IRAN: Khatami: Avowal of failure
President Mohammed Khatami acknowledged last week that he had failed to fulfill pledges to the young voters who elected him to introduce more social and political freedoms.
“These days, it is difficult for me to speak because I feel the convictions that I held, what I said and expressed with sincerity and what people believed, have not been achieved”, the president said in a speech.
Khatami, first elected in 1997 thanks to a massive youth vote, stressed the importance of living up to young people’s expectations and warned that ignoring them would exacerbate the social crisis in the republic.
“Not taking into account young people and their expectations, and using religion and values to marginalize [others] causes massive problems in our society.
“Our society wants freedom, independence and progress while taking into account religious values, but this does not mean setting up a religious aristocracy”.
The remarks were a veiled swipe at Islamic conservatives in the regime who control the courts, the army and security apparatus and the top state arbitration bodies, which have repeatedly undermined the reform efforts of Khatami’s government.
“I am faithful to my commitments even if the difficulties make it seem that I have abandoned them”.
Frustration at the failures to reform the system culminated in June when students staged 10 days of anti-regime demonstrations to express anger at the deadlock between the reformist-dominated Parliament and conservative-dominated state bodies.
About 70 percent of the Iranian population is aged under 30.
A last stand?
The conservative-dominated Council of Guardians -- which oversees the religious and constitutional propriety of all legislation -- last week struck down three pieces of reforming legislation passed by Parliament.
Two would have authorized the government to sign UN conventions, one being the UN’s 1979 convention on women’s rights, the other an international agreement banning torture. The third would have abolished the Council’s right to vet candidates for political office.
Reformists accuse the council of disqualifying reformists for flimsy reasons, and wanted to end its screening of candidates before crucial legislative elections early next year and presidential polls in 2005.
Many saw the bills as a last-ditch attempt to assert Khatami’s embattled position in the face of entrenched conservatives.
Theoretically the bills must return to Parliament until the two sides can agree. But in the event of a protracted dispute between the two bodies, the conservative Expediency Council, Iran’s supreme political arbitration body, will decide on the matter. That is a recourse to which Khatami is strongly opposed.
Some reformers have proposed instead to call a referendum, which would require Khamenei’s approval, or else stage a mass walk-out from their posts and plunge the regime into a crisis of legitimacy.
Reformists fear that unless they can restore confidence among voters, next February’s parliamentary elections could see a very low turnout of the kind seen during this year’s municipal polls -- which were won by conservatives.
The bill on the women’s rights convention did not even amount to full endorsement of the accord.
As a sop to conservatives, the measure excluded from adoption any clause of the convention which was perceived as not compatible with Islam, and ruled out arbitration of its implementation by the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
But even this sparked charges by conservatives that the Khatami Administration was undermining the strict interpretation of Islamic law which had been the basis of all legislation since the 1979 revolution.
“Unfortunately, Parliament has passed a bill that has at least 90 points against Islam”, a leading conservative thinker, Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi told seminary students in the clerical stronghold of Qom.
The Qom-based conservative faction, Followers of the Imam and Leader, had launched a campaign to have the Council of Guardians, reject the bill.
But the bill’s supporters argued that it was the very conservatism of some of the leading clergy that had forced them to resort to international law to win women their rights.
“If the clergy had already evolved Islamic law as it affects women, we wouldn’t need to join this convention... Unfortunately, we are still stuck with laws that date back some 70 years”, according to MP Jamileh Kadivar, a leading women’s rights advocate.
Speaking before the bill was quashed by the Council, she said its acceptance might even strengthen the Islamic regime by easing some of the human rights criticism fuelling Western hostility to a government which Washington terms part of an ‘axis of evil’.
“For years, the international community has dubbed Iran a violator of women’s rights, so passing the bill could stop international objections to Iran...”
But the reformers themselves are divided over the effectiveness of a purely nominal signature of the convention, in which all of its provisions are made subject to vetting by the conservative-controlled judiciary for their conformity with Islamic law.
For woman MP Akram Mosavari-Manesh, the exclusion poses no problem as she insists none of the convention’s clauses run against Islamic teaching.
“The spirit of the conventions tries to eliminate discrimination against women and therefore could not be considered anti-Islamic”.
But other women’s rights campaigners argued that the bill would have had little impact without subsidiary legislation to end the systematic discrimination faced by Iranian women in both civil and criminal courts.
Under Iranian law, women receive only half the amount of ‘blood money’ and inheritance as men, and only in rare cases is custody awarded to wives in divorce cases.
“The passing of the bill is not enough, since we have to witness changes to our legal system”, said, Haleh Keshavarz, one of the few Iranian women to have forged a successful career as a lawyer.
“Since there are inequalities between men and women concerning blood money, child custody, inheritance and divorce, once we have joined the convention, they will then have to be changed in accordance with society’s needs and Islamic teachings”.
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