Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (48 page)

Since the revolution the Parliament hardly ever operated as an independent arena of power. Decisions always seemed to have been made elsewhere first, a mirror of the conflicts within Iranian society. But then ordinary Iranians hungry for a voice in government decided to ignore this reality and voted for the Parliament as if it really did have power. And in doing so, they took a serious measure of power for themselves. They also created the potential for a Parliament that might be much more independent than before.

The results of the election elated many of the reformists, who saw it as a powerful endorsement of President Khatami’s policies and the means to enhance his authority to fight for further change. But the election also stiffened the spine of conservatives and opened a new phase in the ongoing struggle for the future shape of the Islamic Republic. Left unresolved were the issues of how much the new parliament would be allowed to legislate changes in Iran’s political, economic, and social life and how far the conservatives would go to thwart it.

The contest itself was unwieldy, as more than 5000 candidates ran for 290 seats. Each candidate had to be approved by provincial supervisory bodies, the Ministry of the Interior, and then by the clerically dominated conservative Guardian Council. About 10 percent of the potential candidates were barred from participating because they were judged to have either rejected Iran’s Islamic Constitution or lacked adequate education. Those rejected included Ibrahim Yazdi, the former Foreign Minister; Hamid-Reza Jalaeipour, the newspaper publisher; Abbas Abdi, the first editor of the banned newspaper
Salaam;
and Azam Taleghani, the woman who had tried to run for President in 1997. Even President Khatami’s older sister, Fatemeh, was turned down, because she didn’t have a college degree, although she was an elected member of the town council from Ardakan and headed the women’s organization there. Still, the rejection rate was dramatically lower than that of the previous election in 1996, when more than 40 percent were barred.

Candidates used Western-style vote-getting techniques: paid campaign advertisements, polling, and mass mailings. They set up storefront headquarters to field phone calls, receive visitors, and distribute literature. Even though Iran has no formal political parties in the Western sense, with broad-based popular memberships and established platforms, that did not deter one of the leading reformers, the President’s brother, Mohammad-Reza Khatami. The younger Khatami, an English-speaking urologist and the former Deputy Minister of Health, had nearly lost a leg while serving as a volunteer in the Iran-Iraq war. In late 1998 he founded the Islamic Iran Participation Front as a vehicle for his brother’s reformist ideas, and by 2000 it functioned as an informal political party, publishing a serious issue-oriented platform and sponsoring a substantial number of candidates. Together with seventeen other reformist groups it formed the Second of Khordad Front (named after the day in 1997 when Mohammad Khatami was elected President), whose common goal was to bring about wholesale changes in the way the Parliament was run. The reformist candidates debated serious issues: personal and societal freedoms, the rule of law, the rights and duties of the entire populace to participate in the country’s decision-making, Iran’s rightful place in the world. The conservative side had little to say in response.

A sign of the changing atmosphere was that a candidate in the city of Karaj, west of Tehran, dared to praise Reza Shah in one of his campaign speeches, saying the autocrat had helped to modernize the country. A number of candidates in Shiraz published poems of Saadi and Hafiz—not verses of the Koran—on their campaign posters. For the first time, sex appeal played a role too. A cleric running from the western province of Loristan walked through the city with a sign that said, “Temporary marriage. Yes, temporary marriage. Free.” A cleric from the city of Qazvin printed a poster of himself flanked by two beautiful, chador-clad women smiling and pointing at him. Faezeh Hashemi, an incumbent in the Parliament and the daughter of former President Rafsanjani, distributed flyers in which her legs were crossed and her chador was open, revealing a black and white polka dot coat, blue jeans, and red boots. She turned up at a political rally for the Servants of Construction, the political faction backing her and her father, and it featured music, clapping, whistling, even dancing! Some hard-liners criticized the hoopla but they couldn’t quell the excitement.

Election day itself was chaotic, as 70 percent of those eligible voted—lower than the turnout in the 1997 presidential election but extraordinary for a parliamentary election. Nazila’s father, Jaffar Fathi, was a typical new voter. When I spoke with him after the election and asked him if he had voted, he said, “Of course! What a silly question.” Silly question? The only other time he had voted was when his younger daughter, Golnaz, had dragged him to the polls to vote in the presidential election in 1997. This time, this retired civil servant in his sixties spent hours combing the newspapers, reading the candidates’ platforms, and preparing his list of thirty candidates out of a field of 861 running in Tehran. He was so proud of his list that he drafted a second copy for his daughter. He rose at dawn on election day to beat the crowds. “It was my duty,” he explained.

