The tear gas no longer floats over Tehran's streets, the protesters are gone, and so are the paramilitary thugs enforcing the will of the clerical ultras who wield power in Iran and don't want to give it up. After last week's scenes of protest and repression, Iranians and the rest of the world are wondering whether the hard-liners came out the winners or whether the first phase of a new Iranian revolution has begun, one rooted in an awakening and coalescing of civil society.

Historical analogies are rarely exact, but there is a tantalizing clue to what Iranian intellectuals anticipate in their nickname for Iran's reformist president, Mohammad Khatami. They call him Ayatollah Gorbachev.

Like the last Soviet leader, Khatami plainly wishes to save a faltering political order by reforming it. Just as Gorbachev tried to substitute glasnost, with its experiment in free speech, for a complete jettisoning of the rotted Soviet system, Khatami has lightened slightly the heavy hand of the theocratic censor while demanding allegiance to the theocratic principle of ''velayat-e-faqih''…

As Gorbachev discovered, however, no amount of ingenious political juggling can save from extinction a political elite that is incapable of preventing bankruptcy. In the Soviet Union, the enlightened reformer Gorbachev was no better suited to reverse the system's ineluctable impoverishment than were the old Communist troglodytes, whom the West took to calling conservatives…

For the students who thought they were backing Khatami's glasnost by protesting the closing of a reformist newspaper and then were beaten and thrown out of dormitory windows by paramilitary thugs, the political revelation of this month's turmoil was that when the chips were down, Khatami sided with the other theocrats - and against civil society's demand for a modicum of free speech.

At certain key moments during his six-year reign, Gorbachev, too, was obliged to side with repressive conservatives, notably after violent episodes in Lithuania and Georgia. In the long run, the phony distinction between reformer and conservative did not fool Russians aspiring to self-government. Gorbachev followed his hard-line rivals into the dustbin of history. And if Iranians have the good fortune to throw off the misrule of the mullahs and govern themselves, they will likely remember Khatami the way Russians remember Gorbachev, as the pretender who tried to save an unredeemable system.
 
 

Iran's Resistance Says Thousands Held After Unrest, Reuters, July 15

LONDON - Iran's main exiled opposition group said Thursday more than 10,000 people were arrested after the recent violent unrest in Tehran.

The Mujahideen Khalq said in a statement: "The total number of those arrested in the past seven days in Tehran and other cities exceeds 10,000. On Wednesday alone, 12 busloads of those arrested were taken to the Evin Prison."
 
 

"Paper-Thin Nature" of Khatami's "Reform Movement", The Economist, July 17

… In six days of public anger, unseen since the beginning of the 1979 Islamic revolution, students calling for "death or freedom" exposed the paper-thin nature of a reform movement that many had hoped was irreversible. Suddenly, the students whose votes had helped to bring... Khatami to power faced automatic gunfire and lethal blows from baton-wielding Islamist vigilantes buzzing around on motorcycles. It was hardly snapshots from the civil society that... Khatami dreams about...

Thousands of students reacted to the dormitory attack with spontaneous protests at Tehran University. Within a day or two, the demonstrations had spread to Mashhad, Isfahan, Tabriz and other big cities. The students called on… Khatami to honour his promises... But they got little joy from the authorities, aside from the sacking of two senior policemen... The protests took a more violent turn on July 13th, when some of the students, deeply dissatisfied with the official response, tried to storm the Ministry of Interior, the perceived seat of their troubles… Some non-students joined the protest...

For a time on Tuesday, chaos reigned in central Tehran. There were running street battles as the police and the Basij, or Islamist militia, took on the students, many of whom were arrested… Khatami, deeply embarrassed by the violent turn of events, found a way out by claiming to distinguish between "true reformers" and "the deviant movement" of protesters. Editors of… newspapers took their cue from the president, arguing that only a minority of students, with no popular support, were carrying out the street protests.

But the way the protesters and their supporters see it... Khatami and those loyal to him have chosen to sell out the pro-democracy students in order to continue themselves as actors within the system. Although this may guarantee their political survival for now, in the longer term… their strategy sends a message of betrayal to their core supporters…

After the protests, riots and official puppet-show, many questions remain unanswered. One is whether... Khatami will emerge from the crisis with his credibility intact. Is he still the new, improved mullah, impeccably groomed with a smiling face? Or is he in reality a paid-up member of the familiar old clerical guard?

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