Mojtaba Vahedi: Iran's Revolution From the Inside Out
Mojtaba Vahedi, an exiled former insider with the moderate mullahs, talks about the struggle for reform, his own exile, and why Tehran won't change without another popular uprising. .
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By SOHRAB AHMARI
Alexandria, Va.
'Iran is a country with a government that was elected." So declared Secretary of State John Kerry on a visit to France in February. His statement echoed an earlier one by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who during his Senate confirmation hearings in January pronounced the Iranian government "elected" and "legitimate."
In the coming days, count on Western media to reinforce that view of Iranian democracy with coverage of the run-up to the June 14 presidential election. The horse-race aspect of the reporting is already in the air. There was breathless news on May 21 about the disqualification of dozens of presidential hopefuls, including the reformist standard-bearer, former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. This week, attention turned to the improving fortunes of one candidate, Saeed Jalili, a hard-liner with a pronounced hostility to the West. Could a reformer still win? With President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stepping down after two four-year terms, would a Jalili victory mean even more trouble for America and its allies than his predecessor?
Mojtaba Vahedi is here to say: None of it matters.
"What is happening now is not an election but a form of theater and the candidates should really be called actors," he says from his home in exile in Northern Virginia. "The regime couldn't care less who the people prefer."
Exiled critics of the Iranian regime aren't hard to find in the West, but Mr. Vahedi, who is 49, brings a unique perspective to his condemnation of the country's rulers: He was at the heart of the reform movement that began to gain traction in Iran a decade ago. And he was a trusted adviser and strategist for the moderate cleric Mehdi Karroubi, who co-led the popular opposition movement that in 2009 represented perhaps the best hope Iran has ever had of steering away from tyranny and extremism.
Witnessing what happened to Mr. Karroubi and to the reform movement in the 2000s prompted Mr. Vahedi to flee the country in 2009. Once safely clear of Iran, he became one of the Islamic Republic's most vocal critics, no longer a believer in democratic change from inside the regime. The mullah-dominated government, he now believes, must be overthrown.
We sit for an interview in Mr. Vahedi's study in suburban Washington, where Dan Brown thrillers and self-help books vie for shelf space with hefty volumes of Islamic philosophy and jurisprudence. He serves scalding tea, pastries and roasted almonds. Yet these hallmarks of Persian hospitality don't diminish the strangeness of our encounter: Here is a former official of a regime that in my Tehran childhood I thought omnipotent—now enjoying a modest and relatively anonymous slice of the American dream.
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Mr. Vahedi observes events in Iran from a frustratingly long distance, but he often appears on Persian-language media, such as the Voice of America's Persian service, denouncing Iran's clerical regime. He also derides his former allies in the Iranian establishment reform movement. The reformists, he says, cling to the notion that the past decade's massive increase in repression was the work of President Ahmadinejad.
They delude themselves, Mr. Vahedi says, because the problem is far deeper than one man. "Anyone who thinks Ahmadinejad was behind the electoral rigging of recent years, or the brutality and the killing, is a fool." Dictatorship in Iran is "structural," Mr. Vahedi says. "The structure makes everyone obey one man, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and the leader isn't accountable to anyone."
So why does Mr. Khamenei, the paramount leader, even bother with the charade of popular elections? "Khamanei is looking for a fall guy who at the same time has no real power—someone with no serious responsibility but who's nevertheless accountable for every failure."
Chief among the country's ills are the mounting international isolation and economic hardship that have been caused by the regime's pursuit of nuclear weapons. Yet those in Western capitals who dream of rapprochement with a post-Ahmadinejad Islamic Republic should think twice, Mr. Vahedi warns. No matter who is designated the winner of the June 14 vote, the new president will have little to say about nuclear policy. But if the office is claimed by Mr. Jalili, the combative Iranian nuclear negotiator would be a most agreeable deputy for the Supreme Leader. "Jalili has zero independent will," Mr. Vahedi says. "Whatever policy change he ushers in the nuclear arena would solely reflect Khamenei's wishes."
And the nuclear program is certain to continue apace: "Khamenei won't permit a solution to the nuclear issue. Having invested eight years of repression to prevent any sort of change, what has Khamenei to lose? Do you think now he's suddenly going to say, 'OK, I'm going to improve my reputation and change my ways?' "
If Mr. Khamenei's speech last month before an audience of Iranian women was any indication, the answer is no. "The European race is an uncivilized race," the leader told the black-veiled figures seated beneath him. "They may have a nice, polished exterior but at heart, the Europeans are still savages."
Mr. Vahedi's journey from loyalist to antiregime polemicist isn't uncommon among members of the generation that brought the mullahs to power. Like many another lapsed Islamist, he has the dejected appearance of a man who looks on his life's project and sees a catastrophe staring back.
