Rooyesh

IS IRAN slipping back into a more repressive mode? A generally edgy feeling sharpened this week when the government announced that petrol would be rationed within hours. This caused chaos at pumps, with drivers fighting over the last drops of fuel; some of them chanted anti-government slogans and set cars on fire. A cap on consumption of 100 litres (22 gallons) a month shows that the government is nervous about relying on imported fuel. The unrest suggests that people are getting cross about the economy.

Yet this does not mean that political dissent is bubbling up. The regime’s detractors may feel angry but they have little scope for expressing their feelings. The crackdown is probably not because of a real threat from within; it is a way of responding to pressure from outside for fear of military strikes, an economic embargo or American plans for a “velvet revolution” leading to a change of regime. Since December, the UN Security Council has passed two resolutions imposing sanctions on Iran because of its persistent failure to be candid about its nuclear programme, while the United States has pressed Western companies to cut ties with the Islamic Republic. It has sent more troops and battleships to the Persian Gulf and has detained Iranians inside Iraq. The American press continues to speculate about American and perhaps Israeli air attacks against Iran’s nuclear sites. Iran has also reacted vehemently to last year’s decision by the American administration to give $66m to Iranian opposition groups. Most of the cash is for radio and satellite broadcasters putting across views at odds with those beamed by Iranian state television, but $20m is for unnamed groups inside Iran. The overall figure is expected to rise to $75m next year. A mood of fear has been building up for more than a year. Many Iranians interpreted last summer’s detention of Ramin Jahanbegloo, a mild-mannered academic, as a warning not to attend political or cultural conferences abroad. In September Iran’s largest liberal daily, Sharq, was closed; it reopened last month but the ban may have made its journalists more cautious. In March campaigners for women’s rights were arrested and held for several days for defying a government order not to protest. A teachers’ demonstration was also broken up in the same month. At present, the authorities seem keener to intimidate would-be dissenters rather than imprison hundreds of them. By locking up a few well-known ones, the authorities are serving notice to intellectuals generally. The authorities have embarked on one of the harshest morality campaigns for several years. But the crackdown, which after two months has begun to slacken, may have been driven by a desire to placate conservative clergy in Qom, Iran’s most religious city, where several of them have criticised President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for letting standards slip. In any event, the regime has been going out of its way to display its strength. Police and militiamen have been manning “morality checkpoints” across Tehran, the capital, and have been publicly beating alleged gangsters, who were paraded on television and forced to wear derogatory placards. This grimly reminded liberals of a period in the 1990s when intelligence agents assassinated known criminals—and then started to kill a number of well-known intellectuals and dissidents too. The supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, who is more powerful than the president, has called for a “year of national unity and Islamic consolidation”. The presence of more old soldiers in the government’s upper ranks has shifted the power balance, which in the past prevented any one faction from winning too much control. Since Mr Ahmadinejad’s election as president in 2005, younger conservatives have dominated key positions. Many of them view politics through a military prism. It is they who are keenest on the present crackdown. The brief arrest in April of Hossein Mousavian, a former nuclear negotiator, showed how strong the hawks are. Last week a group of angry right-wing radicals and seminarians gathered outside a clerical court in the eastern city of Mashhed to demand the prosecution of a former president and leading reformer, Muhammad Khatami, for having shaken hands with some women during a recent trip to Italy—a bad error under a strict interpretation of Islamic law. Either the reactionaries are rattled by the prospect of the general election scheduled for next year, or they are flaunting their confidence. In Iran’s opaque politics, it is hard to say which. Source: Economist

U.S. and European officials are still very angry at Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, for appearing to concede that Iran’s uranium-enrichment program is here to stay. “Every time he gets up there, he comes out with Iranian talking points,” snipes one Western diplomat. But NEWSWEEK has learned that the British recently drafted a proposal that shifts the West’s “red line” closer to El Baradei’s position as a way of breaking the stalemate in the talks.

The draft proposal, which is being circulated among the governments but has not yet been formally submitted to Iran, calls for a “freeze for freeze” rather than an outright suspension of enrichment. The “freeze” concept is similar to the “timeout” that ElBaradei first called for last January. In order to get talks started, both ideas effectively permit Iran to continue with the uranium enrichment it is doing already, but they demand that Tehran freeze further construction of centrifuges and reprocessing of nuclear material, in exchange for a reciprocal freeze on further U.N. sanctions. That seems to mark a concession by the Europeans and Americans, who had previously insisted that Tehran suspend all enrichment activities before they would come to the table to negotiate a broader agreement. Washington and the so-called “EU-3”—Britain, France and Germany—also pushed through two U.N. Security Council resolutions insisting on suspension. In an interview, a European diplomat who is helping to disseminate the proposal denied that it represents a breach of the U.S-European “red line,” which is to insist that Iran suspend all enrichment before formal talks begin. “We’re talking about choreography here,” he said. “We said we are prepared to be flexible over process to get back to talks. That doesn’t mean that we’re flexible over the substance of the red line. If it would help the Iranians to be able to sell this to their own domestic audience, to say they won this great victory, we can accept that.” Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, has insisted that Iran will never suspend enrichment. Earlier this year, Iran announced it had reached “industrial-scale” enrichment, with more than 1,000 centrifuges operating. Despite some technical setbacks, experts feared that Tehran was working its way steadily toward the 3,000 centrifuges it would need to produce nuclear weapons (though Tehran denies that is its aim). Around that time, ElBaradei outraged European and American negotiators by suggesting that Iran’s program was so far advanced that demands for complete suspension were unrealistic. “They pretty much have the knowledge about how to enrich [uranium],” he told The New York Times. “From now, it’s simply a question of perfecting that knowledge. People will not like to hear it, but that’s a fact.” An IAEA official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told me that ElBaradei is simply recognizing the reality on the ground in Iran that Washington refuses to see. “ElBaradei warned about this a year ago when they had only 20 centrifuges—in other words, the danger of just letting things drag on. There is simply not going to be any absolute suspension of Iran’s activities, and the longer the United States and others hold out for that the more centrifuges Iran will build,” said the official. ElBaradei’s worry is that if the diplomatic stalemate continues, Iran could have 8,000 centrifuges by Christmas, a critically high number. Tehran also seems to be gravitating toward a “freeze for freeze.” During a visit last week to Iran, I talked to a senior Iranian official, Mohsen Rezai, secretary of the Expediency Council, who spoke favorably about El Baradei’s concept of a timeout. “With old solutions and old arguments, [the nuclear issue] will not be resolved,” he said, adding, “I agree with Mr. El Baradei that you cannot bomb away nuclear technology.” Now, sensing they may have an ally at the IAEA, the Iranians are eager to satisfy ElBaradei’s demands for further clarity on the illicit history of Iran’s program—so much so that Larijani met twice with him last week. Larijani also apparently dropped Iran’s earlier demand that cooperation with the IAEA would come only after the Security Council referred the Iran case back to the agency. “They can have their surveillance. They can have their inspections,” Larijani told me in a separate interview in Tehran. What remains at issue is how much enrichment Iran will be permitted to have. Source: Newsweek

