Neighbors Covet Iran’s Democracy

Iran’s exercise in democracy during last week’s parliamentary election has prompted an intriguing reaction among the Persian Gulf state’s Arab neighbors: unadulterated envy. In country after country, commentators have been asking: Why don’t we have the same thing?

The Iranian vote, in which more than 80% of the electorate participated, including women and youths 16 or older, resulted in what appears to be a peaceful transfer of legislative power from hard-line conservatives to pro-freedom reformers for the first time in Iran’s modern history.

The atmosphere of the election was noted by the Arab commentators. The political slinging was hard but fair; each side had access to mass media and made no bones about criticizing its foe, and both accepted the outcome as legitimate and final.

Even though the stakes were high, there was no noticeable intimidation of voters and no known rigging of the results. There was an important flaw in the process: the elimination of many would-be parties and candidates from participating because they were deemed to reject Iran’s Islamic basis and constitution. Within those parameters, however, there was a wide spectrum of allowable opinion.

Everything considered, commentator Riad Najib Rayyes concluded in Lebanon’s An Nahar newspaper, Iran’s democratic process stacks up well and is miles ahead of anything practiced in the modern Arab world.

“In spite of the fact that it is a theocratic state ruled by a group of clerics, it has managed over the course of 20 years to nurture institutions . . . based on a mechanism of democratic competition,” he wrote.

For all their excesses and human rights violations, including waves of arrests and executions that took place after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, censorship and restrictions on women and religious minorities, Iran’s rulers have never outlawed the ballot box. Last Friday’s election, in fact, was the 21st vote held by the Islamic state since its inception.

During that time, Iran’s elections have grown more like those held in the United States or Western Europe, with clearly defined political parties and platforms, paid campaign advertisements and modern vote-getting techniques such as polling and mass mailings.

By contrast, most states on the Arabian Peninsula are monarchies. If they have elected parliaments at all, the bodies’ powers are secondary to those of the ruling family. And when there are elections, women and even some adult males often are excluded from voting or running for office.

Other “democratic” Arab states hold elections, but there is a sham quality to the process. Security forces often suppress opposition, enabling ruling parties to hold on to power for decades. Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Tunisia and Libya are in this category to greater or lesser degrees.

Rayyes noted that Iran’s Islamic brand of democracy was open enough to produce a moderate such as President Mohammad Khatami, whereas elections had not elevated “a single liberal reformist to a position of leadership throughout the length and breadth of the Arab world.”

Also praising Iran was Adnan Hussein, in the Saudi-owned newspaper Asharq al Awsat. Unlike some Arab states, he wrote, Iran did not offer a bagful of excuses such as “the extraordinary conditions” or “the imperialist aggression” for blocking a transition to democracy.

Such praise is ironic given the history of Iran’s relations with the Arab world. Arab leaders were terrified by the Islamic Revolution, fearing that the philosophy of clerical rule of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini would spread. Their nightmare was that the Arab kings and emirs would be toppled in the same fashion in which Iranians, a linguistically and ethnically distinct people, got rid of their shah.

Now, if anything, it seems that Iran’s chief political influence on the Arab world may be as a model of democracy, not theocracy.

Admiration for Khatami is one reason many Arab countries seem determined to upgrade relations with Tehran, even at the risk of annoying the United States.

In a milestone, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia last week extended his country’s first invitation to the highest leader of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to visit the kingdom that is home to Islam’s holiest sites.

With Iran legitimizing democratic institutions, it is small wonder that the U.S. recently has been “running after Iran to open a dialogue with it,” while Arab countries have to plead with Washington for even a small bit of attention, according to the London-based pan-Arab newspaper, Al Quds al Arabi.

“To put it very simply, Iran is moving forward,” said the paper, quoted by the Mideast Mirror monitoring service. “We are moving too: backward.”

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Daniszewski was recently on assignment in Tehran.

* ELECTION FRAUD PROBE

Officials investigate allegations of vote-rigging in Tehran race. A20