Tehran Ripe For A Spot Of Mischief-Making

The Times

After the election, one pressing issue for the Foreign Office should be how best to help dissidents in Iran.

IF THE IRANIAN mullahs were watching the Prime Minister’s grilling by Jonathan Dimbleby on Monday night, they would have had every reason to feel reassured. Tony Blair told the audience that there is no chance of American military action against the Islamic Republic to halt its nuclear programme. With that option forsworn, he reiterated that the only show in town is the endless quadrille which the EU3 countries — Britain, France and Germany — have been dancing with the ayatollahs since late 2003. This means “engaging” Tehran with an admixture of carrots and sticks to ensure that its atomic aspirations remain peaceful.

Yet Mr Blair — who spoke so passionately about democracy in Iraq — again neglected to mention the ghost at the diplomatic banquet: the 60 million-plus Iranian people. They are the grouping most affected by the Tehran’s nuclear programme. Do they really want atomic weapons? At what price? And if the regime fulfils its ambitions to become a regional hegemon, able to intimidate its neighbours, will that not finish off all hope of domestic reform?

Maybe some tender consciences in Britain were assuaged by the Prime Minister’s conviction that the “Great Satan” in Washington is now well and truly tethered. But whether right or wrong, Britain’s Iran policy today has a desperately traditional flavour to it. In classically 19th and early 20th-century fashion, the future of Persia is being carved up like the proverbial plum pudding by two very different lots of elites: Euro-mandarins and their clerico-fascist counterparts in the Islamist hierarchy.

Even if the mullahs never obtain nuclear weapons, they are already the winners from this process. Whatever happens now in the negotiations with the EU3, the very fact of their taking place at all confers the legitimacy they so crave. For if Tehran has sought anything from the EU3, it is a guarantee that the United States will forswear the option of regime change for good.

It has not yet received it. That said, the Administration has so far proved reluctant to give much assistance to the disparate Iranian opposition movement. Partly, this stems from the need to give the EU3 — to whom the Americans seem to have sub-contracted a key element of policy for now — a fair wind.

Yet are the only alteratives eitherthe existing EU3 process or the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities? Strangely, the option of making massive political mischief for the regime has never been fully developed. For as in most tyrannies, the absence of popular support is the soft underbelly of the Iranian system.

But how is that vulnerability to be exploited? Boycotting the forthcoming presidential poll, scheduled for June 17, seems unlikely to do the trick. It has been tried before, after hundreds of reformist candidates were forbidden from standing in the parliamentary elections last year by the clerics.

The most hotly debated proposal in Iranian opposition circles today is the referendum on the 1979 Constitution. The 1979 basic law enshrined the concept of velayat-e faqih, or rule of the jurisprudent — that is, government by the clerics based on Sharia. It was ratified by plebiscite in 1979 after the fall of the Shah. This was the last occasion on which there was a reasonably free vote in Iran, and the endorsement continues to be held up by the mullahs as proof of their legitimacy.

Now dissidents want to turn this device back on the ayatollahs. They argue that everything has changed since 1979: close to half of their countrymen are under the age of 30, and have no memory of the Shah’s regime. Nearly 70 per cent live in urban areas, with half in Tehran. There are three million satellite televisions. As in the Islamic Revolution of 1979, student activism is the key: when the “reformist” President, Muhammad Khatami, went to Tehran University last December, he was booed with shouts of “referendum, referendum”.

To that end, the dissidents have launched the www.60000000.com website urging their compatriots to sign an e-petition. It calls for a referendum with a free ballot, under international supervision, for the drafting of a new constitution compatible with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The opposition knows that the elected presidency means little under the current constitution: real power over key organs of state such as the armed forces and revolutionary guards resides in the hands of the Supreme (religious) Leader and the Council of Guardians.

The organisers have obtained 35,000 signatures to date, both at home and in the diaspora. Partly, this is because the Tehran regime has blocked internet access to it. But supporters note that support for the concept spans Mossadeq-style social democrats, monarchists, leftists and disillusioned supporters of the regime. They include, controversially, Mohsen Sazgara, the former Revolutionary Guards commander and Khomeini associate. It was a significant straw in the wind that the US State Department recently gave Sazgara a visa to take up a fellowship at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

But perhaps most interesting has been the response of Grand Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, now effectively living under house arrest in Qom. He endorsed the referendum, only for his son effectively to rescind this the next day — presumably under pressure from the regime — by declaring that his father had been confused. The day after that, though, the Grand Ayatollah’s office made clear that there had been no misunderstanding. Montazeri’s position has, if anything, been strengthened by the rise in Iraq of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani: Sistani is also a strong opponent of rule of the jurisprudent.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office, like the State Department, believes all this to be a purely internal Iranian matter. But there was a time when the West did not engage in such pious formalism. In the weeks after the death of Pope John Paul II, it is worth recalling how much the US Government and trade union movement (as well as some Western Europeans) aided the rise of Solidarity in Poland. More recently, foreign democracy activists also played a critical part in the overthrow of Tehran ’s close ally, President Akayev of Kyrgyzstan — where the demonstrations also started small and blew up very rapidly once they gained traction.

The mullahs make suspiciously much of their ability to avoid Akayev’s fate. It is now up to the West to help to puncture that apparent confidence. The most potent vehicle for doing so would be for President Bush to endorse the referendum proposal: the Persian equivalent of Ronald Reagan’s call in Berlin to Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear this Wall down”. And the price would be smaller than if Tehran got the bomb or America invaded.