The Iranian Elections

After the Landslide—The Challenges Facing Khatami

By Andrew North

To no one’s surprise, Mohammad Khatami won a resounding victory in Iran’s June presidential elections, securing himself a second four-year term. The only issue that was in doubt before polling day was whether he would break the 20-million votes barrier, bettering his 1997 performance.

He achieved that convincingly, with 21.6 million votes—or 77 percent—of the ballots cast. Even though turnout was lower than in 1997, Khatami’s victory gives him what appears to be a powerful mandate to continue and indeed step up his reform program.

It would be naive, however, to expect a sudden turnaround in the fortunes of the reform movement centered on the president. Ever since the February 2000 parliamentary elections, Iran’s reformists have been on the defensive. In fact, there are many in Iran who believe that nothing has changed at all, and that things could even get worse for Khatami.

For one thing, Khatami still is operating with the same constraints on his power that he complained about in his first term. The real power remains with Iran’s conservative Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the various state bodies he controls: the judiciary, the security services, the army and Revolutionary Guards, and the state television broadcaster, IRIB.

By closing down almost all Iran’s pro-reform newspapers and jailing many prominent journalists, the judiciary in particular has been very successful at undermining Khatami’s reform efforts. All the conservative-dominated arms of Iran’s factionalized government system, however, remain equally determined to resist reform and anything that waters down clerical control of the levers of power.

The continued power of another right-wing element—and therefore thorn in the side for Khatami—was also evident in the immediate aftermath of the election. Clashes broke out in Tehran between Khatami supporters celebrating his victory and members of Ansar Hezbollah, a hard-line Islamic vigilante group.

Recent police moves to clamp down on private parties in the wealthy districts of north Tehran are another potential worry for the reformists. One of the few tangible results of Khatami’s first four years in power has been the gradual liberalization of Iran’s social and cultural climate.

This has meant women have been able to bend the strict dress code when outside their homes and wear far more make-up and jewelry than in the past and show more of their hair—something they would not have dared do in the past. It has also meant people have become far more outspoken in day-to-day conversation, even as such expression was being curtailed in the media.

Although they have frequently attacked such developments, right-wingers have concentrated their fire on bigger targets such as the press and the reform movement’s most prominent figures, like the still-jailed Abdollah Nouri, publisher of the newspaper Khordad, which was shut down in 1999. That may now be about to change, however, and hard-liners may be trying to attack what they see as the symptoms as well as the causes of what they view as a virus of liberalization spreading across Iran.

President Khatami at least can count on a reformist majority in the parliament, or Majlis, his supporters say. But the Majlis is just as constrained as the president in what it can do. Any legislation it passes has to be vetted by the conservative Council of Guardians before it can become law.

In some cases, the Supreme Leader has stepped in to curtail parliamentary actions of which he disapproves—nuch as when he stopped a debate on a press liberalization law last year. Ayatollah Khamenei did surprise the Majlis in late June, when he agreed to allow deputies to scrutinize IRIB’s budget—after the speaker had first stopped their investigation. Whether the deputies actually will be able to change the state broadcaster’s budget, however, remains to be seen.

To talk about the reformers in parliament as one group can be misleading, however: they certainly do not vote as a bloc and there are wide differences among them. Indeed, despite the fact that they won on a reformist ticket, some have demonstrated views much closer to those of the conservative clerical establishment than to Khatami.

As if divisions within his supporters’ ranks and the machinations of his opponents were not enough to contend with, Mr. Khatami is facing perhaps even tougher challenges in the country at large—Iran’s struggling economy being top of the list.

Put simply, Iran’s economy, dominated by oil exports, is not producing enough new jobs to keep up with the country’s population growth. Officially, joblessness is at 16 percent, but among those under 30 it is thought to be as high as 35 to 40 percent. More worrying in the long term is that, with prospects so poor, many skilled young Iranians are leaving the country in hope of finding work in Europe.

‡resident Khatami is well aware of this, and made tackling unemployment a priority after his June victory. But he also knows he has tried previously to address Iran’s economic malaise, and has little to show for his efforts.

Ironically, increased oil revenues over the past year are part of the problem. With more money in state coffers, the government has not been under as much pressure to push through tough reforms. Economists both inside and outside Iran say what is needed is a kprogram to privatize the many state-owned companies. But that, of course, would inevitably mean more unemployment in the short term.

Foreign businesspeople, as well as Iranian exiles considering returning home, say the government must make it easier to set up and run companies by reducing the amount of paperwork involved.

½hatami’s apparent inability to tackle Iran’s economic problems, however, is not entirely about inertia and reluctance to confront consequences. Not surprisingly, it too has become entangled in the wider political struggle over the country’s direction.

That is because many conservatives regard calls to introduce economic reform and privatize state-owned industries as a direct threat to their power. Some, moreover, have become wealthy themselves through their control or association with giant religious foundations which own large numbers of companies—many of them confiscated after the 1979 revolution. Similarly, calls to make it easier for foreigners to invest lead conservatives to charge that Tehran is opening the gates to imperialist Western interests.

