BY PAUL T HORGAN
Deng Xiao-Ping, The Butcher of Tiananmen Square, perhaps deserves some credit for the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in the months following the massacre in the Chinese capital in June 1989. By coincidence this happened at roughly the same time as Ayatollah Khomeini died, but more on that later.
Sending tanks to face pro-democracy protesters in Beijing, and slaughtering thousands, brought home to security forces in East Germany to what extent they would have to go to prevent the weekly protests that grew in Leipzig, coincidentally shortly after the massacre in Beijing. In East Germany, it was the authorities that blinked first, especially as they were aware that the Soviet Union would not bail the regime out as it had done after the uprising of 1953.
And it seems history is repeating itself, but this time in Iran. Yes, there have been mass protests before, but apparently not on this scale. In the past, the regime has cracked down hard, killing hundreds with indiscriminate armed attacks. But the protests have previously been related to policy, specifically a rigged election and a heavy-handed response to a woman who left her hair uncovered, which resulted in her murder at the hands of the authorities.
This time it is different. The focus of protest is the dire state of the Iranian economy. The domestic currency, the rial, is crashing against the dollar. Inflation is at about 40%. The middle classes, usually insulated from the economic turmoil compared to the lower orders, are now feeling the pinch.
So far, the regime is playing it softly-softly. It is making conciliatory noises. It seems to have no choice. The options for the regime to dig itself out of its economic hole are limited. The roadmap looks bleak. Iran faces years of stagnation and decline. There is no prospect of any kind of political change to alleviate the country’s plight.
So, the people may have lost all hope. But, unlike in the Brezhnev-era USSR, the stagnation is not gentle. Added to this, the regime has mismanaged its supply and storage of water. There has been particularly bad rainfall in the last few years. Afghanistan is hoarding water that would normally flow into Iran, and the country is utterly dependent on water that may have come from elsewhere. There is talk of a partial evacuation of Tehran if the city’s water supplies fall any lower.
A hopeless people have nothing to lose when they take to the streets. The regime may be hoping that the people will tire of demonstrations eventually. They may hope in vain. In East Germany, the Monday evening demonstrations in Leipzig grew week by week, as the people saw there was no strong crackdown to their assembly. Shorn of Soviet support, the East German government lost its will to oppress.
And it seems that Iran’s regime may be losing this will as well. The regime seems slightly paralysed, as its ageing ‘Paramount Leader’, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who succeeded Khomeini back in 1989, is nearing the end of his life, and his successors are jockeying for position.
A government crackdown will not improve the dire economic situation Iran finds itself in. In fact, the international response to such an atrocity may make conditions worse. The current state is in part the result of international sanctions, but misgovernance plays a significant part. Iran followed an international policy of exporting terrorism across the Middle East. Its SS analogue, the IRGC, has set up camp in Venezuela to prop up another ailing regime. Money that could have been spent improving the lot of ordinary Iranians, such as the construction of underground reservoirs resistant to evaporation, have instead been spent on underground factories to enrich uranium for weapons.
So, the regime may find itself in an endgame of sorts. No policy, short of a copy of a Marshall Plan by China or some UN relief organisation, can address the economic decline. The regime refuses to step aside. The people refuse to go back to their homes and the use of violence seems to have been priced in by the demonstrators, because no amount of violence will affect the economic reality. The next stage may be armed resistance. An IRGC base has been ransacked by demonstrators who now may have weapons.
The regime does have a record of resilience, but that seems largely due to its exercise of selective terror against its domestic opponents, as well as assassinations against those overseas. The problem is that the regime is known for its rapid crackdowns and their absence seems noteworthy. The regime may well be faltering this time.
In January 1989, the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe by the end of the year seemed a remote possibility. It was plausible to Western observers that some graceful transition to social democracy by those in power would take place. The game-changer was Tiananmen Square, when Marxist oppressors and also the oppressed were able to stare into the abyss and see what could happen unless something changed. The security forces in these dictatorships realised that they would either have to go in hard or the game would be up, and they realised they would have to go in hard without the backing of Moscow. It is possible that the mobilised troops would refuse to fire on their own people, and there would be mass desertions leading to messy regime collapse. Prior to 1989, they could have just said they had been pressured by the Kremlin. Once that pressure was gone, so were their regimes.
Iran does not have a ‘Kremlin’ to back it up and historically has not needed one. Perhaps the regime is getting its forces ready for a nationwide attack in the same way that Deng’s China took several days to manoeuvre units with no connections to Beijing to carry out atrocities in the capital. The risk is that the crackdown will initiate a civil war, as happened when Muammar Gaddafi and Bashar Assad tried to halt the historic inevitability of the Arab Spring in Libya and Syria respectively. The Syrian war dragged on because the country was propped up by external powers. Different external powers ganged up with UN resolution backing to bring Gaddafi down in the Summer of 2011.
Iran has its own protectors in the Security Council, so the possibility of open foreign intervention against the regime, Libya-style, is limited, but the USA and NATO may be getting ready to commit a form of terrible revenge for over 40 years of Iran’s bad acts. But the question remains. Will Iran be another Syria, or Libya, or just plain old limp-along Iran?
Paul T Horgan worked in the IT Sector. He lives in Berkshire.