West in dark about ways to re-establish ties with Iran

By Rudolph Chimelli

PARIS (DPA): When will Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder travel to Iran? Although he happily accepted the invitation relayed him by Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi on the latter's recent visit to Berlin, whether he will go at all is still up in the air.

The trip will presumably occur once all the conditions demanded by Schroeder have been met -- but a date appears remote. And will his potential host, President Muhammad Khatami, decide to run for a second term? Or will he perhaps withdraw, making it known he has little faith that his reform ideas can succeed?

Khatami's backers have never had to ask themselves scarier questions than the ones they are asking on the 22nd anniversary of the Islamic revolution, now being celebrated in Iran with the usual round of acclamation for its successes.

But the reformers have faced nothing but setbacks since their victory in parliamentary elections last spring.

It emerged that the Majlis, or parliament, is powerless against the institutional barricades manned by the conservatives in the executive and the judiciary.

The most recent example was provided when the parliament passed a law permitting single women to study abroad. The Council of Guardians, the spiritual constitutional court, promptly overturned it.

But far worse is that the fact that the reform movement is now almost indiscernible to the population at large. More than 30 of its newspapers have been banned and of the applications for replacement publications, the authorities threw out 132 in January alone.

Some of the best heads among Khatami's party allies are now in jail. The president's brother and leader of the largest reform party, Muhammad-Reza Khatami, was prevented from finishing a speech at a rally in the holy city of Qom because radicals made it impossible for him to be heard above their shouts of "Death to the American deputy".

The few remaining western journalists in Tehran have also begun to feel the regime's heavy-handed approach, as shown by the double-quick expulsion of a Reuters' correspondent and his Lebanese wife who reported for the New York Times.

Both had reason to fear repression after they held a written interview with the jailed investigative journalist Akbar Ganji.

To ensure that reporting is performed to the regime's taste, 5,000 young people taken from the volunteer Basij organization were recently trained as journalists.

Following Khatami's successful visit to Berlin, German-Iranian relations improved last year after a long ice age caused by the Mykonos trial, in which a German judge ruled that the Iranian intelligence service was involved in the Berlin murder of dissident Iranians, and the Hofer case, involving a German businessman jailed for allegedly having sex with a Iranian Muslim woman.

The auspicious development was sabotaged almost immediately, however, after opponents of domestic liberalization and external detente played up a provocative meeting of exiled opposition figures in Berlin as a grand plot. The majority of Iranians who attended were sentenced to long jail terms on their return.

The reformers have high hopes that George Bush will be able to achieve a slight thaw in U.S.-Iranian relations. Vice-President Dick Cheney was, after all, a director of the Texan oil multinational Halliburton until the election, during which time he spoke up for the lifting of sanctions against Iran and Libya. Halliburton maintains an office in Tehran.

The company has rejected charges that it violated sanctions with the explanation that its office was controlled by a foreign subsidiary. Secretary of State Colin Powell has hinted that the new administration will review its sanctions policies. A decision on their extension will be taken in August at the earliest.

The case of Egypt also demonstrates how great the imponderables are for states which wish to befriend Iran and Khatami. The president, anxious to re-establish normality, is planning to take part in an Islamic conference in Cairo at the end of February.

One sticking point there is that a street in Tehran is still named after Khaled Islambuli, the man who murdered Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat.

Now, plans are apparently afoot to erect a gigantic portrait of the assassin within sight of the street.