Internal Struggle FOR POWER IN Iran
I s
likely to open door for TALKS on Nukes,
Regardless of which side ends up as Winner!
Foreign Policy Will Be Softened To Prevent Riots
Occurring again because of any regime Repression!
June 21, 2009
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
Begin Excerpt from the Associated Press in the New York Times via World News
Top Cleric May Be Playing Role in Iran Unrest
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 20, 2009
Filed at 5:58 p.m. ET
CAIRO (AP) — One of Iran’s most powerful men may be playing a key role behind closed doors in the country’s escalating post election crisis.
Former president and influential cleric Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani has made no public comment since Iran erupted into confrontation between backers of hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and reformists who claim he stole re-election through fraud.
But Iranian TV has shown pictures of Rafsanjani’s daughter, Faezeh Hashemi, speaking to hundreds of opposition supporters. And Rafsanjani, who has made no secret of his distaste for Ahmadinejad, was conspicuously absent from an address by the country’s supreme leader calling for national unity and siding with the president.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei praised Rafsanjani, 75, on Friday as one of the revolution’s architects and an effective political figure for many years, but he acknowledged that the two have ”many differences of opinion.”
”Of course, the president’s ideas are closer to mine,” Khamenei said, warning opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi and his supporters to halt protests or face the consequences.
Demonstrators clashed with security forces in Tehran on Saturday despite the ultimatum in the most widespread violence of the crisis. There were unconfirmed reports of violence in other Iranian cities.
While his true views, and even his whereabouts, remain unclear, any support for the opposition would place Rafsanjani in direct conflict with many of the most powerful clerics in Iran’s highest echelons of power.
The stakes for the world are high.
Iran is pressing ahead with its nuclear program in the face of international sanctions and Israeli threats of military action.
The United States and other Western nations maintain that the program is geared toward making a bomb, a charge Iran consistently denies.
Meanwhile, President Barack Obama is seeking to improve relations with Iran, ending 30 years of animosity that have helped define the Islamic Republic.
The regime’s militant wing, with Ahmadinejad its most visible face, takes a hard-line position on relations with Washington and is determined to push forward with the nuclear program regardless of the consequences, experts say.
A camp of pragmatic clerics and politicians led by Rafsanjani, while loyal to the revolution’s principles, wants to build better ties with the West and a more friendly image of Iran.
”What is clear is that the leadership is far more polarized and splintered than has been clear in the past,” said Anthony Cordesman, a former Pentagon analyst with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Friday’s comments showed the country’s ultimate authority is firmly behind Ahmadinejad, who has publicly accused Rafsanjani and members of his family of corruption.
Experts said that could mean Rafsanjani’s power is waning.
”Now that the leader has made clear he was supportive of Ahmadinejad and sharing the same vision of the future of the Islamic Republic, it can be taken as a major defeat for Rafsanjani and for the political options he promotes,” said Frederic Tellier, an Iran expert in the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank.
Iran’s crisis began when Mousavi, a reform-minded architect who served as prime minister in the 1980s, claimed he was the victor of the June 12 election, accusing Ahmadinejad of using widespread fraud to win it.
Mousavi insists he wants a new election, an option Khamenei ruled out.
Rafsanjani was president between 1989 and 1997, but failed to win a third term when in 2005, losing to Ahmadinejad in a runoff. He was a close follower of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, father of Iran’s Islamic Revolution. He now heads the Expediency Council, a body that arbitrates disputes between parliament and the unelected Guardian Council, which can block legislation.
He also is the head of the powerful Assembly of Experts, which comprises senior clerics who can elect and dismiss the country’s supreme leader.
Alireza Nader, an expert on Iran with the RAND corporation, says Rafsanjani retains some leverage against Khamenei and Ahmadinejad as chairman of the Assembly of Experts.
However, he says, Khamenei ignored a letter Rafsanjani wrote asking him to restrain Ahmadinejad, who accused the former president of corruption in a televised debate.
Ignoring the letter, Nader said, ”was perceived by many Iranians as a rebuke to Rafsanjani and his role in the political system.”
Rafsanjani’s influence may have significantly dissipated as a result, he said.
”Rafsanjani is a son of the revolution,” said Tellier of the International Crisis Group. ”But his own future depends on how far the leader will allow Ahmadinejad to go in his attacks against Rafsanjani and his family.”
Begin Excerpt from Al Jazeera via World Newa
Police crack down on Iran protests
June 21, 2009
Riot police in Iran have used tear gas, water cannon and batons to disperse about 3,000 people attempting to protest over the disputed presidential election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president.
Witnesses said that dozens of people were hospitalised after being beaten by police and pro-government militia in the capital, Tehran, on Saturday.
“Lots of guards on motorbikes closed in on us and beat us brutally,” one protester said.
“As we were running away the Basiji [militia] were waiting in side alleys with batons, but people opened their doors to us trapped in alleys.”
Supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi, a defeated reformist candidate, had planned to stage a rally in the city’s Revolutionary Square, but arrived to find their way blocked by police.
A witness told Al Jazeera that police were turning people away.
