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PARIS, 8 Jul. (IPS) Ten days after his surprise
election to the presidency and one month before
taking office officially, Iranian president-elect
Mahmoud Ahmadi Nezhad is experiencing his first
political turbulence, with some hard line lawmakers
and clerics urging him to “purify” the society from
Western, un-Islamic “impurities”.
"Islamic and revolutionary cultures have been
neglected in the past years", lamented Hojjatoleslam
Mohammad Taqi Rahbar, a hard line cleric MM (member
of the Majles) , or the Iranian Parliament Cultural
Committee, quoted by the official news agency IRNA.
Mr. Rahbar and other colleagues were reacting to
recent declarations by Mr. Mehdi Kalhor, a former
Director for cultural affairs at both the
leader-controlled Voice and Visage (Radio and
Television) and the Culture and Islamic Guidance
Ministry, stating that the new president was against
the government and the State interfering with
people’s private and intimate affairs and life, like
cloth, music or using satellite dishes, that are
officially banned, but tolerated.
"Even if women remove the small handkerchiefs they
wear instead of a proper veil, nobody says
anything", Mr. Rahbar said adding that mixing of
young men and women in public also contravened the
values of an Islamic society.
In a live telephone interview from Tehran with the
Farsi-language “Mohajer” (Emigrant) Television based
in Germany, Mr. Kalhor, described as a Cultural
attaché to the 49 years-old Mayor of Tehran said Mr.
Ahmadi Mezhad was “basically a very joyful man very
much against the interference of the State in
people’s private sphere”.
“We are against the Law enforcing forces involved
with the way young girls and boys are dressed or
what they do. Those are not our youngster’s
problems. People’s life is already under too much of
pressures. Mr. Ahmadi Nezhad want all people be
happy, for we think they are not laughing from the
bottom of their hearts”, he added.
He regretted that due to restrictions imposed on
Iranian musicians, many of them had left the
country. “Where in this world a television is
prevented to show musical instruments, as does our
Television? We have very talented musicians who can
export their music to outside world. We have to open
up the society so every one could get permission to
express his talent”, Mr. Kalhor said, adding that
“even Iranian musicians now living in Los Angeles
should be free to perform in Iran”.
Observing that Iranian women are among the world’s
most fashionable and glamourous, Mr. Kalhor said
some of Iranian tribe’s dresses are so nice and
trendy that they could be presented in fashion
shows.
And on the use of satellite antennas, he said people
must be free to have satellite. “If you impose
censorship and prevent people by force, the reaction
is obvious. Satellites are today an integral part of
our people’s life and no body is allowed to deny
them possession it”, he pointed out.
His remarks, aimed obviously at giving the
austere and pious Ahmadi Nezhad, a non turbaned but
an “osouli”, or “principalist” Muslim a friendly
face immediately created outrage among hard line
officials, expecting the president-elect enforcing
strict Shari’a principles they insist were not
observed by the government of the outgoing
Hojjatoleslamt Mohammad Khatami, a middle rank
cleric.
In fact, during his two years as Mayor of the
Capital, Mr. Ahmadi Nezhad had done nothing to
oppose the limited social and cultural freedoms
Iranians women and youngsters had obtained with
their beak and nail. Though he had closed some of
cultural centres and encouraged mosques, but also
refrained from tearing down satellite dishes and
punishing households using them to receive Western,
Indian, Turkish or Arabic televisions, not speaking
of the tens of Iranian radio and televisions, mostly
based in Los Angeles playing forbidden Iranian
shows, pop music and anti-regime political programs.
"Such remarks might cause doubts among Ahmadi
Nezhad's supporters", IRNA quoted Mehdi Tabataba’i,
also a hard core conservative MM, as having said.
The lawmaker was referring to the “masses” of
voters who gave their ballots to the Mayor of
Tehran, the son of a poor, village blacksmith who,
like them, lived in simplicity, keeping his old flat
in Tehran instead of moving to palaces in the posh
areas situated in the northern part of the Capital
where most of the officials, including senior
ayatollahs, lives.
