The Iranian Dubcek bows out (BBC News)
A visibly-shaken Khatami defended his record and criticised the powerful hardliners who have closed newspapers and jailed dissidents.Khatami may still believe that, but at this point I suspect that very few other Iranians still agree with him. In retrospect, the Khatami experiment, beginning in 1997, will almost certainly be seen as the last shot at reforming and democratizing the system from within (like the Prague Spring of 1968). It was tried, and it failed.
He asked students to stop heckling and accused his critics of intolerance.
Students were once some of President Khatami's strongest supporters. But they now accuse him of failing to stand up to the conservatives who won parliamentary elections in February.
Correspondents say Mr Khatami is concluding his second and final term in office as a virtual lame duck - having once been seen a force for great change in the Islamic republic. [....]
"There is no Third World country where the students can talk to their president and criticise the government as you do now.
"I really believe in this system and the revolution and that this system can be developed from within," he is quoted as saying.
What happens next is less clear. Like the eastern European regimes during the 1980s, the Iranian regime seems to have decisively lost its legitimacy and support among the great majority of Iranians. But historical analogies are rarely exact. By the 1980s, the eastern European elites (with some very rare exceptions) didn't really believe in the system either, had become cynical and demoralized, and collapsed fairly rapidly when they were challenged. Unlike those regimes, the Iranian regime still commands the loyalty of a sizable hard core who are committed to it from genuine ideological belief and/or from materialistic motives, and who seem willing to use as much violence as it takes to crush opposition. I suspect this means that Iran can look forward to an indefinite period of very unstable political equilibrium, probably marked by increasing repression as well as potentially dangerous efforts by the ruling elite to build up support through nuclear brinksmanship and other types of foreign-policy adventurism.
Or maybe not. After all, when Solidarity was suppressed in Poland in 1981, almost no sane person imagined that the whole edifice of eastern European post-Stalinist state socialism would come crashing down a decade later. History is unpredictable. And Iran remains one of the very few countries in the Middle East where, if the current regime collapsed tomorrow, it's plausible that it would NOT be replaced with an even worse regime. In fact, I think we could still see an Iranian 1989 ... sometime down the road
Yours in struggle,
Jeff Weintraub
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BBC News
December 6, 2004
Students chanted "Shame on you" and "Where are your promised freedoms?" to express their frustration with the failure of Iran's reform movement.
A visibly-shaken Khatami defended his record and criticised the powerful hardliners who have closed newspapers and jailed dissidents.
He asked students to stop heckling and accused his critics of intolerance.
Students were once some of President Khatami's strongest supporters.
Correspondents say Mr Khatami is concluding his second and final term in office as a virtual lame duck - having once been seen a force for great change in the Islamic republic.
Free speech
"My period is going to be over soon but I do not owe anyone," Mr Khatami told the meeting of about 1,500 students in remarks quoted by Reuters news agency.
"Those power-seeking fanatics who ignored the people's demands and resisted reforms... the ones who destroyed Iran's image in the world, they owe me."
"There is no Third World country where the students can talk to their president and criticise the government as you do now.
"I really believe in this system and the revolution and that this system can be developed from within," he is quoted as saying.
But student leader Abdollah Momeni complained that there was is no difference between the president and the authoritarians who thwarted his reform programme.
"Students are very disappointed because they paid a heavy price for supporting Khatami, but in return they got nothing," he is quoted as saying by Reuters.
A statement distributed by one pro-reform student group at the meeting said: "Unfortunately what Khatami sees as his tolerance was his extreme weakness towards the opponents of democracy".
Published: 2004/12/06 15:26:28 GMT
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BBC News
June 30, 2003 [updated]
Iranian President Mohammad Khatami came to power amidst promises of reform.
But with many of his initiatives foundering on conservative resistance, he has looked increasingly embattled.
When Iran's Council of Guardians barred hundreds of reformists from standing in the February 2004 parliamentary elections, the president backed the reformists.
"I do not agree with the disqualifications. We shall go through legal channels to prevent this sort of thing from happening," he said on Iranian TV.
The son of a respected ayatollah, Mohammad Khatami was born in central Yazd Province in 1943.
His previous posts included two terms as minister of culture and Islamic guidance, cultural adviser to his predecessor, former President Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, and head of Iran's National Library.
He won a landslide victory in the 1997 presidential election. His campaign pledges included greater freedom of expression, as well as measures to tackle unemployment and boost privatisation.
His victory was attributed largely to support from young people and women, impressed by his vision of "religious democracy".
President Khatami's first term ushered in some liberalisation, exemplified by a renaissance of the print media and improved relations with states inside and outside the region.
In January 1998 he held out the prospect of rapprochement with the United States, by addressing the American nation on CNN to stress that Iran had "no hostility" towards them.
In September 1998, the president addressed the UN General Assembly to propose that it declare 2001 the year of "Dialogue among Civilisations". The proposal, aimed at fostering global tolerance, was duly adopted.
Calls to resign
Yet his attempt to implement "Islamic democracy" at home found itself blocked by the country's conservative institutions. The initial blossoming of the media was followed by newspaper closures and the arrest of journalists.
Despite these setbacks and economic woes compounded by the fall in the oil price, President Khatami went on to win a second term in 2001. Though the turnout was lower than in 1997, his percentage of the vote rose.
Frustrated by the obstacles to his reforms, he submitted a bill aimed at boosting presidential power, and another curbing the role of the Guardian Council, which has to approve all legislation.
The bills were overwhelmingly approved by parliament in April 2003, but rejected by the Council as unconstitutional in May. Reformist MPs have suggested that the bills be put to a referendum - or that the president resign in protest.
In May 2003 an open letter signed by 153 deputies was read out in parliament, urging conservatives to give way to reforms. Otherwise, the letter says, Iran could face the same fate as Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
When students, once the president's natural constituency, took to the streets in June 2003 over the slow pace of reform, they called for his resignation along with that of hardliners.
In televised remarks, he defended the students' action.
"Our students have the right to stage their protests and, fortunately, they have demonstrated their maturity in so doing," he said.
But he also reacted to President Bush's comment that the protests showed Iranians wanted freedom with a warning:
"We will not allow any foreigner to interfere in our destiny."
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BBC Monitoring , based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.
Published: 2003/06/30 13:41:19 GMT
posted by Jeff Weintraub at 12:31 AM
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