Enter the clerics
It reads like a drama from that galaxy far, far away, sometime before the republic, when Sith clans were fighting among themselves. This weekend the clerics of the holy city of Qom intervened, declaring the 2009 election in Iran illegitimate, demanding the results to be tossed and criticizing the government for not handling protests properly.
Rafsanjani has kept it low key, but apparently he has been able to explain to the leading Iranian scholars in Qom that Ahmadinejad is driving Iran in the ground, destroying any hope for peaceful reconciliation internally and all opportunity to negotiate progress for Iran on the international platform.
Today the clerics stepped out in defense of the increasingly persecuted opposition in Iran, daily subjected to threats of prosecution and intimidating accusations of treason and compromising national security.
And it was about time, because the
Iranians have been counting on them all along:
There is a secret few outsiders
know about Iran: The theocratic
regime is afraid of the mainstream establishment of clerics in Qom. Why? Because clerics like Montazeri
believe that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his protégé, President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, use a distorted interpretation of Shiite theology for
their own political ends. As a result, they believe Iran has become an un-Islamic, militarized
state where Islamic militias repress the Iranian population in the name of God.
There is another fact unknown to those unfamiliar with Iran: The youth
are actually fond of some of the clerics, and shout their names at their
demonstrations.
According to official reports Rafsanjani's meetings in Qom began on the 20th of June, and already on June 21 other reports stated the clerics were looking around for someone to replace the ageing and chronically ill Grand Ayatollah Khamenei as Supreme Leader.
How to make a new election fair?
While largely silent when the protesters were being antagonized and
beaten in the street and reluctant to speak out, even as some were
butchered and others hanged in mass stream of executions over the past
week, the clerics have now reached a consensus.
This basically means all
hostile action against the opposition will be harder, as it would be
considered in violation of Islam. Khamenei can back his guy, but a
strong statement like this from the clerics whose influence reach deep
into
the Assembly of Experts who could depose of him, forces him to think things over.
The Assembly of Experts has never used their authority to pull the
Supreme Leader title, but Khamenei has been compromised by his
inability to command respect, to solve internal Iranian matters without
creating an international incident and to control his candidate,
Ahmadinejad.
Even to step up in defense of Ahmadinejad as
unambiguously as Khamenei has done it served to sow suspicion of his
intentions and role in the election, accused by the opposition of being
rigged.
Opposition leader Mousavi has just delivered a bulk of documents proving irregularities and possibly organized voter fraud.
The
2009 election is likely to be tossed, since this is the only sane
response to the dead-lock Iran finds itself trapped in, squeezed hard
from outside over the nuclear processing dispute and torn from the
inside by increasing polarization of the political wings.
This
raises the question of how to secure fair and orderly elections in the
political climate of theocratically ruled and increasingly isolationist
Iran.
One thing is for certain: Ahmadinejad should no longer consider himself an
indispensable champion of the Islamic Revolution.
