THIS time a year ago, shortly before a presidential election, Iran seemed on the verge of momentous change. The streets of Tehran, its capital, as well as those of other towns, heaved with opposition supporters, and the ejection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the country's firebrand president, seemed a distinct possibility.
Yet the incumbent won by a landslide, apparently with the help of massive fraud, leading to months of tumultuous unrest. Now the president's people boast that the "traitorous" opposition has been broken and the country is back to normal. This confidence is reflected internally, where the state's policies, of repression galore and some selective clemency, have born bitter fruit.
Iran's reformist opposition limps on, but is quiescent and demoralised. Street demonstrations seem to have ended, though there is talk of a protest on June 12th to mark the election's anniversary. Former and potential dissidents are monitored by moles at their mainly public-sector workplaces. "The movement is going nowhere," says a former campaigner who teaches at one of Tehran's universities, where informers abound. "No one," she adds, "wants to overstep the line and find themselves suspended and unable to find a job later on."
The authorities have adroitly strained the bonds of communication that gave the demonstrators a sense of common identity. Thanks to government jamming devices, access to the BBC's Persian-language channel, formerly a popular source of news, has become well-nigh impossible in most parts of Tehran. The censors work diligently; the news-stands are bereft of a single genuinely reformist newspaper, though anyone with anti-filter software can surf the anti-government sites.
The frenzied brutality of the second half of last year, when arrests took place in the hundreds and many dissidents were killed and tortured in custody, has given way to a duller repression. Some imprisoned senior reformists have been freed, although, having posted extortionate bail and been threatened with more horrors, they then tend to steer clear of dissident politics. Ordinary detainees are often "encouraged" to leave the country on their release. Many have done so.
Though riven by personal animosities and far from uniformly pro-Ahmadinejad, parliament unites in slavish praise for the deeply conservative Ayatollah Khamenei, who still has the last word on all affairs of state. Last month a majority of deputies tactfully turned down a chance to launch an inquiry, into atrocities committed by the security forces in government detention centres, which might have reflected badly on Mr Khamenei.
To judge by their ability to move around, attend weddings and visit just-freed allies, the two most prominent thwarted presidential candidates, Mir Hosein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, may be more comfortable than they were at the height of the crisis, when both were subjected to physical assaults. In truth, they were never more than figureheads for a movement whose demands for constitutional change exceeded their own more modest aims; fewer dissidents heed their public statements than they did before. There is a good chance they will be arrested just as soon as the authorities are confident of a muted public reaction.
With the end of large-scale unrest, the authorities have resumed their efforts to "purify" Iranian society. Alcohol-fuelled parties attended by boys and girls are again being busted, though heavy fines rather than detention have become the penalty of choice. The morals police have returned to the streets, where they impound the cars of cruising lotharios and any young woman who shows her curves too candidly.
The border provinces of Kurdistan and Baluchistan, where members of Iran's Sunni minority live, have experienced brutality of a different order. In May four Kurds and a Baluch were executed on charges of separatist terrorism, after trials (in the Kurds' case) that were widely condemned. Parts of Kurdistan observed a general strike in protest.
In the capital all eyes are on the struggle between Mr Ahmadinejad and his sworn enemy, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president and the head of several government bodies, who has been repeatedly humiliated since he failed to prevent the president's "re-election" last summer. The government is close to seizing control of an immensely profitable network of private universities that Mr Rafsanjani set up, and his eldest son faces trial on corruption charges if he returns home from exile in London. In May a pro-Ahmadinejad ayatollah obliquely denounced Mr Rafsanjani for aspiring to be part of a "leadership council" that could succeed the frail Mr Khamenei.
Abroad, Mr Ahmadinejad is also tirelessly chipper, parading his Islamist populism and declaring that Iran is the world's most important nation. After witnessing a public-relations success he claimed to have scored recently over the American administration of President Barack Obama, his fans are happy to agree. Few images were more telling of Iran's new bounce than those of a grinning Mr Ahmadinejad standing triumphantly between Brazil's president, Luiz Inácio Lula de Silva, and Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, on May 17th. The three had just clinched a nuclear deal which, they presumed, would force Mr Obama to reverse his decision to steer a new sanctions resolution against Iran through the UN Security Council.
