ReportWire

Tag: revolutions

  • Iran’s Regime Is Unsustainable

    [ad_1]

    Politically, the regime has rotted from within, discarding, discrediting, or detaining its own kind. Ali Kadivar, a sociologist at Boston College and a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, said that the turning point happened last Thursday, the beginning of the Iranian weekend and the sabbath, when vast crowds joined the protests. “That’s the point where people saw each other,” he told me. (Kadivar’s father, Mohsen, was an outspoken critic who was imprisoned at Evin Prison and now teaches at Duke University. His aunt, Jamileh, was a reformist Member of Parliament who was put on trial for attending a conference in Berlin and banned from running for a second term. She now lives in London.)

    The ideology invoked to justify Iran’s revolution has become increasingly untenable since the emergence of accusations of voter fraud in the 2009 election, which put a hard-liner in power, according to Charles Kurzman, a University of North Carolina sociologist and the author of “The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran.” Since then, “people just didn’t buy what a leader was saying anymore, and were looking for a way out,” he said. Iranians have occasionally rallied around reformist candidates, but they, too, have been undermined by hard-line revolutionary purists. “Many Iranians who share the ideals and goals of the reformist movement no longer believe that reform is going to lead to those goals,” Kurzman said.

    During an event at the Atlantic Council on Friday, Rob Macaire, a former British Ambassador to Iran, said that the regime in Tehran “does not have the answers to any of the challenges that it’s facing.” The inner circle of power has become “tighter and tighter,” so the government “finds it very difficult to do anything other than to circle the wagons and to double down on a repressive policy.” Guy Burgess, a sociologist who studies conflict and co-founded the blog Beyond Intractability, said that prospects of the Islamic regime collapsing have increased. “These are the sort of things that happen when, all of a sudden, people decide that the brutal force that kept the regime in power can be overcome.”

    But the Islamic Republic still has the forces—in the hundreds of thousands—to repress the current uprising. And it has been ruthless. Videos circulating online from one medical center showed a computer screen displaying digital images of the deceased in its morgue for families to identify. Other videos published on social media have shown the dead zipped up in black body bags, laid outdoors for families to claim. The BBC quoted Iranian medical staff who described people blinded by pellets, a tactic used by Egyptian security forces during the Arab Spring, in 2011.

    In the days, weeks, and months ahead, much will depend on sentiment within these security forces. In June of last year, Israel and the U.S. destroyed military installations and nuclear sites in Iran and killed key leaders and scientists, leaving the Iranian military feeling vulnerable. In addition, the rank and file share the same (increasingly existential) economic challenges faced by most Iranians. While the security forces are often lumped into an ideological monolith, there is a wide diversity among their members, as nearly all men are required to serve. Some opt to join the Revolutionary Guard because they get off earlier in the day than conventional soldiers, and thus can earn money at a second job. For others, having the I.R.G.C. on their résumés helps them later when applying for jobs in government or at government-funded universities.

    O’Donnell noted that a critical juncture in the fall of the Berlin Wall was when upper-level officials in East Germany were no longer assured that the Soviet Union had their backs. Mid-level officials, in turn, were no longer convinced that their superiors would protect them. “So then they started to ask questions whether they should fire on crowds or not and think to themselves, ‘I’m certainly not going to put my neck out if no one’s going to cover me,’ ” she said. Ultimately, the erosion of morale at mid-level positions was what ended Communist rule in East Germany. “It was very unexpected.” Burgess added, “Once you get to the point where some of the regime’s forces decide that they’d be better off siding with the uprising, then the regime collapses quickly, and you find guys like [the former Syrian President Bashar] al-Assad suddenly finding new housing in Russia.”

    [ad_2]

    Robin Wright

    Source link

  • The Bloody Lesson the Ayatollah Took from the Shah

    [ad_1]

    On November 6, 1978, while riots raged throughout Tehran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, addressed the nation in a rhetoric of conciliation. “I have heard the voice of your revolution,” he said. The Shah promised to correct the regime’s mistakes, liberate political prisoners, call parliamentary elections, investigate the corruption in his midst, and ease the crackdown on dissent against a nationwide opposition.

