88 Still a Tool for Radicals’ Destruction
Perhaps the best question yesterday was asked by a Kayhan journalist to Masoud Pezeshkian, not because it was a professional question aligned with the issues and expectations of the majority, but because it showcased the alignments, boundaries, and fundamental conflicts in today’s Iran. The questioner, facing the president, was the voice and representative of a minority movement that not only does not seek to solve today’s issues and crises in Iran but also does not recognize any mission or responsibility for itself other than to extinguish the small spark of hope formed to stop the country’s decline and allocate resources in an anti-development process.
Kayhan is the main spokesperson for this movement, and its journalist fulfilled their organizational duty by raising it in yesterday’s press conference.
For this movement, which outwardly calls itself a defender of the underprivileged and supported the ‘Leader of the Underprivileged’ in the previous government, issues like energy, water, housing crises, sanctions, and lack of resources to pay retirees, nurses, wheat farmers, teachers, disabled individuals, contractors, and industrialists are not considered problems at all.
Let alone the public dissatisfaction with filtering, the treatment of women and girls, the expulsion of professors and students, and the daily intensification of pressures and sanctions.
For this movement, the issue of the country today and the root of the crises simply goes back to the appointment of a few political and media activists to some minor responsibilities in the fourteenth government. Therefore, the Kayhan journalist’s question is why individuals who have faced judicial and security actions due to their positions have been given any responsibility, even small ones.
In reality, the main concern of this movement is the change of the misguided path that the purifiers have built over these three years, and with resolution-based inquiries, they have tried and are trying to stabilize this path and prevent those who can change the direction of the government and the country from taking responsibility.
With such an approach, Kayhan and its aligned media did everything in their power in the first stage to prevent Pezeshkian from winning the presidential election and to ensure that the purifiers’ candidate would continue the path taken in the past three years with more intensity.
After the election and with Pezeshkian’s victory, the Kayhanians tried to undermine Mohammad Javad Zarif and the Strategic Council for forming the fourteenth government to prevent the influence of political and intellectual elites in shaping the cabinet and determining proposed ministers.
When this goal also bore no fruit due to Pezeshkian’s political management, and he introduced a cabinet composed of various political streams but reasonably based on announced criteria to the parliament, the third phase of the purification stabilization project was implemented by Kayhan and its supporters, which was the attack on a few proposed reformist and moderate ministers, especially Mohammad Reza Zafarqandi.
During the cabinet review days, they used all their power to ensure that at least two to three ministers would not receive votes.
Even when the parliament, despite the attacks and accusations of the radical minority, voted overwhelmingly for all the ministers, they began attacking the president personally and called his statements about coordination with the leadership in introducing proposed ministers a lie.
Even when the leader, in a meeting with the president and the cabinet, welcomed the parliament’s vote for the cabinet and thanked God for it, they still did not back down and claimed that his statements, where he said he did not know most of the proposed ministers, meant a denial and rejection of Pezeshkian’s statements.
However, the president had specifically named certain ministers as individuals whom he claimed the leader had approved and emphasized.
Besides Kayhan, members of the Stability Front also entered the field at this stage, to the extent that some of its prominent members referred to some government ministers as murderers, on the pretext that they had tweeted or written letters in support of protesters during the protests.
Recently, with disappointment at the ministerial level, the turn has come to pressure and create an atmosphere against appointments at the middle levels of the government. It seems that the situation has escalated to the point where they want to turn the appointment of a media expert in the presidency into the country’s primary issue, and in this chaos and atmosphere, take away the courage of ministers and the president’s deputies and senior government managers to employ capable forces from reformist and moderate streams.
Yesterday’s question from the Kayhan journalist to the president was a new curtain of this multi-layered political-advertising scenario that has continued for more than two months and has not stopped even with the direct intervention of the system’s leader and continues in other forms and at lower levels.
In contrast to this logic and this political-advertising scenario stands Masoud Pezeshkian, who has emphasized the necessity of internal cohesion and consensus as a condition for any decision to improve and develop the country since the election days and has even considered the lifting of international sanctions to be influenced by resolving internal tensions and conflicts.
