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Iran's protesting politicians out on a
limb
By Ramin Mostaghim
TEHRAN - In an effort to ease the growing
political crisis in Iran, supreme leader Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei on Wednesday ordered the country's hardline
conservative body to revise its massive blacklist
banning thousands of reformists from next month's
parliamentary elections, including 80 current members of
parliament.
According to Iran's state
television, the supreme leader said those candidates
should not have been barred from running unless there
was adequate proof they are not qualified. But despite
Khamenei's words, members of parliament protesting the
ban have refused to end their sitin.
President
Mohammad Reza Khatami has urged the approximately 100
protesters - including lawmakers who joined although
they are not barred from competing at the polls
scheduled for February 20 - to end their sitin, held in
parliament's lobby, and promised to work to reverse the
ban. But by vowing to keep up their round-the-clock
vigil, the protesters are turning up the heat on
negotiations with the president and clerics, and fanning
debate about the future of democracy in Iran. This
leaves Khatami and Mehdi Karrubi, the speaker of
parliament, to carry on with shuttle diplomacy.
Karrubi has accused the unelected Guardian
Council of the Islamic Constitution, a 12-member panel
of clerics and lawyers, of trying to rig the elections
by barring reformists who favor greater openness and
freedom of expression. Khatami, however, has said that
the council can be persuaded to reinstate a number of
disqualified candidates through negotiation rather than
protest.
Khatami's own Islamic Mosharekat
(Participation) Party, or IMP, has suffered the highest
number of disqualifications. The IMP presently commands
a majority of seats in the legislature. "Most of the
over 4,000 nominees rejected by the Guardian Council of
the Islamic Constitution are supporters or sympathizers
of the party," said Ali Yossefi, an IMP organizer from
eastern Tehran.
The protesters have said that if
they are not reinstated as candidates for re-election,
international pressure will be brought to bear on their
behalf.
Mohsen Midamadi, an IMP politburo member
and head of the party's parliamentary foreign policy
committee, said he discussed the issue with European
Union foreign policy and security chief Javier Solana,
who wrapped up a two-day visit to the country on
Tuesday.
But as the protest entered its fifth
day on Thursday, observers and activists debated the
action's wider significance. Sitin participants so far
have failed to win popular support, especially on
university campuses - a key base for the democracy
movement.
"If the protest remains limited to the
disqualification cases for some candidates and their
agenda does not embrace all out democracy and human
rights issues, the students will not support them," said
Farid Moddaresi, 24, a political activist and
journalist.
"The Iranian students and other
walks of society are thinking of establishing an
umbrella front to embrace all activists fighting for
human rights and democracy, regardless of their
religious belief and political tendencies," he added.
Likewise, observers from the secular opposition
question the protest's long-term impact. "The sitin
protest is not a genuine one and will play no role in
the future development of Iran," Siavash Mokhtari told
IPS. Unidentified intelligence officials strangled his
father, the writer Mohammad Mokhtari, to death more than
four years ago.
Members of the public also have
expressed skepticism about the protests. Azamsadat
Abhari, a 66-year-old woman who proudly stated that she
has never voted since the 1979 revolution that brought
in theocratic rule, dismissed the sitin as political
theater designed to drum up public interest in the
polls.
"Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei,
chairman of the expediency council Hashemi Rafsanjani
and the speaker of the parliament [Karrubi] are
pretending to be uninformed about the [Grand Council's]
disqualification reasons," she said. "Once they make
sure that enough people are enticed to vote, they [will]
collaborate and nullify some of the disqualifications
and all the hocus-pocus will vanish."
Nevertheless, reformist journalists, most of
them young, plan to call on the parliamentary protesters
to keep going - but also to champion the rights of
citizens regardless of religion, race and political
allegiance. The journalists are collecting signatures
among their ranks for an open letter to the lawmakers.
"This open letter will be published in a few
days and the signatories advise the disqualified
candidates to forsake their personal campaigns to be
requalified [for the polls] and fight for human rights
and democracy," said reformist journalist Mohsen Akbari,
27.
The prospects for such a transformation
appear to hinge on the majority IMP. Some see the party
as too politically ambitious.
Commented Hassan
Abduli, 50, a laid-off civil servant who earns a living
by tutoring high school students in mathematics and
physics: "In vain the IMP tries to seize the leadership
of the fledgling democracy movement in Iran. Party
officials are making attempts to minimize people's
democratic requests and to reoccupy their seats in
parliament."
Yet the IMP also has opened its
doors to more radical politicians and advocates of
democracy. Every night, people flock to the party's
downtown headquarters to listen to speechmakers who call
for expanding the reform agenda.
One of the
speakers was Ahmad Qabel, a former cleric who protested
the emergence of a religious ruling establishment by
disrobing himself in the seminary at the holy city of
Qom a decade ago. Addressing the IMP crowd, he stressed
the importance of remembering that "the Iranian people
have suffered in the past 25 years and their citizenship
rights have been ignored by the rulers".
Ayatollah Khamenei has the final say concerning
all state matters, and his intervention is expected to
ease the mounting political tension. Meanwhile, the
council is set to make a final ruling on the
disqualifications at the end of the month. A final list
of candidates is to be released in mid-February.
(Inter Press Service)
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