Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2000, pages 16-18

Two Views

The February Majlis Elections in Iran

Despite Their Stranglehold on Government, Popular Support for Conservatives Dwindling

By George W. Cave

Iranian President Mohammad Khatami has had limited success to date in implementing his reform program. His biggest impediment has been the Majlis, the Iranian parliament where all bills originate and which is constitutionally the most powerful organ of government. This highlights the importance of new elections for the Majlis scheduled for February.

At present the conservatives have a slim majority in the Majlis, and they also have an enormous advantage in the dictatorial power wielded by their leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, the Rahbar-l-Moazem (Supreme Guide). Under the principle of velayat-e-faqih (guardianship of the religious jurist) he holds his position for life and can only be removed by the Assembly of Experts. The Assembly of Experts consists of 86 Islamic scholars from throughout Iran who are elected for an eight-year term. The next election will not be until 2006 and the current Assembly supports Khamenei.

The conservatives also control the security forces, including the Law Enforcement Forces (LEF) which were formed in 1991 by merging the Gendarmerie, the National Police and the Islamic Revolutionary Committees. Perhaps the most important conservative asset is the Council of Guardians of the Constitution, whose main role is to render judgment on all bills passed by the Majlis. The Council of Guardians' other role is to approve or disapprove all candidates for elective office. This is a major impediment to democratic elections, since it limits the choices offered to the voters to candidates approved by the incumbent government. The Council of Guardians consists of 12 members. Six of them are clerics who are masters of Fiq (jurisprudence). They are appointed by the Supreme Guide, Khamenei, and are the Council's only voting members. The six other non-voting members are lawyers appointed by the judiciary and approved by the Majlis . Most clerics who support the conservatives belong to the Ruhaniyyat, an organization of conservative clerics supportive of Khamenei's policies.

As for persons who support President Khatami's reforms, they represent a wide range of political views, but the majority belong to two groups. The first are the technocrats, who draw their support from Western-educated Iranians, the middle class, the professionals and the industrialists. They favor a market economy and closer trade and economic relations with the West, but they entertain more conservative social and cultural views than some of the other reformist elements. Their best known political organization is the Kargozaran-i-Sazengagi, the Executives of Construction.

The second group, the reformers, consist of like-minded politicians close to Khatami: the youth, students, intellectuals, women and leftists. The Iran Participation Front is one of the political organizations in this grouping. They actively support Khatami's call for a rule of law and the establishment of Islamic democracy.

The problem for the reformists will be getting their candidates approved by the Council of Guardians. In the past, the council has blackballed any candidate known to have liberal views. The reformists did register a minor victory in mid-October when the Majlis sent a bill limiting the powers of the Guardians to the Expediency Council. The bill resulted from agitation calling for a change in the absolute authority exercised by the Council of Guardians, as there is no appeal of the council's decision on the acceptability of a candidate. Former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani heads the Expediency Council, andit is unclear what the council will decide.

For their part, the Executives of Construction plan to field a large number of candidates, figuring the Guardians cannot blackball them all. The biggest problem for the Guardians could be candidates who won in the recent provincial elections. The majority of those who won are supporters of President Khatami. Many will probably announce as candidates for the Majlis and it will be difficult to blackball them.

The conservatives have taken steps to bolster their position, some of which backfired badly. These were the assassinations carried out by a "renegade" group within the Ministry of Intelligence. Several liberal reformists and journalists were assassinated, the most well-known being Darius Foruhar and his wife. Someone managed to get word to Khatami identifying the group. Its leader, Sa'id Imami, was arrested and, allegedly, committed suicide while in prison.

The conservatives have also closed down two newspapers that support Khatami. One of these newspapers is Salam, published by Ayatollah Kho'iniha, who first became known to Americans as the adviser to the students who occupied the American Embassy inTehran on Nov. 4, 1979. The other newspaper recently suspended (September) is Khordad. It is or was published by Abdollah Nouri, a politically powerful reformer within the regime.

He was recently the interior minister in Khatami's cabinet, but was impeached by the Majlis in June 1998. He now has been sentenced to a five-year jail term and a five-year banishment from political activity by the special court for the clergy (Nouri has the rank of Hojat ol-Islam). The court also closed his popular newspaper, Khordad, and fined him 15 million rials, equivalent to $5,000. Although with Nouri's sentencing those who seek to elect reformist candidates in the February Majlis elections have lost an important voice, he could very well become a cause cŽl?bre in the upcoming elections.

