88 Still a Tool for Hardliners’ Destruction
88 Still a Tool for Hardliners’ Destruction Perhaps the best question asked yesterday was by a Kayhan reporter to Masoud Pezeshkian, not because it was a professional question aligned with the issues, expectations, and demands of the majority of the people, 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 faction that not only does not seek to resolve issues and alleviate today’s crises and imbalances in Iran but also does not recognize any mission or responsibility for itself other than to extinguish the small spark of hope formed to halt the country’s decline and to allocate resources and facilities in an anti-development process.
Kayhan is the main spokesperson of this faction, and its reporter fulfilled their organizational duty by raising it in yesterday’s press conference.
For this faction, which outwardly calls itself a defender of the underprivileged and previously supported the ‘Leader of the Underprivileged,’ energy, water, housing crises, sanctions, and shortage of resources to pay the demands of retirees, nurses, wheat farmers, teachers, disabled people, contractors, and industrialists are not considered issues at all.
Let alone the public dissatisfaction with filtering, dealing with women and girls, expelling professors and students, and the daily intensification of pressures and sanctions.
For this faction, today’s issue of the country and the root of the crises merely goes back to the appointment of a few political and media activists in some secondary responsibilities of the fourteenth government, and hence the Kayhan reporter’s question is why have you given responsibilities, albeit small, to individuals who have faced judicial and security confrontations due to their stances?
In fact, the main issue and concern of this faction is the change of the misguided path that purists have built over the past three years and with consultation-based resolutions, they have tried and are trying to stabilize this misguided path and prevent those who have the ability to change the course of the government and the country from being placed in responsibilities.
With such an approach, Kayhan and its aligned media did everything in their power in the first stage to ensure that Pezeshkian did not win the presidential election and that the candidate of the purists would continue the path taken in the past three years with more intensity and severity.
After the election and with Pezeshkian’s victory, Kayhan’s supporters tried to undermine Mohammad Javad Zarif and the Strategic Council for forming the fourteenth government to prevent political and intellectual elites from influencing the formation of the cabinet and the selection of proposed ministers.
When this goal also bore no fruit with Pezeshkian’s political management, and he introduced a cabinet composed of various political factions but reasonably based on announced criteria to the Parliament, the third phase of the purist stabilization project was implemented by Kayhan and its supporters, which was the attack on several proposed reformist and moderate ministers, primarily Mohammad Reza Zafarghandi.
This faction did everything in its power during the cabinet review days to ensure that at least two to three ministers did not receive votes.
When the Parliament, despite the attacks and accusations of the radical minority, gave high votes to all ministers, they began attacking the President personally and called his statements about coordination with the Supreme Leader in introducing proposed ministers a lie.
Even when the Supreme Leader welcomed the Parliament’s vote on the cabinet during a meeting with the President and the government and thanked God for it, they still did not retract and claimed that his statements, which mentioned that he did not know most of the proposed ministers, meant a denial and rejection of Pezeshkian’s statements.
While the President had named specific ministers in his remarks as individuals whom he had confirmed and emphasized.
Besides Kayhan, members of the Stability Front also entered the field at this stage to the extent that some 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.
In recent days, 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, and it seems that things have escalated to the point where they want to turn the appointment of a media expert in the Presidential Office into the country’s primary issue, and in this uproar and atmosphere, they aim to take away the courage of ministers, vice presidents, and senior government managers to employ capable forces from reformist and moderate factions.
Yesterday’s question from the Kayhan reporter to the President was a new curtain in this multi-layered political-advertising scenario that has been ongoing for more than two months and has not stopped even with the explicit entry of the Supreme Leader of the system and continues in other forms and at lower levels.
In contrast to this logic and this political-advertising scenario stands Masoud Pezeshkian, who from the very days of the election has emphatically stressed the necessity of internal cohesion and unity as a condition for any decision-making change for the improvement and development of the country and has even considered the lifting of international sanctions to be affected by the resolution of internal tensions and conflicts.
