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Copyright © 1994-98, by the Middle East Data Project, Inc. All rights reserved.
Iranian President Hojjat-ol eslam Mohammad Khatami won a sweeping victory in the Feb. 26 local council elections with an estimated 70% of some 200,000 newly-elected officials said to be supporting his reformist line. It was the first time Iranians have been able to vote for local officials since the time of the Shah.
But Khatami's election victory almost didn't happen. Hard-liners resorted to legal maneuvers, intimidation, and in some cases physical violence, in efforts to discredit Khatami and discourage his supporters.
Last month we reported that hard-liners including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamene'i, Majlis speaker Nateq-Nouri, and former President Hashemi-Rafsanjani warned Khatami to stop his investigation into the MOIS hit squads. Undeterred, Khatami demanded the resignation of Intelligence Minister Dorri-Najafabadi.
Not long after we published our report, Khatami not only got Dorri-Najafabadi's resignation, but succeeded in getting his own candidate approved by the hard-line Majlis to succeed him as head of Iranian intelligence (see below).
Our sources inside Iran now tell us that just five days after the tumultuous weekend meetings, Khatami returned to meet with Khamene'i alone. Khatami not only repeated his demand for Dorri-Najafabadi's head, but warned Khamene'i not to go through with his threats to disallow reformist candidates, including close Khatami ally Abdallah Nouri, from running in the local elections.
Nouri's candidacy was in fact annulled by an election board controlled by hard-liners on Feb. 22 . But he ran anyway and won the most votes of all twenty elected Council members for the city of Tehran. There is now talk that he will become Tehran's new mayor, or failing that, be given the power to control Tehran's finances, the first time an elected official has ever had such powers in Iran.
Not Banisadr: Khatami warned Khamene'i during this January 21 face-off that he would not allow himself to be removed from office to satisfy the hard-liners, and that the extent of his popular support would make any attempt to remove him by the regime extremely dangerous. "I want you to know that my name is not Abdolhassan," he told Khamene'i, according to sources who heard accounts of the meeting.
Khatami was referring to Abdolhassan Banisadr, the first President of the Islamic Republic who was removed from office by Ayatollah Khomeini in June 1981 and promptly went into exile in France.
"We are both sitting on a branch that is being sawed off," Khatami said, "and we will certainly crash to the ground if the present situation continues.... The country is facing complete collapse," Khatami said. "I was elected by 70% of the voters, and even here many people did not believe the elections were fair, because otherwise I would have received 90% of the votes. Today, as a result of the actions of the hardliners against me, I would get 95% support."
Khatami's demands: Khatami then presented a letter, prepared by his top economic advisor, former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Moussavi, listing eight demands which he insisted be met by February 26, the day of the elections.
1) The government must be given absolute decision-making power in all areas relating to executive branch operations, from the appointment of ministers and day-to-day decisions, to control over semi-governmental organizations;
2) Reform of the security forces and their control by the Ministry of Interior
3) The appointment of Mir Hossein Moussavi as First Vice President, replacing Hasan Habibi, and as Executive Assistant to the President, a post now occupied by Mohammad Hashemi, the younger brother of former President Hashemi-Rafsanjani. Moussavi would also be put in charge of a High Economic Council and be given full powers over economic policy and planning. In addition, the Ministry of Finance will assume control over all foundations, including the powerful Bonyad-e Mostazafan, which today controls large segments of the Iranian economy for the benefit of Ayatollah Khamene'i, its titular head. This first timid step against the Bonyads, if successful, is Khatami's first real attempt at structural reform.
4) Parliament will have no right to interfere with economic policy.
5) The government will assume control over Iran's foreign policy.
6) The local elections will go ahead according to the law, under supervision of the Ministry of the Interior and without the interference of other individuals, groups, or organizations.
7) Reforms will be carried out prior to the next Parliamentary elections.
8) Ayatollah Khamene'i would remain the religious leader of the Islamic Republic and Commander in Chief of the armed forces. 50 billion rials would be cut from funds budgetted for the islamic Republic Guard Corps (IRGC), but Khamene'i would be free to assist the IRGC using his own discretionary funds.
