Will history judge the Iranian president for his small victories or greater failures?
When Mohammed Khatami addressed a student meeting at the University of Tehran in December, a loud minority heckled him and accused him of betrayal. But when Khatami held his ground, asking above the tumult for tolerance and the right to speak, most of those present responded warmly.
Whatever criticisms many Iranians have of a president who will stand down in the summer, few doubt that his two terms in office have extended freedoms of speech and social behavior. "His achievements may look like molehills compared with the mountains of people's demands," Akbar Montajebi, a reformist journalist, told me. "But the fact we can now talk about political prisoners, or that deputies can send a critical letter to the supreme leader - these changes are largely due to Mohammed Khatami."
What is less clear is the future direction of the reformist movement. Since February's parliamentary election, the Majlis has been dominated by a strongly right-wing majority whose victory owed as much to the alienation of most Iranians from politics as to the decision of the Guardian Council to exclude over 2,000 reformist candidates from the poll.
Mosharekat, the main reformist party, has announced its backing for Mostafa Moein, the former minister of higher education, but party strategists admit that Moein may not clear the Guardian Council. "The council should reflect public opinion and we will campaign for Mr. Moein's acceptance," says Mustafa Tajzadeh. "If he is excluded, we will expose the decision."
But for the reformists to repeat their call in the parliamentary elections of February 2004 for voters to stay at home would dent the already limited chances of a second candidate, Mehdi Karrubi, who as parliamentary speaker in the last Majlis was a close ally of Khatami and has already announced his decision to stand.
At the same time, other reformists, especially those with liberal economic views or with business interests, are considering supporting Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former president who has been lingering for months over a decision to stand, apparently to block a right-wing candidate and keep on track the government's program for privatization.
High hopes. The confusion in the reformist camp reflects the disappointing end to Khatami's presidency, which began with such high hopes after he won 69 percent of votes in his 1997 landslide election victory and which has ended with such disappointment. The Guardian Council blocked legislation Khatami saw as crucial, voters became disillusioned with what they saw as the government's concentration on constitutional rather than bread-and-butter issues, and the government is now in deadlock with a right-wing Majlis, unable to get approval for simple requests.
Khatami was elected on a commitment to build a "religious democracy" based on the rule of law and a vibrant civil society, but found it hard to overcome vested interests within the Islamic system he wanted to uphold. His powers of persuasion were not enough to clear the blockages, and many Iranians saw his handling of the February election as a betrayal of his ideals.
When the Guardian Council disqualified more than 2,000 mainly reformist candidates, the president kept his distance from a sit-in of deputies and from reformist governors who wanted to list disqualified people on ballot papers. Instead Khatami opened discussions with the council and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader. And when the Guardian Council, with the leader's blessing, reinstated only a few hundred barred candidates, Khatami said his government would run the election as usual.
In his December speech at the University of Tehran, Khatami said he had received a positive response from Ayatollah Khamenei about the disqualifications. This was the first time Khatami claimed that Ayatollah Khamenei showed sympathy with his own opinion about the elections. "We were asked [by the leader] to write down our conditions [for fair elections]," he said. "The leader's view was positive. Unfortunately, the Guardian Council did not take into consideration even the leader's view."
But others have suggested the president was cheated. "They told him to run the election, and in return they'd make changes over the disqualifications - the hardliners didn't keep their word," said Hamid Reza Jelaieepour, a journalist and friend of Khatami's.
"He paid the price of naivet," Montajebi told me. "But we shouldn't forget Mr. Khatami's commitment to the system. He's like a man who loves his mistress, but doesn't want to upset his family by leaving his wife."
Hence when Mosharekat accused the supreme leader of bias and boycotted February's poll, Khatami called for a strong turnout. At the University of Tehran in December, he again defended this action. "We reached a point [of choosing between] holding elections or [risking] unrest and tension in the country," he said. "I did not see it as expedient at all for such a thing to happen."
The president feared confrontation might spark serious unrest, said Mohammed Reza Khatami, the president's younger brother and general secretary of Mosharekat. "If we were sure we could get democracy, we'd pay any cost - but who knows what will happen in Iran?" he said. "Age makes you cautious; it makes you realize what is possible."
In international affairs, Khatami's period of office has seen a notable easing of tension with the Arab world and with Europe. Most analysts give credit for November's agreement with the European Union - averting the US plan to refer Iran to the security council over its nuclear program and opening up talks on a wide range of issues - both to pragmatic conservatives in the security apparatus and to Khatami's government.
And the last years of Khatami's president brought not just a new challenge from the US - represented by George Bush's infamous "axis of evil" speech - but also the removal of two of Iran's arch enemies.
"Iran has maintained its security during the past four years while two big wars happened in the region," read a recent editorial in the moderate Madras-Salary newspaper, "changing the direction of the arrow from Iran to Afghanistan and Iraq, and removing two big enemies: the Taliban and the Ba'ath regime. This is one of the successes of Khatami's foreign policy."
But most Iranians will judge Khatami's presidency more by his domestic achievements than his foreign policy, and certainly than his much repeated call for a "dialogue of civilizations." In truth, radical critics had lost faith in Khatami in 1999 when he stayed neutral as right-wing vigilantes attacked students with clubs and knives after they protested when the judiciary closed reformist newspapers.
And many conservatives echo their cries that Khatami's popularity was based more on slogans than on actual policies. "Khatami came to cool down their exuberance, to curb their demands by partly meeting them," said Reza Tarraqi, a member of Jamiate Moutalefeye Eslami (Islamic Coalition Association). "He articulated their wishes with ambiguous slogans like freedom, reform, civil society."
Baby boomers. Conservatives argue the baby boomers of the 1970s and 1980 - born before Iran's birth rate dropped from 6.4 per woman in 1986 to 2.5 in 1999 - were excited as teenagers by Khatami's promises of political change but are now married and busy making a living and raising children. Such demographics, say conservative strategists, underline both a lack of popular interest in politics, with voter turnout down to 50 percent in last February's parliamentary elections from 67 percent in 2000, and the conservatives' victory in those polls.
But in the process of cooling down such exuberance, Khatami's presidency has shifted the terrain of Iranian politics. While diehard statists - more prevalent on the right than the left - defend state dominance of the economy, even right-wing potential president candidate Ali Larijani has spoken of "making use of the accomplishments" of previous governments. "We don't live in a vacuum, and we are not supposed to start from scratch," he said.
Few expect any government in the foreseeable future to attempt to reverse the relative liberalization in social freedoms, including the hijab. "We've reached the point where we accept that what people do in their own homes is their own business," a leading conservative columnist told me.
Iran has weathered many storms since Khatami first entered parliament in 1980 as a strong supporter of then leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and since he ruffled many feathers by relaxing censorship as minister of culture between 1983-92.
History may judge his presidency as a time when Iran was consolidated after years of upheaval and war - but the alienation of Iranians from politics must be a massive disappointment for a man who wanted a vibrant and tolerant Islam. Khatami showed that the country could bend to meet some of its people's aspirations, but not that it could bend far enough to win their hearts and minds.Gareth Smyth
© Arabies Trends 2005