As a cleric, Nouri is important for other reasons. He represents the thinking of the broad majority of clerics who believe Iran must be more democratic, and who feel the clergy should never have gotten so involved in politics. An ayatollah who was a close friend of the author's once told him, "The clergy is too corrupt to be exposed to the additional corruption of politics."

In the past these clerics absented themselves from the political process. The case of Abdollah Nouri may energize them to get more involved in the political process with the goal of finding some modus vivendi between religious authority and executive power.

The conservatives may be able to manipulate the elections, but they are acutely aware they must do it quietly, for dramatic intervention on the scale of the suppression of student riots in Tehran last July could create an unmanageable internal situation, spawning demonstrations and even uncontrollable riots.

Khamenei may well find himself in the same position the shah was in in March 1975 when he was told by the chief of SAVAK and the minister of interior that if he held the free Majlis elections he had called for, the opposition No'in party would win an overwhelming majority, on the order of 80 percent of the vote. The shah would then have to deal with a prime minister whose constituency would comprise a vast majority of the voting population.

Manipulation of the election was out. Therefore, acting in his imperial interests, the shah dissolved both the No'in party and Mardom party, and created a state party, the Rastakhiz, and named himself as its head. Khamenei could well find himself in a position as untenable as the shah's.

Election by Trial: Iran's Campaign 2000 in Full Swing

By Dr. John P. Nordin

Those who find the United States election campaign less than compelling should consider switching their attention to the Iranian parliamentary elections, which have their first round on Feb. 18. President Khatami, confident that the people support him, tries to call out the vote.¹ Conservatives, in power but worried about keeping it, call for "unity" (under them) and "convergence" (with their ideas).² But, at this stage, the campaigning is being conducted less "on the stump" than in the courtroom.

Nouri Puts the System on Trial

To continue the campaign analogy, the trial of Hojjatoleslam Abdollah Nouri was "super Tuesday." Nouri has been interior minister, vice president, and also the leading vote-getter in Tehran's recent municipal elections. He is widely considered to be the leading candidate for speaker of the Majlis if the reformers obtain a majority. As such, he is a special target of the anti-reform faction. Drawing on articles in Khordad, the newspaper Nouri manages, conservatives charged him with "insults" to Ayatollah Khomeini and Islam, advocating normalization of relations with the U.S. and Israel among other offenses.

Nouri was not tried by the ordinary courts, but by the Special Court for Clergy, which is controlled by the hard-liners. This trial was not held in secret but was open to the media, resulting in something akin in impact to the Army-McCarthy hearings, as Nouri turned the tables on his right-wing accusers.

Nouri attacked the court's legitimacy, arguing that it had no basis in law.³ That attack was only one part of a comprehensive analysis of where authority should rest in Islamic Iran.⁴ In a speech before his trial, Nouri anticipated his defense. "One viewpoint propounds that only those who hold legitimate positions in the ruling establishment have the right to talk on the domestic scene. [Another view] believes that Iran belongs to all Iranians and that the rule of law is the only parameter that determines the extent of citizen's rights."⁵ In the trial Nouri argued that "even the leader cannot act above the law,"⁶ that "he has no powers above those created for him by the constitution."⁷ On issues such as beards, the chador and divorce Nouri showed that the regime is enforcing "invisible laws"—personal interpretations of the leadership—not laws established by a transparent process.⁸

Observers reached for analogies to capture the import of Nouri's position. Nouri invoked the Inquisition. One analyst called Nouri a Socrates,⁹ another "Khrushchev" for Nouri's public naming of the Stalinist nature of the existing regime.¹⁰

It is tempting to think of Nouri as a modernist, advocating a separation of church and state. However, a more precise analogy that highlights the religious nature of his argument would be to compare Nouri's situation to that of Martin Luther in the Protestant reformation.

