Anonymous

TEHRAN—Former President Ali-Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani is perhaps the ultimate survivor in the rough-and-tumble world of Iranian politics, but now the aging revolutionary has found himself at the very center of Iran’s instability, in what could prove the ultimate test of his survival skills.

Since demonstrations broke out in June in the aftermath of the disputed presidential polls, Rafsanjani has lined up with the opposition movement. He has put on public display his long-standing disdain for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, even snubbing him recently at Tehran’s televised Friday prayers gathering. He has also has worked hard to undercut the power of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), whose leadership is fiercely devoted to the president.

Yet, Rafsanjani is facing a daunting challenge from his rivals as he seeks to preserve his own vision of the Islamic political system. In particular, he is paying now for a number of serious blunders during his eight years as president, errors that grew out of his own innate caution and his preferrence for consensus, moderation, and conciliation. These errors include failing to check the growing power of the IRGC, or to protest the mass executions in Iran’s prisons in 1988—policies that he personally opposed. In fact, these mistakes have set the stage for today’s showdown within Iran’s ruling elite.

Rafsanjani is by nature a moderate conservative. He has been in key positions since the Iranian Revolution and was a close confidant and adviser to Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini. He acted as a mediator during the turbulent days of the 1980s, and in the climax of clashes among various factions, especially the right and the left wings of the regime. He was successful as a mediator, thanks to the personal backing of Khomeini, his wits, and his influence among various political factions.

Those days are long gone. And today’s struggle must be seen not as a matter of electoral politics—the common image in the West—but as a potential fight to the finish between the traditional hardliners and their IRGC allies on the one hand, and the man who has long served as their most serious obstacle within the political establishment on the other.
Ahmadinejad used the first televised debate of the presidential campaign to attack Rafsanjani and his family publicly for alleged corruption, in what had been, until then, an intense power struggle behind the scenes. In fact, that debate should be viewed as D-Day in the IRGC’s project to take power, through reelection of their ally Ahmadinejad, and begin an internal cleansing of the regime that would eliminate Rafsanjani and his network of allies and supporters.

It should not be forgotten that IRGC commanders were following the orders of Ayatollah Khamenei, the supreme leader, during the June 12 “coup” that ended in the effecitve “coronation” of the incumbent Ahmadinejad. These commanders sought to achieve two goals: to weaken the opposition and the critics of Khamenei among the grand ayatollahs in Qom, and to a complete cleansing of the moderates and reformists from the political and executive structure of the country.

At first, the disputed election returns and the way Khamenei rushed to formalize the president’s reelection victory sparked large public protest in Tehran and other urban centers, with a protest movement emerging under Ahmadinejad’s electoral rival, Mir Hossein Moussavi. In what some have called the Green Movement, peaceful demonstrators flooded the streets to assert their rights and to demand a rerun of the election. A harsh crackdown by the IRGC and its allies in the basij militia against the protesters, and the torture and sexual abuse of detainees, however, pushed this movement along a more radical path and drove some key elements underground.

All this has played into the hands of the hardliners, for a crackdown on radical movements by the coercive apparatus has been easy to justify in the name of political and social stability. This is all the more the case among Iran’s ruling elite, which knows from personal experience in the late 1970s how quickly social movements can take on revolutionary overtones.
Moreover, the IRGC and the hardline faction, which attacked Rafsanjani before the election, have convinced Ayatollah Khamenei that the reformists are out to topple the Islamic system. Despite a thirty-year tradition, the hardliners successfully prevented Rafsanjani from leading the last Friday prayer of the month of Ramadan. They also are targeting his son. In the so-called Velvet Revolution trials, Rafsanjani’s son was named as one of the main architects of an attempt to overthrow the regime.

For his part, Rafsanjani is trying to stave off his own elimination from the inner circles of political and economic power. To do that, he must convince the leader that the best guarantee for the long-term survival of the Islamic system is a return to the rights and freedoms enshrined in the Iranian constitution, including the right to free and fair elections.

The presence of thousands of people in Tehran, Esfehan, and Shiraz, meanwhile, proves that the Green Movement is still alive and feels secure enough to surface during the regime’s propaganda-like ceremonies and anniversaries. Protesters are aware the state is unlikely to mar such political gatherings, aimed at proclaiming Iran’s defiance of its foreign critics, with further domestic strife.

However, time may be running out for a negotiated resolution to the crisis, raising the stakes for both Rafsanjani, for decades the consummate insider and fixer, and the Green Movement. The renewed demonstrations have outraged the conservatives and their allies in the security forces, presaging another harsh crackdown. At the same time, Ayatollah Khamanei’s remarks on Shahrivar 20 (September 11), in which he invoked the suppression of heretics under Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law and the first Imam of the Shi’ites.

The writer is a reformist journalist living in Iran