TEHRAN: The movement to liberalize this Islamic republic has hit a slump as reformist politicians regroup after electoral defeat and amid public consternation about the prospects for change.
The Islamic Participation Front (IPF) - long a main driving force of the reform movement - appears to have run out of steam. The party's politburo - its central command - failed to show up for their latest weekly session. Instead, their staff watched a televised football match and chatted about the erosion of the party's influence in government ministries.
The IPF has become a lame duck since being stripped of its parliamentary majority in February's national elections. Although final election results remain to be released, conservatives have said they will occupy two-thirds of the national assembly's 295 seats come June, when the new legislature is sworn in.
Voters re-elected reformist President Mohammad Reza Khatami. The immediate causes of the sharp reversal in parliament include the disputed wholesale banning of reform candidates.
However, even reform-minded observers have said that the movement is beset by larger problems, not least of which is confusion over the meaning of reform. Statements by Khatami have stoked the disquiet, said Mohammad Sadegh Javadi Hesar, manager of the banned reformist daily 'Tus'.
"There is no consensus on the definition of reform among reformists. President Khatami and his associates, in campaigning for the presidential election, introduced a definition of reform that is totally different from what is stipulated by the reformists within the ruling establishment these days," he said.
Sociology student Rambod Kochoee was more blunt. "President Khatami, two months before his landslide victory, talked of promoting civil society and less than three months after his victory said that by civil society he meant the Mohammadan (Prophetic) society found in the early days of Islam in the holy city of Madina in the Arab peninsula," Kochoee said.
Khatami may have been confused, Kochoee added, because the Arabic and Persian words for the ancient city and for 'civil society' share the same root. Even so, reformists who were barred from the polls and those who ran and lost have garnered little sympathy from secular intellectuals who see the reformists as having betrayed their popular constituency.
"Four years ago, in the run up to the sixth parliament election, the reformists launched a meaningful platform labelled 'Iran belongs to all Iranians'," columnist Sohrab Mostofi wrote recently in the magazine GOFT-O-GU ('Dialogue'). This galvanized support among political activists previously unaffiliated with any political faction.
Many, Mostofi said, "decided to register themselves as parliamentary nominees but when these Iranian citizens were disqualified by the vetting bodies, the reformists did not remember their platform and replaced the rejected nominees with their (own) like-minded candidates".
Some legislators barred from running for re-election have saidvoters' rights were violated and have threatened to resign. Their statements have shared a common phrase: "I submit my resignation to protest the breach of voters' citizenship rights."
But the gesture appears to have come across as hollow. "The reformists are self -centered people. Only when they, themselves, were disqualified did they think of the citizenship rights of Iranians," said Wazgen Ebrahimian, an Armenian antique seller running a shop near IPF headquarters here. "In fact, they are resigning to secure their political future."
IPF theorists, meanwhile, appear to be groping for a new way forward. Party theorists including politburo member Sa'eed Hajarian, a former high-ranking intelligence official during the first decade of the Islamic revolution, have advocated reinventing Mohammad Mosaddeq, the late secular nationalist prime minister ousted in a British and US-backed coup in 1953, as a "secular Muslim".
A new party magazine, aptly called 'Doctrine', is said to be gearing up to use similar historical revision to advance "Islamic secularism". Such moves already have raised the hackles of conservatives, who in statements have blasted the reformists for "rushing toward secularism." The charge seems implausible, yet it could serve to drive a wedge between reformists. -Dawn/The Inter Press News Service.
