Still 88, the tool for destroying the hardliners.
Still 88, the tool for destroying the hardliners might have been the best question yesterday that Kayhan reporter asked Masoud Pezeshkian. Not because the question was professional and appropriate to the issues and expectations of the majority of the nation, but because it exposed the factions, boundaries, and fundamental conflicts in Iran today. The questioner, like a challenger to the president, became the voice and representative of a minority movement that not only seeks to solve today’s problems and crises and imbalances in Iran but also does not recognize a mission and responsibility for itself other than forming a spark of hope to stop the country’s decline and redirect resources and facilities away from an anti-development trend.
Kayhan is the main spokesperson for this movement, and its reporter fulfilled its organizational duty to present it at yesterday’s press conference.
For this movement, which outwardly calls itself the defender of the deprived and was a supporter of the deprived in the previous government, energy, water, housing crises, sanctions, and lack of resources to pay the claims of retirees, nurses, wheat farmers, teachers, disabled people, contractors, industrialists, and others are not considered issues at all.
The dissatisfaction of society with filtering, mistreatment of women and girls, 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 crises solely return to the appointment of a few political activists and media in some secondary responsibilities of the fourteenth government. Therefore, the question of Kayhan reporter is why individuals who have faced judicial and security confrontations due to their positions are given even minor responsibilities.
In fact, the main concern of this movement is the change of the wrong paths that the purifiers have constructed in these three years and have been trying and are trying to solidify these wrong paths with approval-centric decisions and not allowing those who have the ability to change the direction of the government and the country to take on responsibilities.
It was with such an approach that Kayhan and the media aligned with it did everything in their power in the first stage to prevent the victory of the medical personnel in the presidential elections and to continue to intensify the path of the purifiers’ deviated candidate of the past three years with more intensity.
After the elections and with the victory of the medical personnel, Kayhanians tried to obstruct the influence of political and intellectual elites in shaping the cabinet and determining the proposed ministers by sabotaging Mohammad Javad Zarif and the Steering Council of the formation of the fourteenth government.
When this goal was not achieved with a strategic management of physicians, and he introduced a cabinet consisting of various political currents but based on acceptable criteria to the parliament, the third phase of the project of purification consolidation was implemented by Kayhan and its supporters, which was the attack on several proposed reformist and moderate ministers, with Mohammad Reza Zafarqandi at the forefront.
During the cabinet review days, this movement did whatever it could to prevent at least two to three ministers from gaining votes.
When despite the attacks and accusations of the radical minority, the parliament, with high votes, approved all the ministers, they started attacking the president personally and called his statements about coordination with the leadership in introducing the proposed ministers lies.
Even when the leadership welcomed the parliament’s vote for the cabinet in a meeting with the president and the government, and thanked God for it, they still turned back on their path and claimed that his statements saying they did not know most of the proposed ministers meant denying and rejecting the physicians’ statements.
However, the president had mentioned specific ministers in his speeches as individuals whom he had approved and emphasized.
Apart from Kayhan, members of the Stability Front also entered the field in this stage to the extent that some prominent members of it accused some government ministers of being killers, using the pretext that they had tweets or letters supporting the protesters during the protests.
In recent days, with disappointment among the ministers, the pressure and propaganda against appointments at intermediate levels of the government has escalated. Apparently, things have escalated to the point where they want to make the appointment of a media expert in the Presidential institution the country’s top priority. In this commotion and propaganda, ministers, deputy presidents, and senior government officials dare to take on the task of employing capable forces from reformist and moderate currents.
Yesterday, a reporter from Kayhan asked the President about a new curtain of this multi-layered political-publicity scenario that has been ongoing for over two months. It has not even stopped with the explicit entry of the system’s leadership and continues in different forms and at lower levels.
In contrast to this logic and political scenario, Masoud Pezeshkian’s promotional activities emphasize the necessity of internal coherence and consensus as a prerequisite for any decision to improve and develop the country, even attributing the lifting of international sanctions to the resolution of internal tensions and conflicts.
