A second chance

Mohammed Khatami, elected for a second four-year term as Iran's President, has one last chance to save the Islamic Republic.

ALONG the spanking six-lane highway that runs south from Teheran to Isfahan, there are boards at regular intervals indicating the distance to the Imam Khomeini International Airport. The airport project has been going on for most of the 22 years since the Islamic Revolution, but from what can be seen from the highway the work has hardly progressed. To judge by the huge gap between the promise of the Revolution and what has been accomplished, the airport project stands as a metaphor for the failure of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Syed Mohammed Khatami, who was re-elected for a second four-year term as President in elections held on June 8 has one last chance to save the Islamic Republic. Khatami and his associates appear to be the last die-hards who believe that the theocratic regime can be so reformed as to fulfil the aspirations of the Iranian people. Most Iranians appear to doubt that reform is possible - though they are willing to be patient for a little longer to see if Khatami can work his magic. Those entrenched in the power structure do not believe that there is any need for change; neither do they seem capable of perceiving that the system will break if it does not learn to bend. Unless Khatami can make the clerics of the status quo understand the reality of the situation, there is almost certainly going to be a calamity before the silver jubilee of the Revolution.

The Iranian society of today is one that is almost bereft of hope. There are few people even among the vast majority that voted for Khatami who believe that the President will achieve his objective of changing the system from within. People like Khatami, they wish him well and they want him to succeed in his enterprise. But scepticism is widespread and strong. For the moment Iranians are using up the social space opened by the retreat of the theocratic regime on a few fronts, but the regime is not likely to retreat or reform to the extent that people want. The increasingly discontented masses are awaiting a leadership that will articulate their aspirations and give them direction. Those entrenched in the regime will do their best to ensure that such a leadership does not emerge.

Khatami appears indispensable in the current Iranian context. The masses need him to preserve the social spaces that were opened during his first four-year term in office. Although it is seldom stated in so many words, the obvious wish is that a sturdier leadership will either coalesce around Khatami or offer itself as an alternative over the next four-year period.

Ironically, the clerics of the status quo, the Iranian conservatives, need Khatami in the Presidency for similar reasons. He is the one cleric who has a rapport with the masses and he alone ensures that the contradictions within Iran are not manifested as a clear confrontation between the theocrats and the secular masses. But while people on both sides look to Khatami to prevent the calamity, they are each applying such contradictory pressures that the President has a near-impossible task.

That the Iranian conservatives needed Khatami to continue in the Presidency was clear from the manner in which they tried to manage the election. Over 800 Iranians filed nomination papers to contest the eighth presidential election. The Council of Guardians, a conservative-controlled body that vets candidatures for all elections, cleared barely 10 nomination papers including those of Khatami. Hardly anyone outside or inside Iran had a doubt that the main objective of the conservatives would be to ensure that Khatami was humbled - even when it was unlikely that he could be made to lose. To this purpose they could have cleared the candidature of Ibrahim Azgarzadeh, a relatively young revolutionary hero, so that he cut into Khatami's support base among the youth. But if they had allowed Azgarzadeh to contest, the Guardians would have tacitly admitted that his radical views fell within the ambit of the tolerable.

Since the conservatives could find no way by which they could engineer a split of the pro-reform vote, it might have been thought that they would do their best to consolidate the anti-reform forces. They could have done this by projecting one candidate from their front, and in former Labour Minister Ahmed Tavakoli they did have a candidate who had not completely discredited himself the last time he contested the presidential poll (against Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani in 1993). There was, however, the danger that if a single strong conservative candidate against Khatami emerged, the pro-reform vote would be galvanised. An election result that showed Khatami winning as many votes, or more than the 20 million he won in the 1997 election, would have been an even greater blow for the conservatives.

Eventually what the Guardians did was to clear the names of nine broadly conservative candidates to contest the polls against Khatami. Once the campaign got under way, it was impossible to avoid the conclusion that a degree of orchestration was at play. Each of the other nine candidates chose to focus on specific aspects of Khatami's record or perceived shortcomings while they also liberally borrowed from the President's lexicon to show that they too stood for liberalism and moderation. Tavakoli hit out against Khatami's failure to combat corruption. Ali Shamkhani, the 44-year-old Defence Minister, said that he would bring to the Presidency the decisiveness and ability to pull along various groups - a quality that he said Khatami lacked. Abdollah Jasbi, an educationist, sought to appeal to the youth by promising to cut the costs of higher learning. And several of the candidates promised that they would end the isolationist trends in Iran's foreign policy (by promising that they would establish relations with the U.S.).