“The roads were pretty much blocked by the militia, they were out with retractable metal batons. It looked like they were very frantically trying to keep people from the area,” he said.
Protests ‘quelled’
Amateur video of Saturday’s protests, which could not be independently verified, showed dozens of Iranians running down a street after police fired tear gas.
Other footage showed protesters trying to give first aid to a badly injured woman in the street.
The protesters apparently threw stones at the police and set fires in the streets.
Al Jazeera’s Alireza Ronaghi, reporting from Tehran, said that the protests had largely been quelled by Saturday evening.
“The presence of security forces were very high, they definitely wanted to take back the streets of Tehran … right now I don’t expect that many protesters are concentrated anywhere in Tehran,” he said.
He said that state television had quoted the head of Iran’s police force as thanking the Iranian people for not taking to the streets and taking the police warnings seriously.
As the clashes took place, a suspected suicide bomber blew himself up outside the shrine of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic revolution in 1979, injuring at least two people, local news agencies reported.
As night fell, the protesters kept up their show of defiance shouting “Allahu Akbar” (God is greatest) from the rooftops, a deliberate echo of a move made during the Islamic revolution in 1979.
Barack Obama, the US president, condemned the violence and urged Tehran to allow Mousavi’s supporters to stage peaceful protests.
“The Iranian government must understand that the world is watching,” he said.
“We mourn each and every innocent life that is lost. We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people.”
Nick Spicer, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Washington DC, said: “It’s his [Obama] strongest language to date.
“He’s putting the blame for the violence squarely on the Iranian government saying that the world is watching what is going on in Iran, not just that the United States is watching
“Basically he is calling the whole world as a witness to what’s going on in Iran.
“He’s trying to make this not an Iran-America thing, but a global human rights argument that he’s putting to the leaders of Iran.”
‘Ready for martyrdom’
In a statement posted on the website of his Kalemeh newspaper, Mousavi repeated his demand for the elections results to be annulled and hit out at a speech by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader.
“If this huge volume of cheating and changing the votes … which has hurt people’s trust, is presented as the very evidence of the lack of cheating, then it will butcher the republican aspect of the system and the idea that Islam is incompatible with a republic will be proven,” he said.
Anoushka Marashlian, an independent Middle East analyst, told Al Jazeera: “I think the momentum would be very difficult to maintain now because of the nature of the protests that have become more violent.
“They are not only defying the results of the elections but they are now perceived to be defying the directions of the supreme leader, and so, in essence, questioning the foundation of the Islamic Republic,” she said.
In a sermon on Friday, Khamenei ruled out any fraud in the June 12 vote and stressed there could be no doubting the re-election of Ahmadinejad.
An unnamed ally of Mousavi told the Reuters news agency that the former prime minister has said he would continue his fight and was “ready for martyrdom”.
Earlier on Saturday, Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi, another defeated presidential candidate had declined to meet the Guardian Council, Iran’s highest legislative body, concerning 646 complaints of voting irregularities in the poll.
State television quoted a council spokesman as saying that the Guardian Council had expressed its readiness to “randomly” recount up to 10 per cent of the ballots.
The contested result gave President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a tally of about 63 per cent, to Mousavi’s 34 per cent.
Begin Excerpt from Jerusalem Post
Analysis: Dissension in the ranks
June 21, 2009
MICHAEL EISENSTADT , THE JERUSALEM POST
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s Friday sermon, which called for an end to mass protests contesting the outcome of last week’s presidential elections and which carried an implicit threat of “bloodshed and chaos” if they continued, has raised the stakes in the ongoing standoff between the government and opposition in Iran.
The stage may now be set for a violent showdown. Past experience, however, raises questions whether the security forces can be uniformly relied on to implement an order to violently quash the protests, and whether such an order could in fact spark unrest within the ranks of the security forces that could have significant implications for the future stability of the regime.
According to the constitution of the Islamic Republic, the army is responsible for defending Iran’s borders and maintaining internal order, while the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) is responsible for protecting the regime.
In practice, matters are not so clear-cut. During the Iran-Iraq War, the IRGC (and its popular militia, the Basij) fought alongside regular military units at the front.
This ambiguity regarding roles and missions has continued until today: The regular military and IRGC routinely hold joint military exercises, while the Basij has, in the wake of the US invasion of Iraq, played a greater role in preparing to confront a foreign invasion, implementing the regime’s new “mosaic” doctrine, and preserving the values of
the revolution.
The IRGC and Basij also routinely participate in exercises that hone their ability to deal with domestic unrest. The Law Enforcement Forces (LEF) is a partner with the Basij (and ultimately the IRGC) in these efforts to maintain domestic order.
The intermittent unrest that has racked Iran since the early 1990s has occasionally exposed latent tensions between the country’s political and military leadership, as well as political differences between the senior echelons of the armed forces and the rank-and-file, raise questions about the implications of a violent crackdown in Iran today.
The first sign of trouble was the refusal of army and IRGC units garrisoned near Qazvin (a major town northwest of Teheran) to obey orders to quash riots there in August 1994.
