Iran, an Iranian activist was sentenced to death after being found guilty of membership in the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK). Such sentences are not unusual, as in October, another protester was sentenced to death for MEK membership. Such sentences are part of a broader effort to discredit the opposition movement, in which hundreds have been rounded up and convicted at show trials after making forced confessions.
The Iranian regime’s cracking down on groups of dissidents, those inside Iran and those in Iraq, is inadvertently resulting in a melding of the dissident movement and providing the momentum that was largely missing in 1999 and 2003. Indeed, during July 2009, Massoud Rajavi, historical leader of the MEK, expressed solidarity with “all those sentenced to death and tortured as well as all political prisoners.” Such solidarity demonstrates the ironic effect of crackdown by the Iranian regime that enhances the cohesiveness of dissidents on the streets of Tehran and the countryside of Iraq.
While State repression helps unify the opposition, the clerical elites are developing fissures as their legitimacy is called into question. “Crippling sanctions” would likely exacerbate such splits and increase the likelihood that the current cycle of peaceful protest and State violence leads to 1979, rather than 1999 and 2003 outcomes. As would rhetoric from President Obama that highlights the egregious human rights violations of the Iranian regime, the nobility of those Iranians who sacrifice their bodies to protest for democracy, and the commitment of the United States to the principle of self-determination for all peoples. In his statement to accept the Nobel Prize, President Obama said: “We will bear witness…to the hundreds of thousands who have marched silently through the streets of Iran,” which is a step in the right direction.

Professor Raymond Tanter is president of the Iran Policy Committee; he was a member of the National Security Council staff and personal representative of the Secretary of Defense in the Reagan-Bush administration. His latest book is President Obama and Iraq: Toward a Responsible Troop Drawdown, 2009.