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IRAN'S LEADER FEAR THEIR OWN PEOPLE MOST

The Daily Star - July 3, 2009 by Shaazka Beyerle On Monday something surprising happened in Iran. It wasn't the Guardian Council's certifying the results of the June 12 presidential election - the questionable victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over Mir Hossein Mousavi. It wasn't that thousands of people took to the streets even though electricity, landline and mobile phone connections were cut. Nor was it that security forces were out en masse. It was that citizens confounded the authorities with dispersed actions. According to Roozonline, rather than concentrating in one place, groups formed across Tehran - "something that government agents did not expect, and so [they] did not know how to respond ..." Civil resistance is more than huge demonstrations. People power is expressed through the sustained, strategic use of noncooperation, civil disobedience, mass actions, strikes, boycotts, social networking, and over 200 nonviolent tactics designed to win popular support, shake-up the status quo, and weaken the oppressor's sources of control. The Mahatma Gandhi once pointed out, "Even the most powerful cannot rule without the cooperation of the ruled." Iran's clerics depend on people to carry out their orders - to run the country and to suppress. Nonviolent movements succeed not necessarily when there are masses on the streets, but when a large enough number of citizens withdraws its cooperation from the system, disobeys and disrupts, thereby dissolving the power of the oppressors and undermining their rule. Ordinary citizens - young and old, men and women, middle class and working class - have been demanding new elections and protesting across the country, including in the Arab, Azeri and Kurdish regions. In the wake of the harsh crackdown, resilience to repression has been essential for survival. The civic movement faces the strategic challenges of developing new tactics that minimize harm, creating simple acts of defiance involving people not yet mobilized, and avoiding confrontations that give the regime opportunities to repress. Reports indicate that Iranians are indeed engaging in low-risk mass actions, such as turning on car headlights and, apparently, writing slogans on money and standing in front of security forces holding the Koran. The nightly rooftop calls of "Allahu Akbar" are increasing by the day, and people are wearing black both as a symbol of defiance and as a sign of mourning for dead protesters. Last week, Mousavi urged citizens to walk about the bazaars but refrain from buying. A report in The Los Angeles Times says that "commerce has slowed to a trickle" in the grand bazaar, which normally would be at its busiest as Ramadan approaches. Second, as in past cases, a campaign to win over parts of the security forces may be pivotal. According to Iranian analyst Afshin Molavi, "the Basiji volunteer militia ... [is] not monolithic." The Revolutionary Guard's Tehran chief was detained, and 16 Guard members were apparently arrested after disobeying orders to shoot protesters. If these reports are correct, they are signs of the regime's growing weakness. Finally, nonviolent discipline must be maintained. Only nonviolent methods can enlist the active participation of citizens, spur defections, and encourage disobedience among those carrying out the oppressors' orders. Moreover, nonviolent discipline denies oppressors the excuse to crack down, so when they do, as is happening in Iran, they lose credibility among their own supporters. There are growing rifts in the ruling establishment. Pro-reform clerics have expressed anger and Grand Ayatollahs Yousof Sanei and Hossein-Ali Montazeri have called Ahmadinejad's government illegitimate. Faezeh Rafsanjani, the daughter of the former president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, openly backs Mousavi. Her father, who chairs the Assembly of Experts, is attempting to consolidate support to remove Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as the supreme leader, and replace his position with a small committee of senior ayatollahs. Iran's Parliament speaker, Ali Larijani, has announced that he wants to set up a parliamentary committee to examine the recent post-election violence in an "evenhanded way." Ayatollah Abdul-Karim Mousavi Ardebili stated that "people's protests should not be silenced through the use of force." On top of this, around a hundred parliamentarians snubbed Ahmadinejad's victory dinner. If these rifts widen, the system could begin breaking apart. The Nobel laureate, Thomas Schelling, wrote 30 years ago that nonviolent actions can deny oppressors what they need, including money, food, supplies and manpower. From this perspective, can the Iranian regime indefinitely cut electricity, phone links and internet without hurting its own interests? Even attempts to demobilize the popular movement have costs. Moreover, coercion isn't cheap. It requires huge sums to feed, transport and arm security forces, as well as to maintain the loyalty of the inner circles and top commanders in the state. During the "people power" revolution in the Philippines, the public withdrew its money from banks associated with the Marcos dictatorship and stopped paying utility bills. Will Iranians invent their own low-risk disruptions? Iranians can draw upon their own rich history of nonviolence, spanning over a century, for inspiration, including the 1979 Islamic Revolution that ended the brutal rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Iran's rulers may generate conspiracy theories about a "velvet revolution staged by foreigners," but in reality, it's their own legacy and people they fear. Shaazka Beyerle is a senior adviser with the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, and co-author of a chapter on the Iranian women's movement in a forthcoming book on nonviolent struggles in the Middle East.

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