Still banging on that door
The Economist
August 5, 2000
TEHRAN -- Although Muhammad Khatami and his reformers control Iran's
presidency and parliament, they remain outside the power structure, trying
to get in
HE IS the symbol of the reform movement, but can Muhammad Khatami bring
about a fundamental change in Iran? A great orator, the president is now
being ridiculed for talking so much and so fluently but never getting anything
done. People have begun to wonder whether exposed toenail polish and "bad
hejab" (a scarf loosely fastened to reveal bits of a woman's hair)
will be the most concrete achievements to materialise from the dream of
political pluralism and religious flexibility.
The president announced on July 27th that he would be running for re-election
next May. This was premature. Presidential campaigns officially last only
a few weeks and candidates usually enter the race a month or two before
the election. But Mr Khatami delivered the news early, probably to boost
his ailing reform movement.
The davom-e Khordad, as the movement is called in Persian, has already
won two big elections: the presidential one in 1997 and the parliamentary
one this February. But controlling the presidency, and a majority of seats
in parliament, does not necessarily mean power in Iran. The reformers are
constantly tripped up by their conservative rivals who dominate the judiciary,
the enforcement of laws and the Assembly of Experts, which can veto legislation
passed by parliament.
The reformers still find themselves banging on the door to get inside
the power structure. Muhammad Reza Khatami, the president's brother, who
is both deputy speaker of parliament and head of the Islamic Iran Participation
Front, the reformers' biggest faction which functions as a political party,
told The Economist that "one of the problems we discussed at our recent
congress was whether we had remained an opposition group or were part of
the government."
For many years, President Khatami and his allies believed that fundamental
change could be brought about so long as there was a free press. In the
1980s, for this reason, he accepted a post as head of the Ministry of Culture
and Islamic Guidance, which licenses all publications. His team sanctioned
the first progressive journals and newspapers to appear, and handed out
money to publishing houses and the arts. And he managed during his tenure-he
was ousted in 1992-to inflict quite a bit of damage on the conservative
establishment.
But after those early days, which later gave birth to the davom-e Khordad
movement, Mr Khatami and his allies made little progress toward institutional
change. Instead, they concentrated on setting up a free press. This was
short-lived: no fewer than 20 newspapers and journals were slammed shut
this spring by conservatives in the judiciary. And these closures, it seems,
will stick.
The conservatives continue to demonstrate their strength. After they
shut the newspapers, they swiftly imprisoned a number of influential journalists
perceived as troublemakers. Last month, a military court acquitted the
Tehran police chief who had been charged with responsibility for the bloody
events that started the student riots in July 1999. The verdict was considered
an outrage, given the unambiguous evidence that police and plainclothes
vigilantes had broken into the students' hostel as they slept, beating
them and throwing at least one student out of a window.
Free speech was further crippled when the conservatives imprisoned a
prominent human-rights activist over a videotape scandal. A leader of the
hardline Ansar-e Hizbollah confesses on the tape that his group, obeying
orders from senior clerics and officials (some of whom he names), plotted
to assault, and in one case assassinate, leading reformers. The tape has
never been aired in public, but a transcript was available on the Internet
and copies were secretly circulated.
Abbas Abdi, a reformer who was once a radical, having led the takeover
of the American embassy in Tehran in 1979, accuses his movement of dancing
on the rooftop before its building was completed. In the long term, time
is on the reformers' side. About half the population is aged under 25,
and the young will eventually insist on change. But this, the reformers
now admit, could take years. The dancing
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