Quarreling over Ghosts

By Thomas A. Sancton

The hostage release grows into a burning internal issue

Like ghosts haunting the attic of their past, the 52 American hostages continue to provoke shrill quarrels among their Iranian tormentors. Last week the circumstances of their negotiated release grew into the focal issue of the country's internal political struggle. Each of the opposing positions was riddled with Persian irony and paradox.

On one side stood the clergy-dominated Islamic Republican Party (I.R.P.), which had rabidly supported the taking of the hostages yet ultimately negotiated their release with the nation they called "the Great Satan." On the other side were the moderate supporters of President Abolhassan Banisadr, who had long called for an end to the crisis but now denounced the deal with Washington as a humiliating national sellout. In the wings lingered Iran's pro-Moscow Communists, temporarily in league with the right-wing mullahs but waiting for economic and political chaos to make the country ripe for a Soviet-sponsored takeover.

The moderates fired first with a volley of blistering editorials in Banisadr's daily Enghelab-e-Eslami. Noting that the government had recovered only $2.8 billion of its $12 billion in frozen assets--and not a cent of the Shah's fortune--the paper blamed the original, clerically supported seizure of the hostages for most of the country's appalling problems.

Charged one editorial: "It stimulated anti-Iranian feelings on an international scale ... caused the economic boycott with the consequent downfall of national economic growth, and finally provided the grounds for the Iran-Iraq war."

Responding for the mullahs' camp, Prime Minister Mohammed Ali Raja'i rose in the parliament to defend the government's handling of the negotiations. Iran's problems, he asserted, resulted from its revolutionary upheavals and not from the hostage crisis. No other regime, he said, "could have obtained from the United States more than this government has." Chief Hostage Negotiator Behzad Nabavi later conceded that Tehran got much less than the $24 billion it had originally demanded, but added somewhat lamely: "We should avoid looking at the issue through a trader's eyes. Our political gains were far greater."

Sensing the mullahs' vulnerability, Banisadr followed up with the sensational charge that his political foes had twice plotted to murder him. One group of would-be assassins, he said, had planned to shoot him on Nov. 19 during a speech at Ahwaz; another band of plotters had intended to attack his car with rocket-launched grenades. By these allegations, Banisadr dramatically amplified his oft-repeated charge that the I.R.P. power brokers would stop at nothing to consolidate their position. Whether by force or otherwise, the mullahs clearly would have preferred to eliminate Banisadr as a political leader after sweeping last spring's parliamentary elections and ensconcing Raja'i as their figurehead Prime Minister. But the intervening war with Iraq greatly strengthened the President's hand by giving him an active military role as Commander in Chief and winning him the crucial support of the army. Says Barry Rubin of the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies: "Banisadr has won popularity through the war effort. Now he has just a short time to try to tar his opponents with the settlement. It won't remain a hot issue for long."

The current uproar over the hostage deal could indeed be short-lived. But the departure of the 52 Americans may have other enduring consequences by depriving the mullahs of their most effective device for rallying revolutionary support. As Professor Richard Bulliet of Columbia University's Middle East Institute points out, the hostage release also throws into embarrassing relief the fact that the clerical hard-liners simply "cannot run the government." Adds an Iranian politician: "The present government has no chance of solving any of the terrifying economic, social and administrative problems faced by Iran today. The I.R.P. put the most incompetent men available into sensitive positions so that it may use them as marionettes."

A major factor in deciding the power struggle between the mullahs and the moderates will be the support of the revolutionary patriarch, Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, who still has a large popular following despite his diminished role as day-to-day leader. Until recently, Khomeini tended to side with the I.R.P. Now, says an insider of the clerical establishment, he is "gingerly shifting toward the Banisadr camp." The Ayatullah has publicly barred the mullahs from interfering in military affairs, thereby undercutting their ability to criticize and frustrate Banisadr's handling of the war.

Whoever wins the struggle will ultimately have to face a stiff challenge from the far left, whose various factions have thousands of trained guerrillas under arms. The best organized of the leftist groupings are the pro-Moscow Communists, led by the Tudeh Party and including a faction of the guerrilla organization Fadayan-e-Khalq. So far, these groups have opposed Banisadr, whom they suspect of being pro-Western. Instead, they have pretended to support the mullahs, whose bungling feeds the popular discontent necessary for an eventual Communist takeover. Former Foreign Minister Sadegh Ghotbzadeh told TIME last week:

"The Communists have thoroughly penetrated right-wing organizations. Their bankrupt ideology can only grow in filth and squalor. So the more chaos the better."

Thus the final showdown could be between the Communists and the moderates. According to some Iranian analysts, the best thing the U.S. can do to shore up the moderate forces is simply to remain aloof. That would deprive the militant clergy of any further opportunity to smother criticism of their own incompetence under a barrage of anti-U.S. rhetoric. --By Thomas A. Sancton.

Reported by Roberto Sum/Washington

With reporting by Roberto Sum/Washington

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