Iran expanding effort to stifle the opposition

By ROBERT F. WORTH

c.2009 New York Times News Service

DAMASCUS, Syria — Stung by the force and persistence of the protests after last summer’s disputed presidential election, the government of Iran appears to be starting a far more ambitious effort to discredit its opponents and re-educate Iran’s mostly young and restive population.

In recent weeks, the government has announced a variety of new ideological offensives.

It is implanting6,000 Basij militia centers in elementary schools across Iran to promote the ideals of the Islamic Revolution and it has created a new police unit to sweep the Internet for dissident voices.

A company affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards acquired a majority share in the nation’s telecommunications monopoly this year, giving the Guards de facto control of Iran’s land-lines, Internet providers and two cell phone companies. And in the spring, the Revolutionary Guards plan to open a news agency with print, photo and television elements.

The government calls it “soft war,” and rooted in an old accusation: that Iran’s domestic ills are the result of Western cultural subversion. The extent of the new government campaign underscores just how much Iran’s clerical and military elite were shaken by the protests, which set off the worst internal dissent since the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been using the phrase “soft war” regularly since September, when he warned a group of artists and teachers that they were living in an “atmosphere of sedition” in which all cultural phenomena must be seen in the context of a vast battle between Iran and the West. He and other officials have since invoked the phrase in describing new efforts to re-Islamize the educational system, purge secular influences and professors, and purify the media of subversive ideas.

There have been periodic earlier campaigns to reinforce the government’s Islamist message throughout society. Some analysts say that the new efforts are unlikely to be any more effective than those in the past, and may even backfire.

“By trying to gain more control of the media, to re-Islamize schools, they think they can make a comeback,” said Mehrzad Boroujerdi, an Iran expert and professor at Syracuse University. “But the enemy here is Iran’s demographics. The Iranian population is overwhelmingly literate and young, and previous efforts to reinstall orthodoxy have only exacerbated cleavages between citizens and the state.”