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Iran Speaker Has Ayatollah’s Trust : Rafsanjani Ready to Take Mantle From Khomeini

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Times Staff Writer

A decade ago, when the brooding Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini swept triumphantly into Iran on the heels of the departed Shah, his coterie included a hard-working cleric in a white turban, Hashemi Rafsanjani.

It was a tumultuous time. From the ashes of monarchy the ayatollahs, supreme religious leaders among the Shiite Muslims, set about building an Islamic state under Khomeini’s guidance, not without dispute or violence. Amid the struggle, Rafsanjani, then as now bearing the lower clerical rank of hojatoleslam , was never far from the sleeve of Khomeini, his former teacher.

Uncertain Times

Iran is once again in difficult straits, its economy ruined by the eight-year war with Iraq that ended with a forced truce last July. Its pugnacious government remains largely isolated by its Muslim neighbors and the West. And the aging Khomeini, while still calling the important shots, has been making provisions for the succession of power.

An announcement that the 89-year-old ayatollah underwent surgery Tuesday for bleeding in his digestive tract underlined the uncertainty of the times.

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The 54-year-old Rafsanjani, in his third term as Speaker of the Iranian Parliament, acting commander of the armed forces and the only declared candidate for the August presidential election, is widely regarded as the man to watch.

“He has the trust of Khomeini,” said Shaul Bakhash, a former Tehran journalist now with the Wilson Center in Washington, underscoring Rafsanjani’s most formidable political attribute.

In addition, Bakhash observed in a telephone interview: “He has ability. He’s managed Parliament very well. He adjusts.”

However labeled--liberals and conservatives or pragmatists and radicals--Iran’s politicians seem to be performing in a house of mirrors. Rafsanjani has been put down as a pragmatist, a man who has spoken of the need to open up to the West in order to bolster his country’s attempts at postwar economic recovery.

But on May 5 he appalled and outraged Western governments by calling on Palestinians to kill Americans, Britons and Frenchmen to avenge Palestinian dead in the uprising against Israeli rule in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. A few days later, he said his remarks had been misinterpreted and that he “did not mean to condone the killing of innocent civilians.”

Despite the shock waves, many analysts put Rafsanjani’s inflammatory words down to domestic political maneuvering. No Iranian leader is openly campaigning to succeed Khomeini, but nearly all follow his fundamental line on issues about which the old man feels strongly. Before Rafsanjani’s clarification, the Iranian newspaper Islamic Republic said his remarks were “well within the framework of the imam’s (Khomeini’s) firm stance that Israel must be eliminated.”

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Last February, Khomeini set the tone for political debate and what he apparently saw as wavering on the spiritual underpinning of the Islamic state by seizing on Salman Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses,” which he labeled blasphemous. He demanded the execution of the Indian-born British author as an apostate.

A month later, Khomeini moved more directly into the political arena by withdrawing the mantle from the Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, his designated successor as Iran’s supreme leader. He instructed Montazeri, who had been critical of the current wave of arrests and executions in Iran, to “clean his house” of liberal influences.

“There has been a real shift in what Khomeini is willing to tolerate,” Iran analyst Bakhash noted. He said the old man was disappointed in the Western countries’ tilt toward Iraq at the end of the war, when Rafsanjani and others expected more support for what they considered Iran’s just cause.

The Montazeri episode left Iran’s future power structure uncertain. The remaining senior ayatollahs, those with sufficient prestige to ascend to Khomeini’s singular position, are too old or “their qualifications are not quite right,” Bakhash said. A possible option, he said, would be the establishment of a council of Islamic leaders to take over the spiritual reins of the state. The present constitution provides for such a council, of either three or five members.

Political Maneuvering

On the political side of the power structure, meanwhile, Rafsanjani has reportedly sought a constitutional amendment to abolish the post of prime minister, currently held by Hussein Moussavi, his longtime rival in Parliament. Instead, a more powerful president--the post Rafsanjani is seeking--would administer government through a group of presidential deputies.

If Rafsanjani is now the second-strongest leader in Iran, he would emerge--as president with centralized powers, and with Khomeini succeeded by a council of clerics--as the country’s foremost political personality.

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His candidacy has already received the blessing of the incumbent president, Ali Khamenei, who is barred by the constitution from seeking a third term. But Rafsanjani’s bid for extraordinary power is not expected to go unchallenged.

Prime Minister Moussavi and others opposed to his pragmatic tendencies will oppose him issue by issue. But neither Moussavi nor Interior Minister Ali Akbar Mohtashemi--nor any other political strongman--has made a move to seek the presidency.

Another possibility could be the succession of the ailing Khomeini’s son Ahmad, 43, the reclusive ayatollah’s closest confidant, his ears and voice outside the family home. But the old man has imposed a legalistic formula for succession and a dynastic appointment would run against the procedures he is setting in place. Nevertheless, Ahmad has become a power in his own right and in the confusion that will follow the ayatollah’s death he will have a circle of influential followers.

Rafsanjani’s power base would be difficult to challenge. He controls a large bloc of votes in Parliament. Over the years in government, he has managed to place important allies in important positions (a brother runs the broadcast media). He commands the military and the Revolutionary Guards, but his support there may be less certain.

But in any political or ideological difficulty, Rafsanjani’s well-demonstrated agility will serve him, as it did when he survived the implications of his direct role in the Iran-Contra affair.

Besides the shape of a future government and ideological questions, political tensions revolve largely around the national economy, which is a mess. The government concedes a 23% annual inflation rate on basic items, while outside analysts say it is many times higher. The price of potatoes, cigarettes and cooking oil has gone up sharply, and subsidized rations for the poor have dried up. Lines for subsidized commodities begin forming before sunrise. The salaries of government workers have been frozen for a decade.

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So-called radicals are pushing explosive issues like land reform and nationalization of foreign trade. Rafsanjani, who has the support of the bazaari , the merchant class, might be more inclined to go slow on economic reforms, although he supports change.

At the podium, in command of Parliament, Rafsanjani has a reputation for polished control, a conductor with a well-trained orchestra. He likes a joke, it is said, and smiles readily, although perhaps not at the nickname his critics have given him--”the beardless one.” Among a host of Shiite clerics with bushy whiskers, Rafsanjani wears only a thin mustache.

Born in the southeastern province of Kerman, Rafsanjani went to the shrine city of Qom at age 16 to study religion. By the late 1950s, he was a student in Khomeini’s class in Islamic jurisprudence and had developed a flair for preaching.

In the struggle against the rule of the late Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, he was jailed a number of times and drafted into the army. “He used to go around converting fellow conscripts, most of them from peasant families like himself, to the Islamic thought and revolutionary teaching of Khomeini,” a contemporary told a European reporter last year.

Alarmed, the army sent him back to Qom. There he set up a property firm--he is a rich man today--which tithed its proceeds to Khomeini’s movement. When Khomeini went into exile in Iraq and later Paris, Rafsanjani followed.

He remains a loyal acolyte, and still owes his powerful position to the ayatollah. But as the Montazeri dismissal proves, the ayatollah can change his mind. Ahmad, a gatekeeper for his father, has given Rafsanjani unusual access. But Ahmad too has accumulated political power, and other politicians are knocking at his door.

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