With such an approach and background, Pezeshkian responded explicitly to Kayhan and practically considered the non-employment of managers and experts due to having files or sentences arising from their political and protest stances in past years as an incorrect and unacceptable policy.
This approach of Pezeshkian, which addresses both the government and the critical and protesting forces in the events after 2009 to today, is the most precise definition of unity in today’s Iran.
In the approach that Pezeshkian presents, there is fundamentally no issue of reopening the 2009 file. This meaninglessness is not because the events that occurred in 2009 and their consequences were insignificant, and the political forces on both sides of the issue can easily forget them.
The meaning of moving beyond 88 is not such. Naturally, as Pezeshkian also said yesterday, each party to that dispute considers itself right and attributes those harsh events and conflicts to the actions of the opposing side.
Each party also has the right to have such a perception of the matter and to present such an image of it.
Naturally, for judging which side is right and truthful, one cannot rely on the reports of security agencies or the judicial rulings of courts that themselves were a party to the dispute, and many of today’s conflicts are due to their behaviors and approaches in the protests and events of 2009 and similar and more severe cases in subsequent years, because the protesting forces have such a perception.
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, today, after 15 years from those events, do not have much impact.
Moreover, the government has rejected such proposals throughout all these years, so the solution to the matter is a kind of setting aside of the issue.
This setting aside, as mentioned, does not mean ignoring those events and conflicts by the forces on both sides of the dispute, because such a thing is fundamentally impossible, and one cannot erase a part of the country’s political history.
However, from this approach of moving beyond 88, another interpretation can be made, which is that the series of events after the 2009 elections, regardless of which side the factors and designers and promoters of the matter were, should be analyzed as a trap or, in official discourse, as sedition.
By trap or sedition, of course, it is not meant 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, became the groundwork for a major sedition in the country’s political space and, like an enticing trap, engulfed both sides of the matter, the government and the protesters, and even after 15 years, they have not escaped its bonds.
The trap and sedition of 88 in this sense changed the course of power relations in the country from a socio-political model to a military-security model, which although might have been initiated a decade earlier during the events of 1999, it was in 2009 and thereafter that it was fully and explicitly implemented and engulfed the entire political structure and political space.
The warnings and suggestions of political elders like Hashemi Rafsanjani, who saw the source of this sedition and wanted to close it with a spade, were not heeded.
In the early days of the events, once again, Hashemi’s proposed package for both sides to compromise and console the injured received no response, and even Hashemi himself was defined and described as the head of the sedition.
Thus, the 2009 event appeared like a festering wound and, with the protests of subsequent years, culminating in 2022, escalated to an irreconcilable contradiction.
In such a historical-political context, Pezeshkian’s constant talk of reconciliation and unity finds meaning.
The tangible meaning of unity from this perspective is moving beyond the 88 event and returning the governing relations in the country’s administration from a military-security model to a socio-political one.
If Pezeshkian’s election is derived from such a major change in approach, which evidence and signs largely confirm, it can provide a basis for the main issues of the country and the crises and imbalances that are eating away at the spirit and psyche of Iran and Iranians from within like termites, to find solutions and be resolved.
From this perspective, the question and answer between Kayhan and Pezeshkian yesterday should be seen and understood at a level far beyond the appointment of a few middle managers and experts; this question and answer is between two serious approaches to today’s grand relations in Iran.
On one side is an approach that still wants to keep the 88 trap open by labeling this and that as seditionists and rioters and adds to the circle and scope of this trap every day and every year under the pretext of the emergence of a protest movement and even critical stances.
On the other side are Pezeshkian and the supporters of the unity discourse, whose approach is to close this old trap and provide the opportunity to make maximum use of the political, social, and intellectual forces’ capacities.
In Pezeshkian’s approach, as he told Kayhan yesterday, the necessity of unity is moving beyond a sedition-focused discourse, and in this direction, as Hassan Rouhani said in 2013, the healing of wounds and the reduction of gaps is pursued.
This fundamental struggle and conflict is the reality of today’s political scene in Iran; it remains to be seen which side the balance of power will tip towards—Kayhan or Pezeshkian.
