TEHRAN, 14 April 2004 — Iranian President Mohammad Khatami yesterday asked Parliament to withdraw two bills aimed at tempering hard-line power. Khatami staked much of his reputation on the bills that would boost his powers and curb the ability of the Guardian Council, a hard-line watchdog, to block election candidates.
Khatami in March vowed to give up on the bills after the 12-man Guardian Council blocked them, complaining the presidency had no authority within the constitution.
Vice President Muhammad Ali Abtahi read Khatami’s letter to Parliament, in which the president said he would rather withdraw the bills completely than let their spirit be perverted.
“There may be more changes to the bills to contradict their general essence and people’s rights ... if they remain in Parliament,” he said in a parliamentary session broadcast live on state radio. Hard-liners will take over Parliament in late May after sweeping the board in February’s elections.
Khatami won a surprise landslide victory in 1997 but most reformist attempts to push through change have been thwarted by the constitutional supremacy of hard-line bodies.
Analyst Saeed Laylaz said the removal of the bills had symbolic importance. “He wants to express his total disappointment with the political structure,” he said. “He has said he has no power and wants to show his power is only as a functionary.”
Khatami criticized the hard-line panel of six clerics and six Islamic jurists for barring more than 2,000 mainly reformist hopefuls from February’s parliamentary elections.
“Unfortunately, we believe the Guardian Council has repeatedly been violating the current election law,” his letter to Parliament said. Iranians will go to the second round of parliamentary polls on May 7. The second round will not damage the conservative majority but will settle seats where no one candidate won 25 percent of votes cast in February.
Also yesterday, Iran’s unelected clerics honored one of the biggest enemies of Khatami’s reform program: Saeed Mortazavi, a former judge and now Tehran prosecutor who was behind closure of about 100 pro-democracy publications. Mortazavi was praised as “best manager” in the judiciary.
Reformers have described Mortazavi as the “killer of press freedoms” for the closures and for jailing dozens of writers on vague charges of insulting Islamic sanctities. Iranian television showed a smiling Mortazavi receiving the award from top judiciary official, Abbas Ali Alizadeh. Alizadeh is also known as an opponent of democratic reforms.
Meanwhile, five UN nuclear inspectors arrived Monday to try to confirm whether Iran has stopped building and assembling centrifuges and get answers to a number of outstanding questions that have raised concerns about the Persian state’s nuclear program. Mohammad Saeedi, a top Iranian nuclear official, told The Associated Press the experts from the United Nation’s International Atomic Energy Agency arrived for a series of meetings and inspections.
The inspectors’ visit coincides with a hardening of position by Iranian radicals who have called on their government to defy the UN nuclear agency, expel UN inspectors and resume uranium enrichment. The Iranian government, though, appears determined to stick to a more moderate approach in hopes of avoiding international isolation.
