H
amed is a child of the revo-lution. His parents were among the thousands of protesters who took part in the over-throw of the monarchy and brought Iran’s Islamic Republic into being 40 years ago next week. His father joined the Revolutionary Guards to defend the system and fought for its survival in the brutal Iran-Iraq war that cost at least half a million lives.Like more than 50 per cent of Iran’s youthful population Hamed, 38, has never known anything other than the theocratic state. But ahead of its 40th anniversary, the business graduate questions why his parents’
generation pushed so hard to topple the Pahlavi dynasty that ran the country between 1925 and 1979. It was a “mistake”, he says, that he is conscious not to repeat.
“I respect the desire of my par-ents’ generation for change but do not understand their immature act to overthrow a ruling system which still had room for improvement,”
says Hamed. “Ideally, I want a secular system but I am not willing to destroy everything when we can push for reform.”
Protesters calling for the over-throw of the Shah in January 1979 hold up a poster of the exiled cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini who went on to found the Islamic Re-public © AFP
John Bolton, the hawkish US national security adviser, predicted last year that the republic would
“not last until its 40th birthday”. He was clearly wrong. But for the first time in four decades there is a seri-ous debate inside the country over whether the Islamic Republic can survive in its present form.
Iranian politicians mock com-ments like Mr Bolton’s as naive and speak of a country that has devel-oped a large, educated middle class which is conscious of the turbulent recent history and wary of risking their security. Ruling clerics insist that the Shia faith — the religion that underpins the Islamic Republic — is flexible enough to adapt its rules to modern demands if need be.
Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a pillar of the revolution who pushed for clerical rule, elected president promising a reconstruction plan.
He serves for eight years
Many Iranians now openly dis-cuss whether the system is heading toward a similar fate as that of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. “How do you think the revolution hap-pened?” says Bahman, a 65-year-old businessman who took part in the 1979 revolt. “It was exactly like these days when we were frustrated and wanted a big change.”
Some have taken to social media
— Instagram and the popular
mes-saging app Telegram — to vent their anger at the clergy, circulating jokes on how backward the old clerics based in the holy city of Qom are in the face of modern issues. “Ira-nians rightly see the root of their problems in mixing politics with religion,” says one cleric. “There is rising demand for separation of the two.”
But a former reformist official warns that those seeking radi-cal change will be disappointed:
“Those who talk about the collapse of the Islamic Republic have very shallow knowledge of Iran and Shiism,” he says. “The resilience and pragmatism of the Shia clergy and Iranians will prevent a radi-cal movement similar to the 1979 revolution.”
Yet, battered by sanctions, criti-cised over its involvement in for-eign conflicts in Iraq, Syria and Yemen, and distracted by internal splits over who will replace the ageing supreme leader, the Islamic Republic looks highly vulnerable.
In protests over the past year workers, teachers and even victims of banking scandals have taken to the streets. Female protesters have openly challenged the authorities in anti-hijab demonstrations that have been posted online. At the end of 2017, rising prices triggered widespread demonstrations against poverty and corruption in working class areas that tipped over into calls for a change in the system.
Politicians do not rule out the possibility of more protests but urge caution. “The collapse of a system can happen if there is insecurity or when it loses its control over the country’s affairs, none of which has happened in Iran,” says Hamid-Reza Taraghi, a politician close to hardline forces. “The gap between the political system and the people is not big; Iran’s military forces listen to political rulers and Iran has a thorough dominance of intelligence over the Middle East which even the US lacks.”
Opposition to the US-backed Shah grew steadily in the 12 months before the 1979 revolution. His regime had become increasingly brutal and the introduction of western-style economic and social reforms antagonised the highly religious and traditional society.
But he had also riled the largely apolitical merchants in the tra-ditional bazaars who joined with the clerics, students and ordinary workers in protests and strikes across the country.
Fanning those flames was the Paris-based Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who went on to be the founder of the Islamic Republic.
Exiled by the Shah in 1964 after leading protests against his secular reforms, Khomeini communicated
with supporters, many in rural parts of the country, via audio cas-settes recorded in the suburbs of the French capital. Smuggled into Iran, the tapes and paper statements were distributed via a network of mosques by young cler-ics and more widely by an eclectic group that included Marxists and nationalists united behind a desire to overthrow the Shah but all also vying for control of the system that would replace him.
Khomeini’s return to Iran on February 1 1979 — two weeks after the Shah had abdicated and left the country — brought the protests to a new height. Many ob-servers believed the clerics would go back to their seminaries and leave power in a Shah-less Iran to the technocrats. Ten days later, February 11, the revolutionaries confiscated the state-run radio and TV and claimed victory. The army put down its weapons and declared itself neutral. A referen-dum two months later saw 98 per cent of eligible voters support the establishment of the Islamic Re-public of Iran.
Initially the clerics, who had no history of ruling Iran, welcomed educated figures in suits and ties but later decided to occupy senior executive positions themselves as they grew concerned that they could meet the same fate as the Shah.
While the Islamic Republic continues to enjoy the backing of its core believers, estimated by reform-minded analysts to be a few million people, many Iranians have reassessed their support for the revolution. Aziz, at the time a 26-year-old student in Tehran, joined the revolt, he says, after being “shocked” at seeing women in the streets without headscarves and feeling “disgusted” at bars sell-ing alcohol.
