Teaching Comparative

Sort out these informal power relationships

In a political system like Iran's, the relationships among the elite are often more important in understanding politics than reading the constitution or looking at an organization chart. Here's one place to start with Iran.

Panel in Iran Will Oversee Investigations Into Unrest

Conservative rivals of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran have continued to challenge his drive to consolidate power, appointing a committee to supervise investigations into the unrest that swept the nation after he claimed a landslide victory in the disputed presidential election in June, political analysts said.

On Saturday... the chief of the judiciary, Sadeq Larijani [right], announced the appointment of a panel to oversee investigations by allies of the president into the postelection unrest.

Mr. Larijani, a rival of the president, said the committee was told “to ensure that the defendants’ rights are reserved and that they are treated properly,” according to the semi-official Fars news service, offering a not-too-subtle vote of no confidence in the president’s handling of events.

The announcement... seemed to be part of a strategy by the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to repair his own tarnished credibility with the clerical elite and the loss of his standing as a fair arbiter with the population, political analysts said...

“I believe we are witnessing a move for reconciliation,” said Mustafa Alani, director of Security and Defense Studies at the Gulf Research Center in the United Arab Emirates. “I don’t think the reconciliation will include a review of the election or delegitimize Ahmadinejad. It will look at the torture accusation and it will basically smooth out the court procedure to remove all the hard-line accusations.”
As Mr. Larijani announced the formation of the new committee, leaders of the Revolutionary Guards and the Tehran Police, perhaps pre-emptively, denied that their personnel had committed abuses during the unrest...

“One can think of what is happening as a major move by Khamenei to contain Ahmadinejad, but only because the reformists have been completely crushed and there are signs that Ahmadinejad wants to keep up his power grab at the cost of pragmatic conservatives,” the political analyst said. “The clerical establishment favors pragmatic conservatives.”

The political analyst, who is based in the United States, said that Ayatollah Khamenei, who was a mid-level cleric before he was named supreme leader, had turned to the Larijani family to help restore “support for himself in the clerical establishment.”

The Larijanis are not only critics of Mr. Ahmadinejad, but are from “clerical aristocracy,” he said. Mr. Larijani’s brother, Ali, is the speaker of Parliament and is the representative for Qum, the center of religious learning in Iran. Their uncle, Mohaqqeq Damad, is a cleric and a former chief of the judiciary. The family is also related by blood to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Mehdi Haeri-Yazdi, an eminent 20th-century Shiite cleric...

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Hard-line Iranian prosecutor fired

Iran's new judiciary chief ousted the hard-line prosecutor behind the ongoing trials against opposition figures in Tehran, replacing him with a relatively moderate newcomer from the provinces, an Iranian news agency reported Saturday...

His removal suggests an attempt by the new judiciary chief, Sadegh Larijani, the scion of a powerful conservative family, to curtail the influence of hard-liners and clean up the image of the country's legal system...

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Labels: Iran, leadership, politics

posted by Ken Wedding @ 6:07 AM