"Khatami is glued to his seat", Analysts say
Report Section
Jul 12, 2003
TEHRAN - Iranian political analysts cold shouldered President Mohammad Khatami’s latest declaration that the rulers should go, "if the nation says we do not want you".
"We are not people's masters, but we are this nation's servants. We will go, if this nation says we do not want you", the lamed and powerless president said in a speech made on Thursday in the city of Karaj, 40 kilometres west of the capital, according to "Iran" newspaper."This is not the first time that Khatami makes such bursts, but in spite of all the calls and appeals and encouragements he had received from his closest allies to either resign or face up to the conservatives, he is glued to his presidential seat", one veteran observer of Iranian affairs pointed out.
Mr. Khatami repeated the warning, oblivion of the fact that he is abandoned by the students and the youths in general, the women and the elite, including journalists and intellectuals and his reform program is considered by the majority of Iranians as dead.Thousands of Iranians, led by students, during nightly protests in the past two weeks, not only denounced the ruling conservatives with chants of "death to Khameneh'i", but also called on Khatami to resign.
Mr. Aldolkarim Soroush, an internationally noted thinker and philosopher on Islam who, years before Khatami, introduced and defended the aberrant idea of "religious democracy", in a letter to Khatami, harshly blamed him for the misery of the reformers, accused him of failing to profit from the popular support he used to enjoy in order to implement the reforms he had promised in his electoral campaign of May 1997 presidential election."The peaceful and democratic uprising of the Iranian people against religious dictatorship in May 1997 was a sweet experience that turned sour. As a result of your failure, the prisons are in full expansion while universities fall in ruin and the nation faces unrest", Mr. Soroush noted.
The closure of more than 90 pro-democracy publications in the past three years, the arrest of dozens of prominent intellectuals and writers and closed trials without jury were open violations of the constitution, he said further.
"Khatami is facing a crossroads. He either sides with the people or joins hands with the conservatives and in either situation, he would be the looser", the Iran watcher observed."He can no more join the people because they demand not reforming the constitution of the present theocracy, as the reformists wants, but a fundamental change towards full fledged democracy and secularism. He cannot join the conservatives because they consider him as a used handkerchief", he explained.
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