It was one of the most crucial speeches in the life of a man who has been at the centre of Iranian politics since shortly after the tumultuous revolution of 1979. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, is no stranger to drama and upheaval, and this afternoon he signalled his readiness, in the face of the most serious civil protests revolutionary Iran has known, to use force to preserve the Islamic Republic he helped create.
The supreme leader's sermon came a week into a crisis that has pitted one part of the state, represented by the hardline president of the past four years, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, against a second, gathered around the reformist Mir-Hossein Mousavi and his influential backer, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. The flashpoint is the disputed presidential election of 12th June, which Mousavi says was massively rigged in favour of Ahmadinejad, who was proclaimed the winner, leading to a week of massive street protests. So far the security forces have done little to stop the protests, which have been mostly peaceful, but this now seems set to change. If they do not stop, Khamenei warned, the results could be "blood, violence and chaos."
Mousavi's supporters had entertained slight hopes that the official election results, which gave Ahmadinejad 25m votes to Mousavi's 13m, might be substantially revised or the election annulled. These have now been quashed. In his sermon, Khamenei denied that the Islamic Republic "goes in for betrayal in the matter of the people's votes," and referred to Ahmadinejad, who was sitting in front of him, as "the elected president." The stage seems set for a tense, even calamitous, confrontation between Mousavi's supporters and the security forces. Even if Mousavi urges his supporters to cancel a march planned for Saturday afternoon–he has not yet expressed himself–many have indicated they will disregard his advice.
Amid anxiety surrounding Saturday's march, Iranians gathered around their television sets this afternoon will not have been blind to other remarkable, even defining, aspects of Khamenei's performance. I was one of only two western journalists permitted to observe the sermon, under a vast awning on the campus of Tehran University, amid a dramatic tightening of conditions for Iranian journalists, some of whom have been arrested, and new restrictions for their western counterparts.
This was Khamenei's home crowd, an assembly of pious, revolutionary Iranians who regard him as an absolute leader whose word cannot be questioned. They rose from their prayer mats to surge forward on his entry to the room, wept when he confessed himself to be "unworthy" of his task, and chanted, "the blood in our veins is our gift to the supreme leader." In the front rows sat most of Iran's top civilian, judicial and military authorities, with one glaring empty space, that of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Rafsanjani had a big hand in Khamenei's election as supreme leader on the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, in 1989. Rafsanjani has served in four of the country's top positions, but he now stands on the threshold of open opposition.
Khamenei acknowledged these tensions in his sermon, unusually specific for a tradition of oratory that favours vague generalities, when he addressed the hostility that exists between Rafsanjani and Ahmadinejad. The supreme leader rebuked the president for publicly doubting the probity of Rafsanjani's children, but he unambiguously threw his weight behind Ahmadinejad when he said that, of the two men, "the views of the president are closer to mine."
Khomeini famously described the Islamic Republic as a bird with two wings–one representing Islamist ideologues, and the other the socialism-influenced "left." Today's speech leaves little doubt that, from now on, the Islamic Republic will fly without a left wing. Moussavi, a prime minister when the office existed, and many of his influential supporters, are not marginal figures, nor the counter-revolutionaries of hardline caricature: they are working to reform the system from within, and the chances of this happening now seem slim indeed.
Khamenei devoted much of the second part of his address to those European countries that have, following the death of at least seven protestors on Monday, increased their criticism of Iran's handling of the crisis. So far, President Barack Obama, whose priority is to reach an agreement with Iran on limiting Iran's nuclear ambitions, has been relatively muted, but this did not stop Khamenei from lashing out at the US, and at those "hungry wolves" intent on bringing about a "velvet revolution" using agents "planted by the secret services of the west and the Zionist regime."
The supreme leader called Britain "the most abhorrent of all"—an undiplomatic sally that led the Foreign Office to summon Iran's ambassador for a dressing down. It is likely that, apart from Britain's public pronouncements on the crisis—Gordon Brown today condemned Iran's "violence" and "media suppression"—the supreme leader has been riled by the success of the BBC's Persian TV channel, which has been immensely effective in disseminating images of the unrest, much of its provided by normal Iranians, back into the country via satellite.
The election of 2009 has opened wounds in the Islamic Republic that may not heal. More urgently, though, the protesters must decide how to respond to the supreme leader's warning, and the security forces how to act on it.
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