An Iranian commentator dubbed the contest as one between "a gladiator and nine soldiers". The imagery probably came from last year's Oscar-winning epic (which Iranians are not supposed to see), but it was appropriate enough. It was clearly the job of the earnest nine to deliver so many cuts to Khatami that he would be bled dry even if he did manage to emerge victorious. There was an obvious target that the conservatives had set for themselves. In 1997, Khatami had won 20 million votes (roughly 70 per cent of a 90 per cent turnout). So the task for the conservatives was to ensure that the turnout was lower and Khatami's margin of victory lesser. If such an outcome was achieved, the conservatives would have been able to say that support for Khatami had been eroded and they could have then blocked his efforts at reform with greater boldness. Meanwhile, conservative hardliners, most conspicuously led by Ayatollah Mohammed Taqi Mezbah Yazdi, launched a propaganda offensive against Khatami and the reform camp, accusing them, among other things, of distributing pornography.

FOR a couple of hours after the polling stations opened on that clear and relatively cool Friday morning, it appeared that the conservatives' game plan would work. Lines were thin at the polling stations and there was none of the fervour that was evident in the presidential poll of 1997 or the parliamentary election of February 2000.

Then, suddenly around noon, the scene was transformed. From noon till late at night crowds thronged the polling booths to such an extent that the time for voting had to be extended by five hours. Since there was no evidence that Khatami associates had suddenly activated themselves to get the voters out, it appears that a frenetic bush telegraph got into operation. It was as if an alarm had been set off warning the Iranian public that if they did not cast their votes the conservatives would be handed a victory.

It was a stunning result that the Interior Ministry announced the next evening. There was confusion about the exact turnout (the Ministry first announced an 83 per cent turnout of the 42.1 plus million voters and then revised it to 67 per cent) but the basic fact was that Khatami ended up with at least a million more votes than he did in 1997. The Guardians have started making noises about irregularities, and the conservatives would dearly like to make something of the fact that Khatami added only a million to his tally although several million new voters had been added to the list.

It is also not beyond the realm of possibility that the Guardians, who have overriding authority to validate the election results, will somehow show that Khatami won fewer votes than the Interior Ministry says he did. (In the February 2000 parliamentary elections they moved Rafsanjani, who had come last among Teheran's 30 candidates according to the Interior Ministry's count, to the 24th position.) But the Guardians face a difficult task of manipulating the record because the nature of Khatami's victory is unprecedented. Never before in an Iranian presidential election has an incumbent been returned to office with anything close to the margin of victory he won on the first occasion - leave alone a victory by a margin bigger than the first.

By the time the campaign came to a close, Khatami's associates in Parliament were chalking out measures that they would take to further their reform agenda. Their initial target was the conservative-controlled judiciary which has busied itself over the last four years negating all the measures that Khatami has taken to open space for political and civic debate. There are other measures that the reformers have indicated they would take and which they must take if Iran is to move forward, especially on the economic front. Before anything else they will have to curb the extraordinary and overriding powers over legislation that the Guardians and another conservative-dominated body, the Expediency Council, exercise.

Iran's conservatives are not about to give up the fight because they cannot do so. Since the advent of the Islamic Republic, non-oil economic enterprises that are nominally owned by the state and which make the bulk of the country's productive assets have been hived off to the Boniyads (the so-called charitable organisations) controlled by the conservatives. The protection of these monopolies is the fundamental objective of the conservative clergy and they have allies among the Bazaris who do not want domestic manufacturers to affect their trading monopolies. Rhetoric about protecting Islamic values is a mere smoke-screen behind which they preserve their economic interests.

Till now Iran's conservatives have fought reform on the grounds that the loosening of discourse and the relaxation of social rules will lead to an unravelling of the moral fabric. What is, however, evident in today's Iran is that the economic stranglehold which the cleric-dominated oligarch exercises is the main factor that is stifling economic development. As the rapidly rising graphs of crime and prostitution show, a desperate people have begun to resort to all means for their sustenance. The dignity and self-respect of the ordinary Iranians have taken a beating and the results of the presidential election leave no doubt as to who they hold responsible for their plight.