Mojtaba Vahedi was born in 1964 to a pious household in the holy city of Qom but grew up mostly in Tehran. As a teenager he along with his family joined the 1979 Islamic revolution that toppled the shah. Then in 1982, a middle-aged cleric and rising parliamentarian, impressed by his ambition and zeal, recruited the 18-year-old Mr. Vahedi to join his staff.
That cleric was Mehdi Karroubi, a kindly looking and charismatic figure who would go on to serve as Iran's parliamentary speaker during a brief period of reform in the early 2000s and who would emerge as the more outspoken of the two main opposition candidates in the stolen 2009 presidential election. From the time he graduated from high school until less that a year ago, Mr. Vahedi served on-and-off as Mr. Karroubi's aide, spokesman and chief of staff while editing a Karroubi-aligned reformist newspaper.
Mr. Karroubi, he recalls, was one of the first Iranian politicians to openly confront the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—the engine of the regime's repressive apparatus—over its attempts to wrest control of the civilian economy. To be sure, the cleric was nothing if not a loyalist during the mullahs' first decade in power. In 1988 he went out of his way to defend the summary execution of some 3,000 leftists.
But by the time Mr. Karroubi took the reins in parliament in 2000, he had moved to the reformist fold. "He received five families of political prisoners every day," Mr. Vahedi says. "You couldn't call him a liberal but he had a reasonable mind-set." Mr. Karroubi attacked arbitrary sentences handed down by the judiciary; he also sharply criticized the powerful unelected legislators of the Guardian Council, even threatening to veto its budget.
In 2005, Mr. Karroubi contested the presidency on a reformist platform. When Mr. Ahmadinejad was declared the winner, Mr. Karroubi accused the revolutionary guards, the basij paramilitia and, most dangerously, Mr. Khamenei's son and heir-apparent, Mojtaba, of vote-rigging in at least three provinces, where the total number of votes cast outstripped the number of residents. The supreme leader denounced Mr. Karroubi, who responded by writing an open letter of protest addressed directly to Mr. Khamenei.
"I wrote that letter," Mr. Vahedi says with obvious pride. "It was extremely risky. We went into a basement away from prying ears, argued over the substance of the letter, and then I drafted it. I sent the office janitor, an illiterate, to have it printed. I knew Iranian newspapers couldn't carry it, so I hand-delivered it to the BBC."
When Mr. Karroubi launched a second presidential campaign in 2009, Mr. Vahedi once again joined his team. But two days before the polls opened, Mr. Vahedi flew to Dubai. He left Iran, he says, because he foresaw the vote-rigging that returned Mr. Ahmadinejad to power as well as the vicious crackdown that would soon answer the country's postelection uprising.
Sensing danger in Dubai, he next flew to London two weeks later, in late June 2009. As the violence in Iran's streets intensified, Mr. Vahedi kept editing and writing for his newspaper from abroad. "But then they realized I wasn't coming back," he recalls, "and one night Ahmadinejad's press minister took to state TV and claimed, 'There's a newspaper editor who's lived in England for seven months, and we know that he receives instructions every day from the Mossad and the CIA.' There were three nights of consecutive programming showing my face and denouncing me as a spy."
With that virtual death sentence, Mr. Vahedi escaped to the U.S. in February 2010. It was here that Mr. Vahedi finally broke with the reformists. "I saw the reformists getting ready for the 2013 elections," he says. "We'd seen the cheating in the last election, and nothing had changed—there's no change in the regime's behavior. . . . Reforms mean nothing if one man can hand them down from above and the same man can take them away."
It was a message meant for Mr. Vahedi's longtime mentor, too: "Then I said goodbye to my teacher, Karroubi. I had to part ways so I could say what I ultimately came to understand: that Iran's salvation depends on the total destruction of this regime." It's that last conclusion that the establishment reformists still can't abide, even as their candidates—including Mr. Karroubi—remain under house arrest and their supporters are beaten, jailed and executed.
As long as religion casts a shadow in politics, the people won't be free," say Mr. Vahedi, who counts himself a religious man. "Religion put to political use is a most corrosive thing. We don't have a religious government in Iran—it's a government that abuses religion. . . . Whenever they need it, they take advantage of the people's pious feelings and attachments."
What are the chances of another popular explosion of anger and resistance toward the regime after the June 14 election like that seen in 2009? Unlikely, says Mr. Vahedi. He isn't given to optimism about a country where "there's been a total breakdown in the Iranian concept of trust—beginning with the families, in small towns, in the big cities. The people lie to each other. The regime lies to them. They lie to the regime."
How long can this state of affairs last? Mr. Vahedi sighs and yet sounds optimistic despite himself: "No regime can survive on repression alone."
Mr. Ahmari is an assistant books editor at the Journal.