Iran's revolution starts to devour its own children

After the revolution comes the revolution, only now it's devouring its own children. Even the most powerful reformers in Iran fear the policeman's knock these days as the country's clerical rulers use their control of the security forces and the judiciary to maintain their grasp on power.

One such child of the revolution is Massoumeh Ebtekar, a Vice-President and government minister. At 38, she is the highest-ranking woman in the country. Aside from running the country's fledgling environment policy, Ms Ebtekar – a woman with a radical history – needs to protect her own back and that of President Mohammad Khatami from the zeal of the ruling clerics.

Iran has "a novel form of democracy," she told The Independent. "It's a religious democracy with its own red lines, which does not mean it won't work out."

She spoke as a showdown loomed between Mr Khatami's supporters in the parliament, and the mullahs who have blocked his efforts to create a more open society. Parliament is debating a controversial bill aimed at stripping conservative hard-liners of some powers.

"The President is very sincere and open, and there has been lots of favourable response" from conservative clerics to two controversial bills he has proposed, Ms Ebtekar said. Besides removing the clergy's veto on reformist candidates, Mr Khatami wants the power to declare rulings by the "Guardian Council" of clerics as unconstitutional.

Despite the honeyed words about the mullahs, their response to Mr Khatami's reforms came as a scion of the revolution, the liberal journalist and academic Hashem Aghajari, was sentenced to death this week while another was thrown in jail merely for conducting an opinion poll. He was also sentenced to 74 lashes, eight years in jail and a 10-year teaching ban. Curiously, both are close allies of the popularly elected President.

Then the mullahs moved against another leading reformer, Abbas Abdi, who took a leading role in the take-over of the US embassy in Tehran by Islamic students, 23 years ago this week. Ms Ebtekar, then 18 years old and known only by her nom de guerre "Mary", was the students' interpreter and spokeswoman.

Over many of the following 444 days of the siege, it was Mary who appeared before the world's media to harangue the "evil" United States. The 52 hostages were eventually freed unharmed, but the embassy crisis has poisoned relations with the US to this day.

By stitching together thousands of shredded secret documents discovered inside the embassy – later published in 85 volumes – the students uncovered countless CIA shenanigans, including a coup plot against the ruling ayatollahs and details of secret contacts with the highest level of the nascent post-Shah government. They also found safes filled with thousands of fake passports and ID cards, secret writing paper and other tools of the spying game.

Long held up as heroes in Iran, students who took over the "den of espionage", as the embassy became known, were handed influential jobs by the regime. Some went on to become heroes in the war with Iraq, while others were handed ambassadorships and other high government positions.

"Mary" appeared on US television almost nightly during the embassy siege, speaking in perfect American-accented English learned as a child in Philadelphia. She told ABC News that, if provoked, she would willingly kill hostages being held at the embassy: "Yes, when I've seen an American gun being lifted and killing my brothers and sisters in the streets, of course."

Now as a vice-president, Ms Ebtekar has become the acceptable face of democratic Iran. The trouble is that the government and its allies are all but powerless in the face of hard-line conservatives. If, as expected, the attempts to push through the new legislation curbing the powers of the conservatives are rejected, the government may opt for a referendum. But that too may be blocked by the mullah dominated Guardian Council, or its twin, the Expediency Council.

"This bill is supported by anti-revolutionary elements, and if approved, all the infidels, former Marxists and non-Iranians can enter parliament," Golam-Hossein Elham, of the Guardians Council research centre, said.

Ms Ebtekar, who has no regrets about her hostage-taking days, puts the best face on those turbulent times. "We were a group of students and something very precious was at stake," she now says. In the face of plots by the US against the revolution, "the Iranian people could not voice their concerns. It was not an act of revenge, it was an act of defence."

But dedication to the Iranian revolution is now longer a defence for reformists. More than 18 pro-reform newspapers have been shut in the past few months and editors are regularly detained without charge but she says that "nothing is being covered up in Iran."

When asked why a pollster was thrown in jail for reporting that 74 per cent of Iranians want improved relations with the US, Ms Ebtekar said: "That's the way it goes in Iran."