There is no handbook for staging a democratic revolution. Bringing down power-greedy and self-interested leaders such as those ruling Iran must largely be done by trial and error. No two situations have been, or can be, the same. Nonetheless, lessons from the Philippines' 'People Power' movement that toppled dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986 remain a valuable starting point.
I suspect a number of the demonstrators in Iran opposed to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his hardline Islamic clerical and political allies already know this. There has long been a sizeable Iranian population in Manila. My long-time informant of all things Filipino in that city, Raissa Robles, told me this week she used to teach English to Iranian students in the 1980s. She surmised it would not be far-fetched to believe that some of the protesters were first-hand witnesses of People Power.
A media clampdown in Iran means we have limited knowledge of what is happening. There are splits among ruling clerics, but it can only be speculated as to how deep. Reformist former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani is thought to be plotting behind the scenes, but whether he has the numbers among clerics to gain the upper hand for the overthrow of Ayatollah Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is guesswork. Defeated main opposition presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi is the de facto leader of the demonstrations, although exactly how democracy-minded in the western sense he is remains a mystery.
The only parallel between the Philippines of 1986 and Iran today is that presidential elections were held and the incumbent was declared the winner under questionable circumstances. Demonstrations which then erupted came about differently. This does not mean that subsequent Iranian events cannot be similar. Iranians searching for a way ahead will find ample inspiration from their country's experience with the overthrow of the shah in 1979 and pointers to the way forward from the anti-Marcos movement in the Philippines seven years later.
Marcos called a presidential election to placate pressure from Filipinos and the US that had been growing since the assassination of his main rival, Benigno Aquino, in 1983. Aquino's widow, Corazon, contested the poll, which was marked by violence against her supporters and rampant vote-rigging by the dictator. Marcos was declared the winner with an impossibly large victory margin. This behaviour was expected of dictators back then; but the events that followed were not.
Two key military figures, defence minister Juan Ponce Enrile and army deputy chief of staff Fidel Ramos, defected from the government on February 22. They holed up in the military headquarters in Manila with a small number of sympathetic troops. The powerful head of the Philippines' Catholic Church, Cardinal Jaime Sin, appealed on the independent Radio Veritas for citizens to take food to the defectors. Hundreds of thousands of people were soon surrounding the camp.