The Financial Times is reporting the Iran’s parliament on Wednesday night agreed to press ahead with plans to introduce fuel rationing in the face of panic and rioting across the country over the proposals. The protests presented a rare public challenge to Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, the president, whose popularity has been based on his pledge to share oil revenues more fairly and cut living costs for ordinary Iranians. After attending a closed parliamentary session addressed by the interior and oil ministers, Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel, Iran’s parliamentary speaker, said fuel rationing, introduced at midnight on Tuesday, had to continue, to thwart US threats and the possibility of sanctions hitting petrol imports.

Though Iran is one of the world’s biggest oil producers, its lack of refineries means it must import about 40 per cent of its petrol – of which it consumes about 75m litres a day. Iran imported $4.9bn (£2.45bn) of petrol in the year to March 20. This year, however, the government is authorised by parliament to import only $2.5bn. Police were out in force in the capital to protect petrol stations, at least 10 of which had been burned overnight by angry crowds. In north-western Tehran, police patrolled the Niyayesh highway, where one petrol station had been burnt. Protesters had also smashed the windows of the nearby state-owned banks Sepah and Tejarat. “It serves this regime right,” said one driver passing by a burnt petrol station. “People should do the same in response to in-creases in the prices of other goods.” Kazem Vaziri-Hamaneh, oil minister, assured people they would not face petrol shortages. But this failed to convince Tehran motorists, who formed queues several kilometres long outside those petrol stations that remained open. The local media reported similar long lines throughout the country, although only three petrol stations outside the capital were reported to have been set ablaze and there were no reports of casualties. The judiciary said 80 people “who destroyed public resources” had been detained. The government made contradictory statements about fuel rationing plans in the run-up to Tuesday’s announcement. Motorists were instructed to use smart cards last month to prepare for rationing but hundreds of thousands of drivers have yet to obtain them, including Tehran’s 5,000-strong taxi fleet. The government has imposed rations of 100 litres of petrol a month for private cars, 450 litres for private taxis and 800 litres for shared taxis.

The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was under pressure to perform a U-turn on petrol rationing yesterday after the restriction prompted violent protests at filling stations across the country this week. MPs said they would press the government to alter or even scrap the plan after angry citizens set fire to at least a dozen petrol stations in Tehran and chanted slogans against President Ahmadinejad following Tuesday night’s sudden introduction of quotas. Banks, supermarkets and fire engines were also attacked while further disturbances were reported in other big cities, including Isfahan and Shiraz.

There were unconfirmed reports that three people were killed in the violence, which led to 80 arrests. In a sign of official concern that the disturbances might spread, the government temporarily closed the country’s mobile phone text messaging network after widespread circulation of a text urging protestors to gather in Tehran’s Valiasr Square. The unrest was triggered by an announcement on state television on the rationing, prompting a rush by drivers to fill their tanks. Motorists are restricted to a monthly limit of 100 litres (22 gallons) for the next four months while cab drivers must not exceed 800 litres. Iran, the world’s fourth largest oil producer, imposed rationing to try to cut the estimated £5bn annual cost of providing massively subsidised petrol, which has to be imported because the country lacks refinery capacity. While parliament has already approved the plan, MPs had urged the government to delay the scheme amid fears over its social and economic impact. However, some analysts say it has become more urgent because of the prospect of further UN security council sanctions over Iran’s nuclear programme. Nevertheless, there was anger yesterday that the government had implemented the scheme without prior notice in an apparent attempt to prevent fuel hoarding. Esmaeil Ahmadi-Moqaddam, the chief of police, said its implementation had even been kept secret from his officers, so there had been no time to provide extra security for the filling stations. MPs attacked the failure to allow motorists to buy fuel at higher free market prices and said that if disturbances continued parliament might be recalled from the three-week recess that began yesterday. Kamal Daneshyar, chairman of the parliamentary energy committee, said: “We have told the government … that rationing with this mechanism should not be implemented, but they paid no attention. Petrol rationing will not last long and will be only a short-term measure. Free-market prices should be offered sufficiently.” The decision has already had an impact on Tehran’s congested roads, with traffic cut as cars are left at home to save fuel. Taxi drivers have responded by raising fares. Issa Saharkhiz, a political analyst, suggested the impact on the fortunes of Mr Ahmadinejad’s could be equally dramatic. “This will damage [him] and the people and groups around him, maybe even the supreme leader. He is not going to be a candidate for a second presidential term.”

Source: Guardian