National Agenda : Social Reforms Out as Iran Takes Turn to the Right : The expected debut of a kinder, gentler Islamic republic will have to wait. The mullahs are back.

There’s a wry joke going around the Iranian capital these days. Did you know, a wag will ask, that Iranian television is now black and white? Black turban on channel one, white turban on channel two.

The moral of this story is, just when the world was awaiting the full-color debut of a new Islamic republic--a kinder, gentler Iran under the stewardship of President Hashemi Rafsanjani, with new openings to the West and a more tolerant social climate at home--the mullahs are back.

Last spring’s parliamentary elections, in which Rafsanjani-style moderates forcefully ejected most of the radicals from the ruling Majlis, were supposed to give the president the mandate he needed to forge better relations with Europe and the United States and attract new foreign investment with economic reforms.

But the Islamic republic, after a hopeful spring, has weathered a hot summer of violence, and Muslim vigilantes have once again taken to the streets of Tehran. Riots broke out in the holy city of Mashhad, and in Arak, Tabriz, Shiraz and Esfahan. A shootout erupted between the Revolutionary Guards and the police in north Tehran just weeks ago. A small bomb exploded near the tomb of Iran’s former supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, killing three and injuring 10.

In the tree-shaded capital, new roadblocks manned by the popular militias scrutinize cars for signs of alcohol, Western music cassettes, videotapes or women showing too much hair. A recent religious ruling warned of executions for those convicted of their third alcohol offense.

Women without the correct Muslim dress--the required hijab of long coats and scarves--have been rounded up on buses from the streets, hauled to jail and sometimes beaten. One 13-year-old girl threw herself from a window to her death in mid-August when she was chased home by “the guardians of the revolution,” according to recent testimony before a U.N. committee. A newspaper editor was sentenced to six months in jail for printing an unflattering cartoon of Khomeini.

Religious leader Ali Khamenei, the ayatollah’s successor, seemed to set the tone for the post-election era when he declared that “radical Hezbollahi elements” must remain at the helm of all key jobs in the administration and the military. He also asserted that Western-style capitalism is not for Iran.

Since the election in May, economic reforms have been proceeding at a snail’s pace. Relations with Britain, Germany, Italy, Turkey and Sweden have taken a U-turn for the worse. Hostilities are flaring with the Arab nations of the Gulf, and, as ever, Iran has tended to blame the United States for most of its trouble.

“One must never believe that the United States, the everlasting enemy of Islam, has put an end to its antagonism to Islam. The U.S. is the main enemy of Islam, and it will stay so,” Khamenei warned in a speech at the end of July that some observers believe set him on a collision course with the more moderate Rafsanjani.

But Rafsanjani himself is said to have been stung by the West’s failure to respond to Iran’s overtures. Iran helped free the Western hostages and launched a campaign to mend relations with Washington’s Arab allies in the Gulf region, but so far it has nothing to show for it, the Iranians have complained to foreign diplomats.

“You should see what’s happening in Iran as a sign that Rafsanjani is disappointed in the West. He took many constructive steps, and they were not reciprocated. He felt betrayed,” says one foreign envoy who has tried to mediate between Iran and the West.

Rajaie Khorassani, a Rafsanjani-style moderate in the Majlis and a former ambassador to the United Nations, says the West is mistaken if it expects an immediate new face on Iran after the elections.

“I think in the areas of foreign policy, things should not and will not change unless some very dramatic, fundamental changes take place like what you saw in the early days of our revolution, or in the explosion of the U.S.S.R. . . . There are going to be changes. But they will come gradually, and very constructively, and not hastily,” he says.

“You have to realize that the old Majlis had its own policies,” he adds. “Those programs are already injected into the government. We cannot change them. Certain foreign policy issues, cultural trends, they have been already well-absorbed. . . . It is this reason that prevents the advent of some of the things that were foreseen before the elections.”

While the new Majlis has been impatient to plunge into change, demanding the resignation of four Cabinet ministers, Rafsanjani himself has urged waiting until after the presidential elections in 1993.

But part of the rough going so far has been the fact that some of the old radicals in the Majlis have been replaced by new ones of a different bent. In the topsy-turvy world of Muslim politics, old-style radicals who despised the West and right-wing capitalism--but who insisted on cultural freedom and free expression--have been thrown out. They’ve been replaced with rightists more amenable to Rafsanjani’s economic plans who are, in many cases, more conservative socially.

The result: for the Islamically liberal, a kind of social terror.

At an amusement park in northern Tehran where families stroll among “Wild River” boat rides, caviar stands and Ferris wheels, a voice on a loudspeaker exhorts the patrons: “Show the people what an exemplary Muslim woman is like!”

Women wearing too much makeup or with too much hair showing are stopped at the gate, as are men in short-sleeved shirts--all part of a crackdown, park workers say, over the last month.

Women in black chadors patrol the park, wearing the white badges of the “Disciplinary Forces.”

“Our real aim is guidance, to guide people toward being better Muslims,” explains Kokab Moulanorouzi, part of the chador patrol. “If in some cases you see someone with bad hijab, we go and talk to them, try to make them understand. If the case is bad, then we send them to the office. In the office, they try to guide them. If the case is critical, we give them to the mankoot (police).”

