http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FA16Ak02.html Iran's protesting politicians out on a limb
By Ramin Mostaghim
TEHRAN - In an effort to ease the growing political crisis in Iran, supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Wednesday ordered the country's hardline conservative body to revise its massive blacklist banning thousands of reformists from next month's parliamentary elections, including 80 current members of parliament.
According to Iran's state television, the supreme leader said those candidates should not have been barred from running unless there was adequate proof they are not qualified. But despite Khamenei's words, members of parliament protesting the ban have refused to end their sitin.
President Mohammad Reza Khatami has urged the approximately 100 protesters - including lawmakers who joined although they are not barred from competing at the polls scheduled for February 20 - to end their sitin, held in parliament's lobby, and promised to work to reverse the ban. But by vowing to keep up their round-the-clock vigil, the protesters are turning up the heat on negotiations with the president and clerics, and fanning debate about the future of democracy in Iran. This leaves Khatami and Mehdi Karrubi, the speaker of parliament, to carry on with shuttle diplomacy.
Karrubi has accused the unelected Guardian Council of the Islamic Constitution, a 12-member panel of clerics and lawyers, of trying to rig the elections by barring reformists who favor greater openness and freedom of expression. Khatami, however, has said that the council can be persuaded to reinstate a number of disqualified candidates through negotiation rather than protest.
Khatami's own Islamic Mosharekat (Participation) Party, or IMP, has suffered the highest number of disqualifications. The IMP presently commands a majority of seats in the legislature. "Most of the over 4,000 nominees rejected by the Guardian Council of the Islamic Constitution are supporters or sympathizers of the party," said Ali Yossefi, an IMP organizer from eastern Tehran.
The protesters have said that if they are not reinstated as candidates for re-election, international pressure will be brought to bear on their behalf.
Mohsen Midamadi, an IMP politburo member and head of the party's parliamentary foreign policy committee, said he discussed the issue with European Union foreign policy and security chief Javier Solana, who wrapped up a two-day visit to the country on Tuesday.
But as the protest entered its fifth day on Thursday, observers and activists debated the action's wider significance. Sitin participants so far have failed to win popular support, especially on university campuses - a key base for the democracy movement.
"If the protest remains limited to the disqualification cases for some candidates and their agenda does not embrace all out democracy and human rights issues, the students will not support them," said Farid Moddaresi, 24, a political activist and journalist.
"The Iranian students and other walks of society are thinking of establishing an umbrella front to embrace all activists fighting for human rights and democracy, regardless of their religious belief and political tendencies," he added.
Likewise, observers from the secular opposition question the protest's long-term impact. "The sitin protest is not a genuine one and will play no role in the future development of Iran," Siavash Mokhtari told IPS. Unidentified intelligence officials strangled his father, the writer Mohammad Mokhtari, to death more than four years ago.
Members of the public also have expressed skepticism about the protests. Azamsadat Abhari, a 66-year-old woman who proudly stated that she has never voted since the 1979 revolution that brought in theocratic rule, dismissed the sitin as political theater designed to drum up public interest in the polls.
"Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, chairman of the expediency council Hashemi Rafsanjani and the speaker of the parliament [Karrubi] are pretending to be uninformed about the [Grand Council's] disqualification reasons," she said. "Once they make sure that enough people are enticed to vote, they [will] collaborate and nullify some of the disqualifications and all the hocus-pocus will vanish."
Nevertheless, reformist journalists, most of them young, plan to call on the parliamentary protesters to keep going - but also to champion the rights of citizens regardless of religion, race and political allegiance. The journalists are collecting signatures among their ranks for an open letter to the lawmakers.
"This open letter will be published in a few days and the signatories advise the disqualified candidates to forsake their personal campaigns to be requalified [for the polls] and fight for human rights and democracy," said reformist journalist Mohsen Akbari, 27.
The prospects for such a transformation appear to hinge on the majority IMP. Some see the party as too politically ambitious.
Commented Hassan Abduli, 50, a laid-off civil servant who earns a living by tutoring high school students in mathematics and physics: "In vain the IMP tries to seize the leadership of the fledgling democracy movement in Iran. Party officials are making attempts to minimize people's democratic requests and to reoccupy their seats in parliament."
Yet the IMP also has opened its doors to more radical politicians and advocates of democracy. Every night, people flock to the party's downtown headquarters to listen to speechmakers who call for expanding the reform agenda.
One of the speakers was Ahmad Qabel, a former cleric who protested the emergence of a religious ruling establishment by disrobing himself in the seminary at the holy city of Qom a decade ago. Addressing the IMP crowd, he stressed the importance of remembering that "the Iranian people have suffered in the past 25 years and their citizenship rights have been ignored by the rulers".
Ayatollah Khamenei has the final say concerning all state matters, and his intervention is expected to ease the mounting political tension. Meanwhile, the council is set to make a final ruling on the disqualifications at the end of the month. A final list of candidates is to be released in mid-February.
(Inter Press Service)
