[The most
explosive issue in Tehran isn’t the nuclear agreement ⎯ it’s the continued imprisonment of the
leaders of the Green Movement. And one unlikely parliamentarian is picking a
fight with Iran’s hardliners over their fate.]
TEHRAN — A shard of glass hit Ali Motahari’s face first. Then a
brick smashed into his shoulder. Finally, rotten tomatoes flew in through the
car’s shattered windows. The 57-year-old member of Iran’s parliament escaped
the attack in the southwestern city of Shiraz with a bloodied head, and other
cuts and bruises. It could have been worse.
There had been warning signs. A
few dozen men were waiting for Motahari upon his arrival in Shiraz, which is
best known as the birthplace of Hafez, Iran’s most famous poet, whose works
chronicled love and wine but also included regular takedowns on religious
hypocrisy. The assailants, roughly 50 men on motorcycles, were determined to
prevent Motahari from giving a speech to reformist students at Shiraz
University — and after the parliamentarian left the airport alone in a taxi,
they pounced.
After a three-hour wait in a
police station, where officers chose not to arrest a few of the assailants even
as they lingered with impunity outside, Motahari returned to Tehran. His
attackers had achieved their immediate goal — Motahari did not deliver his
speech.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani
described the March 9 attack on Motahari as “shocking and unfortunate.”
Motahari, the son of a famous ayatollah and founding member of the Islamic
Republic, was more blunt: His attackers, he said, “came with [the] intent to
kill or mutilate.”
The outburst of violence was
caused by the fact that Motahari dared to touch the third rail of Iranian
politics — an issue far more explosive than the ongoing nuclear negotiations:
the contested 2009 presidential election. The street protests that followed the
announcement of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s reelection, which Iran’s dyed-in-the-wool
revolutionaries accuse the United States, Israel, and other Western states of
backing, haunt Iran’s leaders. Two men have borne the brunt of the regime’s
anger: Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi — the two reformist candidates
who alleged that the election was rigged — have been held under house arrest
for four years. The bloody beatings of protestors at the hands of the regime’s
Basij militia that crushed the nascent Green Movement are still a wound that
has not healed.
The official death toll from the 2009 unrest was 36, but
many in the opposition say it was in the hundreds. Thousands of ordinary
Iranians were locked up, and many figures within Iran’s clerical establishment
have called for Mousavi and Karroubi to be executed for treason.
They would never admit it, but
the overhanging trauma of 2009 lies at the root of the regime’s current
outreach to the United States and other world powers in the nuclear talks. The
protests, in the eyes of millions of Iranians and the reformist movement, severely
damaged Iran’s political legitimacy. In a country where your vote is your
greatest right, people chafed at allegations that it was stolen.
President Rouhani, having pledged to tackle the issue of
Mousavi and Karroubi’s detention before he was elected, has since stepped back,
sensing danger.
Ali Motahari is the sole member
of Iran’s political elite who has dared to confront Supreme Leader Ayatollah
Ali Khamenei on this issue. The parliamentarian is as close to a maverick as
Iran has produced: He’s a hardliner on cultural issues, staunchly opposing
efforts to allow women into sports venues to watch male athletes. When the last
government raised the issue, he said women would want cabaret
performances next. He has also condemned any
suggestion of easing the laws that require mandatory veiling, which have been
in force since the 1979 revolution.
Mousavi and Karroubi’s plight
is more remarkable because of their previous roles in the regime — Mousavi was
prime minister from 1981 until 1989, while Karroubi served twice as parliament
speaker. The two men have been detained under a decree issued by Khamenei
himself, citing national security reasons. The supreme leader has
rejected appeals for Mousavi and Karroubi’s release, saying their
offenses were too grave and that the government was treating them with
“kindness.”
In the past year, Motahari has
said the unsayable, implying that Khamenei has exceeded his powers in ordering
the holding of the Green Movement leaders. He even reportedly
suggested that had his father, Ayatollah Morteza Motahari, a
philosopher and aide to the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini, not been murdered by anti-revolutionaries just months after the
regime came into being, Khamenei would not have ascended to Iran’s ultimate
position of power.
Before he was attacked in
Shiraz, Motahari’s speeches had gone where others fear to tread. “The leader’s
opinion is this, that he says their crime is severe, and if they are
prosecuted, their sentence will be severe, and right now, we are treating them
gently,” he said at Ferdowsi University in the city
of Mashhad in November. “[But] this is not the place for a ruling decree. The
Prophet of Islam himself cannot say that a person’s sentence is severe, without
prosecution and defense, and hand down a judgment without hearing their
defense. I have not been convinced by this argument, and I still urge that
house arrest without judicial order is oppression and is unjust.”
The students listening to
Motahari applauded his comments. No one had
confronted Khamenei so publicly since 2009.
