Farewell to the reformists’ ally

The funeral this week of former Iranian
president Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi
Rafsanjani grew into a “rare display
of public dissent,” said Saeed Kamali
Dehghan in The Guardian (U.K.). More
than 2 million mourners turned out as
Rafsanjani, who died of heart failure at
age 82, was buried in the mausoleum
of his close friend Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini—the revolutionary leader
who overthrew Iran’s shah in 1979.
Many of the mourners wore green
wristbands, symbolizing the pro-reform
Green movement, and they chanted the
names of opposition leaders under house
arrest. Other mourners shouted anti-Russian slogans, reflecting
the Iranian people’s discontent with the war in Syria, where Iran
is allied with Russia in support of the brutal Syrian regime. As
the procession passed, Rafsanjani’s daughter, Faezeh Hashemi, a
women’s rights and reform advocate who was jailed during the
Green protests in 2009, flashed the crowd a victory sign, a gesture
“seen as an indication of her continued support for change.”
Iran’s reformists know they have lost their most powerful ally in
Rafsanjani, said Omid Khazani in AlJazeera.com. As president
from 1989 to 1997 he was a ruthless figure, suppressing dissent
by authorizing the execution of several prominent liberals and
leftists. Yet over the decades he became a kind of grandfather figure
for reformers. An advocate of artistic freedom and women’s
rights, he ran again for president in 2005 but lost to the hardliner
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whom he openly criticized. After
the Guardian Council refused to let him run in 2013, Rafsanjani
picked an unknown, Hassan Rouhani,
to run on a slogan of “moderation
and prudence.” Rouhani won
that vote. But without his powerful
backer, he and other reformists could
soon be pushed aside by hard-liners.
The nuclear deal with the U.S. and
other major world powers could be
the first casualty, said Kim Sengupta
in Independent.co.uk. Hard-liners
have long chafed at the 2015 deal,
which required Iran to destroy many
of its uranium-enrichment centrifuges,
and give up the ability to produce
weapons-grade plutonium, in exchange for sanctions relief.
They are now “claiming that President Rouhani was tricked into
the deal by treacherous America,” and if an incoming President
Donald Trump were to put new sanctions on Iran, these hardliners
could well scrap the deal altogether. Even before that, their
criticism and the loss of Rafsanjani could ensure that Rouhani
loses his bid for re-election in May.
For now, though, Iran mourns, said Hamidreza Jalaipour in
Sharq (Iran). Rafsanjani was the one person who had everyone’s
trust. As chair of the Expediency Council, he “played the role
of a bridge between the two sides of the government,” resolving
disputes between the reformist-dominated legislature and the
hard-line Guardian Council. It is largely “thanks to him that the
Islamic Republic is not entirely a theocracy.” Deprived now of
his calm and wise mediation, we can only hope that the various
forces in Iran find a new way to talk to one another.


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