The call for a referendum in Iran has raised many questions and occasioned serious disagreement and debate among Iranians. I, among other students who have been active in Iran in the last seven or eight years have opposed the referendum appeal. Why?
The signatories are demanding a referendum to change the constitution in Iran. But Iranian political history, from the day the first elected parliament wrote a constitution in 1906, serves as testimony that the law is an irrelevant factor in the struggle over power in Iran. This is true both for the rulers and the opposition: neither has ever dropped a political strategy on the grounds that it was prohibited by the constitution.
Bahman Kalbasi is responding to Mohsen Sazegaras proposal for a referendum on a new Iranian constitution, Irans road to democracy
See also the articles by Afshin Molavi, Kaveh Ehsani, Mansour Farhang, Farideh Farhi and Bezhad Yaghmaian in our Iran debate, Democracy & Iran
For an introduction to openDemocracys debate, see David Hayes Iran between revolution and democracy
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A prime example is the rule of the Pahlavi dynasty from 1921-79 (interrupted for twenty-eight months in 1951-1953 by Mohammad Mossadeqs democratic but tragically thwarted presidency). In that fifty-seven year period, the constitution (as in democratic monarchies like the United Kingdom), gave the Shah a symbolic role, leaving parliament and prime minister as the only executive and legislative powers. In reality, however, the Shah wielded sole real authority in almost all internal and foreign affairs.
The widespread repression and authoritarianism of the Shahs dictatorship led to the 1979 revolution, which changed the regime and wrote a new constitution for the Islamic Republic. But once more, the absence of civil society and a clear understanding of what real democracy consists of has had baleful results: another period of totalitarian rule, which has now lasted more than twenty-six years.
This is despite the fact that the new constitution, although it grants final power to the supreme leader, still guarantees freedom of speech and assembly, and free elections. The only thing that doesnt matter is the law: right-wing clerics have consolidated power and have full access to money, intelligence services and military forces. They alone run the affairs of state.
This has only changed sporadically, when the opposition could ease the brutality of dictatorial rule by inserting elements of popular power into the equation again, regardless and independently of the law. The 1997 election, which resulted in a landslide victory for reformist President Khatami, is a salient example: it was a victorious moment for a nation that chose to vote against all odds and force the fundamentalists to share a small portion of their power with a representative of the people (or so we thought at the time, anyway).
The call for a referendum is tangled in a contradiction in that those who signed it are on the one hand committed to non-violent opposition while on the other declare any hope of reforming the current regime dead. This ignores the real problem: that reformists and the democracy movement in Iran failed to rally people behind their goal the way, for example, Ukraines orange revolution did.
It is legitimate to argue that the reformist president and his allies failed to use their already faded popularity to bring people into the streets and to thus take advantage of their enthusiastic base in the first years after the 1997 election. But that failure in no way justifies adopting a strategy that calls any effort at reform useless. Calling for constitutional change sends the wrong signal: that it is the constitution and the law that are the obstacle. This is a wild oversimplification of the complex situation on the ground. That the goal of a secular democracy has not been achieved is partly the failure of the reformist politicians, but also partly the result of the absence of a developed civil society with strong non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
If the signatories are correct in asserting that the right-wing establishment has killed any hope for reform, then how in the world is that same establishment going to allow a referendum to take place under their watch? Obviously they will not. The call for a referendum therefore implies that in order to have a real referendum, the current regime must first be overthrown. And how can that happen except via a violent process and another destructive revolution? Even if this were to happen which is highly unlikely given the socio-economic situation Iran today there again would not be any guarantee that democracy would be established. A revolution is a recipe for disaster.
What stirs so much debate about the referendum movement is the type of people who signed it: most of them live inside Iran and some have paid the high price of imprisonment for their beliefs. But the support that the call has received from the unpopular monarchist opposition and neo-conservatives in Washington has damaged its credibility. These are some of the reasons that the calls website, though called www.60,000,000.com and meant to collect at least a few hundred thousand signatures, has in fact managed to gather less than 40,000.
One alternative to a referendum is for people to take part in the June 2005 presidential election in big numbers and cast a white ballot in protest against human-rights violations and censorship and in the name of a transparent government. Such a move could have great internal and international consequences, but has the virtues of being non-violent and pragmatically framed within the existing political framework.