IRAN’S REFORMISTS’ LAST-DITCH ATTEMPT TO THWART CONSERVATIVE FOES

The Iranian Student Movement Up to the Minute Reports ^ | July 17, 2003 | Afshin Molavi

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IRAN’S REFORMISTS’ LAST-DITCH ATTEMPT TO THWART CONSERVATIVE FOES

By Afshin Molavi 7.17.2003

WASHINGTON (EurasiaNet-PS) Reformist forces in Iran are making what some observers have described as a last-ditch effort to thwart the country’s increasingly defiant conservative minority, which controls the key levers of power in the Islamic republic. The reformists have appealed to the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khameneh’i, to embrace democratic reforms over dictatorship "to save the country and repel foreign threats."

In recent years, reformers have suffered a seemingly unending string of political setbacks at the hands of their conservative rivals, who have forcefully resisted all attempts at modernisation by Parliament and President Mohammad Khatami’s government. The defeats have caused much of the reformists’ popular support to evaporate.

The strongly worded appeal to (Ayatollah Ali) Khameneh’i, sent on July 15 and signed by 350 reform-minded intellectuals, is clearly an attempt to blunt the conservatives’ political momentum. The appeal calls for the immediate release of all political prisoners, the revival of banned newspapers, a wide-ranging overhaul of the hard-line judiciary and the reduction of power of un-elected bodies that "contradict the people’s will".

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