Iran’s Fear of a ‘Velvet Revolution’

This week, at the start of the fourth mass trial of opposition supporters in Tehran, an Iranian prosecutor read another indictment accusing leading reformist politicians and an Iranian-American scholar named Kian Tajbakhshof plotting to overthrow Iran’s government.

Iran’s judiciary charges that the protest movement that began after the June 12 presidential election was not a spontaneous outpouring of disgust but part of a plot intended to bring about what the government calls a “velvet revolution,” aided, they say, by foreign governments and the billionaire financier George Soros.

While Iran’s ruling cleric, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, did concede on Wednesday that it “has not been proven” that the post-election protests were foreign-led, he also reiterated the theory that opposition supporters did not flood Iran’s streets in the days after the election was declared a landslide victory for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad because they believed the count was rigged. As my colleague Michael Slackman reports, Ayatollah Khamenei told a group of university students in Tehran, “There is no doubt that the events were planned” in advance of the election.

Leaving aside the fact that there appears to be no real evidence, save for what could be forced confessions, that such a plot existed, it is striking that the leaders of Iran’s Islamic republic appear to be obsessed with the peaceful transfer of power that took place in Czechoslovakia in 1989. For starters, the comparison is extremely unflattering to those in power. After the fall of the Berlin wall, the Czechoslovak Communist regime was so unpopular that it crumbled in a matter of days when it became clear that enforcing its will through violence against peaceful demonstrators was no longer an option.

But the larger problem for those in Tehran who look at the opposition leader Mir Hussein Moussavi and see an Iranian Vaclav Havel, is that Czech and Slovak dissidents led an entirely homegrown movement that was not in any way orchestrated by foreign powers. It was only after the collapse of Communist governments across Eastern Europe that the American government and Mr. Soros became involved in financing democracy-building programs.

Despite these and other logical problems with the argument, hard-line members of Iran’s government for quite some time have been trying to frame all opposition to their rule as an insidious plot against the foundations of the Islamic republic.

Before Iran’s presidential election this year,The Lede noted that the Washington-basedMiddle East Media Research Institute (also known as MEMRI) has helped document the role Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence has played in casting the people who have been attempting to reform Iran’s government as counter-revolutionaries who want to topple it.

The institute subtitled an elaborate, and unintentionally funny, public service announcement produced by the ministry, and broadcast last year, to help Iranians understand how their friends and neighbors might be involved in anti-government plots hatched in the White House.

In the P.S.A., embedded below, computer animated versions of John McCain and George Soros are shown meeting inside the White House to plot against Iran. The evil genius they confer with is an animated version of Gene Sharp, the political scientist whose theoretical work on nonviolent protest inspired the color revolutions of Eastern Europe.

Iranian hard-liners are now trying to convince the public that that is the kind of plot the government is facing. Whether it makes any sense, or is even believed by the men putting it forward, as the Iranian-American writer Hooman Madj said recently on PBS, “That’s their story and they’re sticking to it.”

Last week, in an op-ed headlined “Tehran’s Self-Fulfilling Paranoia,” Haleh Esfandiari, an Iranian-American scholar who was held in solitary confinement in Tehran’s Evin Prison for 105 days, wrote in The Washington Post that she knew this story only too well:

I was arrested in early 2007 on the ludicrous charge of attempting to foment a “velvet revolution” to overthrow the Iranian government and held as a political prisoner by the Intelligence Ministry. Even President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has acknowledged the absurdity of these charges. [...]

In weeks of interrogation during my incarceration in 2007, I came to understand only too well the paranoia that drives Iran’s security agencies and its hard-liners. These men fear that they will be overthrown by a mass movement of their own people, similar to the popular movements, or “velvet revolutions,” that toppled autocratic regimes of the former Soviet empire in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Caucasus. They have convinced themselves that those earlier movements were not homegrown but were planned and orchestrated by the United States. They believe America is scheming to pull off a similar upheaval in Iran. [...]

A million Iranians poured into the streets in June in support of Mousavi and to protest a stolen election. The protests chilled the regime; the worst fears of the security agencies seemed to be playing out. It did not register with the government that the protesters were calling for reform, not revolution.

In Ms. Esfandiari’s reading, the government’s fear of revolution (perhaps not surprising in men who themselves came to power not through gradual reform but sudden revolution) may be self-fulfilling. It has led them to create the exact conditions under which an Iranian remake of the velvet revolution might come to pass: they have closed off all avenues to incremental change and resorted to violence against their own people. “The trials,” she writes, “have caused as much revulsion at home as abroad. Prominent Iranians have described the proceedings in Tehran as ‘Stalinist.’”

Ms. Esfandiari concludes:

Iran’s hard-liners have long feared a foreign-inspired upheaval. Ironically, they seem to have accomplished what their ubiquitous foreign “enemies” could not: They have planted the seeds for their own, homegrown velvet revolution.

This conclusion, that by closing off the possibility of gradual democratic reform, hard-line elements in Iran’s government are in fact making revolution more likely, matches that of Omid Habibinia, an Iranian blogger in Switzerland. In a post written earlier this month, Mr. Habibinia was scathingly critical of what he called “the stupidity and confusion of the remainder of reformists” in a struggle “against a police state who wants to eliminate them completely.”

From Mr. Habibinia’s perspective, the brutal security crackdown may have finally discredited the movement to reform the Islamic republic’s system of government:

The main characteristic of the movement after June 20th has been its radicalism and its disconnect from the so called reformist leaders. In other words within the ten days following the elections the movement changed from a silent protest demanding new elections to street fights trying to overthrow the regime. This surpassed even the demands of the most radical factions of the reformists.