By: Horst Teltschik
Published on June 13 in German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
On Friday a new president will be elected in Iran. Does this election herald a new beginning? In a theocratic regime one cannot speak of a free election. Of 686 candidates, the guardian council confirmed the qualification of only eight of them.
One of those who were disqualified was former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. He was one of the founders of the mullahs’ regime in 1979 and a comrade of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But now Khamenei sees Rafsanjani as a threat. Khamenei’s son in law, Gholamali Hadad Adel, has warned him of the “green movement” supported Rafsanjani in 2009. Now the revolution has begun to swallow its own children.
The political foundations of the supreme leader have become shaky. Almost every day, the leadership forces of the regime accuse each other of theft, abuse of power, and corruption of family members. The guardian council disqualified the father of Ahmadinejad’s daughter in law, Rahim Mashaei. But Ahmadinejad is still present on the scene. Only the supporters and companions of the leader have remained on the list. But they are also in competitive, feuding and factional war. The fight for power continues.
This internal feuding will now become further intensified. Inflation and recession have seized the economy by the collar. Iran’s currency has become worthless. Khamenei continuously warns of a repeat of the 2009 uprising because he knows it can push the whole system towards its overthrow. At least from the examples of revolutions in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, it should be clear to Khamenei that he cannot protect his tyrannical rule too long by using the leverage of terror and repression. The disappointment and lost hopes of Iranians are potentially huge and dangerous and the organized resistance is growing.
Diverting public opinion from internal weaknesses by resorting to foreign policy actions is something that has been experience plentifully. Meanwhile, the mullahs’ regime does not hide its support of the Syrian president Bashar Assad by providing him weapons and logistics. In Lebanon, Iran has mobilized Hezbollah and provided them with money and weapons. The Iranian envoys continuously enter Baghdad to draw the Shiite Prime Minister Nouri Maliki into a coalition in order to use Iraq as a corridor for delivering weapons and armed forces to be used against the Syrian opposition. At the same time, the Iranian regime wants to destroy the exiled members of People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran with the help of Maliki.
If Assad wins, it would be a victory for the Iranian regime. If Assad is defeated, it would result in more isolation of the regime and significantly weaken the Iranian regime’s leadership. Mullah Taeb, one Khamenei’s trusted mullahs, said on 15 February: “Syria is our 35th province… if we lose Syria, we have lost Tehran.” Therefore, the debate is far beyond the fate of Bashar Assad.
Given the precarious situation in the region, the scale of the inability of the west is breathtaking. Naturally, facilities are limited. But the opposition forces inside Iran should publicly receive signals and ensure that their resistance is not only recognized, but also supported as much as possible.
An initial signal could be that 3,000 Iranians in Camp Liberty are freed from the clutches of their Iraqi rulers. Everyday their lives are exposed to threats. At the same time, the main Iranian opposition group, Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK/PMOI) must be politically supported. The President-elect of Iranian Resistance, Maryam Rajavi, has provided the public with the Ten-Point plan of the National Council of Resistance of Iran for a free, equal and democratic Iran.
But until now, the free world has inexplicably kept silent on this matter. How should this attitude be explained? Discouragement, cowardice, appeasement? We should remember how we frequently ignored movements in former communist countries such as solidarity movements in Poland, but ultimately they were victorious.
Professor Horst Teltschik is a former policy advisor to Chancellor Helmut Kohl