It was with such an approach and background that Pezeshkian explicitly responded to Kayhan and considered the failure to utilize managers and experts due to their political and protest positions in the past years as an incorrect and failed policy.
This approach of the physicians, which addresses both the government and the criticizing and protesting forces in the events post-2009 until today, provides the most accurate definition of consensus in today’s conditions in Iran.
In the approach proposed by the physicians, issues such as reopening the 2009 case files are essentially meaningless. This insignificance is not because the events of 2009 and their consequences were insignificant, but rather because political forces on both sides of the matter can easily forget about them.
The meaning of passing through ’88 is not like that, as doctors also said yesterday that each side considers their own dispute legitimate and interprets the intense events and conflicts as resulting from the actions of the opposite party.
Each side has the right to have such an understanding of the situation and present such an image of it.
Naturally, it is not possible to judge which side is right and correct based on the reports of security institutions or judicial rulings of courts that have been parties to the conflict themselves. 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 the following years, as the protesting forces have such perceptions.
On the other hand, suggestions such as forming a truth-finding committee or a debate between the parties involved, which may have been feasible in the early months, do not have much impact today, 15 years after those events.
Furthermore, the government has rejected such proposals throughout all these years, so the solution to the issue is a kind of setting it aside.
Setting aside also does not mean ignoring the events and conflicts by the conflicting forces, because fundamentally such a thing is not possible, and part of the country’s political history cannot be erased.
But from this perspective, passing over 1388 can have another interpretation, which is to analyze the series of events after the 1388 elections regardless of which side the actors, designers, and leaders of the story were, as a trap or, in official jargon, sedition.
By trap or sedition, of course, it is not meant the protesters or the presidential candidates of that period and their supporters.
The meaning of trap and sedition here is the whole event that, regardless of the factors and subsets of it, laid the groundwork for major seditions in the country’s political space and, like a deceptive trap, drew both sides of the story, the government and the protesters, into its trap and even after 15 years, they have not found liberation from its shackles.
The trap and sedition of 1388 means changing the course of power relations in the country from a socio-political pattern to a military-security pattern, which although may have been initiated a decade ago during the events of 1378, it was in 1388 and after that it became more apparent and comprehensive, and put the entirety of the political structure and political space in itself.
Warnings and suggestions of senior politicians like Hashemi Rafsanjani, who saw the source of this sedition and called for its closure, were not heeded.
In the early stages of the events, once again, Hashemi’s proposed package for reconciliation and compassion towards the victims did not receive a response in that historic Friday. Even Hashemi himself was defined and described as the head of the sedition.
Thus, the events of 1388 unfolded like a festering wound, and with the protests in the following years, reaching its peak in 1401, it escalated into an irreconcilable contradiction.
In such a historical-political context, the constant talk of physicians finds meaning in reconciliation and unity.
The literal meaning of unity from this perspective is transcending the events of ’88 and returning the relationships governing the country from a military-security model to a political-social one.
If the choice of physicians stems from such a major shift in approach, which is largely confirmed by evidence and indications, it could provide a platform for finding solutions to the country’s main issues and crises, which like a cancer, are eating away at the spirit and psyche of Iranians from within, and like a termite, are hollowing out the country from within, allowing for finding solutions and resolution.
From this perspective, it is important to see and understand that the question and answer between Kayhan and the physicians yesterday goes far beyond the appointment of several middle managers and experts, and it involves a serious dialogue between two major approaches to the current affairs in Iran.
One approach, like Kayhan, seeks to continue to interpret events as conspiracies and unrest, opening the Pandora’s box of the 2009 sedition, and using any movement of protest and even critical positions as an excuse to expand the scope of this box.
On the other hand, the physicians and supporters of the unity discourse aim to gather this old box and provide an opportunity for maximum utilization of the capabilities of political, social, and intellectual forces.
In the physicians’ approach, as addressed to Kayhan yesterday, the obligation of unity is to move beyond the discourse of sedition, similar to what Hassan Rouhani stated in 2013 about healing wounds and reducing gaps.
This conflict and contradiction form the basis of the current political scene in Iran; it is necessary to see which side, Kayhan or the physicians, is tilting the balance of power.
