Tehran Supports The Arab Spring ... But Not In Syria

Iran's regime has always been ready to compromise its principles – hence its hypocrisy over pro-democracy uprisings

By Saeed Kamali Dehghan
This commentary was published in The Guardian on 18/04/2011

Boys hold a banner during a demonstration in the the Syrian port city of Banias on April 17, 2011. Photograph: Str/Reuters 

 

The wave of uprisings sweeping across the Middle East has prompted Iran to voice support for anti-dictatorship movements in the Arab region – except in Syria, an allied country where the Islamic republic has found itself in a very peculiar situation.

When Tunisian and Egyptian protesters overthrew their dictators, many speculated that Iran would stay quiet, so as to avoid potential copycat activities at home.

To the surprise of many observers, though, Iran reacted very publicly by supporting pro-democracy movements in the region while playing down any resemblance to unrest in Iran following the disputed presidential election of 2009.

Similarities between Mubarak and Iran's former dictator, the shah (such as long-term American support and the corruption of their families) allowed the regime in Tehran to liken the Arab uprisings to the Islamic revolution in 1979 rather than the green movement. Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, even labelled the Arab uprising as "an Islamic awakening" inspired by Iran's 1979 revolution.

"Today's events in the north of Africa, Egypt, Tunisia and certain other countries have another sense for the Iranian nation. They have special meaning. This is the same Islamic awakening which resulted in the victory of the big revolution of the Iranian nation," he told the crowd at his Friday prayer sermon in February.

In response, Iran's opposition accused the regime of hypocrisy by praising pro-democracy movements abroad while refusing to allow a single anti-regime demonstration at home. In reality, Iran not only stayed outspoken over the Arab uprising by publicising its "Islamic awakening" scenario, but also used the opportunity – with media attention focused elsewhere – to place its opposition leaders, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, under house arrest in mid-February without much international protest.

Although Iran has opposed the no-fly zone over Libya, partly out of a principled rejection of western policies, it has focused more on unrest in Yemen and especially in Bahrain, where a 70% Shia majority is ruled by a Sunni minority.

In regard to Bahrain, Iran has rightly accused the US of supporting King Hamad, the despotic leader of a strategically important country that hosts the US Fifth Fleet, and has attacked it for staying silent towards Bahrain's brutal suppression of its popular uprising and the Saudi military intervention there.


By highlighting US hypocrisy in dealing with the unrest in Bahrain and Yemen and the American failure to publicly condemn the violence used by both governments in suppressing their own people, Iran has won some recognition within the region. Yet Syria clearly exposes Iran's own hypocrisy.

Iran has portrayed the Syrian pro-democracy demonstrators – unlike others in the Arab world – as "agitators" and "terrorists" hired by Israel to create disturbance and insecurity.

Iranian state media, which initially ignored the unrest in Syria, later reported the broadcast of "confessions" of a group of "Syrian agitators" who appeared in front of the Syrian state-run television cameras. "This group of people [those who confessed on TV] travelled a while ago to Israel and have been paid to send photos and videos taken from the unrest in Syria to foreigners," Iran's IRNA state news agency quoted Syrian SANA state news agency as saying.

Iran's broadcast of the coerced confessions of the Syrian protesters came as no surprise for Iranians themselves, who have witnessed TV confessions and show trials of several members of the green movement since the unrest in 2009.

Iran has always been ready to compromise its principles when that serves its purposes. In recent years Iran has found itself in a corner, with Syria as one of its few friends – leading the Iranian regime to portray Syria's largely secular government as an Islamic one. Thus, the measures taken by Syria in July 2010 to curb the use of the Muslim facial veil (and recently overturned) were not reported in Iran's state media at all.

Iran's reaction to the recent events in the Middle East more than anything exposes the hypocrisy of an opportunistic regime that respects the human rights neither of its own people nor of those in its neighbourhood.