Green mass

The Green Movement took its name from a green sash given to Mir Hossein Mousavi by Mohammad Khatami, Iran’s two-term president and the reform movement’s first standard-bearer.

The Green Movement reached its height when up to 3 million peaceful demonstrators turned out on Tehran streets to protest official claims that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had won the 2009 presidential election in a landslide. Their simple slogan was: “Where is my vote?”

The movement soon embodied the frustrated aspirations of Iran’s century-old quest for democracy and desire for peaceful change.

Mousavi and his wife, Zahra Rahnavard, are the nominal leaders. Mehdi Karroubi has been its most radical and relentless advocate. Former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani embodies politicians who vacillate between supporting the movement and siding with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

The movement has no hierarchical structure. Its global reach resembles the Internet it uses. But its amorphous structure is both its strength and weakness.

Origins

The Green Movement is, in its composition and genealogy, both old and new. The revolution of 1979 was the result of a historically incongruent alliance between modernizing middle and technocratic classes, the urban poor, women’s and students’ groups, some disgruntled members of Iran’s new industrialist class, members of the bazaar and “de-modernizing” forces led by revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The foot-soldiers of the revolution were the new urbanites—culturally religious, conservative and a-modern, if not anti-modern, peasants who had come to the cities in search of their share of petro-dollars.

Since 1941, this class had been assiduously courted by radical Islamist groups. They played an important role in the 1979 revolution. They have since splintered into factions that are today pitted against each other. They were part of the incongruent coalition that overthrew the shah. Included in that coalition were Mir Hossein Mousavi and his activist wife Zahra Rahnavard, who represented the moderate religious elements of the unwieldy anti-shah coalition. At the other end of the coalition were forces today represented by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his allies in the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) and Basij. They represent the Nietzschean resentments of the new conservative urbanites and their déclassé leaders.

After Ali Khamenei succeeded revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini as supreme leader in 1989, he needed to find a political and social base of his own. He lacked charisma, and his religious credentials were weak. He increasingly relied on and strengthened these forces, particularly the IRGC. Khomeini had banned the IRGC from politics, but Khamenei encouraged both political and economic involvement.

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Green mass

Green mass

GREEN MASS

The Green Movement

Origins

Green mass public transport

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