Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (28 page)

The executions of political opponents started in the days immediately following the ayatollah’s return. A firing squad operating under Revolutionary Council orders dispatched SAVAK officials and leading generals on the roof of the school. This marked the start of a new phase of violence. Until this moment, the overwhelming majority of those who had died in the revolution had been victims of the state. From now on it was the revolutionaries themselves who did most of the killing—sometimes among themselves. This type of bloodletting would prove hard to control.

Khomeini had originally intended to postpone his return until a provisional government, free from any ties to the shah, could be appointed, but that plan had been overridden by fears that the military might seize power.
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So now he set about creating his own. On February 4 he appointed Bazargan prime minister, with responsibility for the army, police, and civil service. There were now two people in Iran who held this office: the other was Bakhtiar, who still governed according to the existing constitution and refused to give way. But real power was draining away from him by the hour.

The military itself, one of the few of the shah’s institutions to have survived the revolutionary turmoil unscathed, now began to fragment as well. In the course of the preceding months, many lower-ranking officers and enlisted men had transferred their sympathies to the revolution. The unavoidable confrontation came on
February 10. At a military base in Tehran, junior officers who sympathized with the revolution got into a gun battle with the Imperial Guard, the elite force of the shah’s army. Reinforcements from left-wing militias, the Fedayeen-e Khalq (“the People’s Strugglers”) and the Mujahideen-e Khalq (“the People’s Mujahideen”), rushed to the scene. Neither group, it should noted, took its orders from Khomeini; they were loyal to the “revolution.” The revolutionaries won—and then proceeded to march on other bases where royalist forces were still holding out. Around midday on February 11, the army proclaimed its “neutrality”—a euphemism for capitulation. This meant that there was no one left to defend Bakhtiar’s government. The revolution had triumphed. Bakhtiar left Iran in April, never to return.
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Iran’s 35 million people were now under the control of a revolutionary government. But what sort of government was it, precisely? The Bazargan cabinet did not appear particularly radical. He and his cabinet, which included no clerics, essentially wanted a secular, parliamentary state. One of the most important tasks Khomeini had entrusted it with was the passing of a referendum on the future form of government, to be followed by the drafting of a constitution and its submission to a constituent assembly. The precise timetable for these events remained unclear. For the moment, Bazargan accordingly announced, the 1906 constitution would remain in effect—minus the monarchy—until a substitute was approved. After all, the prime minister declared, Iranian society still needed some sort of ground rules. In speeches he depicted himself as a “delicate passenger car” that traveled on a “smooth asphalted road,” in stark contrast with Khomeini, the “bulldozer” of the revolution. Bazargan’s respect for the rule of law undoubtedly endeared him to nervous members of the middle and upper classes, but it was not necessarily the thing that died-in-the-wool revolutionaries—lusting for blood, power, or justice—wanted to hear. “Those who imagine the revolution continues are mistaken,” Bazargan’s press spokesman told the public. “The revolution is over. The era of reconstruction has begun.”
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It soon turned out that Khomeini had his own views on the matter.

Revolutionary government in Iran actually predated the formation of Bazargan’s cabinet. For months, extending well back into 1978, Islamists and other activists around the country had been forming
komitehs
(revolutionary committees) that coordinated protests, arranged supplies of food and fuel to neighborhoods, or stockpiled weapons. There were
komitehs
on the scale of a city block; others controlled major cities, some as early as December 1978. Students of history noted a striking antecedent: the Russian word
soviet
, meaning “council,” was used for the local groups formed by workers and soldiers after the overthrow of the czar in March 1917. Some of the
komitehs
had similar origins, and there were leftists who tried
to refashion them as workers’ councils—an effort doomed as Khomeini’s supporters gained the upper hand.
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But most of the
komitehs
were organized by religious activists, often with a local mosque at their center. There were some one thousand of them in Tehran alone. They often indulged in the practice of arbitrary justice, sometimes erecting checkpoints that aimed to screen out whatever they deemed as seditious or “anti-Islamic behavior.” (There were cases of people shot for playing chess, which was associated with the reign of the shah.)
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Thus ensued the Iranian version of a situation common to many revolutions: dual government. The revolution had spawned two parallel structures of authority. Since each claimed superior legitimacy, rivalry was inevitable. The
komitehs
paid little attention to the edicts issuing from Bazargan’s provisional government. While Bazargan’s cabinet consisted primarily of moderate oppositionists, the
komitehs
consisted largely of religious radicals who were eager to see Islamic law applied on the ground. They tended to follow the lead of the Revolutionary Council, whose members increasingly had very different ideas from the government’s about the direction the revolution should take. The council was now dominated by clerics, since Bazargan’s secular allies had moved over to his cabinet. While Bazargan’s cabinet continued to churn out laws and decrees, the council increasingly exercised its will through the
komitehs
and the revolutionary tribunals that were springing up around the country.

