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Al-Ahram Weekly 3 - 9 February 2000 Issue No. 467 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 3 - 9 February 2000 Issue No. 467
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Special Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Conflict circumscribed
By Azadeh MoaveniAfter retorting to reformist criticism that he is not above the law and overseeing the disqualification of hundreds of reformist candidates from the upcoming parliamentary elections, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei turned his attention this week to the imprisoned liberal former mayor of Tehran, Gholamhossein Karbaschi.
Pardoning one of Iran's most influential liberal politicians a scant three weeks before elections seems a highly unusual move for Khamenei. The electoral process is murky, and it is any one's guess whether an absolute majority will emerge, but by all accounts Khamenei's conservative faction should be shoring up its position rather than making admirable but uncharacteristic nudges toward political moderation.
Before being thrown into prison, Karbaschi was a major power-broker in the reform movement. His financial support and political clout helped elect President Mohamed Khatami, and under his custodianship Tehran was made an inhabitable city. His 1998 conviction on corruption charges was seen as a blow by conservatives to Khatami's increasingly lively reformists. Likewise, Karbaschi's amnesty is considered less indebted to procedural appeal and the rule of law than it is to the whim of Iran's tangled political culture. "There has always been an extra-legal will imposed on this case from above," said Hossein Marashi, acting head of the Executive of Construction, Karbaschi's centrist faction.
Whether the former mayor can pick up where he left off is, however, still unclear. His conviction banned him from all political activity for 10 years, and observers speculate that his pardon was intended more to highlight the conservatives' flexibility than to allow for his political rehabilitation. But it would be wrong to conclude he was pardoned to no end.
It is rumoured that former President Hashemi Rafsanjani secured the ex-mayor's release, and their relationship embodies the uncomfortable links among Iran's political factions, as well as the inevitable confusion of the very terms "conservative" and "reformist". Conservatives dislike Karbaschi, for example, but Rafsanjani is their political friend and candidate for parliamentary speaker. This week's political brinkmanship reveals the diversity within each faction, as well as their dependency on each other.
As is now a commonplace for political analysts, without the clerical hard-liners nothing would buffer Khatami's reformists from an emboldened public that could very well decide it needed a secular democracy rather than a moderate Islamic one. Similarly, brooking a liberal opposition sustains the Islamic establishment by lending it the popular legitimacy it lacked as recently as three years ago.
An Iranian woman reads a pamphlet about the late Ayatollah Khomeini during celebrations marking the 21st anniversary of the Iranian revolution (photo: AFP)
Karbaschi's release also counteracts the hard-line image projected by the Council of Guardians' disqualification of reformers from competing in the February elections. The Council said on 28 January that it was barring 762 of the almost 7,000 candidates. The final list of candidates will be ready only 10 days before the election, and though most of their prominent leaders have been disqualified, the reformers claim they can still win a majority.
About half of those disqualified were not permitted to run for political reasons, ranging from links to illegal political groups, lack of proper adherence to Islam, or affiliation with the ousted monarchy. Reformers had put forward thousands of candidates in hopes of making strategic disqualification a practical impossibility.
With their best-known leaders barred, they are hoping that they can still dominate the parliament through anonymous supporters, though some worry that a ballot lacking in personalities will not draw people to the polls. Leading reformist Abdullah Nouri, who was expected to sweep the liberals into power and then lead them as speaker of Parliament, remains in jail after being convicted by a clerical court on charges of religious dissent.
"Rafsanjani as speaker could equalise both the extreme right and the extreme left, and lighten the burden on Khatami," commented the Iran News in an editorial on Sunday. Rafsanjani leaked to the press last week that he is running for parliament at the behest of the president himself. A divided parliament with Rafsanjani at its head, suggest observers, would necessarily decrease popular expectations of Khatami. With such substantively varying factions uncomfortably assembled within broad coalitions, the logic runs, it is in every politician's interest to appear hamstrung by his supporters, as well as by his foes.
