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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 January 2000 Issue No. 463 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 January 2000 Issue No. 463
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Heritage Millennium Features Profile Living Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Stalled revolution in the revolution
By Azadeh Moaveni
For a president seeking to put his country's most moderate face forward, 1999 neither began nor ended auspiciously. The year began with the revelation of government complicity in the murder of several prominent intellectuals and ended with the imprisonment of the country's brightest pro-reform politician. Sandwiched in between was a crackdown on the liberal press, the imprisonment of 13 Jews on spying charges, and a brutal raid on a student dormitory that left at least four students dead. In itself, this would be a grim scorecard for any nation.
However what this year's political squabbles have most spiritedly brought out is Iran's social and political maturity. Certainly, a contested election, however dubious its procedure, is better than the decades of predictable campaigns that preceded it. Similarly, an overly-politicised, threatened press is preferable to the narrow debates that filled far fewer newspapers in the past. While the government's uneven progress toward democracy can be described as self-fashioned, the Iranian people have shown through protests and critical debate that they are engaged participants in their own social evolution.
Perhaps the earliest indication that the political landscape of Iran might be different under President Mohamed Khatami came in February. The Intelligence Ministry admitted that its agents had been responsible for that winter's string of murders of opposition figures, an unprecedented show of official accountability for crimes that in the past would have gone unexplained.
Structural change, however, remained elusive, except for the municipal elections that Khatami introduced and presided over in March. The elections were the first of their kind since the revolution, and the reformist victory, as intended, shook up the conservatives' centralised hold on power.
As president, Khatami has concentrated primarily on foreign policy, the area where his ambitions stand the best chance of being realised. In May he made historic tours around the Gulf, mending ties with Arab states who have long regarded Iran with suspicion. Khatami's potential abroad, however, still hinges on Iran's public face, and the June arrest of 13 Iranian Jews on spying charges cooled the ardour of a number of western countries that had been lining up to repair ties with Iran.
Nevertheless the fact that change may come slowly has not reduced Iran's strategic importance, and the US came closer than it has in two decades to renegotiating its relationship with Iran. Though little came of the budding rapprochement beyond the routine airing of long-held grievances, such skittish overtures and Khatami's autumn trip to France indicated the role Iran may begin to play in the next few years.
Though most of Khatami's other reforms have been sidelined by the limited scope of his authority at home, the political movement that his election spearheaded, the Second of Khordad Movement, has given birth to the kind of changes that its president has not always been able easily to control. Student demonstrations in July over the shut-down of a leading pro-reform newspaper were met by brutal and disproportionate police assault, with both Khatami and the Supreme Guide of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, compelled, probably by mutual panic, to show a united front and agree that the ensuing protests and general public outrage had destabilised the country.
That the two clerics were shaken up is not surprising, since the summer's student unrest had unleashed what had previously been unthinkable, namely a challenge to the sanctity of the country's Supreme Guide and the possibility of new kinds of political participation.
The show-trial of former Interior Minister Abdullah Nouri, which began in November and landed the cleric a five-year prison term, escalated the bitter contest between conservatives and liberals in Iran. Nouri is the highest ranking cleric to be removed from political life, and his sentence precludes him from running for February's parliamentary elections, in which he had been expected to lead the reform movement to victory.
Iranians, however, are not yet cynical about the elections, though public scepticism abounds, especially concerning Khatami himself. It was the bleak prospects for Iran's young post-revolutionary generation that first brought Khatami into office, and these prospects -- economic hardship, unemployment, limited university opportunities and housing -- endure. Most analysts believe that the status quo cannot continue under these kinds of pressure, and protest from the younger generation often comes from Islamic-minded students, who are tired of seeing religious moderation equated with stringent social rigidity.
Inevitably conservative success in this February's parliamentary elections will be a guide to the fate of the reform movement. If the liberals, with the help of a reformist president and a supportive press, cannot sufficiently influence the legal process to ensure a popular electoral victory, then their movement will be doomed, at least for the immediate future. However given the president's weak powers, a liberal election victory could produce an abrupt, dramatic change in the way Iran is run.
Nevertheless for Elahe Sharifpour-Hicks, Iran specialist at the US organisation Human Rights Watch, "I think it is naive to speak about election results, when it's not clear that they will even be held."