Nouri, like Luther, is not advocating that a secular state relegate religion to the private sphere. Rather, the issue is whether religious interpretation is the preserve of an infallible hierarchy or is conducted in a public debate based on logic that is open to all believers. "You cannot claim religion is limited to your own particular understanding of it," Nouri declared.¹¹

In Luther's day, a key struggle was over the rules for interpretation of scripture. In the case of contemporary Iran, a rough analogy would be the status given the words of the revered Ayatollah Khomeini. Does his every word have the status of scripture to be interpreted in a fundamentalistic way, or is the application of his words conditioned by time and circumstances?

Nouri was convicted on 15 of 20 charges, and sentenced to five years in jail. While it is widely assumed this means he will be barred by the Council of Guardians from standing for parliament, this conclusion is somewhat premature. Interior Minister Lari pointed out that a press-related conviction doesn't bar someone from the election.¹² Even the secretary of the Council of Guardians, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, was quoted as saying that only association with the shah's regime would be grounds for removal, otherwise, "we will not disqualify anyone."¹³

Speculation began about who would benefit if the conservatives succeeded in excluding Nouri. Did it clear the way for the re-entry to elective politics of former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, who already has declared his candidacy as an independent? Perhaps Khatami (objecting to Rafsanjani's tactics) and Supreme Leader Khamenei (fearing Rafsanjani's politics) would find a compromise to permit Nouri to run? Nouri's popularity has only increased due to, in the words of Ayatollah Mousavi-Tabrise', this "miserable parody of a trial [from] a Judiciary that 20 years after the revolution, has ended as a machine to make popular whomever it condemns."¹⁴

A final irony. One of the charges against Nouri was that he had defended former Prime Minister Mossadeq. The conservatives should have been warned: In late 1953, in an equally electrifying trial, Mossadeq put his accusers on the defensive by his powerful oratory and restored his own political career.

Media Trials

The conservatives continued to use the Press Courts (another set of courts not part of the regular structure of the government) to censor the reformist press. Each time one paper is closed, it seems at least two are created, leading to one joke suggesting that it would be in the interests of reformers to be banning their own newspapers.

The conservatives paid unexpected homage to the growing role of women by the first conviction of a woman editor, Jaleh Oskui, editor of Penj-Shanbeh-haWeekly .¹⁵

(The woman-run Zan newspaper was previously banned, but its editor not jailed.)

The trial of Masha'llah Shamsolvaezin, editor of Neshat and owner of other outspoken (and banned) newspapers, suggested the growing desperation of the hard-line forces to silence him. As he put it: "I was arrested last year and charged with acting against national security, this year for supposedly falsifying documents and probably will be arrested next year for breaking a neighbor's window."¹⁶ His real offense this time was critiquing the death penalty.

Student Trials

By contrast, conservatives are treading lightly in dealing with two groups of students. To be sure, the sentencing to death of three of July's student leaders and holding others incommunicado amid reports of torture¹⁷ would not count as light treatment in most countries. However, the authorities gave a 13-year sentence, rather than death, to Manuchehr Mohammadi, whom they had previously portrayed as the mastermind of the rebellion.¹⁸

The executions have apparently not been carried out, nor have there been show trials or a propaganda campaign.

Much more striking leniency was shown to those students blamed for the publication of the play Entrance Exam in a student newspaper. The majority of Iran's Shi'i Muslim community hold that Imam Mahdi, the 12th successor of the Prophet Muhammad, went into hiding and it is believed that he will return when the world is full of evil and ready for the last judgment. The premise of the play is that the imam does return and attempts to recruit a student. The student refuses, as he has exams scheduled that day and his whole future depends on the results. He asks, "1354 years and 55 days you have been hiding. Why can't you wait one more day for me?" Far from attacking the imam, the play, at least in Western perspective, mocks student obsessions and hard-line clerics (the student also says to the imam, "You are getting worse than these ayatollahs. They promised us so much, and look what happened.").¹⁹

The conservatives unleashed repeated calls for the students to be executed. The reformers responded with their own conspiracy theory: the play had been planted by hard-liners to discredit the reformers.²⁰

However, to this author, the play displays far too much wit to be the product of any nation's security forces. In any case, what followed was unexpected. The supreme leader, by a fatwa, utterly forbade any private vengeance against the students.²¹ The court gave the students suspended sentences (a professor was acquitted).²²

Why this careful concern with youth compared to the rough treatment of the adults? Students have a history of regime-altering rebellion, being key players in the riots that contributed to the overthrow of the shah. Recently, there have been several less-publicized student protests as well.

