So begins a campaign that pits Khatami, with his strong support from women, intellectuals and the young, against the conservative clerical establishment that controls Iran. Few doubt Khatami will win by a landslide, as he and his allies have in every election since 1997. The question is whether, even in victory, the reformer–himself a cleric–can deliver the “democratic system within a religious framework” that he promises. The answer may well depend on a coterie of aides and allies that includes the former students who masterminded the taking of 66 American hostages in Tehran 22 years ago.
Washington has grown increasingly skeptical; some senior officials in the Bush administration are even pushing the line that Khatami is simply a frontman for the status quo. But Farahnaz Ghazi, a 20-year-old history student in Tehran, is keeping the faith. In a country still dominated by billboards of the grim-faced Ayatollah Khomeini and the blank, dour visage of his successor as Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Khatami is “calm, intellectual and smiling,” says Ghazi. “That’s why we love him.” When she heard about the scene at the registration office, she cried too: “When a man, especially a leader, is not ashamed of expressing his emotions, he endears himself to his people.” Says her father, Ahmad: “He kept us waiting, but we knew he… wouldn’t let the people down.”
Khatami likes to say that the hard-liners have created a new crisis for his government every nine days. His supporters argue that any of those crises–the serial killings of political activists, the beating and jailing of students, closure of pro-reform newspapers and imprisonment of the president’s closest allies–would have toppled a government with less popular support. True enough. But that’s only part of the story. The success of Khatami–whose executive resume before he became president was limited to the Ministry of Culture and the National Library–is largely dependent on a group of former radicals who act as both the shock troops of Iran’s reform movement and its brain trust.
Ironically, many of them are the same people who suppressed political opposition and “anti-revolutionary elements” at the beginning of the revolution. They are the former leaders of the U.S. Embassy seizure in 1979, the Revolutionary Guards, and intelligence officers with long experience in the regime’s covert wars at home and abroad (graphic). And they are admired by Iranian youths who see in their change of heart proof that Iran can change too. “When we were young we admired movie heroes like John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, who fought the bad guys,” says Farahnaz’s father, Ahmad, a retired teacher. “But for my daughter’s generation, [Emmadedin] Baghi and [Akbar] Ganji are the real heroes,” he says, referring to two jailed investigative journalists.
It was not an easy conversion. Like most of Khatami’s vanguard, Baghi and Ganji had been close to Khomeini. But they were ostracized when the conservatives took over the government after his death in 1989. During eight years in the political wilderness, they started re-examining their ideas while pursuing graduate studies in Iran and abroad. They also held weekly meetings at the offices of Kian (The Principle) magazine, a religious intellectual weekly. Four years ago, when the conservatives controlled every branch of government, the activists saw the nation’s frustration and realized that Iranians were ready for a new kind of leader: a soothing, reasonable, friendly face.
The Kian intellectuals grew to almost 30-strong and became Khatami’s think tank before and during the 1997 presidential campaign. After his victory, some joined Khatami’s cabinet; most started newspapers and magazines with names like The Time of the Free, Liberty, Victory and Participation. The newspapers harshly criticized authoritarian aspects of the Islamic establishment.
They expected a backlash; they got brutality. In 1998 several intellectuals were murdered. Scores were threatened. “Many people have been hurt to reach this ideal,” Khatami said last week. “I don’t want to elaborate. But our people know what has happened.”
After the reformers won sweeping victories in last year’s parliamentary elections, even journalists with impeccable “revolutionary credentials” were jailed, and still more publications were shut down. Prison terms were meted out to editors who published photographs of old folks dancing in a park on charges of promoting immorality. And in one recent incident several septuagenarian activists were imprisoned for “plotting an armed struggle against the Islamic system.”
The reformed radicals knew how to hang tough. But they were uncertain about how best to exploit their popularity. Even after their victories in the elections they remained as secretive and cliquish as before. They didn’t know how to cultivate public opinion through dialogue, or that they needed to. As pressure mounted, they acted like the underground activists they had been in the shah’s time, and the revolutionary cadres they became in the early days of the Islamic Republic.
Early on, it was clear that Khatami’s government was unable to fulfill its campaign promises, especially on the economic front. But his secretive “public relations” office only made matters worse. Khatami’s interviews during his first term were limited to one with CNN and an annual sit-down with state radio and television. The lack of communication frustrated the public, and the dissatisfaction erupted in violent student demonstrations during the summer of 1999–crushed by security forces.
And yet Khatami and his men are forgiven. Even embraced. “Whatever mistakes this government may make, we don’t want to go back to where we were before,” says Farahnaz Ghazi. But even supporters of reform have their limits. “I am tired of violence and saying ‘death to this and that’,” she says. “If the next four years are as frustrating as the last, I think some young people will [erupt] like… two summers ago.” That which the people have given, they can surely take away.
