The Green Revolution of Iran refers to the Iranian uprising that began on June 12, 2009, after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was announced the winner of contested presidential elections.
Though the open resistance of this popular movement has been suppressed, it remains as a constituency embedded in Iran, which political process is hybrid of religious dictatorship and competitive elections, the regime generates its own opposition, swinging back and forth between conservatives and reformists.
REMEMBERING THE EVENTS
On that day in 2009 Iran’s 10th presidential elections were held. Over 39 million people, representing about 85 percent of the eligible voters, cast their votes. According to the government’s claims, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad received 62.6 percent of the votes,
While his main opponent, former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi received 33.75 percent. The disbelief that these results were accurate ignited the widespread protests of the Green Movement.
Origins
The Green Movement is, in its composition and genealogy, both old and new.
The revolution of 1979 was the result of a historically incongruent alliance between modernizing middle and technocratic classes, the urban poor, women’s and students’ groups, some disgruntled members of Iran’s new industrialist class, members of the bazaar and “de-modernizing” forces led by revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
The foot-soldiers of the revolution were the new urbanites — culturally religious, conservative, and a-modern, if not anti-modern, the poor who had come to the cities in search of their share of petro-dollars.
Iranian soldiers demonstrate in support of the people during the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Since 1941, this class had been assiduously courted by radical Islamist groups.
They played an important role in the 1979 revolution.
They have since splintered into factions that are today pitted against each other.
They were part of the coalition that overthrew the Shah. Included in that coalition were Mir Hossein Mousavi and his activist wife Zahra Rahnavard, who represented the moderate religious elements of the unwieldy anti-shah coalition.
At the other end of the coalition were forces today represented by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his allies in the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) and Basij. They represent the Nietzschean resentments of the new conservative urbanites and their déclassé leaders.
After Ali Khamenei succeeded revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini as supreme leader in 1989, he needed to find a political and social base of his own. He lacked charisma, and his religious credentials were weak.
He increasingly relied on and strengthened these forces, particularly the IRGC. Khomeini had banned the IRGC from politics, but Khamenei encouraged both political and economic involvement.
Mousavi emerges
Ahmadinejad’s election in 2005 marked the beginning of this group’s political rise.
The 2009 election was crucial to consolidate its hold on power.
But then Mir Hossein Mousavi announced his candidacy for president.
He had been prime minister during Iran’s war with Iraq between 1980 and 1988.
After the constitution was amended to create an executive president and remove the prime minister, Mousavi returned to his roots as an architect and a painter.
His eclectic buildings resembled the new style of Italian Renzo Piano.
In 2009, the Guardian Council, responsible for vetting candidates, allowed Mousavi to run.
Rejecting his candidacy would have been difficult. The conservative camp apparently calculated that Mousavi’s lack of charisma and long absence from politics hurt his election prospects.
But Iran’s nascent civil society, reformers, the women’s movement, and student organizations suddenly came to life.
Vast networks of supporters appeared all over the country, connected through the Internet and social network sites. Mousavi was often met with large and enthusiastic crowds.
The Basij ( “The Mobilization”), Niruyeh Moghavemat Basij (, “Mobilisation Resistance Force”), full name Sāzmān-e Basij-e Mostaz’afin (“The Organization for Mobilization of the Oppressed”), is one of the five forces of the Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution
Election turmoil
The day after the June 12 election results were announced, hundreds of thousands of people poured onto Tehran’s streets to protest.
The regime was caught off guard by the Green Movement’s demonstration.
Security forces were initially paralyzed by the numbers.
But then the regime unleashed security forces, including Revolutionary Guards, units of the Basij paramilitary units, and plain-clothed paramilitary forces called lebas shakhsi.
Thousands of protesters were beaten, hundreds were arrested, and dozens were killed by snipers.
On June 18, Khamenei delivered a Friday prayer sermon that dismissed the protesters’ complaints and endorsed the election results. It reflected the regime’s formal announcement that it would not tolerate the Green Movement — and would do whatever it took to suppress it.
The new confrontation was symbolized by the death of 26-year-old Neda Agha Soltan, an aspiring musician, on June 20.
She was shot by a sniper, as she stood at the edge of a Green Movement protest. A cell phone video that captured her dying on the pavement was circulated around the world. Neda and pictures of her blood-spattered face became symbols of the Green Movement.
Her name was invoked by Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and other world leaders. Outside Iranian embassies huge crowds of protesters staged candlelit vigils, held up her picture, or wore T-shirts proclaiming, “NEDA — Nothing Except Democracy Acceptable”.
