It has been suggested by some on this thread that a pure military campaign (invasion, occupation, and restructuring) is needed to defeat the threat of Islamic fundamentalism. Perhaps, but I am not convinced. A military presence is needed to preserve the peace while our greatest weapons are exported to the youths of hostile countries: our ideology, our culture, and our success.
It wasn't our military superiority which led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, and it certainly isn't a military solution which will eventually transform China either. In due time, the Arab states (yes, I know Iranians do not consider themselves Arabs) will follow the lead of the West, willingly or unwillingly. So thank you MTV, Baywatch, and Saturday Night Live. <vbg> Time is on our side.
Iran's Students Step Up Reform Drive
By NAZILA FATHI
nytimes.com
TEHRAN, July 6 — A forceful student movement is replacing President Mohammad Khatami as the leading engine for political reform in Iran. Activists at the country's vibrant, overflowing universities say their calls for change are gathering momentum and they are preparing to put delicate issues like renewing relations with the United States to a public vote for the first time.
Unlike Mr. Khatami, who has twice been elected president but has been stymied in his quest for change by the still-powerful conservative clerics and their supporters, the students are not patient, polite or at all ready to settle for the status quo.
Gholamabass Tavassoli, a liberal activist who had just served a year in jail on charges of trying to overthrow the Islamic government, found out just how far things had shifted when he addressed a crowd at the Science and Industry University here in May.
The students were disenchanted with his muted criticism of the minor reforms of President Khatami, and they wanted Mr. Tavassoli to hear their unrestrained criticism of him.
Akbar Atri, like many of the campus radicals something of an eternal student at age 30, said: "The public in general has lost its vigor compared to five years ago because of the violence and suppression that hard-liners exerted. It is clear that the reform movement has failed because the reformers were not willing to pay the price for change."
Mohsen Sazgara, a reformist politician and former journalist who often speaks at universities, said the students were becoming more and more restive. "They can make a politician sweat with bold questions," he said.
Students were a powerhouse of revolution from Bolshevik Russia to Tiananmen Square and Eastern Europe in 1989 and in Iran's own Islamic revolution 10 years earlier.
They are articulate, educated, a bridge between the elite and more ordinary people — in this case, taking the message of Iran's reformist newspapers to their families.
In today's Iran, students derive strength from numbers. There are 1.7 million in a country of 65 million where two-thirds of the population is under 30. The closed, state-run economy, combined with corruption and mismanagement, has prevented the development necessary to give everyone jobs. Officials predict six million will be jobless by 2004.
Clearly, the future — and its frustrations, if no change is allowed — belongs to the students.
"The country will have to go to any direction this generation wants to go, both because of their quantity and quality, which is their wit and education," Mr. Sazgara said.
"They want more freedom in their private and social lives," he added. "They are fed up with the state's interference, telling them what to do. They want to be able to integrate in the global culture, have a democratic system and be sure that there will be jobs in future."
In contrast to the devoted Islamic revolutionaries envisioned in the strict policies adopted after 1979, today's students are aware of the realities outside Iran because of the Internet and satellite television. They read about Western democracy and are taught by professors who studied in the West.
Reza Amerinassab, a 28-year-old medical student who advocates reform, said he spent hours surfing the Internet and more time reading books on the formation of Western democracies than reading his medical textbooks.
The turning point for students was July 1999, when vigilante forces attacked a student dormitory in Tehran after students protested the closing of a pro-reform newspaper.
The vigilantes, along with the police force controlled by hard-liners, attacked the dormitory while students were asleep. Students were beaten and one was killed. The attack set off five days of the worst violence since the 1979 revolution.
Eventually, protesters retreated after President Khatami pleaded for order. Hard-liners were using the unrest to threaten a coup against Mr. Khatami, said Mohammadreza Namnabat, a student involved in those protests.
But the judiciary, also controlled by hard-liners, mocked the students and acquitted major defendants, convicting just one soldier of stealing an electric shaver.
Meanwhile, student leaders were suppressed and jailed. In one incident that reverberated nationally last year, a student leader, Ali Afshari, was shown on a prime time television news program, cowed and confessing that he had tried to overthrow Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme religious leader.
Last fall, at a news conference shortly before he was returned to jail to serve a one-year term, Mr. Afshari apologized to reformist supporters. "The pressure was beyond the level I could resist," he said. "I had not prepared myself for it." He added that in one year he had spent 328 days in solitary confinement.
Despite the shock of 1999 and the continuing repression, students are pressing for change, led mainly by the Office for Consolidating Unity, the leading student reform movement. It has brought the country's Islamic Association of Universities under one umbrella, represents every campus in the country and has a central board in Tehran.
In elections in February for that board, 53 of the 63 elected members were so-called radical reformists — ardent supporters of change who reject compromise. "We want true and unconditional democracy, not a religious democracy if it violates democratic principles such as human rights, freedom and equality because of being Islamic," Mr. Atri said.
Ahmad Faraji, a student who was jailed for two weeks, said: "We still do not reject Mr. Khatami and his reform movement but believe they are not enough. We think change should be from the bottom up; society must act more forcefully and participate in the process of change by finding its voice to criticize."
Inside the universities, these leaders are preparing to hold referendums on sensitive issues like changing the Constitution to eliminate the veto the clerics have over the democratically elected Parliament, talks with the United States and elimination of hard-line unelected bodies that have impeded reforms. It will be the first time any of the topics are put to a public vote.
"These are important issues and we intend to make at least the universities' opinion public about these matters," said Mr. Amerinassab. "Public opinion is a powerful means for change and universities are where thoughtful opinions are shaped. We must help break the locks that have stopped reforms. We must pressure politicians not to give up." |
