TEHRAN, 18 March 2004 — Iranian President Mohammad Khatami yesterday ruled out resigning in the aftermath of his reformist camp’s resounding defeat by Islamic hard-liners in legislative elections last month.
The embattled Khatami also announced he was withdrawing a pair of bills that had been seen as a last-ditch attempt to assert his position in the face of entrenched religious conservatives.
“I’m staying where I am. I have not taken the decision to resign and I hope to end the work which I started and that I have not been able to finish,” Khatami told reporters after a Cabinet meeting.
“I have no problem with the (incoming) Parliament, and I will work with it,” he added. Khatami was first elected in 1997 and again in 2001, in both cases with massive majorities. His current and final term does not expire until June 2005, and many people view him as a lame duck.
He acknowledged that two bills intended to limit the power of hard-liners were dead following the Feb. 20 polls, which were held after the Guardians Council disqualified thousands of reformist candidates and which registered a record-low voter turnout.
“The bills we introduced have met with a powerful barrage from the Guardians Council ...and I consequently withdraw them.”
One of the bills would have allowed Khatami to suspend judicial decisions he deemed unconstitutional.
The other bill sought to strip the Guardians Council, whose main function is to vet legislation for compliance with the constitution and Islamic law, of the right to weed out electoral candidates. Khatami said he was “withdrawing the law on the presidential powers to prevent the powers of the president from being further reduced,” by the new Parliament.
The president criticized the judiciary for calling in more than a dozen outgoing reformist MPs, including his brother, Mohammad Reza, for questioning.
“I do not approve of these recent summons, and I am going to speak about it with chief of the judicial authority, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi.”
In another development, Khatami reaffirmed that Iran was willing to cooperate with the UN nuclear watchdog to close the file on the Islamic republic, but insisted on its rights to develop nuclear technology.
“We will continue to cooperate with the agency, but we believe that the mastering of peaceful nuclear technology and the fuel production cycle is a right nobody can deprive us of in accordance with international law,” he told reporters.
