Arab Press: Iranian surprise

The political scene in Iran, Arab commentators argue, needs a closer and independent Arab reading. Rasha Saad reviews the week in print

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Despite criticisms Arab commentators praised the Iranian democratic experience, hoping it would give the Arab world a model to emulate.

Rashid Khashana wrote in the London-based Al-Hayat newspaper that if Iran's Hashemi Rafsanjani had run for president in an Arab country he would have been guaranteed victory over Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in simply relying on the political and bureaucratic structures that he commanded earlier while serving as head of state. He added that if Rafsanjani had relied on Arab "experts", he would have garnered 99 per cent of the vote, the turnout cosmetically altered to match the stature of a national president. "However, Rafsanjani ran for president in Iran, where ballot boxes determine things. The Iranian democratic experience has confirmed this fact."

The Iranian democratic experience, according to Khashana, provides the Arab world with a model of the peaceful rotation of power. Khashana cited the victory of the reformist Mohamed Khatami in 1997, defying predictions, as an important point on Iran's democratic path, giving it credibility. Khashana acknowledges that Iranian democracy has had its ups and downs but argues it is now a fixture of Iranian political life.

"Rafsanjani's failure to win in the first round surprised observers and his collapse in the second round did the same. We should ask: in which Arab country would we see things reach a second round to begin with, even though it's theoretically possible based on election laws?"

Khashana criticised the fact that some Western and Arab commentators saw the victory of Ahmadinejad as "a step backward", "disregarding the fact that clerics could set an example of having democracy decide matters, of adhering to democratic mechanisms, more so perhaps than secularists and modernists".

What is strange, Khashana added, is that "the supposed Arab modernists", especially the "radicals" among them, justify their monopoly on power arguing that they act to prevent the rise of religious rule. This policy, however, "neither provides us with modernity nor achieves democracy".

Also in Al-Hayat, Patrick Seale described Ahmadinejad's landslide victory as "a welcome development in a Middle East region profoundly disturbed by unresolved conflicts, corrupt elites and violent foreign intervention".

Seale believes that Ahmadinejad's unexpected victory could provide a healthy stimulus to Iran's Arab neighbours.

Despite reports that Iran's Guardian Council whittled down presidential candidates from 1,000 to just seven, and that there were suspicions of vote rigging in some areas, the Iranian election campaign "gave the region an example of vigorous, authentic democracy, years ahead of what passes for elections in most Arab countries, and very different from recent elections held under American or Israeli occupation".

Ahmadinejad's campaign themes were social justice for the poor, the redistribution of Iran's oil wealth, a crackdown on high-profile corruption, and a return to the traditional values and "spiritual purity" of the 1979 Islamic revolution. According to Seale, if Ahmadinejad is able to implement it, "his radical programme is in stark contrast to the situation in several Arab countries, where the state is all too often reduced to a hollow shell by the greed of a privileged and corrupt elite, which dominates the economy and operates largely above the law and out of the control of state institutions and the state bureaucracy."

That Ahmadinejad's victory came contrary to predictions, almost all of which put Rafsanjani as the forerunner, pushed many analysts to call for a re-reading of the Iranian scene. Many criticised as misleading stereotyped coverage of Iran, arguing that it merely echoed Western coverage rather than offering a genuine Arab perspective on Iranian matters. In the Saudi newspaper Al-Riyadh, Abdullah Al-Qafari asked how could someone so unnoticed by so many come so visibly to the fore.

"This big surprise encourages us to re-read the whole Iranian scene in a different way than the reading which appeared in most of the analysis published on the elections' fortnight."

Focussing on the Arab media coverage of Iranian affairs--and in particular Iran's presidential elections -- Abul-Fadl Salehi, head of the Iranian Cultural Centre in Beirut, wrote in the Lebanese daily Assafir that a barrage of contradictions and misrepresentations showed that a deep understanding of events in Iran was lacking. Citing an example, Salehi wrote that at the beginning reports focussed on how the Iranian president is just a cosmetic façade and that real authority lies in the hands of the spiritual guide, Ali Khamenei and the Guardian Council. Later on, when the presidential race intensified, reports reflected concern about how the expected new president would address the internal and external affairs of Iran, including fears about the future of Iran's relations with neighbouring Arab countries, expectations of the collapse of negotiations with Europe regarding Iran's nuclear file, and the possibility of referring Iran to the UN Security Council.

"Unfortunately, there is a great resemblance between the way Arab media handles Iranian affairs and the Western media." Salehi called on the Arab media to break its dependency on norms that the Western media adopts when covering Iran and other Islamic and Arab countries. He also called on Arab commentators and analysts to dig deep into the Iranian political scene, to thoroughly comprehend it so as to be able to give their own vision and understanding and thus influence the West.

He explained that Iran is an influential and strategic neighbour to Arab countries on political, economic, security and cultural levels. Increasingly, Iran's profile is rising: there is Iran's stance towards the US in regional and international issues and the US and Zionist stance towards Iran. "Hence if the Arab media succeeded in reflecting the true image of what is going on in Iran then it will be able to play an effective role in Arab-Iranian rapprochement, all to the benefit of the Arab region and its people."

Mohamed Fadel in the Emirati Al-Bayan wrote, in an article entitled "Did the Iranians Surprise the World Again?" that Iranian voters repeated the same scenario twice: once in 1997 when they voted for Khatami, and now when they voted for Ahmadinejad, contrary to all expectations. There are eight years between the two votes but the way the external world reads the Iranian elections remains the same. He explained that in the 1997 elections the world dealt with the conservative candidate Nateq-Nouri as the forerunner and Rafsanjani's successor, that he was sometimes received as a head of state in foreign countries, until Iranian voters surprised everyone and voted for Khatami. In the 2005 elections, the world dealt with Rafsanjani as the undoubted next president and again came the surprise with Ahmadinejad's victory. "Thus, along the eight years both the Arabs and the West prove that their norms in dealing with Iran are based on a pre-judged stereotyped analysis."

Also in Al-Bayan Lebanese writer Joseph Samaha described Ahmadinejad's victory over Rafsanjani as the victory of the poor south over the wealthy north. In an article entitled "Tehran: the South beats the North" he wrote that Rafsanjani represents Tehran's north and Ahmadinejad represents its south, with the north moving away, via increasing wealth brought on by trade and industry, from the purist principles of the 1979 revolution and towards the state.

On the other hand, the south is poor, over-populated, its women always in black. Those who fought for the revolution, offering hundreds of thousands of martyrs, suffer unemployment and deteriorating living conditions. Perhaps Ahmadinejad's victory is a sign that the south now insists that the revolution should serve them.

"The confrontation was between two conservatives but it was also between two social backgrounds: Rafsanjani the wealthy Iranian and Ahmadinejad the voice of the poor, and since these poor are the majority they pushed for his victory."