TEHRAN, 18 February 2004 — Reformist lawmakers banned from contesting this week’s Iranian parliamentary election accused Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei yesterday of presiding over a system that abused people’s freedom.
Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi, a human rights lawyer, threw her moral weight behind their boycott of Friday’s poll by saying she would not vote, to protest the mass disqualification of reformist candidates by unelected hard-line clerics.
In a scathing six-page open letter, some 100 outgoing deputies accused the country’s leader of allowing his appointees to “violate the legitimate freedoms and rights of the people” in the name of Islam.
“Now the institutions under your supervision, after four years of humiliating the Parliament and blocking its legislation, have blocked the fundamental right of the people to choose and be chosen.”
The letter was handed to journalists at a protest meeting by more than 30 blacklisted MPs in Parliament yesterday, but Iran’s official media did not immediately report it.
The MPs challenged Khamenei, whose word is normally never questioned, to say whether he pulled the strings behind the mass exclusion of candidates, which plunged Iran into one of its most serious crises since the 1979 revolution.
“Do the members of the Guardian Council dare to resist your orders? Or is it that, as rumors say, despite your public statements, they were permitted by you to disqualify these people illegally and widely?” they asked.
The Guardian Council’s 12 members are all appointed directly or indirectly by Khamenei. They have power to veto legislation and candidates on loosely defined Islamic and legal grounds.
Ebadi, whose award shone an uncomfortable spotlight on the struggle for human rights in the Islamic republic, said: “I will not vote myself because I don’t know those who have been qualified. I’m not ready to vote for someone I don’t know.”
“The first principle of democracy is that people should have the right to vote for anyone they want,” she said. Her comment ran counter to efforts by the authorities to mobilize a big turnout despite widespread public apathy and anger among reformists at the blanket ban on 2,500 contenders.
In a sermon last week, Khamenei called for a massive turnout to give the enemies of the Islamic system a slap in the face.
President Mohammad Khatami, a moderate reformist who failed to get the bans overturned, appealed to Iranians on Monday to cast their ballots despite “some unfairness” to prevent a hard-line minority from seizing control of the country’s future. His own brother, Mohammad Reza, is among some 80 sitting lawmakers barred from seeking re-election.
The main reformist group among Iran’s two million students, the Office to Consolidate Unity, is also calling for a boycott. The campaign manager of the main conservative coalition, the Alliance for the Advancement of Islamic Iran, voiced confidence that the turnout would be up to the average in democratic states despite a largely invisible campaign with few well-known names.
Denouncing the excluded reformists as extremists who had failed to address people’s real economic and social problems, Hossein Fadaii forecast at a news conference that 60 percent would vote nationwide and 40 percent in Tehran.
Political scientists expect a much lower turnout, especially in the big cities that were the reformists’ bastions.
If, as expected, the conservatives dominate Parliament, it will make Khatami a weaker lame duck in his last 16 months in office and could threaten timid advances in press and cultural freedom, already under attack from the hard-line judiciary.
Meanwhile, an Iranian candidate survived a plane crash yesterday while he was dropping campaign leaflets from the sky for parliamentary elections, the official IRNA news agency said.
The pilot of the private plane that crashed in northern Mazandaran province was killed immediately, IRNA said. “But the candidate who was distributing his campaign leaflets was unharmed,” it said. The candidate’s name was not given. Officials told IRNA the plane crash was caused by technical problems.
