Iranian Apathy May Hinder U.S. Bid to Foment Unrest
Reformists Warn Against Destabilization Campaign
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, May 29, 2003; Page A14
ISTANBUL, May 28 -- Iranian analysts warn that any U.S. plan to foment popular unrest in Iran will run up against the same challenge that has stalled the country's struggling reform movement: The careworn Iranian public is steadily disengaging from politics.
"In the current situation, it's impossible," said Saeed Laylaz, a reformist journalist and businessman. "The people are going to their homes, not coming out into the streets. The atmosphere in Tehran and Iran is being de-politicized, step by step and day by day."
As U.S. policymakers debate what stance to adopt toward a country they accuse of sheltering senior members of al Qaeda and seeking to develop nuclear weapons, the assessment voiced by Laylaz and echoed by other reformists and foreign diplomats in telephone interviews this week suggests scant support for those urging destabilization of a government that remains largely under the control of unelected conservative clerics.
Iranian officials today dismissed Bush administration allegations regarding Iran's support of terrorism and its pursuit of nuclear armaments. Speaking at a conference of Muslim nations, Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi said Iran abhorred the "fanatic and perverted beliefs" of al Qaeda, which Tehran worked to defeat, along with al Qaeda's Taliban patrons in Afghanistan, for years before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks drew the United States into war there.
A Foreign Ministry spokesman said several al Qaeda suspects had been held for questioning but that it was not clear whether they were senior operatives or more like the 500 foot soldiers Iran says it has arrested and shipped to their home countries since 2001.
In addition, Kharrazi denied reports by an Iranian opposition group that Iran had built two small nuclear plants as back-ups to a uranium enrichment facility that inspectors from the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency examined in February. He warned against preemptive military strikes against any of the facilities.
"Resorting to force, or directing unverified accusations . . . will only undermine the current international arrangements," Kharrazi said.
U.S. officials are watching Tehran's response closely as the Bush administration mulls shifting to a policy of destabilizing Iran. Senior U.S. officials were scheduled to discuss policy toward Iran on Tuesday, but the meeting was postponed until Thursday and specifics regarding any program to influence public sentiment within Iran have not emerged.
By many accounts, Iranians remain broadly dissatisfied with the conservative clerics who, almost a quarter-century after the 1979 Islamic revolution deposed a U.S.-backed monarchy, still control the government's most powerful institutions. But the reformist politicians who dominate the elective positions in Iran's government also have lost popular support for failing to deliver promised social freedoms and economic opportunities. Gone, analysts say, are the hopeful legions who twice in six years swept President Mohammad Khatami and a reformist parliament into office, both times with more than 70 percent of the vote.
"Because we're here on the ground, we see more shades than the U.S. does," said a foreign diplomat in Tehran, where the United States has had no diplomatic presence since militants seized the U.S. Embassy on Nov. 4, 1979, and held its diplomats hostage for 444 days. "We don't see a disaffected mass -- apathetic, yes, but not disaffected."
That public frustration, though widespread, is focused inward, according to Iranian observers and diplomats. When a few thousand students took to the streets last November, witnesses said the demonstrations were confined to campus of Tehran University both by security forces and the disinclination of bystanders to join in. And when municipal elections were held across Iran on Feb. 12, no city recorded more than a one-third voter turnout. Only 12 percent of those eligible to vote turned out in the capital.
"In the last few years, when the majority of people participated in elections, their experience was disappointment," said Davoud Hermidas Bavand, a law professor at the Supreme National Defense University. "Non-participation has become a kind of protest against the system as a whole."
Laylaz, an editor at the reformist newspaper Norooz, said hard-liners have mollified some segments of society, particularly Iran's youthful majority, by granting limited, marginal freedoms while keeping a tight hold on political power. Young couples hold hands in public now without apparent fear of admonishment from the religious police. Women in Tehran routinely wear head scarves well back on their head, and some don coats that hug their figures.
"This is very, very important to making the people relaxed," Laylaz said. "The atmosphere is not comparable with six years ago. The regime has changed."
Regardless of how they feel about their leaders, said another reformer, ordinary Iranians would likely resist any outside efforts to stir up dissent.
"If anybody took a look at Iranian history, the likelihood of fomenting mass popular uprising in the midst of foreign interference is naïve," said the reformer, an academic who spoke on condition he not be identified by name. "Right now it would result in the opposite, emboldening a sense of collective resentment against a superior outside power.
"This is at the popular level," the academic added. "At the elite level it would be even worse. You would have strong resentments and a closing together of various factions, reformers and conservatives."
One issue on which reformers and hard-liners already have closed ranks is development of a nuclear program -- which officials maintain is solely intended to meet energy needs -- that for them emphasizes both national pride and the existence of Israel's nuclear program.
Likewise, in interviews last month, reformers and hard-liners also warned that the United States should not ally itself with the Mujaheddin-e Khalq, or People's Mujaheddin. The Iranian opposition group, long based in Iraq and supported by Saddam Hussein, is on the State Department's list of terrorist organizations.
Because the group seeks to unseat the Tehran government, Pentagon officials last month made moves toward making it a U.S. client before amending that plan and demanding the group surrender its tanks and other heavy weapons. The back-and-forth sent mixed signals to the people of Iran, analysts and diplomats said, and today a Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hamid Reza Asefi, said "America is not serious about fighting terrorism. It adopts a double standard."
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