Iran's reformers, conservatives square off
By Safa Haeri
PARIS - A new round of public confrontation between the ruling conservatives - a minority of non-elected clerics who rule Iran - and the official reformists who control both the executive and the legislative powers but have no say in decision-making, has set the tone for the runup to the majlis (parliament) elections, due in less than six months.
The two heads of the Iranian political system are engaged in a cutthroat fight on two fronts, and the outcome could well determine, and eventually shape, the future of the present Iranian regime.
Two important ministries of Hojjatoleslam Mohammad Khatami's government are clashing with two major organs controlled by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the leader of the Islamic Republic: these are the Interior Ministry against the Guardians Council (GC) and the Intelligence Ministry against the powerful judiciary.
The first battle is about the future of the next majlis elections, where the conservatives, through the GC, a non-elected, 12-member institution, are responsible for vetting all candidates to all elections in Iran as well as for approving the conformity of all laws passed by the parliament with Sharia, or Islamic, canons.
The Guardians have already rejected two government bills approved by the majlis. The first one calls for curtailing some extra powers of the GC, namely that of vetting the candidates. The other wants some of the president's constitutional prerogatives that are contested by the judiciary to be restored to him.
Two weeks ago Interior Minister Hojjatoleslam Abdolvahed Mousavi-Lari ordered provincial governors not to cooperate with the GC in opening offices for the coming elections, a decision that was immediately denounced by the election watchdog, stating that the GC did not need the governors anyway.
The second front is the theater of an unprecedented clash that opposes the Intelligence Ministry with the judiciary over the death of Zahra Kazemi, a Canadian-Iranian photojournalist killed in July by interrogators from the office of Sa'id Mortazavi, the prosecutor of both Tehran and the Islamic revolution tribunal, the Intelligence Ministry and the Law Enforcement Forces.
Arrested at the end of June while taking pictures of families of jailed anti-regime protesters near the notorious Evin prison in the outskirts of the capital, the Montreal-based photographer died 10 days latter of brain hemorrhage "caused by a heavy object hitting her skull", according to an investigation team formed on orders of the president.
At first, the authorities said that Kazemi had died in a hospital belonging to the Revolutionary Guards of a brain stroke, but ended up by admitting that the death was the result of a "heavy object" that had hit the victim's head while in custody.
According to the French daily Liberation, Judge Mortazavi, who is a protege of the regime's strongman, had personally hit Kazemi's head with his shoe while trying to force her into confessing that she was on an espionage mission in Iran.
But on Monday, a criminal judge in charge of Kazemi's case caused a stir by announcing that he had identified two interrogators from the Intelligence Ministry as the murderers of the photographer, charging them with "semi intentional" killing.
The announcement outraged the Intelligence Minister, Hojjatoleslam Ali Yunesi, who, in a statement, not only rejected the judiciary's findings as "utterly baseless", but also promised to inform the public about the real circumstances of the tragedy.
"Claims made by the prosecutor of Bench 1 of Tehran's Criminal Court, in which two of the Information Ministry's interrogators are accused of being accomplices in the quasi intentional murder of Ms Kazemi are sheer lies," the official news agency IRNA quoted a deputy information minister as saying.
"The Information Ministry has discovered the truth of the matter on the case related to the death of Zahra Kazemi, and is intended to publish it for public information in very near future," the official added, in a veiled threat that the main culprit might well be the very person of Mortazavi.
This is the second time in as many weeks that the judiciary has been charged with "sheer lies". The first time was when Mohammad Hoseyn Khoshvaqt, a general director at the Guidance and Islamic Culture Ministry in charge of the press, revealed that Mortazavi had forced him to make a false announcement by stating that Kazemi had died of a brain stroke.
The claim was further confirmed by the official news agency IRNA, saying that the same kind of statement it had carried concerning the photojournalist was in fact "dictated" by the prosecutor in person.
Iranian political analysts are unanimous in predicting that not only are the conservatives determined not to allow the next unicameral house be controlled by the reformists (as is the case now), they also want an end to the present political chaos caused by the endless feuds between the system's two opposed concepts of theocracy based of one man's absolute rule versus a republicanism mixed with a "tolerant religion", as defined by Khatami.
In the view of the analysts, the recent harsh crackdown on political dissidents and the independent press, which is close to the reformists, by the judiciary, a power that is directly controlled by Ayatollah Khamenei and which serves as the conservatives' political and police arms, is a clear indication of the hardliners' plans in that direction.
At the same time, the analysts say, the government's unprecedented firm stand in facing up to the conservatives is aimed at recovering at least part of the popularity that it has lost with its base, made up mostly of young voters, because of its dramatic failure in delivering the reforms that it had promised on the one hand and Khatami's continued bowing to the conservatives on the other.
To "punish" the reformers, Iranians who in all recent presidential and parliamentary elections had massively voted for Khatami and the reformers, deserted the polls in the last city and village council elections, offering Tehran municipality to the conservatives.
"The reformists' big mistake from the outset was that the political system of the Islamic Republic, based on the absolute rule of one person, is anything but democratic in the Western terminology of the concept," Dr Qasem Sho'leh Sa'di, a lawyer and outspoken political dissident speaking for the neo-reformists told Asia Times Online.
Contrary to the official reformists who insist on reforming Iran's constitution, the neo-reformers want drastic changes to the system, replacing the present theocracy with a secular democracy.
But Dr Sadeq Ziba Kalam, a professor of international politics at Tehran University, says that considering the mounting international pressures on Iran, officials on both sides will close ranks in limiting the scope of their divergences.
"The tragedy of the death of Ms Kazemi and its repercussions on national and international scenes, coupled with other issues [accusations of a nuclear weapons program, the arrest of a former Iranian envoy in connection with a terror act] would force the decision-makers to stop the generalization of their feuds," Kalam told the Prague-based Radio Farda (Tomorrow), the Persian service of Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty, controlled by the United States. |
