When we speak of a country largely closed to the rest of the world as Iran is difficult to understand if the regime is solid, if really has support among the population, how long it can last. After the rigged election of Ahmadinejad and the protests in the streets with dozens of deaths and hundreds of arrests, some hoped that the islamic regime was close to falling.
Others said that however, the power would just past from ultra-conservatives to islamic moderates. Others believed that the protest was a minority and would never manage to topple the government of Ahmadinejad. But the protests yesterday, in the day when the regime traditionally organizes demonstrations for Palestine and against Israel, have shown that the Iranian opposition is not defeated, despite repression and mass trials. While the pro government speakers repeated the usual litany of support for Hamas and Hezbollah and death to Israel, the opposition responded shouting "No for Gaza or Lebanon, I will give my life for Iran" and "Death to Russia", the leading nation that supports the regime.
Opposition leaders Khatami, Mousavi and Karroubi have participated in the protests, although the regime's supporters have tried unsuccessfully to attack them. Ahmadinejad has tried to speak at the University of Tehran, but the protests of the demonstrators forced him to stop the television recording of his speech. The police and the army also seems not to have intervened against the opposition, merely to separate the demonstrators of both sides in the case of clashes.
The attempt by Khamenei and Ahmadinejad to show a pro-islamic and anti-Israeli united Iran clearly failed, even if the president again spoke against Israel denying the existence of the Holocaust.
It's hard to say whether in these months a harder line by the United States and Europe could have lead to a change of government in Iran. Currently, the West continues to offer olive branches to Ahmadinejad in the hope that he will review his nuclear program, that he will free the three Americans still detained and that Russia will intervenes to put pressure on Iran. Meanwhile, the missiles that Bush wanted to place in Poland and the Czech Republic as an anti-Russia will now be moved to threaten Iran, just to warn Ahmadinejad not to overdo it. But the West is more than willing to strike a deal with the Iranian president also to avoid destabilizing Afghanistan, where the Iranian border is already one of the main channels of opium trafficking by the Talibans and the warlords.
The censorship of the Iranian government meanwhile is unleashed against the press and blogs. Many websites that supported the protests have not been updated or suddenly published messages of support to the government, because the people who run them have been arrested and in prison, forced to recant their ideas. Yesterday, the internet and mobile phones have been blocked by the government to prevent the sharing of images of the protest, that went anyway around the world.
There are in fact many indications suggesting that Ahmadinejad's regime is increasingly weak, and the hope in Western governments is that he will be forced to negotiate on nuclear power. But dictators are not known to make sensible decisions and therefore it may be that Ahmadinejad, the president, and Khamenei, the theocratic head that for many controls him, will become even more extremists for the sake of domestic propaganda. And in this case would have been better to isolate them from the start, hoping that the Iranians finally will manage to get rid of them.
Francesco Defferrari
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