TEHRAN, 20 January 2004 — President Mohammad Khatami’s political party has threatened to boycott Iran’s parliamentary elections unless bans on hundreds of aspiring liberal candidates are promptly reversed, newspapers and officials said yesterday.
The hard-line Guardian Council — an unelected body with sweeping powers — last week announced it had barred nearly half the 8,200 hopefuls who wanted to run in the Feb. 20 vote. But Guardian Council officials said many of those originally disqualified would eventually be allowed to stand.
“A large number of candidates whose qualifications have not been approved... will be approved after reviewing their cases,” Ahmad Azimizadeh, head of the council’s election supervisory board in Tehran, told the IRNA news agency.
Whether the revised candidate lists will be enough to satisfy reformers remained in doubt. “Our demand is for free elections,” Mohammad Reza Khatami, brother of the president and deputy Parliament speaker, told IRNA. “If this move is not reversed, no-one will vote in the elections,” he said.
The mass veto of candidates has prompted threats to resign by government ministers and state governors and led dozens of liberal MPs to stage an eight-day sit-in at Parliament.
Reformists accuse the council of trying to help hard-liners regain control of Parliament which they lost in 2000 elections.
Conservatives opposed to any watering down of Iran’s Islamic values have used their strongholds in institutions such as the judiciary and the Guardian Council to scupper most of Khatami’s attempts at reform since his 1997 election win. Khatami’s pro-reform League of Combatant Clerics, following a meeting on Sunday, declared: “If the current situation, under which not all legal (political) factions can compete freely, continues, there is no reason for the League to take part in the parliamentary elections,” newspapers reported.
A government source told Reuters the president and Parliament Speaker Mehdi Karoubi were at Sunday’s party meeting and fully backed the decision to threaten to boycott the vote. “It’s a serious threat,” he said.