The commanders of these units apparently refused to turn their weapons on the Iranian people. The regime was forced to airlift in special IRGC and Basij antiriot units from elsewhere to put down the violence.
The May 1997 election of reformist candidate Muhammad Khatami to the presidency put further stress on civil-military relations. Though senior IRGC officers had endorsed his conservative opponent (Majlis speaker Ali Akbar Nateq Nouri), credible post-election press reports indicated that IRGC personnel voted for Khatami in even greater proportions than did the general population (73 percent versus 69%.)
This indicates that the IRGC – a military organization long thought to have been a bastion of support for conservative hardliners – was in fact riven by the same divisions as Iranian society. This, perhaps, should not have come as a surprise, due to the fact that for
the past two decades, the IRGC has increasingly come to rely on conscripts to meet its manpower needs, due to a drastic decline in volunteers.
This raised questions about the political reliability of the IRGC should it be needed to quell popular unrest.
The student riots of July 1999 provided the backdrop for the next crisis in civil-military relations. These riots were put down by the LEF (often aided by the thugs of the Ansar E-Hizbullah, a shady vigilante group sponsored by the IRGC and Basij) who were relieved by the Basij once the situation had stabilized.
These events highlighted the fact that by July 1999, a new division of labor within the security forces had emerged: the LEF had become the regime’s first line of defense against domestic unrest, with the Basij providing backup. When necessary, they might be reinforced by the IRGC’s “Special Units,” followed by the IRGC’s ground forces. The regular military’s ground forces would be deployed only as a last resort.
At the height of the July 1999 unrest, 24 senior IRGC commanders sent Khatami a letter that in effect threatened a coup should he not restore order quickly. Such a threat was unprecedented in the history of the Islamic Republic, though given the political divisions in the armed forces, it is unclear whether a coup would have succeeded.
The result could well have been bloody street violence, perhaps even civil war. In the end, Iran’s clerical leadership was able to restore calm, thereby preempting a coup, though the threat of overt military intervention was an unsettling new development.
Hardline elements, however, in the security services and armed forces had already covertly intervened in the political arena, through their participation in the murder of dissident and reformist intellectuals starting in the autumn of 1998 (and continuing through the spring of 2000.)
Through these actions, the senior leadership of the security services and armed forces threw their support behind the conservative rivals of Khatami.
This development raised doubts not only about the prospects of the reform movement, but also about the impact of the growing politicization of the armed forces on discipline and effectiveness.
The rise of these security hardliners accelerated under the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. A former Revolutionary Guard member, Ahmadinejad was a manifestation of the ascendancy of a power elite comprised largely of IRGC veterans, who make up a majority of the cabinet and more than a third of the current parliament, and who have benefited from the expansion of the IRGC into nontraditional roles in business and industry.
Under Ahmadinejad, the IRGC – through its current and former members – has emerged as the main pillar of the regime.
The protests that followed in the wake of the 2009 presidential elections constitute the most serious challenge ever to the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic. They have revealed new organizational arrangements for dealing with domestic unrest that raise questions as to whether the use of force to quell anti-regime protests would produce unrest in the ranks, and spark a new crisis in civil-military relations.
Film and television footage of the protests show that this time the Basij are in the lead in dealing with the unrest, with LEF playing a supporting role. IRGC units have not yet been committed. This is consistent with the growing role assigned
the Basij since 2003 as the first line of defense against possible US regime-change attempts – whether through an invasion or a color revolution.
It is not clear, however, that this apparent confidence in the Basij is justified.
While the recruitment base of the Basij is much narrower than that of the IRGC (which draws on conscripts from all sectors of Iranian society), it is a volunteer force that many join for opportunistic reasons – for a paycheck, a scholarship, or a bit of authority. And while the Basij is probably more thoroughly vetted than other mass organizations (due to the role of local clerics and mosques in the recruitment process), it is hard to believe that its membership
is insulated from the broader political forces at work in Iranian society today. Accordingly, some units might experience significant desertions if employed to violently suppress the protests.
So far, the government has avoided a head-on confrontation with the opposition, and has contented itself with harassing demonstrators and detaining or arresting opposition organizers and prominent reformist politicians.
This approach, however, has not succeeded in slowing the momentum of the opposition protests. As a result, the regime might be tempted to employ greater violence in an effort to crush the opposition.
Iran so often surprises even the most seasoned observers that it is impossible to foresee the outcome of a violent clash between regime and opposition.
Much will depend on the following questions: which security forces the regime chooses to employ (Basij supported by LEF, or by IRGC as well), how it chooses to employ them (confronting protesters through a massive show of strength with a relatively limited and focused use of violence, or by overwhelming numbers and an unrestrained use of violence), and how skillful the opposition is in encouraging dissent in and defections from the ranks of the security forces.
But a violent crackdown, even if successful (as seems likely), could be the opening round of a long and bitter struggle, with far-reaching implications for the cohesiveness of the security forces and the long-term stability of the regime.
Michael Eisenstadt is a senior fellow and director of The Washington Institute’s Military and Security Studies Program. – The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
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