Iranian reformers pinning hopes on parliamentary vote

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): "If the government had a cooperative parliament, we could move forward with more confidence," said Iran's President Mohamed Khatami last Friday, addressing hundreds of thousands of people in central Teheran just one week before the parliamentary elections on March 18. It was a scarcely coded appeal for a massive vote for "reformers", in order to destroy the existing stranglehold of conservative clerics on the legislature.

A clear majority of Iran's 70 million people will probably answer Khatami's call and back pro-reform candidates in the parliamentary election, just as they gave Khatami himself a landslide 69 percent of their votes for the presidency in May, 1977. But things are always more complicated than they appear in Iran. The reformers will win this battle, but it doesn't mean that they will have won the war.

The Islamic revolution in Iran is now 20 years old. By that time in the history of any revolution, a majority of the population just wants to get back to normal life, and Khatami embodies that aspiration in Iran. But he is a mullah himself, and while many of his supporters see him as the Iranian Gorbachev, they don't quite understand what that implies.

Gorbachev dreamed of reconciling Communism and democracy, never for a moment wishing to dismantle the Soviet Union. Likewise, Khatami dreams of reconciling Islamic rule and genuine democracy. It is not certain which way he would jump if he finally had to choose between the two, but there was a clear hint in his denunciation six months ago of the pro-democracy student protesters who filled the streets of Tehran to demonstrate in defense of a free press.

"I am sure that these people have evil aims," Khatami thundered as his admiring supporters were beaten, gassed and shot by the secret police and Islamic vigilantes. "They intend to foster violence in society, and we shall stand in their way." This may be caution, but it may also be ambivalence about the ultimate goal.

Others, like Reza Jalalipour, managing director of the tremendously popular newspaper Jame'eh until the conservatives shut it down, have no such doubts about the goal. "We don't believe religion offers a program for society. We want an institutional separation of church and state, so that at the end of the day if our state is Islamic it will be so not through the Sharia (legal code), the lowest part of Islam, but through ethics and our rulers' moral standards. Ninety-nine percent of it will resemble any other democratic state in the world."

In fact, Khatami didn't even expect to win when he ran for the presidency in 1997, and it was as great a shock to him as to the hard-line mullahs who actually run the country when over two- thirds of the voters put their faith in "the mullah who can actually smile".

But in the Iranian system democratic institutions (the president and the parliament) co-exist with an Islamic theocracy headed by "Supreme Ruler" Ayatollah Ali Khamenei -- and it is the theocrats who control all the vital instruments of power: the courts, the police, the intelligence services, and the armed forces.

Khamenei, distrusting Khatami, rapidly created what amounts to a parallel government. Former foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati became the Supreme Leader's senior advisor on international affairs, and former president Ali Akbar Rafsanjani was made the leader of a new "Expediency Council" whose purpose is to undermine the Khatami government's authority even in strictly secular matters. There were more direct assaults on the reformers, too.

At least five reform politicians and dissident writers were murdered in 1998. (When the killings were traced to the intelligence services, they blamed them on "rogue elements"). Prominent Khatami supporters like newspaper publisher Abdollah Nouri and Tehran mayor Gholamhossein Karabaschi were tried and convicted by religious courts on various trumped-up charges. The leading dissident cleric, Ayatollah Ali Montazeri (once the chosen heir of the leader of the Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini), was placed under house arrest.

Khatami has made no significant progress in the past two and a half years in loosening the stranglehold of the clerical conservatives on power, despite the manifest will of the overwhelming majority of voters. Indeed, most of the time the key institution of the theocracy, the Guardians Council, did not even have to block Khatami's initiatives, as the conservative majority in the parliament that was elected four years ago did it for them.

So now the reformers -- both those who want a genuinely democratic Islamic state, and those who secretly want a secular democracy -- are pinning their hopes on the parliamentary election on Friday. It is quite likely that they will win a majority this time round, in which case the confrontation between the conservatives and the reformers from now on will be more plainly a conflict between the theocratic and the democratic forces. But nobody expects this conflict to be settled in the near future.

For one thing, the Iranian constitution as designed by Khomeini is a formula for perpetual stalemate. For another, President Khatami himself will avoid any confrontation that threatens the Islamic character of the state or the special claim to power of those who are learned in religion.

Things will continue to move in the current dance of three steps forward, two steps back, and it will be a long time yet before Iran is a true democracy. But it probably will be, in the end, for that is what the revolution of 1979 was really about.