What began as anger over a stolen election has grown into a revolt against Iran’s system of Islamic government

By Con Coughlin

December 29, 2009

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Six months after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s hotly disputed election victory, the Green protest movement led by Mir Hossein Mousavi, the defeated candidate for the presidency, shows no sign of abating. As a result, the Iranian regime finds itself once more resorting to the tactics of repression it has relied on for more than 30 years. Eight people were killed in nationwide protests on Sunday, including Seyed Ali Mousavi, the nephew of Mr. Mousavi.

Yet rather than being quelled by the regime’s brutal response—as happened during the antigovernment protests of 1999 and 2003—the protestors’ resolve has been strengthened. In the past week, antigovernment protesters have seized on two highly significant events to show that, despite the regime’s attempts to silence its critics, Mr. Mousavi’s opposition movement has grown substantially since last June’s disturbances.

First there was last week’s funeral of Ayatollah Ali Hossein Montazeri, a vocal critic of the repressive regime established by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Mr. Montazeri, a close associate of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of Iran’s Islamic revolution, was a pivotal figure in establishing the Islamic Republic in 1979. He drafted the constitution that incorporated Khomeini’s concept of Velayat-e Faqih (the guardianship of the jurist), which legitimized the ayatollahs’ political authority.

But Mr. Montazeri, who for years had been Khomeini’s heir apparent, was removed from the succession following a series of disagreements over policy, including the mass executions of political prisoners in late 1988. Consequently, Mr. Khamenei became Iran’s spiritual leader upon Khomeini’s death in 1989, and Mr. Montazeri was placed under house arrest at Qom, the traditional base of Iran’s Shiite clergy.

For two decades he remained a vociferous critic of Mr. Khamenei’s leadership of the country, which he regarded as a perversion of the office he had done so much to establish. Shortly before his death earlier this month at age 87, Mr. Montazeri, the most senior cleric then living in Iran, went so far as to issue a series of fatwas questioning the regime’s legitimacy. One denounced Mr. Khamenei’s “unjust rule,” while another accused the Ahmadinejad government of working against Islamic principles.

The growing numbers of antigovernment protesters in Iran seized on Mr. Montazeri’s funeral at Qom last week as a platform to launch yet further attacks on the regime. The huge crowds chanted slogans against the country’s supreme leader as well as against the president, an indication that the revolt has gone beyond Ahmadinejad to become a protest against the entire system of religious government.

Mr. Khamenei has always been vulnerable to criticism from Qom’s clerical establishment, which believes he was appointed supreme leader more because of his slavish devotion to Mr. Khomeini than his religious credentials.

Second, antigovernment activists maintained the momentum generated by the Qom protests by using the Shiite festival of Ashura to bring hundreds of thousands of demonstrators onto the streets on Dec. 27. Ashura commemorates the murder of Imam Hossein, one of Shiite Islam’s most revered figures. Protestors compared the imam’s martyrdom with those killed in the government’s violent suppression of last summer’s street protests.

The strength of the demonstrations has rattled the Ahmadinejad government, which already finds itself under pressure over Tehran’s refusal to compromise on its nuclear program. Ahmadinejad suffered a serious setback last month when both China and Russia, which had previously backed Iran’s right to develop nuclear technology, supported a censure motion at the International Atomic Energy Agency over Iran’s clandestine uranium-enrichment activities.

Iran’s mounting international isolation over its nuclear program was one of the issues that encouraged the antigovernment protesters to take to the streets in the first place. So was the Ahmadinejad government’s ruinous handling of the economy. What the events of the past week have amply demonstrated is that the overwhelming majority of Iranians are desperate for change in the way their country is governed.

Mr. Coughlin is executive foreign editor of London’s Daily Telegraph and the author of “Khomeini’s Ghost: The Iranian Revolution and the Rise of Militant Islam” (Ecco, 2009).