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Iran
Index
Created in February 1979 by clergy who had been students of
Khomeini before his exile from the country in 1964, the IRP emerged
as the country's dominant political force. Core members included
ayatollahs Beheshti, Abdol-Karim Musavi-Ardabili, and Mohammad Reza
Mahdavi-Kani and hojjatoleslams Khamenehi, Rafsanjani, and Bahonar.
All had been active in mobilizing large crowds for the mass
demonstrations during the Revolution. Following the overthrow of
the shah, the IRP leaders continued to use their extensive contacts
with religious leaders throughout the country to mobilize popular
support. The IRP leaders perceived the secular, leftist, and more
liberal Islamic parties as threats to their own political goals. As
early as the summer of 1979, the IRP encouraged its supporters to
attack political rallies and offices of these other parties.
Although Khomeini himself never became a member of the IRP, the
party leaders exploited their close association with him to project
a popular image of the IRP as the party following the line of the
imam Khomeini. This implicit identification helped IRP candidates
win a majority of seats in the elections for the Assembly of
Experts that drafted the Constitution. During the 1980 elections
for the first Majlis, IRP candidates and independents sympathetic
with most IRP positions again won a majority of the seats. The
party's effective control of the Majlis emboldened the IRP in its
harassment of opponents. Throughout 1980 IRP-organized gangs of
hezbollahis used intimidation tactics against supporters of
other political parties, and consequently, most of the secular
parties were cowed into silence as their leaders fled to foreign
exile.
By 1981 the only political party that could seriously challenge
the IRP was the Mojahedin. This Islamic organization had grown
rapidly in two years from a few hundred supporters to a membership
of 150,000, mostly educated young men and women in the cities, who
were attracted by the Mojahedin's liberal, even radical,
interpretations of traditional Shia concepts. The ideological
conflict between the Mojahedin and the IRP was serious because the
former rejected the IRP argument of a religious basis for the
political principle of velayat-e faqih. In fact, in June
1980 Khomeini denounced the Mojahedin on account of the
organization's insistence that laymen were as qualified as clergy
to interpret religious doctrines. Although the Mojahedin closed
most of its branch offices following this verbal assault, unlike
the secular political parties it was not easily intimidated by
IRP-organized political violence. On the contrary, Mojahedin
members engaged in armed clashes with hezbollahis. Tensions
between Mojahedin and IRP partisans intensified during the
political conflict between Bani Sadr and the IRP leaders. The
Mojahedin lent its support to the beleaguered president; after Bani
Sadr was impeached, the organization rose in armed rebellion
against the IRP-dominated government.
Several of the small leftist parties joined the Mojahedin
uprising. These included the Paykar, a prerevolutionary Marxist
splinter from the Mojahedin, and the Fadayan Minority. The latter
had split from the main Fadayan (thereafter referred to as the
Fadayan Majority) in 1980 after a majority of the party's Central
Committee had voted to support the government. Both the Paykar and
the Fadayan Minority shared the view of the Mojahedin that the IRP
was "merely a group of fascist clerics blocking a true revolution."
The Mojahedin had a much broader base of support than did either of
its allies, but the combined strength of all the parties could not
match the capabilities of the IRP in terms of mobilizing masses of
committed supporters. Thus, the government eventually was able to
break the back of the armed opposition. The Mojahedin survived
largely because its leader, Masud Rajavi, escaped to France, where
he reorganized the party while in exile.
Not all of the leftist parties supported the Mojahedin's call
to arms. Significantly, both the Tudeh and the Fadayan Majority
condemned the insurrection and proclaimed their loyalty to the
constitutional process. Even though these parties were permitted to
function within narrowly circumscribed limits, the IRP leaders
remained deeply suspicious of them. Both parties were distrusted
because of their espousal of Marxist ideas. In addition, a
widespread perception prevailed that the Tudeh was subservient to
the Soviet Union, an attitude derived from the Tudeh's historic
practice of basing its own foreign policy stances upon the line of
the Soviet Union. In the autumn of 1982, toleration for the Tudeh
dissipated quickly once the party began to criticize the decision
to take the Iran-Iraq War into Iraqi territory. In February 1983,
the government simultaneously arrested thirty top leaders of the
Tudeh and accused them of treason. The party was outlawed, its
offices closed, and members rounded up. Subsequently, Tudeh leaders
were presented on television, where they confessed to being spies
for the Soviet Union.
After the spring of 1983, the only nonreligious political party
that continued to operate with legal sanction was the IFM.
Prominent members included the former prime minister, Bazargan, and
the former foreign minister, Ibrahim Yazdi, both of whom were
elected to the first Majlis in 1980. The IFM opposed most of the
policies of the IRP. Whenever Bazargan or another IFM member dared
to speak out against IRP excesses, however, gangs of
hezbollahis ransacked party offices. Bazargan was subjected
to verbal abuse and even physical assault. He was powerless to
protect one of his closest associates from being tried and
convicted of treason for actions performed as an aide in the
provisional government. Although Bazargan was reelected to the
Majlis in 1984, he was barred from being a candidate in the 1985
presidential elections. In practice, the IFM has been intimidated
into silence, and thus its role as a loyal opposition party has
been largely symbolic.
The IRP's success in silencing or eliminating organized
opposition was directed not only at political parties but also was
extended to other independent organizations. Even religious
associations were not exempt from being forcibly disbanded if they
advocated policies that conflicted with IRP goals. Although it
emerged as the dominant political party, the IRP leadership failed
to institutionalize procedures for developing the IRP into a
genuine mass party. IRP offices were set up throughout the country,
but in practice these did not function to recruit members. Rather,
the offices served as headquarters for local clergy who performed
a variety of political roles distinct from purely party functions.
At both the national and the local levels, the IRP's clerical
leaders perceived themselves as responsible for enforcing uniform
Islamic behavior and thought. Thus, they generally viewed the party
as a means of achieving this goal and not as a means of
articulating the political views of the masses. In actuality,
therefore, the IRP remained essentially an elitist party.
The debate within the political elite on power distribution and
economic policy also adversely affected the IRP. Intensified
dissent over economic programs, beginning in 1986, virtually
paralyzed the party. Consequently, President Khamenehi, who had
become the IRP's secretary general in 1981 following the death of
Beheshti and several other key party leaders, decided it would be
politically expedient to disband the IRP. Khamenehi and Rafsanjani
jointly signed a letter to Khomeini in June 1987, in which they
notified him of the party's polarization and requested his consent
to dissolve the party. The faqih agreed, and the political
party that had played such an important role during the first eight
years of the Republic ceased to exist.
Data as of December 1987
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