For the moment, Khomeini did little to bring clarity to the situation. He was dissatisfied with the secularizing tendencies of Bazargan’s cabinet, but he had to be cautious. Secular political groups were trumpeting their own visions of the future. The left-wing parties—as they had demonstrated during the confrontation with the Imperial Guard—had powerful militias that remained a force to be reckoned with. And there were also challenges from Iran’s many ethnic minorities, who now began to foment separatist rebellions.
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Under these conditions, establishment of a system of rule by the religious elite was anything but ensured.

On top of all this, Khomeini’s theory of Islamic government had yet to meet with wide acceptance among the rest of the religious establishment. There were quietist clerics, like Ayatollah Khorasani, who rejected the entire premise of theocratic rule: the business of government, this camp argued, should be left to the politicians. Others, like Ayatollah Shariatmadari, approved of greater clerical involvement in government, but insisted on the maintenance of democratic freedoms. Shariatmadari’s Islamic People’s Republican Party, with a solid base in Tabriz, Iran’s second-largest city, was also a force to be reckoned with; his movement had tens of thousands of followers who were fiercely loyal to their leader and who could be sent into the
streets on short notice if the occasion demanded. Meanwhile, Ayatollah Taleqani continued to side with Bazargan’s Freedom Movement.

The referendum on the nature of the postrevolutionary state was set for the end of March. On March 1, four weeks before, Khomeini laid down an important marker: he warned against using the modifier
democratic
for the new republic. The only proper adjective, he said, was
Islamic
. Finally, as Bazargan had promised, Iranians went to the polls to express their preference. On March 30–31, the revolutionary government asked voters to answer yes or no to a simple query: “Should the monarchy be replaced by an Islamic Republic?” No one knew precisely what was meant by the term. But the voters—at least those who participated—liked the sound of it, and 98.2 percent of them said yes.
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With this, the march toward clerical rule passed its first crucial watershed.

Iran, however, was not at peace with itself. Chaos reigned. The shah was gone, but as the months went by it became clear that the central issue of who would hold power in the state had still not been conclusively resolved. There were many groups vying for their share of power. In March the Kurds and Turkmens rose up in separatist revolts. The Tudeh Party was back in business, its armed wing roaming the streets, its leaflets coursing through the universities. Students battled each other over obscure doctrinal questions, and more and more of them gravitated toward the various armed groups: the leftist Fedayeen-e Khalq or the Mujahideen-e Khalq, or the new pro-Khomeini organization that was known simply as “the Party of God”: Hezbollah. The Hezbollahis were the storm troopers of
velayat-e faqih
. They attacked opposing demonstrations, swooped down on displays of ostensibly “anti-Islamic” behavior, and torched the offices of newspapers and political parties whose thinking they disagreed with. In some cases, particular localities had their own Islamist guerrilla groups.

All this was deeply worrying to Ayatollah Taleqani. Like his friend Bazargan, he was worried that the rise of the
komitehs
, the revolutionary courts, and Hezbollah was undermining the democratic freedoms achieved in the revolution and paving the way toward theocracy. (Though Taleqani—long one of Khomeini’s most important allies—was a cleric himself, that didn’t mean that he wanted his colleagues to seize power.) Increasingly, it appeared as though Khomeini was not only denying support to the government he had placed in power but also enabling activities that undermined its work. In April, Taleqani issued a public warning against a “return to despotism.” Thousands of his supporters, mostly “progressive Islamists” of a pro-Shariati coloration, took to the streets, chanting their ayatollah’s praises and denouncing “reactionaries”—meaning Khomeini and his entourage.

