CANDIDATES FOR IRAN'S JUNE 17 presidential election recently began registering to run. The entry into the race of three candidates linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the praetorian force created after the 1979 revolution, exemplifies the distinctly military tone the country's politics has taken on recently. This process has important implications for politics inside Iran and for Iran's relations with the international community.
The most recent person to announce his candidacy is Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, who resigned as chief of Iran's national police in the first week of April. Before his appointment as police chief in June 2000, Qalibaf commanded the Revolutionary Guards Air Force. Notably, he was one of the 24 Guards Corps commanders who signed a July 1999 letter to President Mohammad Khatami urging him to act against student demonstrators before the military took matters into its own hands. "Our patience has run out," the letter said. "We cannot tolerate this situation any longer if it is not dealt with."
Qalibaf is popular with younger so-called conservatives associated with the Islamic Iran Developers Council (known by the Persian name Abadgaran), the same group that dominated the February 2004 parliamentary and municipal-council elections in 2003.
Other conservative candidates with a background in the Revolutionary Guards are Mohsen Rezai, who commanded the corps from 1981 to 1997, and Ali Larijani, who served as a political functionary in the corps. Larijani is the favorite of the older mainstream conservative groups, and Rezai has vowed to run as an independent candidate regardless of the support he gets from mainstream figures.
The wild card in the election is Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who served as president from 1989 to 1997. He has consistently said he would prefer to see new faces leading the country, but on May 10 he announced he would become a candidate. He is seen as pragmatic and relatively centrist, and his entry into the race will reduce support for both the conservative and the pro-reform candidates.
The victory of a candidate with a background in the Revolutionary Guards would build on what some observers view as the "conservative coup" in the parliamentary elections of 2004. This could lead to the emergence of a militarized administration that would try to restore the revolutionary and religious values ascendant immediately after the 1979 revolution, and also would try to restore the national unity that existed during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-88. Under those circumstances, dissidents, the weak, and the disenfranchised would have nobody to defend them. For example, reformist legislators exposed the circumstances surrounding the summer 2003 demise of Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi, who was beaten to death while in custody. More recently, it was a former vice president who detailed the torture of imprisoned Internet activists.
The election of a president linked with the Revolutionary Guards would also affect Iran's relationships with other countries, where the nuclear issue is the predominant concern. Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapons capability and is working on the means to deliver such weapons. Yet Tehran claims that it wants nuclear energy only for peaceful purposes, and Iranian officials claim that the country's supreme leader has issued a religious decree banning the use of weapons of mass destruction.
In Iran the nuclear issue is being portrayed in nationalistic terms, and the candidates have played on this. Larijani famously compared the Iran-E.U. agreement suspending uranium enrichment in exchange for economic concessions to a deal trading a pearl for a piece of candy. Rezai warned last year that Europe might misinterpret Iran's cooperation as weakness, and he advocates the resumption of uranium enrichment.
There is the distinct possibility that a militarized Iran, with a new president backed by a conservative legislature, would renounce its international nuclear obligations. While there is little doubt that Iran is already in violation of its commitments, the need to operate clandestinely has slowed the process somewhat. If Iran withdraws from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors no longer have access to Iranian nuclear sites, then the weaponization program can resume, and at an even faster pace than before.
At first glance it would appear that there is little the international community can do in the short term to affect the Iranian presidential election or to stave off the militarization of the country's politics. But the regime apparently thinks otherwise. In particular, it seems to fear the impact of unfiltered information and democracy. It has already started to seize satellite dishes, which are illegal, and fine their owners in an attempt to control news from the outside about the upcoming election. Furthermore, Tehran has denounced recent U.S. efforts to support democracy and human rights activists in Iran.
Support for Iranians' democratic aspirations and the defeat of the Revolutionary Guards in the country's politics could delay Iran's nuclear breakout. There is no guarantee that Iranians will forsake what they interpret as their right to nuclear technology, but a democratic government in Tehran is unlikely to want nuclear weapons or pose a threat to its neighbors or to the United States.
William Samii is the regional analysis coordinator for Southwest Asia at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. The views expressed in this article are his own.