Despite a huge earning from spiraling oil price,
estimated at over 40 billion US Dollars for the
current Iranian year of 1384 (21 March 2005 to 21
March 2006), the gap between the poor and the rich
continue to increase, with some 76 percent of the
national income going to just 10 percent of the
population consisted of the “nouveaux riches”, most
of them high-ranking clerics, their families and
friends against some 50 per cent of the population
living under the poverty line, earning less than 100
USD per month, Iranian economic analysts observed.
Under growing pressures from ultra conservatives
both inside and outside of the Parliament, Mr.
Ahmadi Nezhad was forced to dismiss his friend,
tipped by some as a possible future Culture and
Islamic Guidance minister.
This is Ahmadi Nezhad’s first, but also both
minor and major challenge on which one can project
on his course once fully in charge, being caught
between the devil and the deep sea, the hard liners
in the one side and the majority of young Iranians
who would, at any cost, defend their freedoms on the
other.
If he does nothing to please the hard liners
“cleansing” the society, implementing Islamic laws
of behaviour, tearing down satellite dishes etc.. in
the domestic front and adopt an aggressive foreign
policy to the extend of emulating North Korean
example concerning the thorny nuclear issue and
increase support for the radical Palestinian and
Arab groups opposed to Peace Process and
normalization of the situation in neighbouring Iraq,
he would face a Parliament controlled by the
conservatives and possible impeachment.
On the other hand, if he yields to them, he would
surely met with fierce resistance from the middle
class, the students, the independent press and the
intelligentsia community backed by the reformists
and their acolytes in the nationalist-religious and
Iran Freedom Movement, all the forces that have
warned against the dangers of “military fascism”
symbolized by Mr. Ahmad Nezhad, but yet lost the
elections, not forgetting Ayatollah Ali Akbar
Hashemi Rafsanjani, the man who was given by most
Iranian and foreign pundits as the winner but lost
the race to the former Revolutionary Guard officer
thanks to obvious manipulations of the votes and
“character assassination” denounced by the former
president, but also the desertion of voting stations
by supporters of other candidates defeated in the
first round.
Does the president-elect have the abilities of a
trapeze artist? Would he resist to pressures warning
the extremists that if they pushes too much, he
would appeal to those who voted for him, something
the outgoing President refused to do, bringing upon
himself and the reformists the anger of his
supporters?
In his first press conference, Mr. Ahmadi Nezhad
played well on the rope, renewed with forgotten
ideals of Grand Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini, the
leader of the Islamic Revolution and founding father
of the Islamic Republic by stating that he wants to
create a “strong Islamic Iran” that would bring
Islamic justice” to the entire world but make
“moderation” the motto of his policies.
He also reiterated that benefiting from atomic
technology is the “legitimate right” of Iran, but at
the same time assured the European Troika that
nuclear talks with Britain, France and Germany would
continue.
The recent accusations that he was one of the
students who stormed the American embassy in Tehran
on November 1979, taking 55 American diplomats and
staff for 444 days augurs bad for the
president-elect, as some former hostages have
indicated that they have formally recognised in Mr.
Ahmad Nezhad one of their captors.
"This is the guy. There's no question about it",
said former hostage Chuck Scott, a retired Army
colonel who lives in Jonesboro, Georgia. "You could
make him a blond and shave his whiskers; put him in
a zoot suit and I'd still spot him."
Scott and former hostages David Roeder, William J.
Daugherty and Don A. Sharer told The Associated
Press on Wednesday they have no doubt Ahmadi Nezhad
was one of the hostage-takers, as alleged by Iran
Focus, a London-based Iranian news service,
distributing an Associated Press picture showing a
thickly bearded young hostage-taker leading out a
blindfolded American hostage.
But some of the students who were actively involved
in the attack have rebuked the allegations, saying
forcefully that he was not among the students who
took part in the seizure.