Khatami ended by warning that if his demands were not met, "violence will prevail and the people will take to the streets." The economy was in a state of collapse, with massive unemployment and disastisfaction among Iranian youth, he said. "The situation in the country is much worse than anybody thinks. This is the direct redsult of 8 years of Ransanjani's rule."
The regime strikes back: Regime hardliners did not take Khatami's assault lying down. In a private meeting in London between Iran's former ambassador to Germany, Hossein Moussavian, and British government officials, they attempted to paint a top MOIS official implicated in the murders of Iranian dissidents, Mohammad Moussavi, as a key Khatami ally. These charges were repeated on a state-run television program back in Tehran, prompting a stern rebuke from the pro-Khatami faction. (Moussavi was a top deputy to Hojjat-ol eslam Mohammad Reyshahri in the 1980s).
In Qom, a hard-line gang attacked Hadi Khamene'i, a prominent Khatami supporter, after a mourning ceremony on February 11. Although he is the younger brother of the Supreme Leader, Hadi Khamene'i and his left-wing daily Jahan-e Eslam (Islamic World) have supported Khatami.
Just four days before the elections, the hard-liners tried again, this time disqualifying Khatami ally Abdallah Nouri and 50 other pro-Khatami candidates from the elections.
But each time, the Khatami faction held fast. And for good reason: the Iranian president held a trump card, and he was playing it very close to his vest.
The Younesi report: Our sources in Tehran report that one reason Khatami waited a full week before officially nominating Ali Younesi to succeed Dorri-Najafabadi, who resigned as Minister of Intelligence and Security on Feb. 9, was to make sure he first signed his Top Secret report on the dissident murders. Younesi signed the document on Feb. 17, and Khatami promptly forwarded his nomination to Parliament the same day.
Khatami waited yet another week before moving the nomination to a vote. When the roll was finally called on Feb. 24, his victory was total. Out of 270 members of Parliament, 224 voted to approve Younesi's nomination. Even more stunning. only 9 deputies actually voted against him. The others either failed to attend the session (19) or abstained from the vote (18).
The reason for this victory was the Younesi report.
[Margin:] Sources in Tehran told The Iran Brief that Younesi accused top advisors of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamene'i of having orchestrated the murder of Iranian dissidents. Among them:
• Askar Oladi. Like Younesi himself, a member of the Fedayan-e Eslam, the terrorist brigades that helped decimate the command structure of the Shah's army during the Revoution, and opponents of Ayatollah Khomeini in its aftermath. Askar Oladi works closely with key members of the Bazaar on Khamene'i's behalf
• Valiollah Mohammad Pourmohammadi, deputy Minister of Intelligence & Security in charge of External Affairs and Ayatollah Khamene'i's personal representative to the MOIS. A member of the hit team that killed the Forouhars was captured on audio tape at the Forouhars house, calling Pourmohammadi for instructions after he had murdered Parvaneh Forouhar. President Khatami reportedly played portions of that tape to Ayatollah Khamene'i as a means of ensuring he would not remove him from office.
• Mohammad Moussavi, General Director of MOIS in charge of internal security.
Younesi's report also implicated five members of Khamene'i's private office for their role in the killings.
Khatami appears to have made a pact with Khamene'i to keep the report quiet, as long as Khamene'i kept the hard-line faction under control.
On Feb. 22, Younesi's successor as military prosecutor for Tehran, Mohammad Niyazi, told IRNA that his office had arrested four more (unidentified) persons who had played an "important role" in killing the Forouhars and two other secular writers late last year. He did not say if the four were linked to MOIS, but said that one of the new suspects had been arrested after he had fled to Turkey and "returned" to Iran.
"His arrest resulted in important information," Niyazi said. The suspects "had transferred some classified documents out of the Intelligence Ministry and hidden them in another place. We later found the documents along with some forged official and military documents and stamps."
Niyazi's terse statement is likely to set the norm for revelations coming from the regime - unless Ayatollah Khamene'i fails to reign in the hard-liners or for his own reasons choses a showdown with President Khatami.