This was a serious matter. The chain-smoking Taleqani was the revolution’s second-most popular figure and, for a time, the chairman of the Revolutionary Council (a fact that became known only after his death). He was closely allied with Bazargan and enjoyed the backing of the People’s Mujahideen, the Mujahideen-e Khalq, who had lent him their support because of his opposition to clerical rule. If Bazargan ever had a chance to thwart the slide toward theocracy, this would have been it. But he failed to respond decisively. Pro-Khomeini forces arrested two of Taleqani’s sons; then Khomeini called Taleqani to Qom (where Khomeini was now ensconced) and forced him to recant. Taleqani, publicly humiliated, was hardly heard from again. (In September he died under mysterious circumstances.)

A key aspect of the growing struggle between the provisional government and the Revolutionary Council was control over the security forces. In late April, one of the moderate ayatollahs and the chief of the regular national police announced a plan to integrate four thousand members of the various revolutionary militias into the regular police force. This would have given a significant boost to the provisional government’s ability to crack down on the chaos in the streets. But on May i, 1979, Ayatollah Morteza Motahhari—the loyalist who had run Khomeini’s network of supporters inside Iran as well as helping to establish Hosseiniye Ershad, the site of Shariati’s most famous lectures—was killed by an assassin. For Khomeini, this was not only a profound personal shock (since Motahhari had been one of his most promising students). He also saw the attack as a direct assault on the clergy. The revolution was under siege, and the army, still staffed by officers appointed by the old regime, could not be relied upon to defend it.

In the week after Motahhari’s death, Khomeini entrusted Ebrahim Yazdi with the job of melding the various armed groups into a new force to be called the “Corps of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution.”
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From here on the Revolutionary Guard became the armed avant-garde of the nascent Islamic state. It was designed to provide a counterweight to the traditional military, which was ideologically suspect, and assumed responsibility for defending the revolution against those deemed to be its enemies by Khomeini and his followers. Its institutional partner in this task was the Islamic Republican Party (IRP), a new political organization created by the hard-line clerics to advance the Khomeinist agenda amid the rough-and-tumble of Iranian politics. The creation of the Revolutionary Guard was another watershed on the march toward theocracy.

By contrast, the draft constitution that Bazargan finally presented in June was surprisingly moderate. It abolished the monarchy and replaced the shah with an elected president according to the French model. It did not give any special role to
the clergy. It provided for a Council of Guardians who were supposed to guarantee that laws conformed with the principles of Islam. Only a minority of the guardians would be clerics.
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Khomeini approved most of the draft, though he did add provisions that restricted women from becoming judges or assuming the office of the president. (They did, however, have the right to vote and to sit in parliament—entirely contrary to Khomeini’s position back in 1963, when he had made female enfranchisement the cornerstone of his resistance to the White Revolution.)

Why did Khomeini approve the draft even though it did not enshrine an Islamic government? It’s not entirely clear, but the best answer seems to be that he felt that it was as far as he could go for the moment. Perhaps he felt that the political situation was still too fluid to make a push for full-fledged theocracy. If so, such fears were entirely justified by the public reaction to Bazargan’s constitution. To Khomeini’s consternation, it touched off a frenzy of debate. At this stage revolutionary Iran still offered considerable freedom of discourse, and every party and civic group weighed in. Secular leftists, drawing on a wealth of legal opinions from various professional and human rights groups, proposed an alternate vision that made parliament supreme, guaranteed an independent judiciary, and enshrined broad human rights (including full rights for women). They pressed home their demands with a flurry of demonstrations and editorials. Most of these secular moderates were skeptical of private property and favored policies that promoted equality. They came out strongly in favor of broad nationalization and social justice. But they tended to oppose plans for a strong presidency, which, in their view, opened the way toward dictatorship. In fact, there was a remarkable degree of consensus among this secular bloc.
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