Iran is moving close to tipping point of revolution
An Iranian opposition supporter shows his defiance next to a burning police motorcycle
When does an uprising become a revolution? Throughout history, demonstrations, strikes and riots have brought crowds out on to the streets and threatened governments. In most countries a swift crackdown coupled with political concessions have usually contained popular unrest. But when violence is extreme, anger long pent up and regimes lose their nerve, a tipping point is reached and revolution sweeps the land. Has Iran reached that point?
The classic revolutions, those that changed world affairs, have come when the dam of repression could no longer hold. The grievances of the French peasants under the ancien régime or of the workers in tsarist Russia had been building up for years. It was only when an attempt was made to accommodate their demands that the would-be revolutionaries were emboldened to strike. The French aristocracy lost its repressive nerve and the mob turned on them. The Tsar abdicated, Alexander Kerensky’s Provisional Government proposed widespread reform — and the Bolsheviks seized their chance. Political concessions are often the harbinger of revolution.
In those countries where a threatened government has redoubled its repression or called up troops to shoot and arrest demonstrators, uprisings have often fizzled out. Saddam Hussein faced wholesale revolt in southern Iraq in 1991 after his defeat in the Gulf War but the Revolutionary Guard put down the rebels with such ferocity that the cowed Shia population was brutalised into submission. Saddam and his regime survived.
Foreign troops can do the job just as well. In East Germany the 1953 riots and demonstrations in East Berlin against the repression of Walter Ulbricht’s satellite Communist Government were swiftly suppressed with the use of troops backed by the huge contingent of the Soviet occupying force. The Hungarian Uprising was crushed in 1956 by Soviet tanks and the Prague Spring, 12 years later, turned to winter when Moscow led an attack by the Warsaw Pact.
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There were no concessions, no attempts to buy off discontent or allow the rebels any political legitimacy. How different from the wave of revolutions across Eastern Europe in 1989. East Germany’s communist leaders were counting on Moscow to back their repression with force but Mikhail Gorbachev refused and his message to the communist dinosaurs across the Soviet bloc was that they should follow his lead in promoting reform, but otherwise they were on their own. The cracks appeared first in East Germany when Erich Honecker, the Communist Party chief, was ousted. The demonstrators were emboldened. The army was forbidden to open fire and when the crowd surged up against the Berlin Wall, the breach was made and the regime collapsed with barely a life lost.
The same happened in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria. It was different in Romania. There were no concessions, no let-up in the Securitate’s arrests and no revolutionary leaders in waiting, but when, in one moment of hesitant confusion at a public rally, Nicolae Ceausescu showed himself vulnerable, even the army abandoned him.
Once a regime has lost the support of its police and armed forces, revolution is almost inevitable. Marcello Caetano, the successor of the Antonio Salazar, Portugal’s long-time dictator, attempted to prolong his fascist rule and grip on overseas colonies but when the monocled head of the Army, General Antonio de Spinola, wrote a book suggesting that the policy was untenable, the regime’s military underpinning was shattered. In 1974 revolution swept the country and the police did nothing to halt it.
According to reports some of Iran’s police have also refused to fire on demonstrators. For the moment, however, President Ahmadinejad appears secure, for he has the zealous support of the basij militias and the Revolutionary Guard. He has also made no attempt to buy off the protesters with concessions that might embolden their demands.
Nervous Iranians attempting to quell the opposition cannot conclude, however, that their hard line will hold. President Mugabe also thought that his “veterans” and bully boys could intimidate the opposition in Zimbabwe but, when the soldiers showed the restlessness of those who had no money and no food, he was forced to make enough concessions to bring Morgan Tsvangirai into government. For the moment, he has survived, but the struggle in Zimbabwe is not over.
Extreme and prolonged brutality can usually stave off revolution for a long time. The Stalinist dynasty in North Korea has survived longer than outsiders expected, despite starvation and economic collapse.
Iran’s leaders do not have the advantage of three generations of autocracy. Indeed, their own example, of fomenting a revolution against the Shah, is a living memory to millions of Iranians and encouragement to their opponents to do the same. The tipping point may come sooner than it has in uprisings elsewhere.