As she speaks, a girl with bangs falling from underneath her scarf walks by, and Moulanorouzi steps forward. “Dear sister, look after your hijab !” she says, and the girl stares straight ahead, gives her scarf a sharp tug downward and walks on.

“There have been waves of strict rule, but never so strict as this period since the elections,” says a prominent Tehran businesswoman who was arrested not long ago for having a party at which she was suspected of serving alcohol. While she was in jail overnight, she said, a young woman who had been arrested at another party was beaten in an adjoining cell.

“She was supposed to be whipped 180 lashes. She was whipped 80 lashes the first night, and they were supposed to do the other 100 the next day. The girl was screaming, ‘It’s hurting!’ The woman who was beating her said, ‘Shut up and lie down,’ ” the woman recalls.

“We have this every day now,” she says. “A friend of mine, her daughter, a teen-ager, had a party. She and all of her friends were taken to be examined to see whether they were virgins or not.”

“Anyway, life goes on,” her husband interrupts. “Life is a lovely holiday!”

Meanwhile, as the economy worsens, the campaign promises of last spring are fading into memory. And the public is getting less willing to wait.

In the pilgrimage city of Mashhad not long after the elections, a dispute that started when city officials began bulldozing squatters’ houses erupted into a full-fledged riot. Thousands of residents, many of them armed, took to the streets for four days and nights, destroying several banks, the main library, several police stations and government institutions.

Similar disturbances broke out in Arak, Tabriz, Esfahan and Shiraz. In the latter case, pro-radical demonstrators clashed with marching war veterans protesting their lack of support from the government.

“People’s hopes were built up so much before the elections that they’re not prepared to be quite as tolerant as before. They have given Rafsanjani their mandate, and they feel a growing sense of impatience,” says one Western diplomat.

“People are not afraid of these people anymore,” says an Iranian businessman. “The reality is the economy is in shambles. People are so pressed monetarily, they won’t be pushed anymore.”

In the slums of south Tehran, where accelerating inflation has hit the hardest, there is a growing sense of disillusionment.

It is here that the faithful initially answered Khomeini’s calls for Islamic revolution, and it is from these neighborhoods that hundreds of thousands of young men answered the imam’s death-dealing appeal for a war against Iraq.

“Our economy is in a mess. Inflation is high, especially for workers. The rents and the cost of everyday life are enormous,” says Bandar Valio’un Ferydune, 60, who cuts, hammers and glues together shoes in a tiny shop in the old Turkish bazaar of south Tehran.

“High?” one of his workers interjects. “Out of sight!”

“They’ve promised things will get better,” Ferydune says. “They have promised us they’re going to fix the factories. They say within the next five years or 10 years, things will be better. Now, we will wait and see if they’re right.”

Is he willing to wait five years, or 10? Ferydune picks up a shoe and pounds his way carefully around the perimeter of the sole before he speaks.

“We are the families of the martyrs, or the people who are handicapped because of the war,” he says then. “Because of them, nobody says anything. . . . You see, we made the revolution. We brought this government (to power), and we lost a great deal for it in the war. Now, what do you expect us to come and say? That we were wrong?”

In fact, the government has made some progress in the last months on economic reform, eliminating most imports at the extremely artificial official exchange rate of 70 riyals to the dollar, a huge effective subsidy on those goods when compared with the market rate of 1,435 riyals to the dollar. But basic foodstuffs are still heavily subsidized, and a large number of goods are still imported at a rate of 600 riyals.

More serious, the government for the first time last July had to begin deferring short-term payments on a foreign debt that has reached $40 billion. Now, Iran has been shopping around with foreign companies to build any number of major reconstruction projects but has been rebuffed when it comes to financing. In such a climate, no one is eager to invest.

“We have lost international connections with financial institutions, with foreign banks, we have lost the reputation of paying on time, we have experienced deferred payments on things, so consequently we cannot borrow,” says a financial consultant who has acted as an adviser to the Rafsanjani government.

But Persians have always been business wizards, and in the hope that Rafsanjani will be able to turn the country around, thousands of Iranians are returning from exile, hoping for a piece of the cake.

Reza Palizi, a Los Angeles businessman for the past decade, returned to Iran a few months ago in the hope of reviving his $10-million housing project in Kermanshah, in northwestern Iran. The Muslim government, which scared him off two years after the revolution, now has renewed his building permits and promises to help him make good on the project.

“You can make more money--if that’s what you’re after--in this country in 10 years than you could in 10 lifetimes somewhere else--if you’re on the right track,” says Palizi. But he remains enmeshed in a dispute with the bank over his foreclosed loan. In Muslim Iran, where interest is considered unlawful under the Koran, many old loans remain open to dispute.

An Iranian writer says his 26-year-old son has recently returned from abroad and may wind up staying in Tehran. The writer, who has been frustrated like many Tehranians with trying to make a go of things, said his son is less so.

“It won’t be like this for my son’s generation,” he says, a little wistfully. “The young will make their own world, that’s for sure. Like Khalil Gibran says, ‘They belong to the house of tomorrow, which we cannot enter.’ ”