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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 February 2000 Issue No. 468 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 February 2000 Issue No. 468
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Focus Profile Travel Books Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Iranians stirred but unshaken
By Azadeh Moaveni
If there was any lingering doubt that the most eventful moment of Iran's parliamentary election season would be the vote-counting, a mortar attack in the capital and a clerical protest in Qom dispelled it this week.
On Saturday, mortar rounds fired at the presidential palace left one person dead and five wounded. If the attacks were indeed the work of the Iraq-based Mujaheddin Khalq opposition, who claimed responsibility, they could not be described as a success. They missed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, ex-president and parliamentary hopeful Hashemi Rafsanjani, as well as the entire Expediency Council -- instead, a print shop employee lost his life and several unsuspecting commuters ended up in hospital.
Iranians were taken aback by the fumbling attack, but Nik-Ahang Kosar, a caricaturist for the local newspaper Azad, was even more surprised when his daily labour landed him in prison one day after the mortar attack. Conservative Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi had insinuated recently that Iran's press was yellow; specifically, he alleged that a former CIA chief had slipped into Iran loaded with cash to buy off Iranian newspapers -- a less than subtle variation on the government's conventional insistence that its domestic opposition is funded from abroad.
The image of a lone, doddering American with suitcases full of dollars lent itself mainly to satire, and Kosar sketched a crocodile shedding false tears over the Western "cultural invasion".
Such an illustration did not, in itself, break with tradition. The conservative press has long printed political cartoons depicting liberal clergy, such as the imprisoned Abdollah Nouri or Ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri, under house arrest, in undignified poses.
But a sense of humour, it seems, is not a characteristic of the conservative clergy. Four thousand clerics took to the streets of Qom to protest the offending cartoon. Of this number, a sturdy 600 staged a street sit in, refusing to budge until Culture Minister Ayatollah Mohajerani, whose liberal policies have long nettled conservatives in the regime, resigned. Eventually, only the gentle nudge of the Supreme Leader called off the remonstrating clergy.
Was Tehran plunged into political crisis? Certainly the coincidence of a mortar raid and what appeared to be the potential sacking of a top minister would have left most electorally-minded capitals in disarray, if not sheer turmoil. Many believe the attacks were intended, however obliquely, to undermine the upcoming elections. The government immediately fingered the Mujaheddin, but pro-reform journalist Saeed Leylaz, among others, says it is not yet clear who was responsible. The unrest in Qom muddies the affair of the mortar attacks, he says, as "there are both domestic and external forces who share a common interest in creating disturbances at this time". But Leylaz says he is not surprised by what many regard as suspicious timing. "This is a climate where there are very clear winners and losers," he said. "So there is a limited range of strategies that can be employed."
Mohajerani has said he has no intention of stepping down. He called a press conference, informed the press that it was its own best critic and insisted that the proper way to deal with such controversy was to clarify the legal boundaries of satire involving the clergy. In the past, the Iranian press had enjoyed an informal agreement on the acceptable red lines of its political critique. But with the elections approaching and the press experimenting ever more boldly with its nascent freedoms, customary self-censorship is more ambiguous.
Indeed, the coalition of liberal newspapers, whose evolution Mohajerani has presided over, turned around this week and filed a complaint against Yazdi, accusing him of making unsubstantiated and slanderous allegations against their integrity. Unlike one predecessor brought down by the weight of similar criticism (none other than current President Mohamed Khatami), Mohajerani has the support of the reformist movement, however divided, behind him.
The political re-emergence of former President Rafsanjani has made the potential contention that has always existed in the reform movement a reality. The left of the reformist alliance says it cannot countenance close cooperation with Rafsanjani: his blend of conservatism and pragmatism, which appeals to the movement's more centrist strain, strays too far from the sort of changes the left envisions.
Time is not on anyone's side. The final candidate list will only be completed 10 days prior to the election and most Iranians will not be familiar with who they end up voting for. Reformists fret over the unintended consequences of this week's occurrences. But Iraj Jamshidi, the editor of the economic daily Ibrar-e-Eghtesad, told Al-Ahram Weekly he thinks the chain of events, even if linked in purpose, will not undermine the elections. "The political environment here doesn't allow for people to be shaken so easily," he says. "After the revolution and the war with Iraq, the Iranian people are both accustomed to and wary of such hostilities, and I think the only result will be enhanced participation in the elections."
Meanwhile, the Iraqi army went on alert following Tehran's mortar attack, increasing security measures around headquarters and camps of the Mujaheddin in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities. Tehran has traditionally retaliated against suspected Mujaheddin attacks by firing rockets at their bases in Iraq.
