Iran experts believe the symbolism of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s death is overwhelming and that the regime will struggle to fill the power vacuum

By Robert Tait 

The Guardian

Even before US and Israeli missiles began raining down, those sensing the winds of change were forecasting a Berlin Wall moment for Iran.

Mass nationwide demonstrations in January – although savagely repressed, causing the deaths of an estimated tens of thousands – were seen as portents of a reckoning for the country’s ruling theocrats, just as the popular breaching of Berlin’s fearful symbol of Europe’s cold war division spelled the downfall of East Germany’s communist regime in 1989.

Now the sudden death of Iran’s most powerful figure, the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – killed, with his wife, in an Israeli missile strike on his supposedly secure compound in Tehran last Saturday – has further fuelled the belief that profound transformation is at hand.

“I think the death of Khamenei is close to a Berlin Wall moment, in the sense that it marks the end of an era,” said Abbas Milani, director of Iranian studies at Stanford University. “I think the psychological effect is profound.”

Khamenei, 86, sat atop Iran’s Islamic power structure for 37 years – nearly a decade longer than the Berlin Wall lasted. As the senior religious authority in the country’s system of velayat-e faqih – rule by Islamic jurisprudence adopted after the 1979 Islamic revolution – he had the final say on all state matters.

These included whether to negotiate with the US on Iran’s nuclear programme, recognition of Israel, women’s dress codes, and whether to bow to demands from below for liberalising social reforms.

Khamenei tended towards intransigence on all these matters – and many more.

While some analysts have argued that the Islamic republic is not a personalised dictatorship and thus capable of surviving a change of leadership, Milani – the author of numerous books on Iran – disagrees.

“It was a personalised leadership,” he said. “If you read what [the former president Hassan] Rouhani and [Mohammad Javad] Zarif [the former foreign minister] were saying in the last few months, every time they talked about higher powers rejecting their warnings that Iran was on the wrong path and couldn’t fight the United States and Israel together, every idiot knew that they were talking about Khamenei.”

His sudden and violent removal leaves a political vacuum that serving members of the regime may struggle to fill, even though a succession plan was put in place in anticipation of his death and is already under way, with Khamenei’s son Mojtaba emerging as a frontrunner to succeed him.

“What’s the Mike Tyson quote about plans? Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face,” said Naysan Rafati, senior Iran analyst with the International Crisis Group.

“His death and replacement would have been a challenging moment for the system under any circumstances. But it’s happening in the most violent conditions that the state could have anticipated with the potential targeting of anyone who is announced to succeed him and people in the transition council that is supposed to hold the reins while this process takes place.”

There have been abundant signs of the regime creaking under the strain.

Khamenei’s funeral, an event the authorities would normally have wanted to hype for maximum propaganda effect, has been postponed lest US and Israeli forces add to the number of regime figures already killed by targeting senior officials in attendance.

For the same reason, the Assembly of Experts – an 88-member clerical body charged with electing a new leader – met remotely this week rather than at its headquarters in the shrine city of Qom, which was bombed on Tuesday.

In the penal system, authorities have intensified pressure on political prisoners even while freeing other inmates on bail amid reports that some jails have been struck in the bombardment.

Prisoners in ward 209, a special high-security section for political inmates in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison run by Iran’s intelligence ministry, have reportedly been dispersed to other locations in case the facility is bombed, as it was by Israel in last June’s 12-day war.

After reports of celebrations at news of Khamenei’s death, security forces are said to have fired live rounds at the windows of homes from which anti-regime slogans have been shouted – a common activity during the recent unrest.

In what appears to be an attempt to intimidate opponents while sustaining their own morale, members of the hardline Basij militia have reportedly been cruising residential neighbourhoods in their cars while blaring out pro-regime slogans.

Despite these efforts, some analysts question the regime’s ability to retain power while clinging to its previous diehard principles minus the presence of the unyielding Khamenei, who stands accused of painting it into a corner by blocking attempts to evolve.

“Khamenei, by his intransigence, by his dogmatism, and by this mass murder [of protesters] that he ordered, made it impossible for any iteration of this regime to survive,” said Milani, arguing that the velayat-e faqih system is “completely dead” regardless of who is chosen to replace Khamenei.

“I think he was a kind of person who resented the idea that there might be an Iran without him, or there might be a regime without him.”

Yet the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the elite force which Khamenei is said to have empowered by granting it control over vast segments of the economy in exchange for its support, could redeem itself, argued Alex Vatanka, Iran programme director at the Middle East Institute in Washington.

Redemption could come through easing the domestic repression favoured by Khamenei – an approach that would probably require a more pliable successor than Mojtaba Khamenei – to placate a population still angry over the crushing of the recent protests.

At the same time, they could play the nationalist card by invoking the traditional Iranian Shia spirit of martyrdom originating in the seventh-century Battle of Karbala to defend the country from its US and Israeli assailants, a posture closely in line with ideology of the regime’s keenest followers.

“This is the part that certainly Donald Trump does not understand,” Vatanka said. “For a lot of these people, this is maybe something that they’ve been waiting for. It’s a way out from being held accountable for all their crimes against their own people.

“Suddenly they are going from being accused of killing protesters just a few weeks ago to, in the eyes of some Iranians at least, defending the homeland.”

Milani said the regime’s surviving elements no longer possessed the means or the power of intimidation over the populace to hold power by fear alone.

“You need an apparatus of oppression,” he said. “They don’t have enough people willing to kill for them. They still have some but they have lost that focused will that allowed, for example, the Communist party in China to survive after Tiananmen Square.

“And you need a population that is frightened. Fear has dissipated. In Iran, when fear dissipates, authoritarian and pseudo-totalitarian regimes can’t survive.”