The internet was flooded with tributes, poems and songs. The exiled son of the Shah of Iran carried her photograph in his chest pocket.
For the next six months, an array of groups under the Green Movement umbrella used public holidays and national commemorations to rally on the streets of several cities. In the past, the government had bussed in people to attend events and used them to claim popular support.
In 2009, however, it dispatched security forces to get the people off the streets. With each new round, the government grew more repressive, yet also appeared increasingly vulnerable.
Fall protests
During demonstrations in the fall, the issues shifted from alleged election fraud to challenges of the system and the supreme leader himself. “Death to the dictator” became a common refrain at protests. Others chanted, “Khamenei is a murderer. His rule is null and void.” Students were particularly active. The key events included:
* Sept. 18 – Qods Day, or Jerusalem Day. In the past, Iranians shouted “Death to Israel” at rallies. In 2009, protesters instead shouted “Death to Russia,” because it was the first government to recognize Ahmadinejad’s election.
* Nov. 4 – Anniversary of the U.S. Embassy takeover. Pupils traditionally get the day off and schools bus them to the old American compound for a rally. In 2009, thousands turned out on the streets to instead protest their own regime, not the United States. Chants of “Death to America” were replaced by cries of “Death to No One.” Some even shouted, “A green Iran doesn’t need nuclear weapons.” More pointedly, others shouted, “Obama, you are either with us – or with them.”
* Dec. 7 – National Students Day, commemorating the deaths of three students in protests around the time of Vice President Nixon’s 1953 visit to Tehran. The turnout was the largest since the summer and spread to campuses across the country, despite increasingly harsh government tactics, including alleged torture, rape, and deaths in prison.
* Dec. 19 – Montazeri’s death. The death of Grand Ayatollah Ali Montazeri, Iran’s leading dissident cleric and spiritual father to the Green Movement, sparked more mass demonstrations. Crowds were enormous in the holy city of Qom, earlier off-limits to protests, and elsewhere.
Montazeri had been the clerical face of the opposition since 1989, when he was fired as heir apparent to Khomeini, for criticizing the regime’s mass executions and failure to live up to its revolutionary promises. The government responded to the outpouring by redistributing the statement about Montazeri’s dismissal as supreme leader 20 years earlier.
* Dec. 27 – Ashura, the holiest day of the year for Shiites as they commemorate the seventh century martyrdom of Hussein, the Prophet Mohammed’s grandson. Hundreds of thousands turned out in mass protests. In response, government forces opened fire on unarmed civilians in the streets.
Turmoil spread to at least ten major cities. There were several confirmed deaths, scores of injured, and hundreds of arrests. The fact that a clerical regime had opened fire on peaceful demonstrators on the day of Ashura was a serious departure from a long tradition of non-violence on that day.
Show trials
As momentum grew behind the Green Movement, the government response was increasingly tough. In the fall of 2009, more than 100 of the Green Movement’s most important leaders, activists, and theorists appeared in show trials reminiscent of Joseph Stalin’s infamous trials in the 1930s. They included:
* Saeed Hajjarian, architect of the reform movement and senior adviser to former President Khatami
* Mohammad Abtahi, former vice president under Khatami
* Moshen Miradamadi, head of the largest reform party, former member of parliament, former head of parliament’s foreign affairs and national security committee, and one of three masterminds of the U.S. Embassy takeover
* Behzad Nabavi, co-founder of a reform party and former deputy speaker of parliament
The accused were forced to confess on television to several crimes against the nation.
But their confessions seemed designed to make a similar point: The Green Movement was a creation of the United States and its goal was to weaken the Islamic regime. Not all the detainees made it to trial.
The torture and death of prisoners in the Kahrizak prison became a lingering source of political embarrassment for the regime.
The regime also shut down newspapers, magazines, and websites close to the Green Movement. Iran became the country with the most imprisoned journalists. To help fight the reform movement’s use of the Internet, the Revolutionary Guards became majority owner of Iran’s telecommunications giant.
First published on Tuesday 13 May 2014 09.16 EDT
An image has emerged of Iran’s opposition leader, Mir Hossein Mousavi, remains under house arrest despite fears for his health.
It appears to be the first picture of the former presidential candidate after 3 years
Soul-searching
In 2010, the Green Movement tried to mobilize demonstrations for the February 11 anniversary of the revolution
. But the advance crackdown was so pervasive that leaders of the movement called it off. Public demonstrations were basically over.
The Green Movement moved into a phase of soul-searching. The key question was whether the movement was in temporary retreat, regrouping to develop a new strategy and tactics, or had simply been defeated.
A few activists even talked about the need to reconcile with Khamenei and his allies, given signs that the conservative camp had also begun to see Ahmadinejad as a liability.
