TEHRAN, 7 February 2004 — Iran’s conservative Guardian Council has completed its review of the thousands of candidates it barred from standing in Feb. 20 elections, clearing only another 200 to stand and dashing reformist hopes, the student news agency ISNA said yesterday.
“The work of the review of the cases finished last night and we reported our work to the office of the supreme leader and today we will report it to the Ministry of the Interior,” Ayatollah Ahmad Janati, head of the Guardian Council, was quoted by ISNA as saying.
“A number of the disqualified candidates have been reinstated, due to the reasons that the supreme leader (Ayatollah Ali Khamenei) deemed fit,” Janati said, adding: “I do not see the necessity to give out the figures of those who have been reinstated.”
The agency quoted Ali Mohammad Hazeri, coordinator of the 2nd of Khordad Front — the body encompassing all the reformist groups loyal to President Mohammad Khatami — as saying 200 more candidates had been cleared to contest the parliamentary poll. They joined the 51 given approval on Thursday.
“Based on the information we got today, the Guardian Council reinstated another 200 of the candidates presented from a list by the Intelligence Ministry to them, and we have heard that some prominent names are among them,” said Hazeri. He did not say who the “prominent names” were.
On Thursday the main reformist party announced it would boycott the election and some 130 deputies, who have been holding a sit-in at Parliament since Jan. 11, said they would now make good their threat to resign their seats.
“It’s the worst possible outcome,” said Islamic Iran Participation Front leader Mohammad Reza Khatami, brother of the president, as he announced his party’s decision to boycott the parliamentary elections.
The Guardian Council, a conservative-controlled vetting body, precipitated the crisis with the news on Jan. 11 it had rejected some 3,500 candidates for the election. It subsequently reinstated around 1,000 but was then instructed by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to review the remaining 2,500 cases.
Most of those rejected were reformists, including more than 80 sitting members of Parliament seeking re-election, on the grounds that they did not respect Islam or the constitution.
The crisis is seen by many as the most serious faced by the Islamic Republic since it was founded in 1979.
The reformists now control both government and Parliament but believe they could lose out to the conservatives if the poll goes ahead on Feb. 20. They have been seeking a postponement.
But earlier this week, Khamenei ordered that the government must go ahead with the organization of the elections.
He also warned that resignations by officials in protest at the barring of candidates were “against the law and prohibited by Islam” and could incur heavy penalties.
Iran’s hard-line judiciary chief Ayatollah Mahmud Hashemi Shahrudi backed up the warning, saying late Thursday that those who resigned with the aim of impeding the elections faced prosecution, state news agency IRNA reported.
Several resignations have been announced among ministers, deputy ministers and all 27 provincial governors, as well as the MPs.
“Those current MPs whose qualifications have been rejected by the Guardian Council are US spies and were implementing US rules instead of Islamic rules,” the chief editor of the hard-line Resalaat paper, Mohamad Kazem Anbarloui, told the congregation in a mosque in Iran’s clerical capital of Qom yesterday, IRNA said.
