Newsweek reports that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei will be the last Supreme Leader of the country, ever. Khamenei is only the second Supreme Leader the country has ever had, the first being Khomeini. His successor has proven to be less successful at being the most powerful voice in the country according to the clerical leadership.
Khamenei’s response to the massive election demonstrations this past summer reaffirmed a longstanding but secretive belief among a majority of Iran’s religious teachers and scholars: supreme clerical rule, no matter who is at the helm, can lead only to despotism and should be abolished. There can be no absolute power because, as Khamenei showed, men are fallible. It’s well enough understood outside Iran that those clerics have found common cause with the street demonstrators; what the rest of the world hasn’t realized yet is that they also want Khamenei gone.
The Supreme Leader will hold the position until he dies at which point the decision to eliminate the title could be made. Whether or not the standing theocratic order will be around that long is an entirely different question. The street protests continue sporadically and Neda Agha Soltan continues to be a powerful global symbol of the Iranian regime’s brutality (as we saw on the blog recently: Neda’s boyfriend speaks after escaping Iran).
Caspian Makan, a 38 year old Iranian photographer, has had a terrible few months. Amid massive street protests against Iran’s government his girlfriend, Neda Agha Soltan, died a bloody and disturbing death. And the whole watched it on YouTube. Things only got worse for Makan from there. He spent months in the dreaded Evin Prison and upon release, decided to flee the country for his own safety.
On the day of her death, Caspian was out with his camera in another part of the city. “I was taking pictures of the protests and the protesters that day. It was hard to take pictures as the security guards were beating up protesters. I used my mobile’s camera when I couldn’t use my big camera. It was six to seven in the evening when I started seeing people get shot and injured. I thought of Neda a lot. I was very worried for her. I wanted to call her but the mobile phone system had been disconnected and I couldn’t contact her at all. I didn’t sleep that night. The terrible scenes were going through my head. I was sitting in front of my computer, looking at the photos I had taken. Around six in the morning my mobile rang. It was Neda’s number. But it wasn’t her. It was her sister. She said, ‘Caspian, Neda is gone!’ I didn’t understand what she meant. I couldn’t believe what she was telling me.”
The LA Times has a fantastic profile of an Iranian couple who were both members of the Basiji – the hard-line militia group that provides much of the muscle behind the governments crackdowns on the opposition. It’s an incredibly personal story of transformation.
Once during a law class she took to help with her part-time job at a law office, the subject was women’s rights. Under Iranian law, the professor said, a woman was worth half a man when it came to court testimony or inheritance.
“That’s not fair,” she burst out, reminded of the bitter child-custody battle that her sister had endured, and lost, against an abusive husband.
“You’re a feminist,” the professor accused her.
That night, she pulled out a dictionary and looked up “feminist.”
She read the definition, and decided that she was.
The basij have long fascinated watchers of Iran, but given their enmity to the West, rarely speak with Western journalists. This profile seems to have been possible because the writer was longtime friends of the couple. Kouross Esmaeli, a journalist working with Collective Journalism for Current was able to get unprecedented access to the group a few years ago and some of its members gave him a very frank depiction of their worldview.
“I don’t know why in this country it’s not allowed to make any kind of criticism of you,” said the student, wearing a long-sleeved blue polo shirt and appearing calm.
“In the past three to five years that I have been reading newspapers, I have seen no criticism of you, not even by the Assembly of Experts, whose duty is to criticize and supervise the performance of the leader,” he said, referring to the clerical body that chooses the country’s supreme leader.
Khamenei countered, “We welcome criticism. We never said not to criticize us. … There’s plenty of criticism that I receive,” according to accounts in state media and on opposition Web sites.
Contrary to the stories of the thousands of protesters and critics of the country’s election results – Mahmoud Vahidnia has faced no repercussions. In fact the incident was originally reported by the Supreme Leader’s office – touting the country’s tolerance for healthy debate. Initially many questioned whether the incident was staged for such a purpose – though opposition leaders are now saying the incident was the real deal.
Here’s some video (albeit in Persian) of the meeting with a little bit of Vahidnia at the podium.
Just hours after Iranian President Ahmadinejad agreed to accept an IAEA deal to enrich uranium out of the country, they suddenly backed out. The plan had been to take Iran’s nuclear stockpile and send it to Russia to be enriched. It’s disappointing for those concerned about Iran’s plans for its enriching uranium – though I don’t think it’s particularly surprising.
