Iran Reforms at Stake in Runoff

Iranian voters cast ballots Friday in a runoff election to determine 66 seats in parliament, but the major issue was whether the recent closure of newspapers and jailing of activists would thwart the country’s movement toward reform.

Sixteen pro-reform publications were shut down by court order in the two weeks leading up to the election, a crackdown that many reformers see as a bald attempt by conservative hard-liners to influence the electorate by denying it information about reformist candidates.

The jailing of several prominent advocates of reform aligned with President Mohammad Khatami also raised fears that the conservatives had no intention of ceding power to a parliament dominated by reformers, regardless of voters’ wishes.

Before the balloting, the Guardians Council secretary, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, told voters to “take care to choose those who do not have anti-revolutionary thoughts.”

Despite the hard-liners’ moves, all signs Friday pointed to the high voter turnout sought by reform leaders, who believe that Khatami’s efforts to relax the rigid Islamic regime remain popular with the vast majority of Iran’s 67 million people. Early results from the voting were not expected until late today.

The conservative Guardians Council has annulled 16 of the reformist victories from the first round of voting Feb. 18. It has also refused to certify the reformers’ victories in the capital city, Tehran, where unofficial returns gave them 29 out of 30 available seats.

About three-quarters of the ballots in the first round of voting went to reformers, so the reformist Islamic Iran Participation Front was expecting that Friday’s election would only bolster its comfortable majority in the new 290-seat parliament.

Most fears in the reformist camp have centered not on an election upset Friday but rather on avoiding any kind of outbreak of popular unrest that could give conservatives a pretext to declare a public emergency and delay seating of the parliament.

But an election day speech Friday by a powerful hard-liner, former judiciary leader Ayatollah Mohammed Yazdi, suggested that the parliament would be allowed to sit but that its power to determine future social and political freedoms would be limited.

Conservative clerics have dominated Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution and have sought to defeat Khatami’s reform efforts since his election in May 1997.

Speaking at Tehran’s main Friday prayer service, Yazdi said only the country’s ulema, or religious scholars, and the Guardians Council are authorized to say which freedoms can be permitted and which do not contradict “Islamic norms” mandated by the constitution.

“The independence of the Islamic system and national unity should not be damaged in the name of freedoms,” Yazdi warned, according to a report by the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency.

Yazdi, who headed Iran’s judiciary for a decade until last year, went out of his way to praise both the hard-line judiciary and the Guardians Council for their recent actions.

He said reform journalists whose papers had been shut down had exceeded the law when they questioned clerical rule in Iran. And he promised that the Guardians Council would certify all the election results in time for the next parliament to convene May 27 as scheduled.

Under Iranian law, 194 seats--two-thirds of the total--must be filled in order to attain a parliamentary quorum, and a majority of seats were filled in the first round of voting.

Despite the blackout of the reformist press, the voting in the 52 constituencies where the runoffs were taking place was “massively heavy,” according to Interior Minister Abdul Vahed Musavi-Lari. He called the turnout unprecedented for a runoff election. He also noted that the election took place peacefully.

In most areas, the polls were kept open two hours later than scheduled to accommodate late voters.