The Mullahs Versus the People

Iran’s hard-line clerics are fighting ferociously to hold on to the power they have wielded for 21 years. Since February’s legislative elections, which like the presidential voting three years ago demonstrated overwhelming support for moderation, conservative mullahs have used their constitutional authority to coerce and silence their political opponents, shutting down 16 reformist newspapers and jailing a number of prominent critics.

Now, in their boldest challenge yet to public opinion, they claim to have found widespread fraud in the February balloting. They have nullified the results in a dozen constituencies and cast doubt on whether reformist candidates who won 29 out of 30 parliamentary seats in Tehran will be seated.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, says his fellow conservatives must respect the law in their confrontation with reformers. But the conservatives cannot ignore the election results, which showed that more than 70% of Iranians want to lift repressive laws.

The 1979 revolution was the basis for the clerics’ political legitimacy, the source of their enormous and corrupting power over Iranian life. If they can provoke an apparent threat to national stability they can use state power to discredit and suppress the reformist movement. That’s why reform leaders, among them President Mohammad Khatami, are wisely urging frustrated advocates of change to stay calm in the face of conservative incitements.

The murky trial in Shiraz of 13 Iranian Jews accused of spying for Israel--among them are a shoe store clerk, a butcher and a high school student--is widely seen as a cynical move to sabotage Khatami’s hope of improving relations with the West. Fouad Ajami, writing in U.S. News & World Report, dismisses as “a proposition too absurd to contemplate” the notion that such simple people could provide anything of value to intelligence agencies. So it is, but the trial’s purpose isn’t to expose spying. It’s to score points in a struggle over Iran’s future. If the election winners are seated when the new parliament convenes May 27, the moderate side in the struggle may finally have the chance to start giving Iranians the democracy they desperately want.