With such an approach and background, Pezeshkian explicitly responded to Kayhan and practically considered not employing managers and experts due to having files or judgments arising from their political positions and protests in past years as a wrong and rejected policy.
This approach of Pezeshkian, which addresses both the government and the critical and protesting forces in the events after 1388 to the present, is the most accurate definition of consensus in today’s Iranian conditions.
In the approach Pezeshkian proposes, the issue of reopening the 1388 file does not fundamentally exist. This meaninglessness, of course, is not because the events of 1388 and their consequences were insignificant and that the political forces on both sides of the issue can easily forget them.
The meaning of moving past 88 is not like that. Naturally, as Pezeshkian also said yesterday, each side of that conflict considers itself right and attributes those intense events and conflicts to the actions of the other side.
Each side has the right to have such a perception of the matter and to present such an image of it.
Naturally, to judge which side is right and telling the truth, one cannot rely on the reports of security agencies or the judicial rulings of courts that were themselves a party to the conflict, and many of today’s conflicts stem from their behaviors and approaches in the protests and events of 88 and similar and more severe cases in later years, because the protesting forces have such an understanding.
On the other hand, proposals such as forming a truth-finding committee or debates between the parties involved, which might have been feasible in the early months, have little impact today, 15 years after those events.
Moreover, the government has rejected such proposals over all these years, so the solution to the matter is a kind of letting go of the issue.
This letting go, as mentioned, does not mean ignoring those events and conflicts by the forces on both sides of the conflict because, fundamentally, such a thing is not possible, and one cannot erase a part of the country’s political history.
However, another interpretation can be taken from this approach of moving past 88, which is to analyze the series of events after the 1388 election, regardless of which side was the factor, designer, or driver of the matter, as a trap or, in official discourse, a sedition.
The trap or sedition here, of course, does not refer to the protesters or the presidential candidates of that period and their supporters.
The trap and sedition here refer to the entire event, which, regardless of its factors and subsets, laid the groundwork for a major sedition in the country’s political space and, like a seductive trap, pulled both sides of the matter, the government and the protesters, into its depths, and even after 15 years, they have not been freed from its bonds.
The 88 trap and sedition in this sense changed the course of power relations in the country from a socio-political model to a military-security model, which, although it may have been initiated a decade earlier during the events of 1378, was fully implemented in 1388 and after, engulfing the entire political structure and space.
Warnings and suggestions from political elders like Hashemi Rafsanjani, who saw the source of this sedition and wanted to close it with a shovel, were not heard.
Even in the early days of the events, once again, in that historic Friday, Hashemi’s proposal package for both sides to compromise and console the affected did not find an answer, and even Hashemi himself was described and defined at the head of the sedition.
Thus, the 1388 event emerged as a festering wound and, with the protests in subsequent years, culminating in 1401, elevated to an irreconcilable contradiction.
In such a historical-political context, Pezeshkian’s constant talk of reconciliation and consensus finds meaning.
The tangible meaning of consensus from this perspective is moving past the 88 event and returning the governing relationships from a military-security model to a socio-political one.
If Pezeshkian’s election is based on such a major shift in approach, which evidence and indications largely confirm, it can provide a platform for finding solutions and resolving the main issues and imbalances that, from every side, eat away at the spirit and psyche of Iran and Iranians from within and hollow out the country like termites.
From this perspective, yesterday’s question and answer between Kayhan and Pezeshkian should be seen and understood at a level far beyond the appointment of a few middle managers and experts. This question and answer are between two serious approaches to today’s major relations in Iran.
On one side is an approach that still wants to keep the 88 trap open by calling this and that a seditionist and agitator, and every day and every year, under the pretext of an emerging protest movement and even critical positions, expand the scope of this trap.
On the other side are Pezeshkian and the supporters of the consensus discourse, whose approach is to gather this old trap and create an opportunity for maximum use of the socio-political and intellectual forces’ capacity.
In Pezeshkian’s approach, as he told Kayhan yesterday, the necessity of consensus is moving past the sedition-focused discourse, and in this direction, as Hassan Rouhani said in 1392, he has taken the path of healing wounds and reducing gaps.
This fundamental conflict and contradiction is the reality of today’s political scene in Iran. It remains to be seen which side will tip the balance of power, Kayhan or Pezeshkian.