Some in the Green Movement also talked of a post-Mousavi phase.
His unwillingness to criticize Khamenei and his insistence on working within the constitution convinced some Iranians that he no longer reflected the movement’s views. Yet another group, led by Mousavi himself, attempted to formulate a more precise platform.
A proposed covenant issued in June 2010 was his first step.
A new covenant
One year after the Green Movement’s birth, Mousavi published a proposed ” new covenant”.
He said the regime represented “institutionalized corruption hiding behind a pretense of piety.”
He placed the Green Movement in context of Iran’s 100-year-old quest for democracy. He was silent on the velaayat-e faghih, but he clearly stated that a government’s legitimacy can be founded only on the will and support of the people.
Nothing in the constitution is sacrosanct, he declared, and every article of the law should be the subject to debate and reconsideration.
The current regime, he wrote, disdained, ignored, and broke its own laws. In contrast, the Green Movement insisted not only on the rule of law, it also called for laws to reflect international standards on human rights and democracy. Iran’s democrats, he added, would insist on equality before the law, irrespective of gender, religion, and ideology. Finally, he demanded a “separation of institutions of religion from institutions of the state,” although he acknowledged that “religion will certainly have a presence” in Iran’s democratic future.
Foreign policy
In foreign policy, Mousavi’s covenant differed sharply with the regime. He insisted that Iran should enjoy all the rights afforded law-abiding nations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But he was emphatic that a new democratic Iran would have full transparency in its relations with other nations and the international organizations — and would not seek a nuclear bomb. Mousavi and other Green Movement leaders have blamed the regime’s “adventurism” for U.N. sanctions.
The future
* Short-term, the opposition faces political purgatory. The regime has been willing to use unprecedented brutality to maintain power.
* Long-term, Iran’s many challenges are likely to be solved only in a more democratic environment. The pressures include a dominant, Internet-savvy youth, an assertive women’s movement, structural economic difficulties (including double-digit unemployment and inflation), badly needed investments in oil and gas industries, and a troubled private sector.
* To survive, the Green Movement must offer a more cohesive leadership and a more cogent platform. It must also find a way to surmount the regime’s cyber-jihad, which uses Western, Russian, Chinese, and Indian technologies to stifle the opposition’s voice.
* The most serious potential problem for Iran’s democratic movement is the threat of war. Smart sanctions focused on weakening the regime’s ideological and oppressive apparatus can facilitate the maturation of this movement. A military assault could sideline or kill the movement for the foreseeable future.
Abbas Milani, author of “The Myth of the Great Satan
President Obama publicly downplayed the prospect of real change, saying that the candidates whom hundreds of thousands of Iranians were risking their lives to support did not represent fundamental change. But Obama wasn’t just reluctant to show solidarity in 2009, he feared the demonstrations would sabotage his secret outreach to Iran.
Contrast that with his laughable claim that the election of the puppet Rouhani years later showed that Iran had changed to the point where we should end sanctions as part of a nuclear deal.
Behind the scenes, Obama overruled advisers who wanted to do what America had done at similar transitions from dictatorship to democracy, and signal America’s support. He ordered the CIA to sever contacts it had with the green movement’s supporters — this according to a new book, The Iran Wars, by the Wall Street Journal’s Jay Solomon
At the time, Solomon reports, Obama’s aides received mixed messages.
Members of the Iranian diaspora wanted the president to support the uprisings.
Dissident Iranians from inside the country said such support would be the kiss of death.
In the end, Obama did nothing, and Iran’s supreme leader blamed him anyway for fomenting the revolt.
It’s worth contrasting Obama’s response with how the U.S. has reacted to other democratic uprisings.
The State Department, for example, ran a program in 2000 through the U.S. embassy in Hungary to train Serbian activists in nonviolent resistance against their dictator, Slobodan Milosevic. Milosevic, too, accused his opposition of being pawns of the U.S. government. But in the end his people forced the dictator from power.
Similarly, when Georgian President Eduard Shevardnadze met with popular protests in 2003 after rigged elections, George W. Bush dispatched James Baker to urge him to step down peacefully, which he did. Even the Obama administration provided diplomatic and moral support for popular uprisings in Egypt in 2011 and Ukraine in 2014.
Iran though is a very different story. Obama from the beginning of his presidency tried to turn the country’s ruling clerics from foes to friends. It was an obsession. And even though the president would impose severe sanctions on the country’s economy at the end of his first term and beginning of his second, from the start of his presidency, Obama made it clear the U.S. did not seek regime change for Iran.