It is a sign of Iran’s
complicated power structure — and the leverage held by a few families — that
Motahari has raised this issue so openly. He has impeccable establishment
credentials: Beyond his father’s heroic status and his own status in parliament
— he has represented a Tehran neighborhood since 2008 — his sister is married
to Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani, who himself hails from one of Iran’s most
powerful families.
Many believe that if Motahari
were not the son of a man Khomeini once called “the apple of my eye,” he would
already have faced censure. In an incredible scene on Jan. 11, he received a
very public signal that he was on notice for perceived disloyalty. In a
speech before Parliament in which he argued that Mousavi’s and
Karroubi’s house arrests contravened the constitution, he was assaulted and
dragged off the podium by three parliamentarians who were former members of the
Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the elite military organization
formed by Khomeini to protect the Islamic Republic from both domestic and
foreign threats. Motahari’s opponents chanted “death to seditionists” as he
spoke; state television cut Parliament’s live broadcast.
Motahari was not so easily
silenced. On May 3, after his assault and just days before he returned to
Mashhad, where he delivered his incendiary comments the previous November, to make
another speech, a student Basij leader issued a page-long threat which was
published by Iranian news agencies.
“You are the son of dear
Morteza,” the letter read. “We don’t expect you to serve seditionists and
fighters against Islam…. We recommend you cancel your trip, or else if you
repeat your previous positions, Mashhad’s revolutionary students will not
remain quiet.”
Motahari did not submit to
intimidation but reached his venue and spoke without interruption.
Instead of backing down,
Motahari has taken a new step in rattling the regime over the events of 2009.
Mohammad Khatami, Iran’s last reformist president, has been exiled from public
life ever since he considered running again six years ago and subsequently
supported the Green Movement. Khatami has become a pariah and was recently the
subject of an order from Tehran’s chief prosecutor barring media from using his
image.
On June 16, Motahari sent a
letter asking the prosecutor to cite the law on which the order was justified.
He has not yet received a response.
The reason for the ban, though
not admitted, is next year’s parliamentary elections. Iran’s security
establishment — having smashed the reformist movement in 2009 — fears that the
vote will give the remnants of the Green Movement, now organized in two
fledgling parties, a platform to call for change on the back of the nuclear
deal. If Iran opens up to foreign investment, some analysts believe that
limited cultural reforms could follow — though hardliners are resisting the
possibility.Motahari’s lonely campaign — and the attempts to silence him —
also contain a potential warning regarding the looming nuclear deal with
Tehran. The aggressive intervention by the judiciary and former members of
the IRGC is proof, critics of a deal say, that no agreement can be relied upon.
While Rouhani has urged more personal freedom, including the removal of
Internet censorship, his efforts have been greeted with contempt from
hardliners. He may be the president — but he cannot control the likes of the
IRGC, which reports directly to Khamenei, who has supported the group over
presidents before, such as when student protests were crushed in 1999 against
Khatami’s will.
Just as Rouhani’s
government recently pushed to allowwomen into a men’s volleyball
match but were stopped by security officials, a similar manipulation of
the administration’s authority could play out when it comes to verifying that
Iran’s nuclear activities are peaceful. Yes, the Islamic Republic may agree
that U.N. monitors will be allowed to visit nuclear or even military sites —
but it’s possible that the IRGC could still stop anyone from entering the
bases. Iran has played such games before: In May 2003, for instance, it allowed International Atomic Energy
Agency inspectors into a site, but then refused to let them take samples.
The political machinations of
the judiciary and the IRGC are also seen by many to be behind the arrest and
near year-long detention of Washington Post journalist Jason
Rezaian, a dual Iranian-American citizen now on trial in Tehran. Rezaian’s
jailing and ongoing trial, in secret, is an embarrassment to Rouhani, who has
responded uneasily when questioned about it by reporters in Tehran, most
recently on June 13.
Such examples of interference
highlight the limitations placed on Rouhani. While he looks to the West for
investment and possible future cooperation in the event of a nuclear deal, such
an outlook terrifies hardliners, who can mobilize powerful forces to take to
the streets against him or use the legal cover of the judiciary to jail or
sideline those they deem a threat to the revolution.
Motahari could be the first
victim of the hardliners’ backlash. The parliamentarian’s raising of Mousavi’s
and Karroubi’s detention is likely a harbinger of calls during next year’s
election campaign for them to be freed or put on trial. Any renewed focus on
their plight could prompt another security clampdown.
The poll in February will also
present Motahari’s detractors with an opportunity to silence him: All
candidates have to be approved by Iran’s Guardian Council in a vetting process
used to filter out those deemed unreliable. Motahari may be targeted for
exclusion. His attackers, meanwhile, remain unidentified.
AP Photo/Vahid Salemi
