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2 The world according to
Ahmadinejad By Kimia Sanati
TEHRAN - "The world is becoming rapidly
Ahmadinejadized, if I'm allowed to make a joke,"
Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad told
journalists last week. Given his habit of grabbing
world headlines, such as with his "letter to the
American people" released at the United Nations on
Wednesday, that may not be an empty boast.
In a letter addressed to the American
people, Ahmadinejad
launched a scathing attack on
US President George W Bush's foreign policy and
urged a withdrawal of US forces from Iraq.
"Now that Iraq has a constitution and an
independent assembly and government, would it not
be more beneficial to bring the US officers and
soldiers home and to spend the astronomical US
military expenditures in Iraq for the welfare and
prosperity of the American people?" Ahmadinejad
wrote.
The 50-year-old former mayor of
Tehran may have gained much popularity in the
Islamic world for his defiance of the great
powers, the United States foremost, since assuming
office on August 6, 2005. But at home it is
another story.
More than 90% of
participants in a recent Internet poll conducted
by the Aftab news agency and commissioned by an
institute affiliated with Iran's Expediency
Council said his popularity had diminished or
greatly diminished over the past 16 months. Only
8% of respondents believed his popularity was the
same as, more than, or much more than before.
Ahmadinejad is known internationally for
his attacks on the exclusive right of veto given
to the permanent members of the UN Security
Council that prevents other countries from gaining
nuclear technology, as well as his remarks on the
Holocaust, threats against Israel and his support
for Lebanese Hezbollah. But he has also stirred up
controversy domestically.
A top student at
Tehran's Science and Technology University, he was
prominent among the radical Islamist students in
the early years after the Islamic Revolution of
1978. Photos showing a man resembling a young
Ahmadinejad alongside one of the US hostages, when
the US Embassy in Tehran was taken over by radical
students in 1979, emerged after he took office. A
similar photo has recently been discovered in
Russia.
However, reformist critics, such
as Said Hajjarian and Mohsen Mirdamadi, say that
at that time, Ahmadinejad believed communism to be
a bigger danger and that he offered to seize the
Russian Embassy instead. They say he was not among
those present for the siege.
In later
years, he was appointed governor of two small
towns in Kurdistan province, served with the
Revolutionary Guards in war fronts with Iraq, and
became governor general of the northwestern
province of Ardabil.
The reformist
Mohammad Khatami's presidency in 1997 saw
Ahmadinejad return to university as a lecturer. He
stayed there until 2003 when he was elected mayor
of Tehran by a hardline city council that had
taken over from a reformist council by only 12% of
the vote.
As mayor, Ahmadinejad soon began
to give greater religious direction to the
activities of municipal cultural centers, which
hardliners believed had become dens of immorality
by encouraging young girls and boys to mix, and by
staging art performances and exhibitions they
considered degenerate and immoral.
The
municipality, under Ahmadinejad, offered marriage
loans to young couples and often distributed food
to the poor. Ahmadinejad, who lived and still
lives a very simple life, speaks the language of
ordinary people and calls himself a "servant of
the people", sometimes partaking of community
meals with municipal workers and street sweepers
in Tehran.
As mayor, he proposed to bury
the bodies of those martyred in the war with Iraq
in the squares of the capital. Critics, including
then-parliament Speaker Mehdi Karrubi, himself a
well-recognized cleric and father of a fallen
soldier, accused him of wanting to turn the city
into a graveyard. The plan was abandoned despite
strong support from the hardliners.
The
circumstances leading to Ahmadinejad's winning the
presidency, with 62% of the vote, remain a
mystery. Ahmadinejad, it seems, became popular
among ordinary people during the last three weeks
leading up to the elections.
Election
slogans promising to place oil money on people's
dinner tables, to fight corruption and
bureaucracy, and to make education cheaper were
very attractive to the country's lower classes who
brought him to power. Many, tired of clerical
rule, saw his defense of the poor and the
oppressed in stark contrast to the status of his
main rival, Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi, who had come
to be known as a symbol of clerical oligarchy and
technocracy.
Rivals, from both the
reformist and the hardline camps, alleged
irregularities and vote-rigging in the first round
of the elections. His
