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Posted on 07/12/2003 4:27:14 PM PDT by Pokey78
Iran's reforming President, Mohammad Khatami, put his future in the hands of the Iranian public yesterday, offering his resignation after weeks of violent student protests and attacks from hardline conservative and liberal politicians.
In a speech that was censored by Iran's state-run newspapers and television stations, Mr Khatami said he would resign if the people wanted him to, recognising disappointment over the slow pace of promised reforms.
"We are not the people's masters. Rather, we are the servants of the people," he said.
"If the nation says, 'we do not like [you],' we will quit. A society should be so."
During the speech, delivered on Thursday, Mr Khatami warned against the abuse of revolutionary and Islamic values, a message bound to infuriate hardline politicians. The President has recently been thwarted by the Guardian Council, a body dominated by clerics loyals to the supreme leader Ayatolah Khamanei which vets all parliamentary legislation, when it rejected two key reform bills that he had championed.
The bills would have given Mr Khatami more power to prevent constitutional violations by his opponents, and bar the council from arbitrarily disqualifying candidates in legislative and presidential elections. "We have to approve the qualifications of various candidates," he said in his speech.
"If the people feel the programme they vote for meets obstacles, then they will not participate in the elections."
Liberal opponents have accused Mr Khatami of failing to push through promised reforms since he was elected in May 1997.
Aldolkarim Soroush, a prominent philosopher, said Mr Khatami had wasted opportunities and disappointed the nation, prompting the demonstrations in which more than 4,000 protesters were arrested.
"The peaceful and democratic uprising of the Iranian people against religious dictatorship in May 1997 was a sweet experience," Mr Soroush said in a letter to the President.
"But your failure to keep the vote and your wasting of opportunities put an end to it and disappointed the nation. Now, failures have turned into unrest." Mehrdad Serjooie, a political commentator in Iran, said Mr Khatami had come under intense pressure to resign, from students, politicians and, more importantly, the general public.
"Khatami is not bluffing," he said. "He is an honest president who will risk his presidency for political democracy.
"However, when he comes to take action on his word, that's when he starts trembling."
He's a moderate. He probably thinks of himself as a servant of society. Many of the rest of the gov't do not fully share that ethics.
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