    But, as had happened so often in the history of brittle regimes, the dictator’s gesture of conciliation was read as desperation. In a village outside Paris, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini consistently attacked the Shah with derision. The “despotic regime of the Shah” was weak, he had said earlier, and was “drawing its last breaths.” And now, despite the Shah’s speech in Tehran, there could be no compromise.

    Two months later, the Shah, suffering from cancer, fled Iran and commenced the indignity of travelling from one country to the next, looking for an acceptable place of exile. He died in July, 1980, in Cairo.

    The current leader of the Islamic regime, Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is eighty-six. He is one of the longest-reigning dictators on the planet. He is keenly aware of the story of the decline and fall of the old regime. And now, with the Islamic Republic facing dramatic demonstrations in dozens of cities across Iran, Khamenei is faced with a dilemma not unlike the Shah’s. With the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and other instruments of force as his bludgeon, Khamenei has chosen bloodshed over conciliation. The regime’s attempt to shut down the internet and other means of communication has dramatically slowed reporting, yet human-rights groups say that Iranian authorities have already killed as many as two hundred demonstrators.

    “Unfortunately, if the Ayatollah is taking any lesson from the Shah, it’s that the Shah was weak and caved,” Scott Anderson, the author of “King of Kings,” a history of the revolution published last year, told me. “Brutally speaking, if the Shah had been tougher and had instructed his soldiers to indiscriminately kill people in the streets, he might have been saved. The question now is will the average soldier on the street shed more and more blood. How far will they go?”

    The leaders of the regime, various experts told me, derived dark instruction not only from their historical enemy, the Shah, but from subsequent history. In the late nineteen-eighties, the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, tried to modernize his regime by democratizing the political system, ending censorship, easing the Cold War with the United States, and introducing market mechanisms into the economy. His conclusion was that “we cannot live this way any longer”; a regime guided by Communist ideology and confrontation had left the Soviet Union in a state of generalized poverty, isolation, and confrontation. And yet, although many conditions improved through Gorbachev’s liberal policies, he also risked the existence of a fragile system. Finally, he could not control the forces he had unleashed, and, by the end of 1991, the Soviet Union had collapsed and Gorbachev was forced from office.

    Khamenei came to power in 1989, at the peak of “Gorbymania.” The spectacle of the fall of the Soviet Union led him and the Iranian regime to grow more suspicious of the West and of any sign of internal reform. “I have now reached the conclusion that the United States has devised a comprehensive plan to subvert the system of the Islamic Republic,” Khamenei said in a speech to government officials, in July, 2000. “This plan is an imitation of the one that led to the collapse of the former Soviet Union. U.S. officials intend to carry out the same in Iran, and there are plentiful clues [evidencing this] in their selfish, often hasty remarks made during the past few years.”

    [ad_2]

    David Remnick

    Source link

  • Nepal’s Violent Gen Z Uprising

    [ad_1]

    On the morning of September 6th, a black S.U.V. carrying a provincial minister from Nepal’s ruling party ran over an eleven-year-old girl, Usha Magar Sunuwar, outside her school in the city of Lalitpur. Rather than stop to help the injured victim, the occupants of the vehicle sped away. Many of the powerful in Nepal, like their brethren across South Asia, believe themselves to be exempt from accountability. And Sunuwar, who miraculously survived, became, in the eyes of the public, another casualty of the governing élite’s contempt for ordinary Nepalis. When K. P. Sharma Oli, the country’s seventy-three-year-old Prime Minister, was questioned by the press about the incident, he shrugged it off as a “normal accident.” Oli, a Communist who began his political career as a tribune of the oppressed, seemed unaware of the anger that had accumulated around him.

    The previous week, Oli’s government had banned twenty-six social-media and messaging platforms—including Facebook and X—for failing to comply with elaborate regulations introduced, as a multitude of Nepalis saw it, to muzzle people’s speech. Almost half of Nepal’s population uses some form of social media, which accounts for nearly eighty per cent of the country’s internet traffic. Among the users of these platforms are politicians’ children, who appear to lead and post photos of opulent lives: designer handbags, luxury holidays, lavish parties. Wealth “without visible function,” Hannah Arendt once warned, breeds more resentment than do oppression or exploitation “because nobody can understand why it should be tolerated.”

