Diplomacy Of Terror

By Bruce W. Nelan

Squeezed to the point of pain by low oil prices and overdue debts, Iran is beginning to mind its manners. Tehran is trying to convince the world that it is responsible and, above all, creditworthy. In spite of the country's best efforts, Western officials say they are not fooled; they insist that there is too much visible evidence that Tehran sponsors terrorists and is driving to develop nuclear weapons. Even the sober, measured Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, unhesitatingly denounces Iran as "an international outlaw." A senior Western diplomat in Tehran is more specific. "They are meddling in the Middle East," he says, "and they are still murdering people in Europe."

Egypt and Algeria say flatly that Iran is the clandestine backer of the Islamic fundamentalist bombers and gunmen who have declared war on the secular governments in Cairo and Algiers. The U.S. State Department's annual survey of terrorism calls Iran "the most dangerous state sponsor" of such violence during the past year. "Tehran's leaders," says the report issued last month, "view terrorism as a valid tool to accomplish the regime's political objectives, and acts of terrorism are approved at the highest levels of government in Iran."

There is no question that angering Iran can be fatal. Western intelligence services say they have proof -- though they will not make it public for fear of compromising their sources -- that Tehran was responsible for the assassination of the leader of the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran and three of his associates who were gunned down in a restaurant in Berlin last year. A Turkish journalist who had written disparagingly of Islamic fundamentalism was killed by a pro-Iranian group's car bomb in Ankara last January. Another Iranian opposition leader was shot to death in Rome as he drove to his office last March.

The best-known name on Iran's hit list is novelist Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses, who went into hiding in 1989 after Iran found the book offensive and issued a religious decree calling for his death and offering a reward. Three Iranian officials suspected of attempting to organize Rushdie's murder were expelled from Britain last year. In Tehran the Iranian parliament, the Majlis, reviewed its execution order and refused to rescind it. The reward offered for Rushdie's murder has been increased from $1 million to more than $2 million.

Iran's immediate neighbors are growing nervous at the way Tehran is staking a renewed claim to Persian Gulf leadership and backing it up with a five-year, $10 billion arms buildup. At bargain-basement prices, Iran is acquiring 20 to 30 modern Russian MiG-29 fighters and SU-24 bombers, along with a Kilo-class submarine. Earlier this year, China confirmed the sale of two civilian nuclear reactors to Iran, which has its own uranium mines and has reportedly been getting bomb-related technical help from Pakistan. Former CIA Director Robert Gates has warned that Iran could become a nuclear-armed power by the end of this decade.

Other Iran watchers are not persuaded that the Islamic Republic is bent on regional dominion or is in any position to pick a fight with a major power. A Western diplomat in Tehran contends, "Unless you project 20 or 30 years into the future, there is no danger of anything more than petty harassment."

Iranian officials deny they are going after nuclear weapons and say the West is painting Iran as a menace only because it does not buy its arms from Western producers. Arab states do not accept that argument. "No one objects to Iran buying weapons to defend itself," says retired Egyptian Major General Ahmed Fakhr, who heads the National Center for Middle East Studies in Cairo, "but the type of weapons that Iran has been buying are destabilizing." One example: a delegation of 20 Iranian experts recently visited North Korea to discuss the purchase of new ballistic missiles with a 600-mile range -- long enough to reach Saudi Arabia and Israel. North Korea is now receiving 40% of its oil supplies from Iran.

Today's Iranian leaders, Western analysts say, are perfectly capable of presenting two faces to the outside world: the responsible, reasoned face that solicits Western loans and investments, and the rigid, ideological face that accepts murder and lies as tools of statecraft. "Iran is in a sense more dangerous today than it was under Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini," says a senior British diplomat. "Then the antagonism to the West was blatant. Now it is more nuanced."

