Khatami Challenges Violent Opponents in Iran

Iranian President Mohammad Khatami marked the third anniversary of his election Monday, challenging the shadowy opponents who have killed, assaulted and intimidated his supporters, and issuing a call for freedom and democracy within Iran’s Islamic republic.

Khatami’s speech was a clear riposte to the hard-liners who have sent his supporters to jail and closed 17 reformist newspapers in the past month. It came as thousands rallied at Tehran University and vowed that reforms will continue no matter what the conservatives do to try to thwart them.

Pulling no punches, the state-librarian-turned-president leaned into the lectern at the auditorium of the Interior Ministry and told an assembly of municipal council members from around the country that Iran needs to find and tear out by the roots the “cancerous tumor” within the state that has used fear and violence to support its narrow view of Islam.

“Khatami, Khatami, you are the light of our eyes,” the audience chanted in unison as he began speaking. “May God’s blessing be upon you.”

Dressed in a long brown tunic and robe, with the black turban that marks him as a descendant of the prophet Muhammad, the gray-bearded president showed no signs of the stress and fatigue that reportedly had sent him to the hospital for an emergency heart examination a week ago.

Khatami has made it a custom to deliver major speeches on the anniversary of his election date. This time, he was speaking less than a week before a new parliament is scheduled to be seated Saturday.

Overwhelmingly pro-reform, it replaces a conservative-dominated parliament that the voters rejected largely because it had obstructed Khatami’s programs.

But despite that change, conservatives still control other powerful institutions in the country, including the watchdog Council of Guardians, the judiciary system, the elite Revolutionary Guards and their Basij volunteer militia, and the state broadcast media. And so far, they show no sign of wanting to make life easy for Khatami and his backers.

One of Khatami’s closest friends and advisors, Saeed Hajjarian, was shot by a would-be assassin two months ago. Other supporters, such as former Interior Minister Abdollah Nouri and former Tehran Mayor Gholamhossein Karbaschi, have been imprisoned. Various members of his Cabinet, such as Culture Minister Ataollah Mohajerani, have been hounded mercilessly by conservatives in parliament and in rightist newspapers.

Lesser-known dissidents were targeted in a series of five killings in late 1998 that were later traced to a cell within the Ministry of Information, the name used for Iran’s intelligence ministry. And student supporters of the president were beaten in their dormitories in Tehran last summer.

State television has mounted a sharp campaign against other reformists who had the misfortune to attend a conference this year in Berlin that was disrupted by demonstrators opposed to Iran’s Islamic regime. Meanwhile, “hit lists” circulate in Tehran naming academics, intellectuals and other supposed enemies of the state who purportedly are next in line for violence.

In his speech, Khatami countered the contention of some of his hard-line opponents--who have lost three elections in three years to reformers--that religious doctrine is more important than popular democracy when setting the country’s direction.

To the contrary, Khatami argued, the 1979 Islamic Revolution’s late spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, always emphasized that he was setting up an “Islamic republic” rather than simply an Islamic state. The difference meant that Khomeini himself always believed in the combination of Islamic principles and the voice of the people, he said.

When Iranians accepted the Islamic Republic’s constitution, “our people voted for freedom to speak, freedom to assemble, freedom to criticize--all these are inalienable rights of the people,” Khatami said.

“Our people voted for Islam, which has a clear definition, not for those who wrongly see themselves as the embodiment of a pure Islam, those who excommunicate or kill their opponents,” he said.

Khatami said freedom of expression and criticism were not denied Iranians during the 1980-88 war with Iraq. “I hope we are not going to do something now . . . that we did not do even then, in the special circumstances of war,” he said.

Later, he said: “Nobody has the right in the name of freedom to hurt our religion and our culture. And no one is allowed in the name of religion to harm the rights of the people.”

The president said that one of the achievements of his three-year presidency was exposing the clique of people within the Information Ministry who had been carrying out killings of dissidents. He called them a “cancerous tumor” that has yet to be eliminated.

“We are trying to cut out all the roots of that tumor. We are going to get to the roots of such ugly events wherever they come up. And of course, we may have to pay a price to do that,” he said, an apparent allusion to the shooting of Hajjarian, who was one of the presidential advisors looking into the workings of the intelligence services.

A few hours after Khatami spoke at the Interior Ministry, several thousand students and other supporters gathered for an election-anniversary rally at Tehran University.

Much of the demonstration’s anger was directed against former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, who seems to have only fallen in the public’s esteem since the conservative-run Council of Guardians raised his electoral standing in announcing final results for Tehran on Saturday.

Some conservatives have been touting Rafsanjani as the next parliament speaker, but attendees at the rally said that the conservative Guardians had shamelessly manipulated the votes in favor of Rafsanjani, and that has made the former president even less acceptable to them than before.

“The people have awakened. They cannot stand Rafsanjani,” went a chant the demonstrators repeated. In the Persian language of Iran, it rhymes.