It’s debatable whether the U.S. ever did support such a policy. But it’s striking the lengths to which Obama went to make good on his word. As Solomon reports, Obama ended U.S. programs to document Iranian human rights abuses. He wrote personal letters to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei assuring him the U.S. was not trying to overthrow him. Obama repeatedly stressed his respect for the regime in his statements marking Iran’s annual Nowruz celebration.
Obama’s dead eyed , uninterested appeal : My message to you — the people of Iran — is that, together, we have to speak up for the future we seek,” he said, adding: “This year, we have the best opportunity in decades to pursue a different future between our countries.”
His quest to engage the mullahs seems to have influenced Obama’s decision-making on other issues too. When he walked away from his red line against Syria’s use of chemical weapons in 2013, Solomon reports, both U.S. and Iranian officials had told him that nuclear negotiations would be halted if he intervened against Bashar al-Assad.
Obama eventually did get a nuclear deal with Iran. Solomon’s book shines in reporting the details of the diplomacy that led to the 2015 accord. American diplomats held two sets of negotiations with Iran — one public channel with the British, Chinese, European Union, French, Germans, Russians and the United Nations — and another, bilateral track established through the Sultanate of Oman. In 2013, U.S. officials shuttled on public busses between two hotels in Geneva to conduct the two tracks before telling their negotiating partners about the formerly secret channel to Iran.
Eventually, the Iranians wore down the U.S. delegation. At the beginning of the talks in 2013, the U.S. position was for Iran to dismantle much of its nuclear infrastructure. By the end of the talks in 2015, Secretary of State John Kerry and his team “agreed that Iran would then be allowed to build an industrial-scale nuclear program, with hundreds of thousands of machines, after a ten year period of restraint.
Other U.S. red lines were demolished too. The final deal would allow the U.N. ban on Iranian missile development to phase out after eight years, and the arms embargo against Iran to expire after five. Iran would not have to acknowledge that it had tried to develop a nuclear weapon, even though samples the Iranians collected at its Parchin facility found evidence of man-made uranium.
In one particularly revealing passage, Solomon captures the thinking of Kerry, who engaged in detailed negotiations over the deal in the final months of the talks. “So many wars have been fought over misunderstandings, misinterpretations, lack of effective diplomacy,” Kerry told Solomon in a 2016 interview. “War is the failure of diplomacy.”
Kerry’s diplomacy succeeded. But the Middle East got war nonetheless. “The Revolutionary Guard continues to develop increasingly sophisticated weapons systems, including ballistic missiles inscribed with threats against Israel on their nose cones,” Solomon writes in the book’s concluding chapter.
“Khamenei and other revolutionary leaders, meanwhile, fine-tune their rhetorical attacks against the United States, seeming to need the American threat to justify their existence.”
There was a chance for a better outcome. There is no guarantee that an Obama intervention would have been able to topple Khamenei back in 2009, when his people flooded the streets to protest an election the American president wouldn’t say was stolen.
But it was worth a try. Imagine if that uprising had succeeded. Perhaps then a nuclear deal could have brought about a real peace. Instead, Obama spent his presidency misunderstanding Iran’s dictator, assuring the supreme leader America wouldn’t aid his citizens . – Bloomberg Press
More recently , Denise Hassanzade Ajiri for Tehran Bureau reported on 19 January 2016 only 1% of the moderate candidates have been allowed to run. A grandson of the late Ayatollah Khomeini is among the thousands disqualified
Iran’s Guardian Council, which vets candidates for elections, has failed to qualify 40% of more than 12,000 candidates for parliamentary elections on 26 February, ILNA news agency has reported.
Reformists told Tehran Bureau that those blocked included the vast majority of their hopefuls. “I predicted that the Guardian Council would massively disqualify the reformists,” said Sadegh Zibakalam, professor of political science at Tehran University. “But the reality is even worse.”
According to Hossein Marashi, a member of the Reformists’ Policy Council, which was set up in October to coordinate efforts for the parliamentary poll, out of the total 3,000 reformist candidates, only 30, or 1%, have been qualified. Their criterion of ‘reformist’ appears unclear, and may include pragmatic conservatives, or ‘moderates’, like supporters of president Hassan Rouhani or former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
Two of Rafsanjani’s children, Mehdi and Fatemeh, are among those not qualified, as is Morteza Eshraghi, grandson of the founder of the Islamic Republic Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. In Tehran, from nearly 1,700 candidates, 760 were qualified, among which only four – Mohammad-Reza Aref, Soheila Jelodarzadeh, Mostafa Kavakebian and Alireza Mahjoub – were reformists, according to the reformist newspaper Arman.
update: