TEHRAN, 17 October 2003 — Iran’s main reformist party opened a two-day congress yesterday aimed at mapping a strategy for upcoming parliamentary elections, amid signs that voter frustration could deal the embattled camp a serious defeat.
Addressing a gathering of some 200 top party members, Islamic Iran Participation Front (IIPF) leader Mohammad Reza Khatami, the brother of Iran’s president, issued a stern warning to hardliners to stop blocking reforms.
“Reformists are trying to prevent the present social movement from being transformed into a violent political revolt or into a scenario of an overthrow (of the regime) from outside the country,” he said in his opening speech. “Reforms will continue and deepen in a movement that is calm and progressive,” he added.
“We are confronted by two visions of the Islamic republic,” Mohammad Reza said, pointing to hard-line-run courts and legislative oversight bodies who favor “power without limits” on one side and “those who believe everything must be done in accordance with the law” — the reformists — on the other.
“The reformists movement always respects the framework of the law and nonviolence,” he asserted. He also hit out at the Islamic republic’s powerful religious hardliners for turning the burgeoning youth population away from their faith and country.
“A great part of the youth are fleeing religion, in particular the social role of religion,” the younger brother of the president said. “I say clearly that when people are fleeing religion and the Islamic republic, the reason is a violent and dictatorial interpretation of religion.”
The next parliamentary elections are scheduled for February 20, 2004. Led by the IIPF and rallying around President Mohammad Khatami, the reformists have controlled Iran’s Parliament since 2000, when they swept to power on a youth vote and a platform of shaking up the way Iran is governed.
But little of their agenda has made it into law, leading to major frustration among young people, students and women who rallied behind the movement. The cause, reformists complain, is the overwhelming power wielded by hardliners in the judiciary, state media, security forces and legislative watchdogs.
Initiatives passed by a Parliament are stymied by conservatives who see them as trying to undermine the foundations of the regime. A bid by Parliament to give greater powers to the president and strip conservative oversight bodies of their right to vet electoral candidates, seen as a last-ditch reform bid, also appears to have failed.
Amid widespread frustration with the deadlock, voters showed their disdain in February 2003, when municipal elections saw an all-time low turnout for a country where voter participation regularly exceeds three-quarters of the electorate.
With just a tiny percentage of people bothering to cast their ballots, conservatives — relying on a committed hardcore support base — won the day.
Analysts see the very same happening in February. Some radical reformers have even called for a boycott of the elections, taking a stand against hardliners and forcing a political crisis rather than lose the elections.
But a number of IIPF delegates said the issue of a boycott would probably not yet be decided during the congress, as they were not yet certain that frustration among their supporters would lead to a low turnout.
Meanwhile, a court in southeastern Iranian city of Kerman has upheld the death sentence for a gang of six men who confessed to killing five people in the name of Islamic morality, a newspaper said yesterday. The men, aged between 18 and 22, last year killed some of their victims by tying them up and throwing them into a swimming pool or by stoning them to death to “eliminate vice on the Earth”, the Etemad daily said.
“The six men were tried by a second court and their death sentences were upheld by this court,” the daily said. Earlier this year, a trial held behind closed doors sentenced the six to death. But the case was sent to another court after they objected to the sentence, saying the killings were religiously motivated.
“The second court said there was no evidence that the victims were in any way corrupt and approved the first ruling,” the daily said. The killers earlier confessed to murdering the five people. They said they committed the murders to fight against moral corruption and promote virtue, Etemad said. The paper quoted an informed source as saying the men would be hanged.
In early September, the same court had had its initial ruling imposing the death penalty overturned by Iran’s Supreme Court, which said the confessions from the gang members had been extracted by force.
The six — who press reports said were members of the Islamist Basij militia, a volunteer army attached to the Revolutionary Guards — had initially been sentenced to death on May 11 for killing five people.
The gang reportedly confessed to killing some victims by tying them up and throwing them into swimming pools, while others were stoned to death, the reports said.