Trials in the Offing

The case of the 13 Jews arrested for spying, while a cause cŽl?bre in the foreign press, is hardly mentioned domestically, other than periodic assertions that they should and will receive a fair trial. Hints are dropped that their case will be dismissed. There are certainly other cases of human rights violations against Jews. However, given the level of abuses against the Iranian population generally, it is hard to make a case, despite The New York Times' hysteria,²³ that there is any systematic campaign to make Iranian Jews the scapegoats for Iran's problems.

Secret Trials Delayed

Some of those who attacked the students in July have been tried in secret military courts.²⁴ However, no one involved in the murder of a series of writers and intellectuals last year has been brought to trial. The one-year anniversary of the first of the murders in late November brought renewed cries for justice,²⁵ cries that are not likely to receive a response until after the elections.

Abbreviations

BBC Online: British Broadcasting Corporation Online Network. Site: news.bbc.co.uk

DFN: Digital Freedom Network. Site: www.dfn.org

GO News: Available at www.go.com

ID: Iran Daily. Site: www.iran-daily.com

IPS: Iran Press Service. Site: www.iran-press-service.com

WRMEA: Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. Site: www.washington-report.org

Endnotes

1ID, Nov. 17, p. 1

2Speaker of the Majlis, Hojjatoleslam Nateq Nouri, in Keyhan International, Nov. 9, p. 1.

3Safa Haeri, "Has the Clergy Court Paved Mr. Nouri's Way [to] the Presidency [of the Majlis]?, IPS, Nov. 11. ID, Nov. 2, p. 1.

4"By Pronouncing Nouri Guilty, Inquisitors Discredited Cleric's Court," IPS, Nov. 13.

5"Nouri Hails Political Differences," ID, Oct. 27, p. 1.

6Howard Schneider, "Cleric's Defense Puts the System on Trial in Iran," Washington Post Online, Nov. 21. Available at: washingtonpost.com.

7Geneive Abdo, "Khatami ally defiant as clerical court convicts him," Guardian Weekly, Nov. 18-24, p.4.

8IPS, Nov. 11.

9"Saying the unsayable, in public," The Economist, Nov. 20, p. 48.

10"Iran's Khrushchev Challenges both the Leader and the CST," IPS, Nov. 2.

11Ali Raiss-Tousi, "Hardline Iranian court ends hearings, Nouri defiant," Go News, Nov. 10.

12"Executive Summary," Iran Press Analysis, Vol. 1:28, Nov. 21, 1999. ID, Nov. 20, p.1.

13ID, Nov. 30., p.1.

14Op. cit., IPS, Nov. 15.

15BBC Online, Nov. 15; ID, Nov. 16, p.1.

16"Hardy Editor Rejects Competence of Kangaroo Press Court," IPS, Nov. 10, 1999; Go Network News, Nov. 18.

17Iran Human Rights Working Group, Nov. 23. Available at: www.ihrwg.org.

18John Nordin, "Iran Regime's leading Reformers and Conservatives Unite, Briefly, to Put Down Mass Protests," WRMEA, Oct.-Nov. 1999, p. 28

19DFN, "Entrance Exam and the Time of Resurrection," Oct. 1999.

20DFN, "The Play that Shocked a Nation," Nov. 3.

21ID, Oct. 2, p. 1.

22ID, Nov. 3, p. 2.

23"Arrests Shake Ancient Roots of Iran's Jews," The New York Times, Oct. 17, 1999, p. 1. The lengthy article does not mention even a single additional example of a human rights abuse against Iranian Jews.

24Asociated Press, "50 tried in raid on university dormitory," Nov. 29. Reported in Boston Globe online, www.boston.com.

25"One Year Past and No Progress in Chain Murders Case," IPS, Nov. 19. Iran Press Analysis, Nov. 21.

George Cave, a retired U.S. government official, was interpreter and political adviser to the Robert McFarlane mission to Tehran in May 1986. Revelation of this mission to trade arms for hostages set off the Iran-Contra scandal that cast a shadow over President Ronald Reagan's first two years in office.

Dr. John P. Nordin is a free-lance writer living in the Denver area.