Iran: Don’t be too nice

Date: 14/02/04

Despite hope of an opening to the West, Iran may go from bad to worse

TWENTY-FIVE years after the revolution that saw Ayatollah Khomeini depose the shah amid scenes of mass euphoria, Iran is in a dismal mess - economic, diplomatic and political - and there is no obvious way out, short of the clerics stepping down and handing power to the people in a genuinely free and fair election.

That looks increasingly unlikely, at any rate in the short run. The parliamentary poll due on February 20th is more likely to be a farce, with one-third of the original candidates, virtually all of them reformers, banned from standing by the conservative Guardian Council. Apathy seems to be prevailing over anger. Reformist Iranians fear that turnout could be as low as 15%. If they are right, conservatives may dominate the new parliament; the reform-minded but increasingly weak president, Muhammad Khatami, is expected to relinquish his job next year, if not sooner. Economic and social change may well grind to a halt. Iranians have lost faith both in their rulers and in those who they once hoped would replace them.

A wretched anniversary

In any event, the bearded clergy who still really run the show cannot claim that their reign, a quarter of a century long, has done their people much good. Though Iran still has 10% of the world's known oil reserves and more gas than any other country bar Russia, its GDP per head was 30% higher under the shah. Central planning and general mismanagement by an interfering government have dulled many Iranians' natural zest for commerce and enterprise. Unemployment is rising relentlessly, at a time when two out of three Iranians are under 30.

But even in those areas where the clergy have been most zealous their policies have failed. Two of the ideological touchstones of their regime - the enforced wearing of the veil by women and the remorseless demonisation of the United States as the “Great Satan ” - are increasingly resented, especially in big towns. Bans on alcohol, on watching satellite television and on the mixing of sexes in public are an ever-more-annoying infringement of personal liberty but are also increasingly ignored. The stoning to death of adulteresses is still enshrined as law - but there is a moratorium against putting it into practice.

Most plainly, the notion that democracy and theocracy could somehow co-exist has been shown to be false. Dozens of independent-minded, reform-friendly newspapers have been closed down. Political campaigners are still arrested if they step too far out of the clerics' line. Shocking events, such as the death in Iranian custody last year of a female Canadian-Iranian journalist after she was beaten up, continue to remind the world how dissidents can be hounded and tortured. But whenever Mr Khatami and the supposedly reforming majority in parliament have initiated legislation designed to create a more genuine pluralism - for instance, by reducing the powers of the judges or of the ayatollahs themselves - they have invariably been stymied. Next week's poll puts the limits of Iran's highly qualified freedom into stark relief.

This is all the more telling at a time when the Iranians' Shia co-religionists in neighbouring Iraq are likely to emerge, by democratic means, as that embattled country's leading legislators. Yet Iraq's ayatollahs have, so far, been saying that they will not be demanding the same anti-democratic veto powers for the clergy as their Iranian brethren have doggedly insisted on keeping.

There is not much that outsiders can do. It would be a mistake for western countries to bolster the opposition, except with moral support. The taint of foreign help is still a risky handicap for any group seeking to get rid of the present order. Outraged Iranians may yet take to the streets and force the clergy to cede more power, though there are depressingly few signs of this happening any time soon.

Keep on squeezing them

But the regime is rattled, in particular by the fact that its country sits between two neighbours, Afghanistan and Iraq, that have been clobbered by the Great Satan for sins that Iran itself has been guilty of. Iran is still acutely conscious of its inclusion by President George Bush in his “axis of evil” in 2002. Yet it knows it still has a way to go before it can convince the Americans, as well as Europeans, that it deserves to be fully embraced as a benign interlocutor.

Iran, for instance, still has some al-Qaeda suspects in its custody: it should hand them over to their countries of origin. Though it has confessed that it failed to report all its nuclear activities to the International Atomic Energy Agency, it has yet to fulfil its latest obligations under its new deal with the world's nuclear watchdog. The agency has noted the contrast between Iran's continuing deviousness and the openness and thoroughness with which Libya has started to make a clean breast of its nuclear bomb-seeking past. Iran also continues to sponsor terrorism against Israel and, unlike the Arab countries, it has yet even to accept Israel's right to exist. Finally, its human-rights record is still very poor, most notably, of late, vis-à-vis the coming sham election.

Yet the clerics still hanker after better relations with the West as well as with other countries in the region. In particular, they hope for a trade and co-operation agreement with the European Union, and more investment from around the world. Unless they do a lot better on all the scores listed above, they should get none of it. Nor, for that matter, should the heir to Britain's throne, Prince Charles, have visited Iran as he did last week, inevitably giving the impression, however unintended, that the clerics deserve a pat on the back. Not yet.