Mini-messaging for major change

Thursday, June 18, 2009

ALMOST ANYONE, thanks to our broadening digital universe, can be a close observer – and even be an active participant - in Iran's tumultuous struggle over the job of second-most-important man in the country.

Among all the Twitter-led and social media-fueled excitement about presidential elections that produced a barely credible result, plus vast street protests that the authorities have been ambivalent about restraining, the fact remains that the actual government of this theocracy remains in deeply undemocratic, clerical hands.

 

The position of the of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (left) may look currently unsteady to some – if only because his actions (or non-actions) have appeared so – but Iran is a long, long way from deposing the pinnacle of its 30-year-old power structures, and of the thoroughly interlocking religious, social, military, paramilitary and intelligence networks that sustain his pre-eminence.

 

Overseas journalists who jetted in on the short-term visas they were allowed for the election period (now mostly departing, embarrassingly just as matters get even more worth reporting on) managed in their few days to swing dramatically in their various interperative “takes”.

 

They went from expecting a sudden overturning of the established order by Mir Hossein Moussavi (center) … to thinking the dug-in conservative (and effectively populist, and oftentimes thuggish) forces behind President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (right) could simply not be toppled … to hailing afresh and breathlessly the world’s first “Twitter Revolution”.

 

(Perhaps they were forgetting the - perhaps easily forgotten - former Soviet state of Moldova, whose communist leadership’s offices were ransacked this April by crowds brought together, in large part, by well-organized tweeting).

 

Also forgotten – though instructively not by President Barack Obama in his studious maintenance of a clear distance above the Iranian fray – has been the real deep-down political complexion of Moussavi. While many western proponents of democracy have touted his leadership– even on occasions calling him “progressive”,  it’s not often mentioned, if at all, that the former prime minister describes himself as “a conservative reformist”. Others are less ambiguous, recalling him as simply “repressive” when in office.

 

During his eight-year term, ending in 1989, he adhered firmly in social matters to clerically-imposed values and constraints, and he’s well-remembered (by United Nations investigators, at least) as the determined nationalist who signed off on first buying nuclear equipment from the Pakistani atom scientist A Q Khan’s black-market operation.

  

 

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THERE’S NO DOUBT, THOUGH, that many of Mousavi’s supporters - correctly or not - expect reform. It’s also of note how thin has been the international media’s understanding of these supporters during the past weeks of electoral reportage.

 

Much sage analysis has been made of the fact that Moussavi people are of course overwhelmingly younger and better educated Iranians, but that their loud outcry – producing, remarkably, the biggest demonstrations since the Islamic Revolution itself in 1979 – has been largely limited to Teheran and the more middle-class, citfied stretches of the northern region.

 

Ahmadinejad, by contrast, is said by observers to retain his hold over the less well-educated, and the older population (including state pensioners) in the broad rural sweep of the country.

 

That’s true so far as it goes. But the dimensions of the matter have long been changing. I remember when, as a newly (and somewhat oddly) appointed specialist in religion on British television, I was compiling reports on the mullahs' takeover - and it was striking even then how the country had been modernizing. The technology of choice for the Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s devastating denunciations of the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was the audio-cassette, secretly and unstoppably circulated everywhere. But the extent of urbanization, on the other hand, was limited. Iranians who were still classed as country-dwellers amounted more than half the country’s population.

 

Now everything is different. Perhaps the biggest change that’s overtaken the country since the Revolution is that an extraordinary 80% of Iranians are now city-dwellers.

 

Not much tweeting, it has to be said, goes on among the 20% left in the countryside. So it may well be true that, along with many other societal fault-lines opening up to now obvious view, the current struggle is one between the growing cities and the shrinking rural sector.

 

Allowing for some over-enthusiastic journalistic hyperbole, maybe it’s in essence right to say (as The New York Times’ diplomatic staff did yesterday in their story about the US State Department asking Twitter's co-founder Jack Dorsey to postpone a  tech-maintenance interruption scheduled for the global network at this "crucial time") that the micro-blogging service started in San Francisco just three years ago does have “the potential to change history”.

 

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