photo: Layla Maryam/ BY-NC-SA

By Layla Maryam

Yesterday, I attended a protest in San Diego in support of the mass demonstrations in Iran. Similar events were taking place at the same time throughout California and have been going on around the world. At the protest, we chanted, “We wrote Mousavi, you read Ahmadi,” referring to what is widely believed to be the rigged re-election of incumbent President Ahmadinejad. A woman standing next to me turned to her friend and asked, “If they say ‘ok’ and put Mousavi in power, then what do we do?” Her friend chuckled, “Then we say we changed our minds!” They were half joking and half pointing out the underlying tension in the cause: why argue about following the rules when you think the rules are inherently unfair?

Many analysts, commentators, and reporters have been making contradictory claims about the mass uprising in Iran, ranging from “revolution is coming,” to “Iranians just want Ahmadinejad out,” and they are all off the mark. The truth of the matter is that the religious clerics, or mullahs, are mired in a showdown between Ahmadinejad’s conservative hard-liners and Mousavi’s camp of moderate reformers; if there was not this bitter division, then there would be no uprising. However, even if one camp prevails, or the clergy agrees to constitutional reform and power-sharing (as has been suggested by many), the government has suffered irreparable harm and alienated the majority of the people.
Civil unrest has been brewing in Iran for some time now. In 1997, Iranians elected a reformist president, Khatami, into office. When that did not produce the desired outcome, students took to the streets in protests that also elicited violence and repression from the government. That this time around the demonstrations have gone on for 5 days and brought people out in throngs is a testament to how divided the clergy really is right now. However, for the people who are taking to the streets and risking their lives each day, their dissatisfaction with the government has been there all along. The infighting among the mullahs merely provided an outlet for their frustrations.

In the end, Iranians want what they have always wanted – a democratic state that is accountable to them and them only. Iranians have repeatedly lent their support to reformist candidates in the ruling clergy all the while swallowing the bitter pill of having to participate in a process that seems to be a setup from the start. And there’s good reason to believe they would have relented had the government responded to their demonstrations in a just and humane manner. Regardless of whether the demonstrators are trying to ignite a revolution or merely get Mousavi in office, one thing is clear--they want change. Not just to loosen their head scarves, but real, meaningful change. And what’s more revolutionary than that.