"Mr Ahmadi Nezhad was never one of students
following the path of the imam that took the spy den
(US embassy)”, confirmed Mr. Mohsen Mirdamadi, an
ex-hostage taker who went on to become Chairman of
the Foreign Affairs and national Security Committee
at the last, reformists-controlled Majles.
“It is just impossible for an (American) hostage
to recognise the captors, for the simple reason that
the students, aware and afraid of the potentials of
the CIA to identify them, would usually be hooded
and the hostages blindfolded during lengthy
interrogation and questioning periods,”, an Iranian
journalist who covered the dramatic event at the
time told Iran Press Service on condition of not
being named.
This was also confirmed by
some of the former hostages.
Sa’id Hajjarian, a former senior Intelligence
Ministry’s officer turned reformist playing an
important role in the victory of outgoing President
Mohammad Khatami in May 1997 identified the man in
the photo as Taqi Mohammadi, who died in mysterious
circumstances in prison.
Mrs. Ma’soumeh Ebtekar, an Advisor to the outgoing
president and one of the students “in the line of
Emam (Khomeini) who stormed the American embassy and
was then known as Sister Mary also stressed that the
president-elect was not among them.
But more damaging for the
president-elect, because more serious, are the new
charges by Austrian press that he was also involved
in the assassination of Dr Abdol Rahman Qasemlou,
the charismatic leader of the outlawed Democratic
Party of Iranian Kurdistan in Vienna on July 1989,
at the height of fighting between Iranian army and
the DPIK peshmergas, or freedom fighters.
Dr Qasemlou had travelled from Paris, where he
lived, to the Austrian capital on the invitation
from a fellow Iraqi Kurd who was acting on behalf of
the Iranian government, then under the presidency of
Mr. Hashemi Rafsanjani, to discuss with an Iranian
delegation modalities for a cease fire, but was shot
dead, alongside his host and other participants by
the Iranians, a special hit commando disguised as
Government negotiators.
Though the Austrian
authorities were alerted about the assassination,
but they helped the murderers to leave Vienna for
Tehran, invoking diplomatic immunity for the
commando.
Austrian Green Party leader Peter Pilz told “Der
Standard” newspaper of Saturday 2 July that he wants
a warrant issued for the arrest of Ahmadi Nezhad,
who he alleged "stands under strong suspicion of
having been involved, by bringing into Vienna the
weapons with which the commando shot dead the
Kurdish leader and his colleagues.
But as the Austria's Interior Ministry and the
public prosecutor's office said they would
investigate the alleged evidence pointing to the new
Iranian president's possible involvement in the
attack, the Judiciary ruled against, saying the
affair is closed.
This accusation is more plausible since at the time,
Mr. Ahmadi Nezhad is reported to have been a member
of the Revolutionary Guards Qods (Jerusalem) Unit in
charge of eliminating Iranians fighting from abroad
the Islamic Republic.
It is interesting to note that in a meeting with
Azeri members of the parliament, Mr. Ahmadi Nezhad
did nothing to remove the accusations, but
questioned “dissemination of unfounded and baseless
information by western intelligence organizations
despite the best information technologies and know
how they possesses?” and warned the outside world,
mostly the Europeans, to avoid “misjudgments” about
him.
By bringing to power a former “Islamist
revolutionary” officer against the so-called
“moderate and pragmatic” but also ambitious Hashemi
Rafsanjani, the leader might have open the Pandora
box. If, by this calculus, he is about to curtailing
the hands of shadowy but powerful,
ultra-conservative clerical-led groups of which he
is a hostage thanks to the joined forces of the “Vox
Populi” and the Revolutionary Guards, he might also
paving the way for a “bonapartist” adventure, one
that, under present international conditions, might
lead to a foreign intervention in Iran, something
few Iranians wants, hence the frightening
possibility of a civil war.
Once again, the answer to all these questions is in
the hands of Ayatollah Ali Khameneh’i, the “Guide”
of the Islamic Republic who takes all major
decisions on both domestic and international issues
and who Mr. Ahmadi Nezhad says is his mentor. ENDS
AHMADI NEZHAD CHALLENGED 8705
www.iran-press-service.com
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