Zibakalam on Iranian elections: ‘we had to choose between bad and worse’
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Version 0 of 1. It took the reformists a while to agree on their preferred candidates for today’s parliamentary and Assembly of Experts elections. In the end, on 16 February they announced they had reached consensus with ‘moderates’ - including former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Hassan Khomeini, grandson of the 1979 Revolution’s leader – and some ‘principlists’ on ‘The Grand Coalition of Reformists’. The coalition published a preferred list of parliamentary candidates in every city and a preferred list of Assembly of Experts candidates in every province. In Tehran there were 30 names for 30 parliamentary seats, and 16 names for 16 seats in the Assembly of Experts, including Hassan Rouhani, who while a candidate for the Assembly was not outspoken given his role as president. The reformists’ preferences raised a few eyebrows. As well as suggesting many unknown figures, the coalition included some principlists, including three former intelligence ministers not widely seen as sympathetic to the reformists’ traditional goals. Sadegh Zibakalam, the reform-inclined professor of political science at the University of Tehran, said the mass disqualification of reformist candidates by the Guardian Council made compiling the lists difficult. “We didn’t have much choice left. Nearly 90% of reformist candidates, even the second- and third-rate ones, were disqualified. So we had to either boycott the elections and leave the political ground to the principlists, or change our strategy.” The reformists picked the latter. According to Zibakalam they decided to invest in a new, young generation of candidates who are not necessarily reformists and hope that if they get to the parliament and the Assembly, at least some of them will gravitate towards reformism. But he adds that this was not enough and they were still short of candidates, so they had to approach some principlists. “We thought, ‘Instead of letting the hardline principlists win, let’s help the moderate principlists get into the parliament’,” added Zibakalam. “Reformism is not only about empowering reformists, it also means you should boost the moderate principlists against the hardliners. That also somehow paves the way for the reformists.” The lists had some notable inclusions. In Tehran for example, principlist parliamentary candidates Kazem Jalali and Behrouz Nemati took strong stands against protests after the disputed 2009 post-election protests, referring to them as “sedition”, a derogatory term commonly used by principlists. In February 2011 Jalali asked for the heaviest punishment for opposition leaders Mehdi Karroubi and Mir Hossein Mousavi. No further punishments were in fact meted out upon Jalali’s request. And as for the Assembly of Experts, former intelligence ministers Ghorban Ali Dorri Najafabadi and Mohammad Reyshahri were on the Tehran list. During Dorri Najafabadi’s time at the ministry, some of its agents were involved in the murder of dissidents and intellectuals, as the ministry admitted in a statement of January 1999. It is not known whether Najafabadi or Reyshahri were aware of the killings. In April 2011 the European Union imposed a travel ban on Dorri Najafabadi, and froze his assets for “serious human rights violations”. After the 1979 revolution, Reyshahri acted as chief judge of the Military Revolutionary Tribunal, which tried political dissidents and sentenced thousands to death, some by Reyshahri’s own order. In Hamedan province, Ali Razini, currently a member of the Assembly of Experts, was on the reformists’ list. As yet another judge of the Military Revolutionary Tribunal, he has been implicated in the execution of political prisoners. And in Khuzestan province Ali Fallahian, also a member of the Assembly, is another example. As a Minister of Intelligence during the Rafsanjani presidency, Fallahian was accused of involvement by journalists, including Akbar Ganji, Emadeddin Baghi, and politicians such as Mostafa Tajzadeh, in killing dissidents. Fallahian is also on Interpol’s wanted list for his alleged connection to the 1995 bombing of a Jewish centre in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people. Fallahian does not appear to have responded to these claims. The reformists, including former president Mohammad Khatami, encouraged people to vote for all the candidates on their lists to stop the hardliners. While Khatami hasn’t named anyone specifically, in Tehran current members of the Assembly, Ayatollahs Ahmad Jannati, Mohammad Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi and Mohammad Yazdi, were the likely targets. Mohsen Kadivar, a research professor of Islamic studies at Duke University, North Carolina, who trained as a cleric at the seminary in Qom, questions this strategy. “Let’s say instead of Khamenei’s appointed figures, former intelligence ministers get into the Assembly. What difference does it make? They also have very dark political records. I don’t see any difference.” Zibakalam disagrees somewhat. “Unfortunately, we had to choose between bad and worse,” he says. “I agree Reyshahri has killed a lot of people...He has no democratic background, but he is also not against democracy and freedom. And also, what other options do we have? To let Jannati and Mesbah-Yazdi, who are openly against any freedom, get in?” Zibakalam also added that people change over time, citing Mousavi, Rafsanjani and Khatami. “During the 1980s they also had no respect for democracy, the rule of law and liberalism, but they had to change over time. If we can accept their changes as genuine, why can’t we accept that other people change too?” Denise Hassanzade Ajiri is a staff writer and editor at the Tehran Bureau, an independent media organisation hosted by the Guardian. Contact us @tehranbureau |