Geneive Abdo and Arash Aramesh
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's decision last week to remove former President Ali-Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani from a powerful governing post is the most striking example to date of a methodical, decade-long strategy to secure the survival of Iran's ruling elite by narrowing the circle of regime insiders.
Khamenei has purged one institution after another to ensure that the leadership is comprised of hardliners, even if this means sacking well-known, and at times independent, conservatives from top posts. This strategy was clear last week when he removed Rafsanjani, who was once instrumental in Khamenei's own rise to power, from the post of Chairman of the Assembly of Experts and replaced him with the 86-year-old Ayatollah Mohammad Reza Mahdavi-Kani, who is now more loyal to Khamenei than Rafsanjani, but so frail he travels with a physician.
With Mahdavi-Kani effectively too weak to govern, the result of this shift has left the Assembly in the hands of a host of radicals, including Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi, former head of the Iranian judiciary from 1989-1999. There are other radical members of the Assembly's leadership with influence, including former Minister of Intelligence Ghorban-Ali Dorri-Najafabadi, who was forced to resign by President Mohammad Khatami over the murders of intellectuals in 1997; Chief Justice Sadegh Larijani, handpicked by the Supreme Leader; former Chief Justice Mahmoud Hashemi-Shahroudi; Friday prayer leader and fire brand cleric Ahmad Khatami; and Ebrahim Raisi, second in command at Iran's judiciary and responsible for the infamous 1988 mass executions of political prisoners.
This move follows others in which Khamenei has silenced Chief Prosecutor Sadegh Larijani, who said six months ago that he would not allow the judiciary to be used to silence political dissent. Now, Larijani has been one of the leaders in the campaign to put on trial Mir Hossein Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi, the de facto leaders of the Green movement. In fact, no sooner had Rafsanjani left his post on the Assembly of Experts, formally charged with supervising the work of the Supreme Leader and naming his successor, the body released a letter condemning leaders of the so-called "sedition" and urged the judiciary to prosecute them in a speedy manner.
The Assembly of Experts was the latest government institution to issue such a statement. Earlier, the Iranian parliament, dominated by conservatives and hardliners, issued a similar statement taking a stance against opposition leaders. Some members of the parliament went as far as chanting "death to Moussavi and Karroubi" and demanding the execution of opposition leaders while Speaker Ali Larijani, who had been a moderate conservative critical of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Khamenei's close ally, presided over the session.
There is no doubt this strategy will strengthen Khamenei's grip on power over the short-term, particularly because he has also consolidated his support in some factions of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards. What is most interesting is how Khamenei began a decade ago marginalizing reformists who opposed his rule. In the late 1990s, Iran's hardliners feared then-President Mohammad Khatami and the reformists around him who also held a sizable majority in the parliament would be powerful enough to liberalize the system. Beginning in 1999, only two years into Khatami's presidency, the hardliners now leading major institutions in Iran, such as the Guardian Council, which is in charge of approving candidates for election, began to take steps to ensure the reformists would never hold key positions again.
In 2005, Khamenei tapped Ahmadinejad, a little-known hardliner and reactionary, over Rafsanjani for president. Then, after the disputed election in 2009 which brought Ahmadinejad back to power, Khamenei began to narrow the circle of regime insiders further, ousting or silencing traditional conservatives who had long been the pillars of the Islamic republic.
But in the long term this might not save Iran's theocracy, at least not in its current form. Now that traditional conservatives such as Rafsanjani increasingly have little to lose, they could find common ground with those other like-minded figures who wish to reform the system and who believe it is broken. Nearly every week, for example, senior clerics speak out against the regime's actions, and while they might not name Khamenei directly out of fear of reprisal, they are clear in whom they blame for the severe repression of Iranian society.
Despite the government's claims that Rafsanjani voluntarily quit the race out of respect to the much older Kani--ten years his senior--members of the opposition Green Movement and a number of moderates inside Iran view Rafsanjani's forced departure as another victory for the hardliners and their intensified efforts to purge the regime of anyone sympathetic to the Green Movement.
Hojatoleslam Mohsen Kadivar, a prominent cleric who was imprisoned in Iran in the late 1990s for challenging the entire concept of supreme clerical rule, wrote in an editorial March 8 on the opposition Jaras website: "Khamenei is now following a policy of 'either with me or against me.' There is no third way for him."
Kadivar insisted that, "Khamenei demands full obedience and absolute adherence (compliance)." In other words, Kadivar believes that Rafsanjani has no real political or institutional power left in the Iranian government thanks to Khamenei's deliberate attempts to cleanse the government of any potential threat to his rule. According to Kadivar, the Islamic Republic has now become "homogenous" and "every official from the very top to the lowest levels obey the Leader.
"The dictatorship's tolerance in Iran is so low that it could no longer tolerate someone like Rafsanjani," Kadivar wrote.
The question now is whether Khamenei's purges will result in such a small circle of regime insiders that there will be few people left to run the government.
Geneive Abdo is the director of the Iran Program at The Century Foundation and the National Security Network. Arash Aramesh is a research associate for the project.
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