Khomeini's Kingdom Qum

Rule 1: If it is Western, "we don't want it

For three days, the 300,000 residents of the holy city of Qum had carefully scrubbed the dusty streets and minareted buildings, making ready for the Ayatullah's return. Now, hundreds of thousands of people, chanting "God is great," lined the narrow highway from Tehran to catch a glimpse of him as his motorcade drove by. When the blue Mercedes bearing the 78-year-old Shi'ite leader neared the city, the throng burst through a cordon of police and armed Islamic guerrillas. It engulfed the car in a sea of humanity so dense that it took nearly an hour for the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini to complete the last mile and a half of his journey. Finally, he mounted the steps of a golden-domed shrine and looked out in triumph over Qum.

It was there that Khomeini, in the courtyard of a theological seminary, had first attacked Iran's monarchy 16 years earlier, leading to his arrest and a long foreign exile. Now, in the same courtyard, the architect of the Iranian revolution delivered a homecoming address that was part sermon, part campaign speech. Before a crowd estimated at nearly a million, he vowed to "devote the remaining one or two years of my life" to reshaping Iran "in the image of Muhammad." This would be done, he said, by the purge of every vestige of Western culture from the land. "We will amend the newspapers. We will amend the radio, the television, the cinemas," he intoned. "All of these should follow the Islamic pattern."

Nor would his proposed Islamic republic be based on Western models. "What the nation wants is an Islamic republic," he proclaimed. "Not just a republic, not a democratic republic, not a democratic Islamic republic. Just an Islamic republic. Do not use the word 'democratic.' That is Western, and we don't want it." When Khomeini concluded, the crowd's cheers filled the air for minutes.

That adoring reception proved, if proof was needed, that Khomeini remains the pivotal figure in a revolution that is still taking shape and is far from under control. In fact, uncertainty about the Ayatullah's intentions had threatened the fledgling government of his hand-picked Prime Minister, Mehdi Bazargan. On the eve of Khomeini's departure from Tehran, Bazargan leveled an emotional attack on the Komiteh, an 80-member group controlled by Khomeini and made up of mullahs and other Iranians with fervent Islamic convictions.

The Komiteh, Bazargan charged, had become a parallel government that not only interfered with his struggling administration, but was tarnishing the revolution. "They persecute us, they arrest people, they issue orders, they oppose our appointments," Bazargan said, speaking with the indignation with which he formerly criticized the Shah. "They have turned my day into night." If the Komiteh is not curbed, he warned, "we would have no alternative but to resign."

When Khomeini returned from his Paris exile a month ago, triggering the collapse of the Shah's last appointed government, the Komiteh had been presented as a temporary organization that would help guide the revolution for a short time but then would gradually turn over its power to the Bazargan government. Instead, its authority has grown to rival that of the Prime Minister.

The Komiteh's specialty, like that of the Jacobins during the French Revolution, has been summary revolutionary justice. It conducts secret tribunals in the middle of the night. In the past month, the Komiteh, and the replicas of it that have sprung up in every Iranian city, have imposed the death sentence on more than a score of the Shah's former soldiers, SAVAK agents and police. The executions have outraged civil libertarians, who are disturbed not only by the killings but by the star chamber proceedings at which the verdicts are handed down. Said a chagrined political science professor at Tehran University: "Due process of law is what the revolution was all about."

The Komiteh's purge of suspected Shah loyalists is running many of the experienced supervisors out of the civil service. Without consulting Bazargan's foreign ministry, the Komiteh arranged for the visit by Palestine Liberation Organization Leader Yasser Arafat. It has interfered with Bazargan's effort to establish a national guard so that the regime might restore order and begin the task of recovering at least some of the thousands of weapons that are now in the hands of Iran's broad assortment of left-and right-wing guerrillas. As Bazargan plaintively admitted: "I have no control over the Khomeini Komiteh."

In an attempt to reduce the friction between the Komiteh and the government, Khomeini designated one of his aides as a liaison between the two groups. But it remains to be seen what this will mean in practice. Some Westerners had speculated that the Ayatullah's departure from Tehran would be the first step in turning over more real authority to Bazargan's government. But Khomeini's spokesmen say that he has no intention of relinquishing any of his power to Bazargan or anyone else. This week he will move back to the low stone house on the muddy side street in Qum where he lived before his 1963 arrest. From there, he will continue to issue directives intended to guide Iran's transition to Islamic rule. Explains one aide: "If he can successfully organize the revolution from Paris, he can surely guide the country's reconstruction from Qum."

