The Iranian people are not an enemy of Israel or the West.
June 24, 2013 12:52 pm
Rohani victory marks Iran’s return to centrist politics
Election victory demonstrates desperate desire for change
The victory of Hassan Rohani has been greeted as a comeback for Iran’s beleaguered reform movement, decimated after flawed elections in 2009. Above all, however, it marks Iran’s return to the political centre following two decades of tense, at times violent, struggles between reformists and fundamentalists.
The dire state of Iran’s economy and the need to deter foreign threats over the nuclear programme appear to have brought the two disparate sides together as disgruntled Iranians demonstrated through the vote that they were fed up with seeing their welfare sacrificed for a power struggle.
The political turmoil in the wider region may also have played a role, convincing voters to seek change through the ballot box instead of revolting against their rulers.
“This new political current of moderation is very strong, and in it there are secular intellectuals, technocrats, the opposition Green Movement and religious people, who are all very glad to see the country saved from radicalism,” says Hamid-Reza Jalaeipour, a reformist sociologist.
Mr Rohani, a 65-year-old mild-mannered cleric, enjoyed the last-minute backing of reformist and centrist leaders, which helped him emerge as theunexpected winner of this month’s poll.
Although he promised to defend Iranians’ rights for more freedom, he has made clear that his first priority is to help “save” the economy through “reconciliation” with the world and an easing of sanctions.
The populist policies of Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, the outgoing president, and the tightening of international sanctions over the nuclear programme have led to about a 50 per cent fall in the national currency, the rial, and driven inflation above 32 per cent, while youth unemployment is close to 30 per cent. And that’s according to official figures, believed to be underestimated.
“People decided to prevent the country from falling into an abyss through the safest channel, which was the election,” Saeed Leylaz, a reformist political analyst, says. “What happened [on election day] was like pulling the brake of a fast train which was just about to be derailed.”
Some 73 per cent of Iranians voted in the election and analysts were surprised that so many had cast ballots even though many believed the election was a charade and suspected the regime had picked its winner in advance.
In depth
Iranians are celebrating the unexpected victory of moderate candidate Hassan Rohani in the country’s presidential election
Yet, for many Iranians, the price of the street protests of 2009 was too steep. About 100 people were killed and repression against reformists increased. The two leaders of the opposition movement, Mir-Hossein Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi, remain under house arrest. As revolts in Arab states nearby spread over the past two years, Iranians feared that an uprising at home would cause widespread turmoil, if not civil war.
“Iranians saw the realities in Syria, Egypt and Libya and chose the ballot box,” Mr Jalaeipour says. He believes that the desire for change has not eased – he says it has, in fact, increased and now encompasses larger sections of the population.
Indeed, the highest echelons of the political hierarchy may have understood the growing drive for reform and therefore given more centrist forces a chance by allowing the results of this month’s elections to stand.
Many fundamentalists in Iran’s several power centres, including in the parliament, have already vowed to co-operate closely with the new government that Mr Rohani will form in August. Iran’s supreme leader and ultimate decision maker, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, appeared to be adopting the same attitude, in contrast to four years ago, when he had insisted that Mr Ahmadi-Nejad, rather than his reformist rival, had won the election.
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PERSON IN THE NEWS
JUNE 21, 2013 7:46 PM
Hassan Rohani: Holder of the key
The symbol of Hassan Rohani’s presidential campaign was the key he promised would unlock Iran’s problems. It was a source of ridicule when voters assumed the election outcome was sealed for a hardliner and the centrist cleric was mere decoration amid the stage management.
When his victory was announced on Saturday, however, it was greeted by an explosion of relief across the Islamic Republic. “The first lock has been opened,” a smiling Mr Rohani said at his Monday press conference.
Iranians danced in the streets for the first time since 2009, when the vote for an opposition reformist leader was rigged and the regime unleashed its thugs on protesters. When the national football team qualified for the 2014 World Cup days later, many said Mr Rohani had brought good luck.
