Khamenei's Political 'Purification' Plans Set To Continue
Narrowing down the circle of trusted regime insiders, a process dubbed by critics as political "purification" ruthlessly continues in Iran.
Narrowing down the circle of trusted regime insiders, a process dubbed by critics as political "purification" ruthlessly continues in Iran.
This is a process the hard core of the Islamic regime in Iran has persistently followed since 1979. A report in Khabar Online website this week said similar processes in other ideological regimes have gradually led to the collapse of those regimes.
In Iran, the latest examples included the disqualification of former parliament Speaker Ali Larijani in the 2021 Presidential election which came as a surprise even to regime insiders.
Before that the regime's vetting process disqualified and effectively discredited former Presidents Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his predecessors Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani who finally drowned during a swim in a suspicious incident, and Mohammad Khatami whose name and pictures are not allowed in government newspapers.
Former Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani openly discussed the process and coined the word "purification" [Khales Sazi, in Persian] for barring some heavyweight regime insiders from elections and giving opportunities to sheepish and more loyal aspirants to rise to power.
Larijani spoke out after he was angered by the publication of a news story on the website of IRGC-linked Tasnim news agency in May.
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, ahead of the 2020 Majles elections called for the nomination of "young revolutionaries," signaling a new round of purification.
The outcome was the rise to power of more than 200 new members of parliament who, according to critics, believe in no principle other than climbing the ladder of power, and failed to introduce even one bill that would serve the nation's interests. Their only function so far has been echoing Khamenei's hardline domestic policies and trumpeting his irrational and paranoid anti-US and anti-Israeli foreign policy.
The website wrote that purification started in Iran with the 1905 constitutional revolution during which traditional Shiite clerics opposed any sign of the modernism advocated by intellectuals. The same process was renewed after nearly half a century later with the 1979 Islamic revolution when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s supporters set fire to cinemas and cultural centers, barred women from active social life and imposed compulsory hijab.
It was then followed by a "cultural revolution" that led to several years of keeping universities closed and the execution of thousands of young men who believed in ideologies other than that of the Islamic Republic. That was followed by Khamenei's conspiracy theory of a western cultural onslaught which culminated in the murders of intellectuals and writers in the 1990s.
Next came the omission of reform minded individuals in the early 2000s. The same thing happened to President Ahmadinejad when some of his vice presidents were called "deviates" by politicians and clerics close to Khamenei. The development was ironic as Ahmadinejad himself was the product of Khamenei's purification process which involved replacing reform-minded individuals in the government with ultraconservatives.
In a backlash, moderates under President Hassan Rouhani took over for a difficult eight-year period (2013-2021) during which the ultraconservatives went out of their way to obstruct his moves to get closer to the West, with a more open foreign policy.
Khamenei's answer was his biggest purification operation by engineering ultraconservative's takeover of the government and the Majles in the 2020 and 2021 elections.
The method was straightforward. He used the Guardian Council loyal to him to disqualify hundreds of candidates.
Although the consolidation of ultraconservatives' power has led to nothing Khamenei or his men can be proud of, it appears that he is keen to continue the purification.
However, there is no bright outlook for purification in the horizon as it is easy to get rid of the old guard, but it is dreadfully difficult to replace it with others who can run the daily affairs of the state.
Mehrabian said that water treatment facilities have resumed operations since Tuesday evening and are working at full capacity. “We are trying to raise the water pressure back to the normal level gradually,” he said. But videos on social media showed tankers distributing water to residents on Wednesday.
Drinking water outage which started in some districts of the capital Tehran Friday has impacted not only households but also many businesses, particularly restaurants. Beside regular household use, the outage has disrupted the use of cooling systems in houses when often near 40 degrees Celsius during the day at this time of the year.
Videos sent to Iran International TV by citizens indicate that outage or low pressure has continued in some of the areas of the capital. They also say water tankers are still distributing water in various neighborhoods.
Reports from Tehran also indicate that bottled water has vanished from shelves in some areas of the capital and the price has gone up too.
The water outage started when torrential rains flooded rivers and caused extensive landslides in various areas of the country including around the capital where riverbeds were completely blocked by debris from the mountains.
Karaj, the capital of Alborz Province, which is a city of over 1.6 million only about 40 kilometers (25 miles) to the west of Tehran has also been affected by the outage.
Some citizen reports on social media indicate that the outage has continued in some areas of the city despite officials’ claims that it ended at midday Monday.
Many citizens have expressed anger on social media over lack of accountability by the water supply network officials who did not provide timely warnings to citizens and repeatedly claimed the outage would end within hours.
Water shortage has been threatening the Iranian capital of 10m for years. Causes include drought and the massive waste of water due to the dilapidation of the distribution infrastructures.
Iran has been suffering from drought for at least a decade and officials have been warning of a further decrease in precipitation. The volume of water in the five dams that supply Tehran, for instance, has consistently been going down in recent years.
Mohammadreza Bakhtiari, the former CEO of Tehran Water and Sewerage Company, said in early April that about 20 percent of drinking water in Tehran, as much as 300,000 cubic meters, goes to waste before reaching households and businesses.
In recent years, massive protests have occurred in several cities against government mismanagement of water resources, harmful dam building, and politically motivated diversion of rivers that have devastated agriculture and drinking water sources in many areas.
In July 2021, water protests erupted in several cities in the oil-rich Khuzestan province that ended with the forceful intervention of police and the Revolutionary Guards. More than ten people were killed and hundreds detained during the protests that lasted a week.
In November of the same year, thousands protested in Esfahan over lack of water for agriculture where the iconic Zayandeh-Roud river has turned into a dry bed over the past few years. The protests soon turned into anti-government unrest.