    Since August, TikTok and Instagram in Nepal had been inundated with sharply cut videos that juxtaposed these excesses with the hardships suffered by most in a country from which, every day, some two thousand men and women leave to look for livelihoods elsewhere. Of those who stay, more than eighty per cent work in the informal sector—as domestic servants, street hawkers, porters, cleaners. Last year, in the formal sector, youth unemployment stood at 20.8 per cent. This helps to explain, perhaps, why young Nepalis are overrepresented among the foreign mercenaries recruited by Russia to fight in Ukraine; the laborers who built the infrastructure for Qatar to host the FIFA World Cup, dying at a rate of one every two days while toiling in extreme heat; and seasonal migrant workers in India.

    The remittances of Nepalis abroad, constituting a third of the country’s G.D.P., are indispensable to Nepal’s survival. The social-media ban cut off many of these expatriates from their families. Implemented in the run-up to a major festival, it also disrupted small businesses that rely on online channels to market their products. An immediate public backlash ensued. On September 8th, cities across the country were deluged with angry young protesters demanding a revocation of the ban. They called themselves “Gen Z”—a label that somewhat obscures the fact that one of the protests’ organizers, Sudan Gurung, a philanthropist who leads the non-governmental organization Hami Nepal, is a thirty-six-year-old millennial. At least nineteen people were killed, most of them in Kathmandu, the capital, when demonstrators clashed with security forces, who responded by firing live rounds of ammunition. The government was sufficiently rattled to rescind the ban the next morning. The marches, however, intensified. By the evening, Oli had resigned and vanished.

    The protesters had by then mutated into a mob. And, as the state receded, the mob set fire to the symbols of state power in Kathmandu: Singha Durbar, Nepal’s administrative headquarters; the health ministry; the Parliament building; the Supreme Court; the Presidential palace; and the Prime Minister’s residence. Private properties, from the offices of the governing Communist Party to the glass-and-steel tower housing the Kathmandu Hilton, were also set ablaze. Outsiders called this mayhem a revolution. And those participating in it dispensed revolutionary justice to members of the ancien régime unlucky enough to be caught. Sher Bahadur Deuba—who had served five terms as Nepal’s Prime Minister, most recently in 2022—and his wife, Arzu Rana, the foreign minister in Oli’s cabinet, were beaten savagely in their home. Rajyalaxmi Chitrakar, the wife of another former Prime Minister, was burned to death inside her residence.

    By September 10th, Nepal had descended into a state of lawlessness, a country without a government or authority. The only national institution that survived—and that possessed the capability to restore order—was the Army, which, sheltering the civilian leadership, opened talks with representatives of the protest movement. Events then moved at dizzying speed. Within forty-eight hours, Nepal’s President had been forced to appoint an interim Prime Minister, dissolve the country’s elected Parliament, and announce new elections. As search teams set about recovering bodies from the charred government buildings, the death toll rose to more than seventy, and the number of injured exceeded two thousand.

    Nepal is the third South Asian country in the past four years to stage a violent overthrow of its government. In 2022, anger over soaring prices in Sri Lanka erupted into mass protests that swept the Rajapaksa dynasty from power. Last August, the long reign of Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh’s autocratic Prime Minister, was brought to a sudden end after bloody street rallies culminated in the sacking of her residence.

    One can scarcely draw solace from the trajectories of those recent revolts. In Sri Lanka, the Rajapaksa clan remains a force, bruised but far from vanquished. The movement that defenestrated President Gotabaya Rajapaksa ended with the appointment of his handpicked successor: Ranil Wickremesinghe, a consummate insider who had already served four terms as Prime Minister. Wickremesinghe set loose the armed forces on the protests, which fizzled out rapidly, and stabilized the economy by introducing painful austerity measures backed by the International Monetary Fund. He was defeated in last year’s Presidential elections by Anura Kumara Dissanayake, a left-wing candidate who had pledged to soften the I.M.F. deal. A year into his Presidency, however, Dissanayake has largely maintained the program. Meanwhile, the interethnic hostilities that led to the horrors of Sri Lanka’s civil war—which ended, in 2009, with the brutal defeat of the island’s Tamil minority—persist under his watch.

    [ad_2]

    Kapil Komireddi

    Source link