HISTORYAT A GLANCE |
Consolidation of the Revolution(Part 1.)
As the government eliminated the political opposition and successfully
prosecuted the war with Iraq, it also took further steps to consolidate and to
institutionalize the achievements of the Revolution. The government took several
measures to regularize the status of revolutionary organizations. It reorganized
the Pasdaran and the Crusade for Reconstruction as ministries (the former in
November 1982 and the latter in November 1983), a move designed to bring these
bodies under the aegis of the cabinet, and placed the revolutionary committees
under the supervision of the minister of interior. The government also
incorporated the revolutionary courts into the regular court system and in 1984
reorganized the security organization led by Mohammadi Rayshahri, concurrently
the head of the Army Military Revolutionary Tribunal, as the Ministry of
Information and Security. These measures met with only limited success in
reducing the considerable autonomy, including budgetary independence, enjoyed by
the revolutionary organizations.
An Assembly of Experts (not to be confused with the constituent assembly that
went by the same name) was elected in December 1982 and convened in the
following year to determine the successor to Khomeini. Khomeini's own choice was
known to be Montazeri. The assembly, an eighty-three-member body that is
required to convene once a year, apparently could reach no agreement on a
successor during either its 1983 or its 1984 session, however. In 1985 the
Assembly of Experts agreed, reportedly on a split vote, to name Montazeri as
Khomeini's "deputy" (qaem maqam), rather than "successor" (ja-neshin), thus
placing Montazeri in line for the succession without actually naming him as the
heir apparent.
Elections to the second Majlis were held in the spring of 1984. The IFM,
doubting the elections would be free, did not participate, so the seats were
contested only by candidates of the IRP and other groups and individuals in the
ruling hierarchy. The campaign revealed numerous divisions within the ruling
group, however, and the second Majlis, which included several deputies who had
served in the revolutionary organizations, was more radical than the first. The
second Majlis convened in May 1984 and, with some prodding from Khomeini, gave
Mir-Hosain Musavi a renewed vote of confidence as prime minister. In 1985 it
elected Khamenehi, who was virtually unchallenged, to another four-year term as
president.
Bazargan, as leader of the IFM, continued to protest the suppression of basic
freedoms. He addressed a letter on these issues to Khomeini in August 1984 and
issued a public declaration in February 1985. He also spoke out against the war
with Iraq and urged a negotiated settlement. In April 1985 Bazargan and forty
members of the IFM and the National Front urged the UN secretary general to
negotiate a peaceful end to the conflict. In retaliation, in February 1985, the
hezbollahis smashed the offices of the party, and the party newspaper was once
again shut down. Bazargan was denounced from pulpits and was not allowed to run
for president in the 1985 elections.
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