Washington, DC-The clerical regime in Tehran has launched a massive crackdown on the dissidents and student leaders who organized the protests that rocked 18 Iranian cities last month. This week 50,000 troops from the Revolutionary Guards and paramilitary units were deployed around Tehran in mock anti-riot exercises. On Tuesday the clerics passed a law that would make almost any criticism of the state illegal and punishable by death. On Wednesday they banned the reformist Salam newspaper, whose original closure sparked the protests, for five years. Just three weeks ago pro-democracy demonstrators were marching through the streets without fear.
There has been virtually no protest from inside Iran against these latest repressive measures. The demonstrations have died out, and the students have gone home. Is it the end of Iran's pro-democracy movement?
Key to the turnaround was President Mohammed Khatami, the self-styled reformer called "Ayatollah Gorbachev" by many in the West. During early demonstrations, protesters held aloft portraits of the popular president, appealing to his public pledges to uphold the "rule of law" and to allow greater freedom of expression. Despite their appeals, Mr. Khatami remained silent. He neither supported the students, nor called on the security forces to intervene.
But as the protests spread and became more violent, so did the pressure on Mr. Khatami to get off the fence. Finally, on July 13, he made his first public statement. "I am sure these people have evil aims," he said of the protest organizers. "They intend to foster violence in society, and we shall stand in their way." Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani chimed in later that day, warning protesters against violence. "We will enforce security at any price."
Behind the scenes, it turns out that Mr. Khatami had been subjected to intense arm twisting by the top commanders of the Islamic Republic Guards Corps. They sent him a letter on July 12, signed by 24 senior IRGC officers-- including the commanders of its land, sea, and air forces--warning him of the consequences of failing to put down the protests.
"Mr. President, if you don't take a revolutionary decision today, and fail to abide by your Islamic and nationalistic duty, tomorrow will be too late and the damage done will be irreparable and beyond imagination," the commanders warned. Their letter was printed one week later by Kayhan, a Tehran daily published by the intelligence ministry. "Our patience has reached its limits," the commanders wrote. The letter was widely interpreted inside Iran as a scarcely veiled hint of a military coup should Mr. Khatami fail to get the situation under control.
With Mr. Khatami firmly on board, the regime launched its counterattack on July 14, bussing tens of thousands of government employees to Tehran to stage a pro-regime rally. While no one was fooled as to the authenticity of the rally, it was an impressive show of force. Addressing the crowd, the secretary of the National Security Council, Hassan Rouhani, a top aide to President Khatami, said that pro-democracy protesters would be arrested and could face the death penalty. Since then, some 1,400 have been arrested, including all the prominent student leaders who organized the protests. International human rights groups have issued appeals in their favor, hoping to prevent them from being executed.
Last week, in his first trip outside of Tehran since the disturbances, Mr. Khatami simultaneously reconfirmed his commitment to the clerical system, to reform, and to repression of the pro-democracy movement in speeches in the Western Iranian city of Hamadan.
While condemning the intelligence ministry attack on student dormitories, Mr. Khatami said that the subsequent pro-democracy movement was "an effort to go beyond the boundaries. It was to express vengeance toward the system... an act against national security with deviant slogans." He added that such protests mean that security in Iran can only be guaranteed through "force and repression." At the same time, however, Mr. Khatami pledged to continue his reforms. "We are under a covenant with you to defend the legitimate civil and legal freedom of this nation," Mr. Khatami said.
Westerners might accuse Mr. Khatami of talking out of three sides of his mouth. But to an Iranian audience, steeped in the coded rhetoric of 20 years of absolute clerical rule, Mr. Khatami's message was clear. The "legitimate freedoms" he pledged to defend derived from the Constitution of the Islamic Republic, adopted at the Revolution's heyday in 1980. That constitution guarantees a broad range of civil and political rights to right-thinking men of Persian ethnic background. It relegates to second-class status women and religious and ethnic minorities, and declares holy war on advocates of secular government, who are considered to have sinned against religion.
The West should have no illusions about Mr. Khatami, what he represents, or how he sees the future of Iran. Western-style democracy has no place in his vision. But he and his clerical colleagues have unleashed forces which none of them will be able to control.
The most significant motor of change in Iran over the past two years has been the liberalization of the laws governing the press. Hundreds of new dailies, weeklies, and monthlies have sprouted up inside Iran, sporting every point of view from the openly pro-Western and pro-democracy tone of Neshat, to the rabid Islamic extremists of Jebheh, a daily associated with the Ansar-e Hezbollah, the vigilante group accused of working hand in glove with the intelligence ministry.
It is no coincidence that the student protests on July 8 were sparked by an attempt the day before to close the most prominent of the pro-reform newspapers, Salam. Several dozen journalists have been arrested over the past month, editors and publishers have been convicted in special courts, and several papers closed. Clearly the regime believes they have broken the back of the pro-democracy movement.
But the real question now is how far can the clerics push ordinary Iranians into abandoning their thirst for freedom and their aspirations for some semblance of a "normal" life. The regime leaders feel they can push very far. They may discover that they have made a fatal mistake. Now that Iranians have begun to taste freedom it is increasingly unlikely they will be willing to give it away.
In the months leading up to next February's parliamentary elections, students and pro-democracy forces will be organizing, coordinating, and planning. They, and not the regime, won the first round by showing, if only for a week, that they had conquered fear. And they have swallowed the bitter pill of their earlier disillusion, having seen President Khatami for what he is: a radical cleric who ultimately believes that maintaining the system is more important than freedom.