The 65-year-old cleric is a clever enough politician to know popular expectation is running far ahead of his ability to deliver. Yet the consent of the conservative religious regime headed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to his election could, in itself, help turn the page on the 2009 vote. After eight years of President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad’s provocative policies, many Iranians also see Mr Rohani’s ascent as a return to sanity.
Nonetheless, in a system in which the president’s powers are constrained, he will face pressures that could prove irreconcilable. His drive to open doors – whether creating jobs, fighting inflation or improving relations with the outside world – is bound to clash with the hardliners’ unbending attitude.
His challenge is to avoid the fate of Mohammad Khatami who in 2005 left a trail of disillusion. It was during the reformist president’s two terms that Mr Rohani held his highest position during more than two decades on the Supreme National Security Council – the body that leads negotiations on the nuclear programme. As secretary, he persuaded Mr Khamenei to accept a 22-month suspension of the programme, the only nuclear deal ever struck with western powers.
People who know Mr Rohani say he is well suited to navigate Iran’s political minefield at a critical time, with the economy crippled by international sanctions and Israel threatening strikes on nuclear facilities. Despite his reformist label, he was not part of the movement seeking to reconcile the republic with democratic principles. He has spent much of his career in the security establishment. Reformist voters ensured his victory; but in the 1990s his role in quashing student dissent was questioned.
In fact, he belongs to the conservatives’ pragmatic centrist wing, represented by Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president. Since the election, he has vowed to make the nuclear programme more transparent, to hold talks with world powers, to help ease sanctions “step by step”, and to boost the economy.
“He’s a calm, rational figure,” says Richard Dalton, the former British ambassador to Iran who dealt with Mr Rohani when he was chief nuclear negotiator. “He can see the other person’s point of view and doesn’t express himself in antagonistic way.”
Mr Rohani’s serenity was apparent from childhood, says his mother, Sakineh, who still lives in his home town of Sorkheh, 180km east of Tehran. He was born Hassan Fereidon in 1948, changing his last name when he became a cleric, to a family of farmers and carpet-weavers. His father, Asadollah, was poor but married into a wealthier family. Eventually he opened a spice shop, acting at times as a representative of the senior clergy in the Shia holy city of Qom.
Hassan, one of five children, was sent to a religious school. “He was intellectually superior to his classmates, and sometimes teachers would hand over their classes to him and he would teach,” a classmate told an Iranian news agency.
He attended a seminary, where he also learnt English and maths, paving the way for his enrolment at Tehran university’s law school. He later earned a doctorate in Glasgow, exploring the flexibility of Islamic law. Despite his clerical background, Mr Rohani prefers to be known as a technocrat, opting for the title of doctor rather than the religious hojjatol-islam. His multi-layered expertise has given him a more realistic approach to relations with the world than many Iranian leaders.
As an impoverished 21-year-old, he married his cousin, Sahebeh, with whom he had five children. One of their sons died in suspicious circumstances, though it is unclear whether it was a murder or suicide.
Like many religious-minded scholars before the 1979 revolution, Mr Rohani was drawn to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Heard mentioning the ayatollah in a Tehran mosque, he became a target of the last shah’s dreaded intelligence service. He was forced to leave the country, eventually joining Khomeini in exile in Paris.
Mr Rohani is an insider: since the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, in which he played a strategic role in the military command, he has not been excluded from regime institutions. Unlike many reformist and centrist leaders before him, he still enjoys a relationship of trust with the supreme leader – even though Mr Khamenei bet on a rival candidate in the election.
Managing relations with Mr Khamenei will be crucial, requiring more of the diplomatic skill that he deployed during the campaign. Mr Rohani trod cautiously, appealing to the reformists without antagonising radicals in the regime. His emphasis was less on political freedom than on the outgoing government’s disastrous economic management and extremist foreign policy.
