Muzzling dissent

Economist.com

IS IRAN slipping back into a more repressive mode? A generally edgy feeling sharpened this week when the government announced that petrol would be rationed within hours. This caused chaos at pumps, with drivers fighting over the last drops of fuel; some of them chanted anti-government slogans and set cars on fire. A cap on consumption of 100 litres (22 gallons) a month shows that the government is nervous about relying on imported fuel. The unrest suggests that people are getting cross about the economy.

Yet this does not mean that political dissent is bubbling up. The regime’s detractors may feel angry but they have little scope for expressing their feelings. The crackdown is probably not because of a real threat from within; it is a way of responding to pressure from outside for fear of military strikes, an economic embargo or American plans for a “velvet revolution” leading to a change of regime.

Since December, the UN Security Council has passed two resolutions imposing sanctions on Iran because of its persistent failure to be candid about its nuclear programme, while the United States has pressed Western companies to cut ties with the Islamic Republic. It has sent more troops and battleships to the Persian Gulf and has detained Iranians inside Iraq. The American press continues to speculate about American and perhaps Israeli air attacks against Iran’s nuclear sites.

Iran has also reacted vehemently to last year’s decision by the American administration to give $66m to Iranian opposition groups. Most of the cash is for radio and satellite broadcasters putting across views at odds with those beamed by Iranian state television, but $20m is for unnamed groups inside Iran. The overall figure is expected to rise to $75m next year.

A mood of fear has been building up for more than a year. Many Iranians interpreted last summer’s detention of Ramin Jahanbegloo, a mild-mannered academic, as a warning not to attend political or cultural conferences abroad. In September Iran’s largest liberal daily, Sharq, was closed; it reopened last month but the ban may have made its journalists more cautious.

In March campaigners for women’s rights were arrested and held for several days for defying a government order not to protest. A teachers’ demonstration was also broken up in the same month. At present, the authorities seem keener to intimidate would-be dissenters rather than imprison hundreds of them. By locking up a few well-known ones, the authorities are serving notice to intellectuals generally.

The authorities have embarked on one of the harshest morality campaigns for several years. But the crackdown, which after two months has begun to slacken, may have been driven by a desire to placate conservative clergy in Qom, Iran’s most religious city, where several of them have criticised President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for letting standards slip.

In any event, the regime has been going out of its way to display its strength. Police and militiamen have been manning “morality checkpoints” across Tehran, the capital, and have been publicly beating alleged gangsters, who were paraded on television and forced to wear derogatory placards. This grimly reminded liberals of a period in the 1990s when intelligence agents assassinated known criminals—and then started to kill a number of well-known intellectuals and dissidents too.

The supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, who is more powerful than the president, has called for a “year of national unity and Islamic consolidation”. The presence of more old soldiers in the government’s upper ranks has shifted the power balance, which in the past prevented any one faction from winning too much control. Since Mr Ahmadinejad’s election as president in 2005, younger conservatives have dominated key positions. Many of them view politics through a military prism. It is they who are keenest on the present crackdown.

The brief arrest in April of Hossein Mousavian, a former nuclear negotiator, showed how strong the hawks are. Last week a group of angry right-wing radicals and seminarians gathered outside a clerical court in the eastern city of Mashhed to demand the prosecution of a former president and leading reformer, Muhammad Khatami, for having shaken hands with some women during a recent trip to Italy—a bad error under a strict interpretation of Islamic law.

Either the reactionaries are rattled by the prospect of the general election scheduled for next year, or they are flaunting their confidence. In Iran’s opaque politics, it is hard to say which.