The Americans, along with the Europeans, Russians and Chinese, were, however, unimpressed with the Brazil/Turkey deal. Unlike an American, Russian and French one put to Iran last October, whereby it would give up much of its under 5%-enriched uranium (which can be further enriched to 90% to make a bomb without too much bother), in return for 20%-enriched fuel rods for use in a research reactor, the May 17th deal would still leave Iran with enough uranium for a bomb's worth, and leave it enriching on regardless, to 20% itself, as it started doing earlier this year.
On June 9th the Obama administration duly pushed through a fourth round of sanctions at the UN Security Council. Hillary Clinton, the American secretary of state, called these the most "significant sanctions that Iran has ever faced". They ban the sale of heavy weapons, extend travel bans and asset freezes on Iranian companies and officials, and give countries the right to examine suspect Iranian cargoes at their ports and airports.
Russia and China, both traditionally Iran's supporters, had watered these down but still voted for them. Only Brazil and Turkey voted no, and Lebanon, where Hizbullah has close ties to Iran, abstained. Iran had worked hard to widen the opposition to sanctions, but Mr Ahmadinejad seemed untroubled. Iran may not necessarily be unhappy to be uncoupled from Russia, a country it now sees as untrustworthy.
An historic meddler in Iranian affairs, Russia had recently been Iran's main nuclear ally, only to disappoint its southern neighbour. With Iran defiantly refusing to suspend its uranium-enrichment work, despite a string of UN resolutions calling on it to do so, Russia has found endless pretexts to delay the commissioning of a nuclear reactor that it has built at Bushehr, on Iran's southern coast, and to stall delivery of a sophisticated missile-defence system. The Iranians also suspect Russia of holding up their application to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, a six-country mutual-security outfit led by China, Russia and Kazakhstan.
It is all a far cry from the chaotic aftermath of last summer's poll. Then, as Tehran teemed with demonstrators demanding Mr Ahmadinejad's resignation, Russia's president, Dmitry Medvedev, welcomed him to Moscow and congratulated him fulsomely on his re-election.
As non-permanent members of the Security Council, aspiring medium-sized powers Turkey and Brazil have no veto. All the same, they do offer a path away from pariahdom. Even before the attempted May 17th fuel deal, hard-line newspapers in Tehran had shrugged off their old contempt for Turkey's secular model, treating Mr Erdogan, a moderate Islamist, with new respect. The Iranians were gratified by Turkey's furious reaction to Israel's killing of nine Turks on Gaza-bound aid-carrying vessels on May 31st, though they will not easily give up their own self-appointed status as the Palestinians' best friend. Iran said its own Red Crescent charity would be sending aid by boat to Gaza soon.
Meanwhile, Iran's declining friendship with Russia prefigures an even greater reliance on China. Although China also voted for tougher sanctions on June 9th, this time Mr Ahmadinejad will probably bite his tongue. He can probably live without Russia. China, he needs badly. This week he was off to Beijing after a short stop-over in Turkey.
The Iranians and the Chinese started cosying up in the late 1990s. Since then, combined trade has vastly increased; it is expected to reach $30 billion this year. China's burgeoning energy needs and the West's policy of isolating Iran explain this. Apart from buying oceans of Iranian crude, China has benefited from the gradual withdrawal of European oil companies from Iran; unilateral American sanctions have long prevented American outfits from working there. Chinese contractors have scooped up cancelled contracts and won new ones, though few have yet taken effect. For as long as China opposes measures against Iranian hydrocarbons, on which the economy depends, the Islamic Republic will probably be able to ride out the challenges posed by other sanctions.
Thus, despite this week's UN vote, Iran feels more comfortable than at any time since the election. For the millions of Iranians who turned out last summer to unseat their president, it is painful to watch him strutting on the world stage. All the same, says one campaigner, Mr Ahmadinejad is perfectly capable, by some of act of coarseness or brutality, of bringing people into the streets again. "All it would take", he says, "is one spark." But the fire of democracy has been doused before.
The Economist Newspaper | Middle East & Africa
Source: http://www.economist.com/node/16319793?story_id=16319793
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