In Iran, a Hostage-Taker Is Now Hostage

          
          Robin Wright -- In IlBn, Mohsen MiMamadi Is a Target of His Own Re , ,, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp.dyn/oontent/artioleI2009/08/07/AR...
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          In Iran, a Hostage-Taker Is Now Hostage _____________
          By Robin Wright
          Sunday, Augu 9, 2009
          Last week Iran's theocracy widened its crackdown from
          suppressing an opposition movement to putting on trial
          the very revolutionaries who launched the Islamic
          republic. This new purge may be more profound
          politically than the campaign against the followers ofMir
          Hossein Mousavi: The Iranian revolution is eating its
          children.
          Mohsen Mirdamadi saw it all coning He warned me
          about it five years ago. The only thing he didn't foresee
          was his own role. Last week, he sat in a revolutionary
          court, dressed in gray prison pajamas, as one of its
          victims.
          I've followed Mirdamadi since the 1979 U.S. Embassy
          takeover. In 1981, I stood below the plane that brought 52
          American diplomats to freedom in Algeria and wondered
          about the type of people who seized, interrogated and
          brutalized hostages for 444 days. Mirdamadi was one of
          three ringleaders. Former hostage John Limbert remembers
          him as “particularly nasty.” I met him a decade ago.
          A surprisingly small man, Mirdamadi
          took the powerful chairmanship of
          parliament's national security and foreign
          relations committee, a platform he used
          to advocate political openings, freedom of
          assembly and speech, women's rights,
          and an independent press, albeit within _________
          the boundaries of Islamic propriety. He
          launched the newspaper Norouz - - or ___________ _____
          New Year -- which advocated the rule of ____________ ______
          law and challenged authority. Ultimately,
          the authorities charged him with libel,
          subversion, “encouraging hooligans to
          Like many early revolutionaries, Mirdamadi had evolved over the intervening two decades from
          a scruffy student radical into a balding, pinstnpe-suited realist. In 2000, he ran for parliament as
          a reformer.
          “Our emphasis originally was on winning independence from foreign influence and creating an
          Islamic state,” he explained at the spartan headquarters of the Islamic Iran Participation Front,
          just two blocks from the old U.S. Embassy. “But today our emphasis is on freedoms Our
          tactics have shifted, too. Before, we carried out a revolution. Today, we're trying evolution.”
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          1 of 4
          8/10/2009 10:5 1 AM
        

          
          Robin Wright -- In IlBn, Mohsen MiMamadi Is a Target of His Own Re , ,, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp.dyn/oontent/artioleI2009/08/07/AR...
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          Mirdamadi came to represent the forces
          that carry revolutions into their final
          phase, what Crane Brinton in his classic “The Anatomy of Revolution” called “the
          convalescence.” But he apparently went too far. When he registered to run for reelection in
          2004, he was disqualified by the clerical Council of Guardians despite his fame. Dozens of
          incumbents and some 2,500 others were also disqualified. Mirdamadi led a mass resignation of
          124 parliamentarians, almost half the total, in protest. It was the beginning, he told me a few
          months later, of what he feared would become a “bloodless coup.”
          In 2006, he became leader of his party, the largest reform faction. In 2008, he backed Mousavi
          for president. And in June, he was among the first arrested when Iran's uprising erupted. While
          Mirdamadi was in parliament, Amnesty International issued 13 “urgent action” appeals asking
          supporters to write him demanding the release of political prisoners. Last month, it issued an
          appeal about him -- as a political prisoner.
          Mirdamadi sat in court last week with 100 others, including a former vice president, cabinet
          members, presidential advisers and spokesmen. An Iranian news agency said some may face
          charges of being “mohareb,” or God's enemy, which can carry the death penalty. The best-ease
          seenano is that, after more “confessions,” they are pardoned but banned from politics and their
          parties dissolved.
          The irony -- one of many in the current crisis -- is that the purge taking place to prevent an
          allegedly foreign-backed “velvet revolution” may in fact spur one. President Mahmoud
          Ahmadinejad's inaugural speech Wednesday was full of inane bluster. “We must play a key role
          in the management of the world,” he told parliament.
          But the regime only looks more desperate with each passing week. Tens of thousands of
          security forces had to be deployed in Tehran to preserve order on inauguration day, yet
          YouTube snippets still showed Iranians on crowded subway escalators shouting “death to the
          dictator” for all to hear. The widening polarization of society will make it difficult for
          Ahmadinejad to rule during his second term.
          “The goals of the revolution are being forgotten as this government becomes more of a
          dictatorship,” Mirdamadi said, predicting the current turmoil. “But people still want change.”
          eontaet ( robinwright.net
          Robin Wright, aformer Washington Post reporter and apublic policy scholar at the Woodrow
          Wilson International Center for Scholars, is the author offour books on Iran.
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