The mission of Iran's new Majlis
Fox News, Thursday March 27, 2008
Transcript
The make up of Iran’s new
parliament following the March 14 elections, though still a
work in progress, has already solidified the rule of the
most belligerent, suppressive faction. The new Majlis can
best be described as a den of henchmen and torturers.
Supreme Leader Ali Khamene'i described the new parliament as
"committed, opposed to Western arrogance, and powerful.” A
day later, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad described the vote
as "safeguarding the right to acquire nuclear energy with
exemplary prowess."
Khamene'i asked for, and got, an anti-Western parliament,
purged of internal opponents, which would endorse Tehran's
nuclear agenda.
In Tehran, which had 30 seats up for grabs, 18 of the 19
candidates who made it through the first round belonged to
the Ahmadinejad faction. The nineteenth, an occasional
critic of Ahmadinejad, is nevertheless a staunch supporter
of Khamene'i.
One of the newly elected deputies, Ruhollah Hosseinian,
lauded the former deputy Intelligence Minister, implicated
in the murder of dozens of intellectuals in the 1990s, as a
"great martyr." Another, a female deputy named Fatima Alia,
has been identified by eyewitnesses as collaborating in the
torture of many women political prisoners affiliated with
the main Iranian opposition, the Mujahedin-e Khalq. Morteza
Agha Tehrani, a cleric, is a ringleader of the plain-clothes
agents responsible for the beating and arrest of many
students. He is also known as a mentor to the henchmen in
Ahmadinejad's cabinet.
The vast majority of the Iranian people steered clear of the
ballot boxes. The Interior Ministry’s claim of a 60 percent
voter turnout more reflected its reaction to the widespread
boycott than the actual vote. According to the Daily
Telegraph’s correspondent, polling stations across the
capital were “quiet, orderly and only sparsely attended,” as
millions of Iranians chose to ignore the plea by Khamene'i
that voting was a "national and religious duty."
The situation was even worse elsewhere. In Iran's second
most populated city, Mashhad, the leading candidate Mohammad
Reza Faker won a seat with 211,624 votes, out of the 1.8
million eligible voters; that is only 12 percent. In the
northwestern city of Tabriz, Massoud Pezeshkzad got 105,000
votes, less than nine percent of eligible voters in that
city, according to the state-run media.
Ridiculing the government’s 60 percent figure, the BBC
reported that “There was certainly no evidence of such a
high turn-out in Tehran where polling stations were not busy
and many people said they felt there was nothing, or no one,
to vote for.” Even the official figure for turnout in Tehran
— nearly two million out of seven million eligible voters —
shows only 28 percent participation.
Abolhassan Nouri, the Friday prayer leader in the
southwestern port city of Khorramshahr, described the
elections as "fraudulent." Voters were enticed and
intimidated, and votes were traded, reported a Persian
language website close to former Iranian Revolutionary Guard
Corps (IRGC) commander Mohsen Rezai.
Many Iranians used the opportunity to criticize the regime,
noting that the elections were largely a sham. One told the
UK paper The Guardian: "The people you see voting here are
people employed by the government, and who depend on the
government. Ordinary people do not have a good life and they
don't vote. Of my family and friends, not one percent are
going to vote. All the people on the list are the same. It's
all the same regime.”
Prior to the election, the Guardian Council, the powerful
clerical vetting body, had disqualified nearly 3,000
candidates. Most were cohorts of former presidents Akbar
Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami, now rivals to the
Khamene’i/Ahmadinejad gang. Most major figures and even many
incumbents were never even allowed to run.
But make no mistake: the objective was not a complete purge.
The ruling faction sought to keep enough of them on the
ballot to give the election a veneer of inclusiveness, while
ruling out the possibility of a strong rival block emerging.
The scheme, known as “electoral engineering” within the
inner ranks of the regime, also sought to discredit rivals
by letting them in and then dealing them a severe electoral
blow. The so called “reformist” faction took the bait.
Far from providing a mandate, the elections demonstrated the
clerical regime’s determination to silence even the nominal
dissent coming from the hapless “reformist” camp. The vote
was viewed as nothing more than an opportunity for Khamene'i
and his allies in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps
(IRGC) to consolidate the politico-military faction
represented by the IRGC’s top brass and veteran commanders
turned politicians, like Ahmadinejad. In recent years,
Khamene'i has thrown his lot and that of his regime behind
the IRGC, at the expense of his traditional ideological and
political base.
The parliamentary elections also exposed the reality that
just beneath the veneer of Tehran’s claims of popular
support for its rogue regional and nuclear ambitions lays a
regime despised by its people, who desperately seek real
democratic change. This reality reveals the IRGC-centric
regime of the ayatollahs as vulnerable, and leaves it little
room to maneuver.
The path of confrontation was chosen long ago, and Khamene'i
must stay the course in the interest of self-preservation.
Tehran will continue secretly developing a nuclear bomb
(while obfuscating the nuclear issue), will keep training
and arming Iraqi militants (while declaring it wants peace
in Iraq), and will not relent on the domestic repression
(while claiming a popular mandate). The sooner the West
recognizes that Tehran has exhausted its capacity to change
its rogue behavior, the better it will be able to fix its
broken policy and take concrete steps to implement a new
approach.
The right policy would maintain international pressure and
sanctions on the Iranian regime, while recognizing that
there is deep, widespread popular hostility to the
ayatollahs. The Iranian people and their opposition are the
best allies for a peaceful and democratic Iran. They are the
ones the West should enthusiastically and urgently engage,
not the terrorist tyrants who rule over them. Europe and the
United States should stop wringing their hands and wasting
time.
Alireza Jafarzadeh is a FOX News Channel Foreign Affairs
Analyst and the author of "The
Iran Threat: President Ahmadinejad and the Coming Nuclear
Crisis" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Jafarzadeh has revealed Iran's terrorist network in Iraq and
its terror training camps since 2003. He first disclosed the
existence of the Natanz uranium enrichment facility and the
Arak heavy water facility in August 2002.
