A textbook supplement
Who are the Basiji? What is the Basij? Neil MacFarquhar provided a partial answer in his New York Times article:Shadowy Iranian Vigilantes Vow Bolder Action
Iranians shudder at the violence unleashed in their cities at night, with the shadowy vigilantes known as Basijis beating, looting and sometimes gunning down protesters they tracked during the day...
The word Basij means roughly mass mobilization in Persian, and the original organization consisted of all the civilian volunteers whom the Ayatollah Khomeini urged to go fight on the front in the Iran-Iraq war. Some of them died while tromping across mine fields toward Iraq.
The Basij was reinvented in the late 1990s, Iran experts said, after the government felt that it had lost control of the streets during spontaneous celebrations when Iran won a spot in the World Cup soccer championship in 1998 and again during student protests in 1999. “They decided to invest in a force that could take over the streets that didn’t look like a military deployment,” said an Iran analyst who did not want to be identified because of his involvement in the events...
The Basij was nominally part of the Revolutionary Guards... Nearly every mosque in Iran has a room marked Paygah-e-Basij or Basij base, which serves as a kind of Islamic club where students study the Koran, organize sports teams and plan field trips.
Some members are religious zealots, and some are not. Most members are lower-middle-class youths who enjoy certain benefits by joining. They can skip the required military service, can obtain reserved spots in the universities and also receive a small stipend...
During a short-lived student protest at Tehran University in 2003, the Basijis roared around on motorcycles and were trucked in on military vehicles. They hit students with chains, lobbed bricks at their heads and beat them with long wooden truncheons...
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, after taking office in 2005, tried to create a more formal organization for the Basij, with an official budget, but the Revolutionary Guards rejected the move, Iran analysts said...
The huge numbers of people who have turned out to protest the election results in recent days have presented somewhat of a problem for the Basij: there are too many demonstrators to enable the vigilantes to intimidate people in their customary way. At times when the Basijis have tried to attack demonstrators, the crowd has turned on them, beating the vigilantes and setting their motorcycles on fire.
Labels: Iran, leadership, political culture
posted by Ken Wedding @ 8:16 AM
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