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COMMENTARY
Signposts
for Iran
By Kaveh L
Afrasiabi
TEHRAN - With less than a month
to go before Mohammad Khatami officially leaves
the presidency for newly-elected Mahmud
Ahmadinejad, it is time review the eight years of
Khatami's two terms and evaluate the record of a
man often blamed in the West as being "powerless"
or even "meaningless".
It is easy, rather
too easy, to label the Khatami era as a "failure"
in light of the stunning defeat of reformist
candidates in the recent presidential elections
and, prior to that, in last year's parliamentary
elections, partly blamed on Khatami's weak
leadership of the reform movement.
As the
nation braces itself for four years of
Ahmadinejad's presidency, lamented by the West as
an ominous sign of Iran's return to fundamentalist
revolutionary politics inside Iran and beyond her
borders, Iranians are also preoccupied with the
question of how to assess the overall performance
of the outgoing president.
Not to be
outdone by his critics, Khatami has recently
defended his record forcefully, citing, among
other things, his role in "uprooting serial
murders", defending freedom of speech, normalizing
relations with European countries, creating jobs
for women, advancing a culture of tolerance in the
country and also lessening global tensions through
his initiative of "Dialogue Among Civilizations".
The United Nations adopted Khatami's suggestion to
make 2001 the year for the initiative, and both
the UN headquarters as well as United Nations
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
implemented several important programs to promote
this idea.
Incidentally, one of Khatami's
main promoters of the initiative, Iran's top envoy
to the UN and US-educated political scientist,
Mohammad Javad Zarif, has been vilified in at
least one US paper as having participated in the
1979 hostage drama in Iran following the Islamic
revolution. In fact, Zarif was completing his
doctoral studies at the time and was abroad,
taking part in various academic conferences. Zarif
is one of Iran's most capable diplomats, playing a
pivotal role in nuclear talks and regional
security, as well as in the global diplomacy of
both the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the
Organization of Islamic Conference. He led a
successful effort by the NAM at the recent nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference in New
York to head off attempts to distract from
disarmament and to deny developing nations access
to peaceful nuclear technology.
This
aside, to open a couple of caveats, for a couple
of years this author was involved with the
Dialogue Among Civilizations program, thereby
becoming close to the Khatami administration, and
at one point spending a few months at the
presidential office, which employed hundreds of
policy experts in all fields. Subsequently, the
author accompanied Khatami on several of his
foreign trips, to Central Asia, Germany, Spain and
the US.
Such close encounters with Khatami
and his circle of advisers left one greatly
impressed by the high ethical standards and fierce
determination with which they pursued their points
of view on domestic and foreign policies. Khatami
and his men are completely unblemished by any
taint of corruption, and not even the
anti-government opposition groups have ever
pointed out a single instance where Khatami or
anyone closely associated with him could be
accused of corruption.
As an unofficial
foreign-policy expert on the sidelines of some of
Khatami's travels abroad, it was clear that his
men cherished the fact that this was one thing
they truly controlled, namely, who would board the
president's plane, an issue of inter-governmental
quarrels at times, as the president was not keen
on bringing along too many hardliners who did not
particularly like the speed of his rapprochement
with the West, or even his Dialogue of
Civilizations, offered as an alternative to the
sirens of clashing civilizations.
To offer
a couple of other insights, Khatami was scheduled
to fly to Ashghabat, Turkmenistan, for a gathering
of leaders of Caspian littoral states, including
Russia's President Vladimir Putin, and Khatami
initially refused to board the plane because he
was unhappy with the pre-summit progress and
thought that he would come back home empty-handed,
particularly on the thorny issue of Iran's share
of the Caspian Sea - Iran insisted it was 20%, but
others were, and are, willing to concede only
about 13%. Once he was persuaded to go to
Ashghabat, Khatami left one of the morning
sessions complaining of backache, but not before
retorting to Azerbaijan's leader, Heidar Aliyev,
who approached him and said, in broken Farsi, "But
sir, even during the Shah, Iran did not go beyond
the Hassangholi-Astara line drawn by the Soviets."
Khatami was, as always, quick with words
and replied, "Yes, but the Soviets were oppressive
and bullied their neighbors, and that is why they
perished." That statement brought a wry smile to
Putin's face. A couple of days later, with Khatami
still touring the region, a more hostile Putin
announced a major military maneuver in the Caspian
Sea, this as Russia's expression of dismay at the
summit's failure to resolve the question of the
Caspian Sea's legal ownership. This surprised
Khatami, who interpreted it as a personal insult,
and he issued a statement opposing the
militarization of the Caspian Sea. Foreign
Ministry officials would learn of this statement
through the press.
Khatami pushed
normalization of relations with the West as a
viable option to overcoming the ills of the
Iranian economy through greater foreign trade and
foreign investment. In his 2000 trip to the United
Nations, Khatami offered an olive branch to the US
in the form of sitting at the UN General Assembly
and listening to then-president Bill Clinton's
speech, instead of walking out, as was Iran's
custom. The US media subsequently wrote of the
"UN's secret diplomacy" involving Secretary
General Kofi Annan and his special representative
on dialogue, Giandomenic Picco, with whom this
author worked closely for several weeks to make
possible a "US-Iran" close encounter at the UN,
with blessings from Khatami's office.
All
this does not add up to a meaningless presidency.
On the domestic front, Khatami, who
threatened to resign on several occasions, spent
hours in heated debate at regular and emergency
meetings. He lost a lot more battles than he won,
but the ones he won were critical, including his
battles to expand a free press, to curtail
mistreatment of prisoners, to protect women's
rights and to privatize state companies.
Without a doubt, the Khatami legacy will
be partly determined by how the new
president-elect performs, and whether he continues
on the path of societal reform and foreign policy
moderation charted by Khatami, or whether he
becomes a vehicle of foreign policy reorientation,
discarding some of the gains of the Khatami era.
Rhetoric aside, it is too early to draw an
even tentative conclusion. For one thing,
Ahmadinejad has promised not to change the group
negotiating nuclear diplomacy with the West, a
very positive sign. Hopefully, in other important
areas of Iran's foreign policy, where Iranian
policymakers have expended considerable energy and
creativity over the years to see tangible
accomplishments, such as normal relations with the
Arab world, there will be only incremental change
and no significant sea-change causing a foreign
policy crisis.
Overall, Iran's strategic
environment looks sound and it would be unwise to
alter the regional geopolitical calculus by
pursuing an alternative, slogan-infested, foreign
policy. Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the
author of After Khomeini: New Directions in
Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and
"Iran's Foreign Policy Since 9/11", Brown's
Journal of World Affairs, co-authored with former
deputy foreign minister Abbas Maleki, No 2, 2003.
He teaches political science at Tehran University.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd.
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