Iranian President Vows Reforms Can’t Be Halted

Defiant against a fierce hard-line crackdown on Iran’s pro-democracy movement, President Mohammad Khatami insisted Saturday that the reforms he started three years ago could not be stopped.

Khatami’s statement was his strongest yet against hard-liners who are trying to preserve their power and, it is feared, will seek to prevent Iran’s newly elected pro-reform parliament from convening.

“The Iranian nation is revolutionary,” Khatami told workers in Tehran, “and nothing can halt its achievements, that is to say, reforms.”

Backed by the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, hard-liners have used their dominance of the judiciary to close 16 reformist newspapers and detain two leading journalists in the past nine days. Their actions are widely seen as an attempt to reverse an easing of Islamic limitations on political and social life that has occurred since Khatami took office in 1997.

But even as the president signaled to supporters that he would not back down, he and other top reformist leaders urged their backers not to take to the streets in protest, for fear of giving the hard-line Islamic clergy a pretext for a harsher crackdown.

Students at two universities heeded the president’s words and staged quiet demonstrations on their campuses Saturday.

Also on Saturday, the courts summoned and ordered the arrest of two female activists who had taken part in a Berlin conference on Iran this month, a relative said.

Siamak Zand said his wife, Mehrangis Karr, called him to say she had been detained with another conference participant, Shahla Lahiji. The detainees are well-known activists for women’s and civil rights.

A hard-line newspaper, the weekly Jebhe, was shut down Saturday for “violations of the press law,” state television reported. Some suspected that the move was the hard-liners’ way of deflecting criticism that they were closing only reformist publications.