To visit Tehran today, in fact, is to marvel at the changes in approach. Gone, for the most part, are the garish caricatures of "Great Satan" America that used to adorn the walls of public places. Where commercial advertising has not replaced them, they have been whitewashed and painted over. Courting couples may sit and talk -- though without holding hands -- in several new gardens and parks.

Many women are dispensing with the cumbersome chador and are wearing simple head scarves. At the Red Shopping Mall in northern Tehran, teenage girls sport cut-down Islamic dresses called mini-manteaus, with flashes of color from bandanas under their scarves. Says an Iranian student: "Women are trying to make a statement. They're trying to say, 'We are still here.' " Bright new buses ply the capital's busy main streets, while shops and showrooms spill over with expensive consumer goods.

The taste for broader contacts extends beyond Tehran. In Qum, a major religious center, clerics at the Ayatullah Golpaigani Research Center use Mitac desktop computers, on which they can call up 700 volumes of Islamic holy law encoded on Foxpro software. The center's director, Ayatullah Ali Korani, wants to network with U.S. universities. "I don't speak English or French," he says, "but I speak computer."

Four and a half years after the end of Iran's disastrous war with Iraq, nearly four years after Ayatullah Khomeini's death, a happier national spirit is struggling to emerge. The problem for outsiders is to square what sometimes appears to be a Persian lamb with a notably lion-like personality. The superficial prosperity of Tehran is illusory. Because of war and runaway population growth -- estimated at 3.6% a year, though that may be declining -- per capita economic output has shrunk about 40% since 1979. Many factories are running at only 40% to 50% of capacity.

Tehran badly miscalculated its income from oil exports after the Gulf War, counting on an OPEC price hike that did not materialize. The oil industry has not regained its prewar export capacity, and its $16 billion a year in earnings helps prop up other failing state enterprises. The country is already $5 billion in arrears in its foreign-debt repayments, and is expected to be about $10 billion behind a year from now.

The talk of the whole country is the economy; the survival of President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani could depend on how well he handles economic problems and the discontent they breed. No one is suggesting he could lose his re- election bid in voting scheduled for June 11, but his personal survival may be at risk. There were reports of an assassination attempt on the President last February, and full-blown riots swept three major cities last year during protests against unemployment and poor housing.

Rafsanjani's power base in the Majlis is made up of a small clique of technocrats and the bazaari merchant class, of which he is a member. The bazaaris were the key to the overthrow of the Shah, and now they want the President to live up to his promises to privatize industry and liberalize the centralized economy. On the other hand, Islamic radicals are still the moral guardians of the revolution, and they oppose reforms that might endanger social benefits and let in greater Western influence. They sometimes accuse Rafsanjani of being too liberal on cultural matters. He in turn warns them that too rigid a line on music, television and clothing risks alienating the new generation of Iranian youth.

As Tehran reaches out for Western trade and aid, Iranian society is feeling a steadily increasing internal pressure. Films and books, daring by local standards, that obliquely explore the effects of authoritarianism and war are enthralling the intelligentsia. For the rich, videotapes, cable television and satellite television dishes are opening fresh windows on the world. One noteworthy addition to the Iranian press is Golagha, a weekly satirical magazine that fires barbs at people in power -- though not at Rafsanjani. Editor Kiyoumars Saberi, a former Deputy Prime Minister, says his first issue in 1990 sold out all 40,000 copies in half an hour. Now he sells 140,000 and says, "We are pushing the limits" of censorship.

More important, Abdelkarim Soroush, a leading intellectual of the anti-Shah revolution, has openly challenged the clergy's infallibility. "Religion is sacred," he said in an interview, "but the understanding and interpretation are not necessarily sacred." Religious interpretations, he said, "are like chemistry and mathematics. They are debatable." Khomeini's heirs will increasingly have to reconcile the everyday requirements of national life with the exigencies of holy law. If they also intend to be taken seriously in the community of nations, they will have to stop using violence and terror in the pursuit of Iran's interests.

With reporting by William Dowell/Tehran, J.F.O. McAllister/Washington and William Mader/London