Forty years on he says he is fed up with what he calls the regime’s
“hypocrisy” and what he considers exploitation of Islam for political purposes. He blames the regime for slowing down the country’s economic progress. “Iran could be where South Korea is now if there were no revolution,” he says. “We naively thought there could be social justice under an Islamic system.”
Farid is the son of a senior mem-ber of the Tudeh party, which was Iran’s largest communist group and played a significant role in the 1979 revolt. But in its aftermath he spent seven years in prison, a victim of the purges that began almost as soon as the clerics took power. Those purges accelerated after Iraq’s invasion of Iran in 1980 with thousands jailed and others, including members of the Mujahedin-e Khalq, which backed Iraq in the war, hanged.
Najmeh Bozorgmehr
60 BUSINESS DAY
www.businessday.ng https://www.facebook.com/businessdayng @Businessdayngmonday 04 February 2019
Two sides claim progress at end of Washington talks but Lighthizer fails to report specific concessions
Sanctions are hurting and many of those born since the 1979 revolution want reform, but the system remains resilient
Trump floats fresh Xi summit to settle trade war
james Politi
Donald Trump says he wants to discuss with his Chinese counterpart ‘some of the longstanding and more difficult points’ on trade © AP
T
he US and China claimed progress in tackling some of the thorniest issues in their trade war as Donald Trump sug-gested that a new presidential sum-mit might be necessary to settle the economic conflict within the next month.At the end of two days of negotia-tions in Washington, Robert Ligh-thizer, the US trade representative, said his talks with Liu He, China’s vice-premier, had finally centred on US demands for structural reforms by Beijing — such as ending the forced transfer of technology from US companies or reining in the use of industrial subsidies.
But Mr Lighthizer failed to re-port a specific concession made by Beijing, and said he and Steven Mnuchin, US Treasury secretary, were considering a trip to Beijing after the Chinese new year celebra-tion in early February to resume negotiations.
“We focused on these core ideas, these core concepts and it’s my judgment that we made headway in significant ways,” Mr Lighthizer said on Thursday.
agreement would “send a positive signal to our two peoples and the broader international community”.
China has offered to boost its purchases of US goods to reduce the bilateral trade deficit — including a new pledge to purchase 5m metric tonnes of soyabeans — and sug-gested it was willing to discuss regu-latory changes to improve market access for international investors.
But it has been reluctant to un-dermine state support for the econ-omy in a way that would reduce its chances of competing with the US on innovation and advanced technolo-gies — and doubts remain about its willingness to cede much ground.
US officials have stressed that they are looking to ensure that any commitments made by Beijing can be verified and enforced — a politi-cally and legal challenging goal. “If we can get an agreement, it’s worth nothing without enforcement,” Mr Lighthizer said.
US officials are counting on fears of a tariff escalation being more intense in Beijing than they are in Washington over the next month, particularly given angst over the Chinese economic slowdown.
But the White House is facing
The two trade delegations held a “frank, concrete and construc-tive discussion” and “agreed to further strengthen cooperation” on structural issues such as technology transfers and intellectual property protection, according to a readout from China’s state news agency Xin-hua, which stopped short of provid-ing details on commitments to re-solve such issues. It also confirmed the proposed Lighthizer-Mnuchin visit for mid-February.
Mr Trump, the US president, ear-lier in the day raised the possibility of a new summit with Xi Jinping, his Chinese counterpart.
“I think that probably the final deal will be made, if it’s made, be-tween myself and President Xi,” Mr Trump said in the Oval Office.
The two countries had “clarified the timetable and roadmap for the next consultation,” according the Xinhua statement.
If no resolution is reached by March 1, tariffs on $200bn of Chi-nese goods are set to increase from 10 per cent to 25 per cent, a prospect that has spooked world financial markets because of the inevitable economic damage.
Mr Xi was also upbeat on Thurs-day, saying in a letter presented to Mr Trump by the Chinese delegation that “intensive consultations” had yielded “good progress”.
“I hope our two sides will con-tinue to work with mutual respect and win-win co-operation,” the Chi-nese president wrote, adding that an
pressure of its own — in the form of the hit taken by the US economy this month from the partial government shutdown and Mr Trump’s sensitiv-ity to adverse movements in equsensitiv-ity markets.
Politically, Mr Trump is striving to fulfil one of his key 2016 campaign pledges — to reset trade relations with China. But any agreement that is seen as weak or inconclusive would expose him to attacks from Democratic rivals.
The chance of a big breakthrough this week in the trade talks was rela-tively low, after Beijing reacted with outrage to Monday’s indictment of Huawei, the Chinese telecoms equipment maker, on criminal charges it stole US technology and violated US sanctions. But US of-ficials said there was no evidence it adversely affected the negotiations.
A new summit between Mr Trump and Mr Xi would follow their steak dinner in Buenos Aires on De-cember 1, just after the G20 summit in the Argentine capital. That meet-ing resulted in a commercial cease-fire between the US and China and avoided a tariff escalation that was originally scheduled for January 1.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the new meeting between Mr Trump and Mr Xi was expected to be held on the southern Chi-nese island of Hainan, right after a planned meeting between the US president and Kim Jong Un, the leader of North Korea, at the end of February.
Monday 04 February 2019
BUSINESS DAY 61
Monday 04 February 2019