No one is predicting a speedy resolution to this economic debate—which begs the question of who will get the blame if Iran’s economy continues to splutter. In his first term President Khatami managed to emerge unscathed, but some fear it will not be so easy the second time around—precisely because of his success in winning so many votes. In 1997, he was relatively unknown and essentially won a protest vote. This time, however, he has a personal mandate. If he fails to deliver, therefore, the voters may punish him.

Given all the difficulties he is facing, observers are watching closely to see whether President Khatami is going to break with his traditionally non-confrontational stance and challenge his opponents head on. But there are some who think Khatami already has gone as far as he can in changing his country. As a loyal servant of the Islamic Republic since the revolution, they argue, Khatami—)ike the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev—is too much a part of the system to be able to reform it.

If he does decide to tackle his opponents head on, however, President Khatami still has a card to play, albeit a slightly desperate one. He can point out the risk Iran faces if its leaders keep putting off big decisions about its future and instead continue to argue among themselves. The risk already is becoming reality, with so many of Iran’s youngest and brightest leaving the country because they believe these arguments are still far from being resolved.

Are U.S. and Iran Condemned to Repeat Past Mistakes?

By Henry Precht

“Governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”—Hegel

More than two decades after the fall of Shah Mohammed Rezi Pahlavi, Tehran’s clerics and Washington’s politicians—both certainly aware of past mistakes in Iran—continue to pursue blindly the same unbalanced policies that defeated the shah and his friends in the U.S.

The clerics understood the reasons for the success of their revolution against the shah—although its quick success surprised many at the time. They know it was led by university youth who were joined by workers and the middle classes. Iranians suffered from a sagging economy and an autocratic regime that had lost touch with them and appeared to encourage corruption and foreign dominance.

The mullahs saw how the shah dithered, sometimes ordering the “iron fist” that left hundreds dead in the street, other times promising future “liberalization” that no one believed. Desperate to preserve his dynasty, he was schizophrenic—unable to decide firmly on a policy of either force or favor and pulled in opposite directions by advisers from both extremes.

In one of history’s unending ironies, Iran’s clerical regime now suffers from the same split personality. Both the conservative leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, and the reforming president, Mohammad Khatami, have as their supreme object the preservation of the Islamic Republic. Both are part of the clerical system; each fears the other’s friends will bring it to ruin. The idea that Khamenei and Khatami have opposing goals is inaccurate. They differ only in how best to make Islamic Iran secure and stable—i.e., how to direct Khatami’s resounding electoral victory toward that shared goal.

Khamenei would bottle up radical dissent, while Khatami would open channels of communications. Both get nervous when students demonstrate, because both know that the cure for youth is a revived economy generating jobs. Khatami better appreciates that the rule of law and foreign investment are essential to jump start the economy.

Khatami’s next term will be a test of whether the leader will restrain the “iron fists” of his conservative friends and whether the president can persuade his radical supporters to be patient with his gradualist approach. With luck, the two men just might find the right balance where the shah failed. Khamenei already has begun to move in Khatami’s direction and allow the reformist parliament to investigate the national radio and television.

Finding the right balance of policy toward Iran, however, continues to frustrate Washington. In the days of the shah Washington looked at Iran and saw only how it might be of help internationally: a long Soviet border, a major oil exporter, the gendarme of the Gulf, a friend of Israel and, later, wasting itself and Iraq in a long war and aiding the Iran-Contra scheme. Political change inside Iran was of no interest for administrations from Johnson to Reagan—except for the hostage crisis.

That historical imbalance was reversed by Clinton and, it now seems, Bush. Washington is fixed on what evil Iran does internally—nuclear development, promotion of terrorism, violations of human rights—while ignoring its international importance as an oil producer and regional concerns—drugs, refugees, Russian influence—which the U.S. shares. A lack of balance produces a distorted policy.

There is, however, a consistent element in past and present American policy toward Iran, and that is Israel. In the old days, some Americans excused the shah’s excesses because he was friendly to Israel, which seeks to ally itself with non-Arab Muslim states (Turkey being its current favorite). Now Washington can’t abide Iran because of Tehran’s hostility toward the Jewish state.

Then and now, important U.S. interests were neglected because of the overriding need to reassure nervous Israelis. Today the Israeli lobby is pushing Congress hard to renew sanctions affecting the development of Iran’s energy resources—precisely when this country needs more oil and gas on the world market. Sanctions will also preclude any exchanges whatsoever with Tehran over the issues we share or dispute.

It would be a shame for America and the world if Tehran outpaces Washington in finding the right balance of policies internally while Washington persists in focusing only on negative internal activities and neglects the potential of Iran’s global and regional roles. Unfortunately, things seem to be heading in that direction.

Andrew North is a free-lance journalist based in London.