A Revolution Still
A trial of Iranian Jews shows moderates haven't prevailed
The late Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai was once asked his opinion of the significance of the French Revolution of 1789. "It's too soon to tell," he answered. Revolutions have their own cunning and method, their own mix of audacity and cruelty and reason. We have been reminded of this yet again by the latest turn of events in Iran. There were anticipations of a "Tehran Spring" and hopes in Iran, as well as in Washington, that the fury of the revolution was spent. But in truth, the reformers have not prevailed. The cynical and cruel trial of 13 Iranian Jews in Shiraz on charges of spying for Israel is one expression of the impasse between the reformers and the real masters of the land--the hard-line clerics.
The trial also seems to provide an answer to the Clinton administration, which sought to test the mood of the revolution. In mid-March, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright launched "pistachio diplomacy," offering an olive branch to the would-be reformers mobilized around President Mohammad Khatami. The sanctions on investments in Iranian oil would remain, she announced, but they were lifted on Iranian pistachios, caviar, and carpets. More accommodation was promised if Iran, in Albright's words, indicated "a desire and a commitment" to improve relations. In an administration and a cultural climate of confessions and apologies, an apology of sorts was given to the Iranians for Operation Ajax, the covert Anglo-American effort that overthrew Iran's popular Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and restored to power his rival, Mohammad Reza Shah. Secretary Albright gave that history a new twist. That 1953 coup, she said, was a "setback for Iran's political development." The shah, who had done a fair measure of America's bidding in the Persian Gulf, was written off by Albright as a man who had "brutally repressed political dissent." It was history at a distance, after history's dangers and truths have long scattered to the wind.
Iranian pawns. On the face of it, the trial in Shiraz is "revolutionary" tribunal justice in its purest and crudest form. Three of those hapless victims--an unlikely group that includes a rabbi, a high school student, and a clerk in a shoe store--have offered the scripted public confessions of those caught up in a lawless world beyond their power. These men are pawns; they have been held incommunicado for more than a year now. The first to offer a "confession" was Hamid Tefileen, a clerk in his father's shoe store. The chance that a man in Shiraz--far removed from the political center in Tehran and the religious center in the city of Qum--would have anything of value to intelligence agencies is a proposition too absurd to contemplate. Iran is rife with corruption: The clerics and their sons and their sons-in-law are available for hire. Why bother with a store clerk when you can recruit the very best? And the chance that Israeli intelligence would put Iranian Jews in harm's way is patently absurd. Some 30,000 Jews remain in Iran. They are apolitical men and women. Anyone who knows the rules of minority survival in harsh and cruel lands can readily see through the sham of Iran's show trial.
The truth of Iran's political life is straightforward: President Khatami reigns but does not rule. This trial is but one way of placing him on the defensive. It provides the theocrats what the late Ayatollah Khomeini gained with his fatwa death sentence, issued against the British-Indian author Salman Rushdie--a way of keeping the revolution vigilant, of tripping up those within the Iranian political class (Khatami and his supporters today) who are eager to temper the revolution's sound and fury. What stands in Iran today is a deadly impasse: On one side are Khatami and the vast parliamentary majority he carried in elections; on the other side is the supreme religious leader Ali Khamenei, as well as the vast clerical apparatus that controls the official media, the judiciary, the wealthy bonyads (the foundations that account for something like 20 percent of the country's economy), and the vigilante squads eager to uphold the reign of virtue and terror.
A society never yields its truth to outsiders easily. U.S. officials may express some remorse for the overthrow of Mossadegh nearly five decades ago as contrition for the past and a gift to Iran's moderates. But the political cartography of Iran is vastly complicated. A hero to the modernists in that country, Mossadegh is at best an ambivalent figure to the theocrats. He was a man of secular nationalism, educated in the West. For many of the hard-liners, Mossadegh is more of an anathema than the shah. The great tribune of the Iranian Revolution, the Ayatollah Khomeini himself, was disdainful of Mossadegh. These are Persian rules, not ours. If moderation is to hold, if the men and women who shouted themselves hoarse against the Great Satan (America) and the Little Satan (Israel) wake up to the poverty of their country and wish for themselves a better world, they will make it with their own hands. There comes a time when a people tire of blood--and of revolutionary virtue and terror. For Iran, the matter, for now, lies in the balance.
This story appears in the May 15, 2000 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.