I was thinking about how long Iran has been playing this game, and it brought to mind this Supernews gem: Iran: Deal or No Deal?
That piece was produced in 2006. Over three years ago. It’s kind of disheartening to see what looks like the same game playing out, but with a few different players. No more Bush or Condoleeza Rice, and Putin is now the Prime Minister of Russia, not the President. But it’s hard not to watch this and see Iran doing the same things today. Is there another card up the Obama Administration’s negotiating sleeve? Let’s hope so.
According to the Iranian government they did. Iran claims that Shahram Amiri disappeared while he was on a religious pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia in May, and that the US was involved.
Iranian media said he was an expert on radioactive isotopes for medical uses at Malek Ashtar University, in Tehran. “We’ve obtained documents about the US involvement in Shahram Amiri’s disappearance,” Iran’s foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, said, according to the semi-official Fars news agency. “We hold Saudi Arabia responsible for Shahram Amiri’s situation and consider the US to be involved in his arrest.”
Vanguard also investigated whether or not the US was already at war with Iran in America’s Secret War with Iran – in which Mariana van Zeller took to the rugged hills and mountains of northern Iraq to meet with the American-backed militia groups fighting Iran.
From the irony files: The Daily Telegraph has investigated a photograph taken of Ahmadinejad in 2008 and determined that Holocaust-denying Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may well have a Jewish past.
A close-up of the document reveals he was previously known as Sabourjian – a Jewish name meaning cloth weaver.
The short note scrawled on the card suggests his family changed its name to Ahmadinejad when they converted to embrace Islam after his birth.
From the Daily Telegraph
The article goes on to wonder if the Iranian President’s vitriol for Jewish people is some sort of overcompensation.
This is obviously a very fascinating story if wholly accurate. It strikes me though a possibly a little too neat. While I trust that the Daily Telegraph has accurately translated the text on the identity card – I wonder about some of the other logic. Does the Jewish name mean a Jewish family? Are they certain it was his parents who held the name? Anyone who has any more insight into this, please weigh in.
What is happening in Geneva?? I just can’t stand the waiting! Are they finally going to work it out?
Hah. No. Probably not. It’s helpful to remember that in the world of foreign policy things can move glacially slow. The question for the P5+1 talks with Iran happening in Geneva is what direction is that icy relationship moving?
For its part, officials and experts said, Iran is likely to turn up with a narrow agenda on its nuclear program, but a host of other issues, including overhauling the United Nations; giving greater voice to non-Western countries; and universal nuclear disarmament. It laid these out in a five-page proposal last month, which was met with derision by Obama administration officials.
FP Passport has the State Department’s take on the meetings in this morning’s “Briefing Skipper” (a distillation of the State Department press briefing):
Crowley sought to manage expectations about the new talks with Iranian officials. “I wouldn’t expect a call for sanctions tomorrow night at the end of this meeting. I think we’re looking for a process,” he said. He acknowledged that Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki was in Washington and that the State Department granted his visa request on the basis he wanted to visit the Iranian Interest section at the Pakistani embassy. There were no plans for him to meet administration officials, Crowley said. “I wouldn’t read too much into this,” Crowley cautioned the reporters. Right…
So we’ll see what officials (from both sides) emerge with. But really the most notable thing happening in Switzerland today is the fact that the US and Iran are meeting at all.
When demonstrators took to the streets after Iran’s disputed Presidential election, many of them were students. That’s why, as Iran’s universities opened back up to students this week, many expected widespread student demonstrations.
The NY Times Lede Blog links to this great first-person video walking along with protests at Tehran University.
As for the other big Iran story: potential threats to the regime’s reputation from abroad. As news from the US is that Obama is preparing to set up a new round of sanctions, Tehran announced today that it will allow inspectors from the IAEA to come in and take a look around the Qom facility revealed last week. What will they find? A facility for purely civilian use? More roadblocks? We’ll see…
It’s a delicate time for the US and Iran, since they’re about to sit down face to face in four (count ‘em FOUR) days.
It’s not like these are the first sanctions the US has levied against Iran. Last year, Collective Journalism contributors Golboo Fuizii (a documentary filmmakers living in Tehran) and Kouross Esmaeli, an Iranian-American filmmaker based in NY, worked together to produce this intimate look at how Iranians view the West. Sanctions were, unsurprisingly, a big topic of conversation.