As word of his victory spread, his campaign tweeted that it was satisfied with the conduct of the vote and asked supporters not to celebrate before the official results were announced. When asked at his press conference whether he would fire many of those now in government, Mr Rohani responded: “I said I have a key, not an axe.”
Look beneath Iran’s revolutionary veneer
June 14, 2013 12:27 am
The Financial Times (FT) By Mohammed Mahfoodh Al Ardhi
The writer is former chief of the Royal Air Force of Oman and chaired the Oman-Iran military committee
There is nothing inevitable about the Islamic Republic’s isolation
Could this week’s presidential election prove a turning point for Iran? The exclusion of Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad’s chosen successor certainly suggests the clerical leadership wants to move on from the president’s confrontational international stance. Yet turning that into a new relationship with the world will require fresh thinking.
Countries that have experienced friction with Tehran in the past will need to look beyond the image of the Islamic Republic as an implacable and irrational force that can only be contained or overthrown. Beneath the veneer of ideology, its motives and aspirations are little different from those of other emerging nations. Iran, in turn, will have to stop treating established global norms as an anti-Iranian conspiracy, and accept that it often provokes opposition through its own behaviour.
There is nothing inevitable about Iran’s isolation. The international system has proved flexible enough to accommodate other rising powers. Look at Turkey, whose growth in status has been broadly welcomed. By contrast, suspicions of Iran’s intentions reflect many years of poor strategic decisions, such as a lack of transparency about the country’s nuclear programme, its use of incendiary rhetoric, funding of armed proxies and, most recently, its involvement in the conflict in Syria. The next president should begin a long-term reorientation of Iran’s posture with the aim of removing these and other points of tension.
The change of mindset required in the west is just as great. In particular, the belief that Iran is a rogue element, beyond the influence of normal diplomacy, must be reconsidered. It obscures the real motives of Iranian policy and narrows options for engagement. The revolutionary identity of the Islamic Republic matters to the elite but not to the exclusion of concerns about national security and regime survival. Self-interest often leads to pragmatism – as in Iraq and Afghanistan, where Tehran has prioritised its neighbours’ stability over promoting its revolutionary model. Even miscalculations, such as alliances with the Lebanese Shia group Hizbollah and the regime of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, have more to do with regional power balances than ideology.
There is, in fact, a certain amount of continuity with the themes and concerns of pre-revolutionary foreign policy: a strong sense of national greatness and a desire to play a bigger role in the region. Even the nuclear programme was started under the Shah. Although security is part of this debate, national prestige is just as important, if not more so. Iranian leaders feel that if a relatively new state such as Pakistan can build nuclear weapons, their ancient civilisation should be able to do the same. It is a sentiment widely shared at a popular level, where the nuclear programme evokes pride in a way that the moon landings once did for Americans. Policy towards Iran must take account of that.
It is also important to understand that any change is likely to be gradual. Iran is not centralised like North Korea. Power is shared among centres of influence, including the supreme leader, the president, the consultative assembly, the clerical establishment and the revolutionary guards.
Change is possible but requires a careful process of consensus-building and regard for the maintenance of regime stability. It may be that a president with a conservative profile will prove more effective at creating a coalition for change within the elite than reformist leaders have been in the past. As always, the process will be vulnerable to setbacks and internal rivalries, so strategies for engaging Iran must be robust enough to cope with short-term disappointment.
Iran has an enviable range of assets: a young, growing and well-educated population, a strong sense of national destiny, an established entrepreneurial tradition and some of the world’s largest oil and gas reserves.
The new president will find his people’s aspirations easier to realise if he harnesses those assets to make the country a pole of attraction rather than a source of concern. Other leaders should encourage that, with a focus on finding constructive outlets for the country’s energies rather than on containing them.
Source: Financial Times online
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Give Rowhani a chance
The Iranian people are not an enemy of Israel or the West.
Rowhani’s voters, who demonstrated their political power, should be extended some credit.
http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/give-rowhani-a-chance.premium-1.530228
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