Chapter culture of Spain

First presidential term of Mohammad Khatami: reformist movement and conservative intervention

Mohammad Khatami
The May 1997 election of Mohammad Khatami, a supporter of Soroush, as president was a surprise for conservatives who had backed Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, speaker of Iran’s Majles. Shortly before the elections, the Council of Guardians had placed Khatami on a list of four acceptable candidates in order to give a greater semblance of democracy to the process. Khatami had been Iran’s minister of culture and Islamic guidance but was forced to resign in 1992 for having adopted a more moderate view on social and cultural issues. He campaigned for president on a platform of curbing censorship, fighting religious excess, and allowing for greater tolerance and was embraced by much of the public, receiving more than two-thirds of the vote and enjoying especially strong support among women and young adults.
The election of Khatami, and his appointment of a more moderate cabinet, unleashed a wave of euphoria among reformers. In less than a year some 900 new newspapers and journals received authorization to publish and added their voices to earlier reformist journals such as Zanān and Kiyān, which had been the strongest backers of Khatami. However, the limits of the reformist president’s authority became clear in the months after his election. The rahbar, Ayatollah Khamenei, continued to exercise sweeping executive powers, which he did not hesitate to use to thwart Khatami’s reforms. In June 1998 the parliament removed Khatami’s liberal interior minister, Abdullah Nouri, in a vote of no confidence, and Tehrān’s mayor, Gholamhussein Karbaschi, was convicted of corruption and jailed by the president’s conservative opponents despite strong public opinion in his favour. Reformist newspapers were accused of offending Islamic principles and shut down one by one, and six prominent intellectuals, including secular nationalist leader Dariyush Farouhar and his wife, Parvaneh Eskandari, were assassinated. Their murders were traced to agents of the Iranian intelligence services, whose representatives claimed that the assassins were acting without orders.
In the February 1999 elections for roughly 200,000 seats on village, town, and city councils, reformers once again won by an overwhelming margin, and many women were elected to office in rural areas. The antidemocratic nature of the office of rahbar was vigorously debated, and calls for its removal from the constitution now began to appear in the press. In July 1999 students protested the closing of the Salām newspaper and opposed further restrictions on the press; and police, backed by a vigilante group known as Anṣār-e Ḥezbollāh, attacked a dormitory at Tehrān University. Four students were reported killed, and hundreds more were injured or detained. On the day after the attack, 25,000 students staged a sit-in at the university and demanded the resignation of Tehrān’s police chief, whom they held responsible for the raid. Within 48 hours, demonstrations had erupted in at least 18 major cities, including Gīlān, Mashhad, and Tabrīz in the north and Yazd, Eṣfahān, and Shīrāz in the south. The demonstrators demanded that the murderers of the Farouhars and other intellectuals be brought to swift justice. They also called for freedom of the press, an increase in personal liberty, an end to the vigilante attacks on universities, and the release of 13 Iranian Jews who had been arrested by the government on allegations that they were spying for Israel. This was the first major student demonstration since the 1979 revolution, and it lasted for five days. By mid-July the government had quelled the protests, and hundreds more were arrested.
Janet Afary