Iran on the edge
Despite Iranian officials' assurances that the country's worst political crisis is close to being resolved, the Islamic regime's political future seems more uncertain than ever, reports Rasha Saad
Click to view caption |
Iranian MPs listen to a speech by a fellow reformer in parliament in Tehran during a sit-in on Monday
|
Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has again intervened in an attempt to end the turmoil resulting from the mass barring of reformist candidates from next month's elections.
Parliament speaker Mehdi Karoubi, President Mohammed Khatami and judiciary chief Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi-Shahrudi met with Khamenei late on Monday to find a way out of the bitter stand-off.
The crisis started two weeks ago when the Guardian Council vetoed 3,605 of 8,157 prospective candidates, including more than 80 sitting MPs, from running in the 20 February parliamentary elections.
"Last night's meeting had good results," Karoubi told the official IRNA news agency.
He said the meeting resulted in the appointment of four ministers -- all of whom have so far kept out of the crisis -- to probe reformist complaints that the mass barring of candidates by hardliners would result in no competition in some constituencies. The ministers said they would be able to complete their investigation by Thursday.
Karoubi also said that the Guardian Council has so far reinstated 500 of the barred MPs.
Khatami, was also confident that the elections row is soon to be resolved and that the 20 February vote would go ahead. "Our demand is for free, sound and competitive elections, and the government will definitely hold such elections," he said.
It remains unclear whether the revised candidate list will satisfy the MPs who have vowed to fight for a complete reversal of the candidate bans.
"We will not participate in illegal elections," reformist MP Ali Shakourirad said in a statement read in the parliament on Tuesday. "We are not ready to accept the shame of remaining silent and yielding to despotic methods," he added.
The intervention of Khamenei came hours after the election dispute between the country's rival conservative and reformist camps reached a peak. Early Monday Iranian reformist politicians announced that they were considering mass resignations or boycotting next month's parliamentary elections after the conservative Guardian Council vetoed their attempt to overturn bans on thousands of election hopefuls.
Iran's reformist-dominated parliament passed an emergency electoral reform on Sunday in a clear act of defiance aimed at quelling the Guardian Council's powers. The council, an unelected 12-member body comprised of conservative clerics and Islamic jurists, however, used its sweeping powers to reject the reform bill, further escalating what is possibly Iran's worst political crisis since the Islamic Revolution.
Two weeks ago, Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei asked the council to reconsider the disqualifications. Only 300 of the more than 3,000 disqualified have been approved.
The reformers' bill which seeks to overturn the disqualification of thousands of liberal hopefuls in next month's parliamentary elections was categorised as "triple-urgent".
This is the first time since Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution that the Iranian parliament approved a triple-urgency bill -- the highest category of importance. A triple-urgency bill is approved only if the parliament feels that the basic rights of Iranians are in serious jeopardy or the country is in great political or military danger.
The bill seeks to amend Iran's national elections law and force the Guardian Council, which technically oversees elections, to allow all lawmakers or candidates approved in past elections to run for office unless strong legal documentation proves them unfit. Also, in an attempt to eliminate politically motivated disqualifications, the bill requires the Guardian Council to approve anyone seeking office who has been deemed loyal to Islam and the ruling Islamic establishment by local trustees.
The council claims that most of the disqualified reformers, including Mohamed Reza Khatami, the president's brother, have failed to respect Islam or the Iranian Constitution. Reformers, however, believe the conservatives are trying to rig the elections.
In a statement issued on Monday, the government hinted that if the disqualifications were not overturned, it would not hold the elections. "The government will continue its activities to help form conditions for fair, free and competitive elections ... Existence of competition is the main condition for holding the elections," the Iranian Cabinet said in a statement.
Students, the driving force behind the reform movement who surprisingly kept a distance since the beginning of the crisis, have now decided to engage in the battle. They said they planned mass protests to denounce the hard-liners. "Students will join professors of all universities in Tehran today to support disqualified prospective hopefuls and denounce hard-liners who are restricting people's choice," reformist student leader Hossein Baqeri said on Monday.
The veto might provoke a boycott of the 20 February parliamentary elections. Reformists have warned they would not take part in polls where more than a third of the candidates had been prevented from running. "The rejection means there is no will on the part of hard-liners to resolve the political crisis through reasonable methods. It only pushes reformist lawmakers to harden their position and seriously consider mass resignations and boycotting the polls," said Mohsen Armin, a prominent reformist lawmaker who was disqualified from the elections. He said boycotting the elections has become a serious option for reformists, including those who had qualified to run again. Khatami's administration, he added, "is expected to seriously consider not holding the elections if things don't change".
Iran's leading religious dissident Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who helped draft Iran's Constitution in the aftermath of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, was another vociferous critic of the Guardian Council's intransigence. "The Guardian Council's role has switched from supervising elections to supervising candidates," he said "The recent disqualifications are based on unwarranted allegations," he added.
Most ministers in the cabinet including Interior Minister Abdolvahed Mussavi-Lari and six vice presidents have already submitted resignations in protest during the past couple of weeks, though Khatami refused to ratify them. Ironically, President Khatami himself had threatened earlier to resign in protest at the disqualifications.
Leading reformists in the civil service have also warned that they will make "important decisions" in the next few days if the disqualifications are not overturned.