Khomeini's plans, however, are arousing concern among many Iranians, particularly members of ethnic and religious minorities. Despite assurances by Iran's chief rabbi, Yedidya Shofet, that Khomeini has them "under the protection of Islam," many of Iran's Jews fear that the Islamic revival and the Ayatullah's anti-Israel position will spell trouble for them. Indeed, of the 80,000 Jews who lived in Iran before the revolution, more than 15,000 have left.

A growing number of intellectuals, professionals and members of the middle class fear that instead of ushering in a new era of freedom, the revolution will result in an Islamic dictatorship as repressive as the Shah's regime. Those worries deepened last week when Khomeini passed along his guidelines for the reform of Iran's legal code. He ordered Justice Minister Assadollah Mobasheri to repeal all laws that "contravene Islam." Henceforth, all trials must end "in a final, absolute decision in a single phase." The right of women to seek divorces, established by a 1975 law enacted under the Shah, would be repealed. Corporal punishments, such as flogging for theft or drinking, would be reinstituted. Said a disappointed young female university graduate: "What they are proposing is to turn this wonderful victory into a new set of restrictions on our freedom that rivals the previous regime's."

Radical opposition to Khomeini's theocratic dictates is gathering force. In a potentially ominous turnabout, a leader of the Islamic nationalist mojahedeen guerrillas, who are still battling the Marxist Fedayan-e Khalq,* joined the leftists in their demands for a greater role in running the country. Mojahedeen Commander Massoud Rajavi demanded that all restrictions on the radicals' participation in the government be lifted. He voiced support for the "democratically elected" workers councils that are springing up in virtually every institution from businesses to the air force. Such groups have three times forced the resignation of officers appointed by Bazargan to command the air force.

In Washington, State Department officials, sifting reports of divided political authority and the foundering Iranian economy, wondered if Bazargan's brittle government would soon follow that of Shahpour Bakhtiar into oblivion. Reduced to defensively guarding American interests in Iran rather than actively buttressing Bazargan, U.S. officials were further alarmed by an incident in which a CIA electronic eavesdropping station near the Soviet border was invaded by rebels last week. First reports indicated that mojahedeen guerrillas had assaulted the station, seizing 20 technicians and sophisticated electronic equipment used to monitor Soviet missile tests. It later turned out that local citizens, seeking to make sure that they were paid for some work they had done at the base, had refused to let the technicians leave. After hasty consultations with Washington, Bazargan's government dispatched a plane carrying $200,000 in cash to settle the debt. The technicians were brought back to Tehran on an Iranian military plane, then hustled aboard a civilian flight to Paris.

Though State Department spokesmen asserted that all of the sensitive monitoring equipment had been removed or destroyed before the base was taken over, the episode raised new doubts about the security of the 77 advanced F-14 fighters that the U.S. has supplied to Iran. No American has been allowed to inspect them for three weeks, in part because the Iranians fear an attempt to destroy the equipment to prevent any possibility of its falling into Soviet hands. But the Carter Administration privately admits that there is little it can do to safeguard the planes. "They are entirely in the hands of the Iranians," said a U.S. intelligence officer last week. "They bought them, and they own them."

Another potential embarrassment occurred last week when Shahriar Rouhani, Komeini's spokesman in Washington, announced that his staff had turned up evidence of widespread payoffs by the Shah's regime to many prominent Americans, including Congressmen. The U.S. Justice Department has also opened an investigation of the charge.

The next big event on the Iranian revolution's calendar is the March 30 referendum to be held on the country's new form of government. All Iranians over 16 will be eligible to cast a ballot on a single question: "Do you approve the replacement of the former regime with an Islamic republic, whose constitution will be voted on by the nation at a later date?" Those voting yes will mark part of a ballot colored in the green of Islam, while those who are opposed must choose a portion dyed in the red of Iran's small and still outlawed Tudeh Communist Party. Though Khomeini enjoys overwhelming support among the 30 million Shi'ites who make up about 90% of Iran's population, he is taking no chances on the outcome of the referendum. Each voter will be required to put his name and address on his ballot. Those who dare to vote red could well be providing the Ayatullah with a readymade enemies list. sb

*A Persian name that translates literally as People's Sacrifice guerrillas. The group has been widely but erroneously referred to by the Arabic term fedayeen, which means warriors who are prepared to risk their lives recklessly.

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