Voting itself was not easy. In addition to choosing candidates from long lists, voters had to write in the names of their choices by hand. Polling booths were public places, full of last-minute campaigning and lively banter. People lined up for hours at mosques and schools to hand in their ballots. As in the presidential election, the country’s youth and women turned out in record numbers.

In the end, reformists routed the conservatives, winning more than 70 percent of the seats. Only 20 percent of the incumbents won reelection in the first round. In Tehran, the ratio was three out of twenty-three incumbents—and all three were reformist. Of Tehran’s thirty seats, twenty-nine went to candidates endorsed by the reformist front. President Khatami’s brother finished first; only Rafsanjani’s thirtieth-place finish prevented a clean sweep. Early in the revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini said, “Those intellectuals who say that the clergy should leave politics and go back to the mosque speak on behalf of Satan.” But the voters in 2000 made clear that the mosque is where they feel the clergy belongs. Only 14 percent of the new deputies were clerics, compared to 53 percent in the first Parliament elected in 1980. And the average age of the new Parliament was more than a decade younger than the one that came before.

From the earliest days of the Islamic Republic, the idea of a legislature had been a crucial part of Iran’s government. But like so many aspects of Ayatollah Khomeini’s improvised revolution, it was an idea that could always be manipulated. Soon after militants seized the American embassy in November 1979, Khomeini announced that it would be up to the Parliament to decide whether and when the hostages would be released. Only the Iranian people, he said, were capable of making the monumental decision about the hostages’ fate. In reality only he had the final word. But the dictum gave him latitude to divorce himself from the consequences of being either tough or accommodating, since he had officially declared the decision out of his hands.

In time, the Parliament, which is elected by popular vote every four years, has come to have the authority to draft and pass laws, to approve cabinet members, to question government officials, and to vote for their dismissal. Parliament’s sessions have been open to the public, its deliberations broadcast, and its minutes published. Yet since the revolution, Parliament has hardly been independent, and despite its ostensible openness, much about its true workings remains hidden. As few as eleven members can request a closed session. Information about the political views of most members, except those from Tehran and other big cities, is limited. Parliamentary votes, moreover, have been taken by secret ballot, so unless members make speeches explaining their votes, there has been little transparency or accountability. Even then, some deputies some times have made speeches one way but have voted another—or have orated in Parliament simply to ratify a decision already made.

Still, whenever I visit Iran I like to monitor debates in the cavernous parliamentary chamber with its deep blue carpet, its grand chandelier, and its elaborate interiors designed by the house of Jansen in Paris. Over the years the debates have provided a window into the everyday concerns and demands of the nation. This was particularly true in the years before Khatami was elected President, before the explosion of new newspapers and magazines
.
Though conservatives held the majority in those days, and did what they could to keep a strict monopoly over social and political discourse, I could always count on deputies in the Parliament, particularly those from obscure villages, to speak their minds.

Deputies often have lined up to accuse the central government of failing to deliver on promises to build roads, install electrical lines, provide jobs, or rebuild areas devastated by floods and earthquakes. Nothing has been too lofty or too petty for discussion. Deputies have debated issues such as how to encourage people to eat thick bread (which has a longer shelf life than flat bread), how to develop better packing of raisins, how to decrease meat and fish imports, how to curb corruption and profiteering, how to justify having a foreign coach train Iran’s national soccer team. Deputies also have taken on sweeping philosophical issues—how to interpret the words of the late Ayatollah Khomeini in present-day policymaking and how to maintain the status of the United States as the country’s number one enemy.

At times the Parliament has sought to promote economic and social justice, even at the expense of landowners and businessmen; at other times it has fought to maintain the status quo. Early on, the Parliament played its role as the protector of the oppressed much more seriously than the overseeing Guardian Council thought it should. Parliament passed a law to give to the poor land that had been confiscated from large landowners. But the council vetoed the law, arguing that “private trading” in Islam was “sacrosanct.” The revolutionaries in the Parliament who truly believed in the need to bridge the gap between rich and poor were criticized as people “influenced by Marxist thought.”

By the 1990s, though, much of the early leftist fervor had dissipated. The process of vetting parliamentary candidates by the Guardian Council had become so heavy-handed that the Parliament came firmly under the control of the conservatives. At times the deputies seemed more interested in making points about the dominance of conservative philosophy and power than in passing laws that could be implemented. In 1999, for example, Parliament passed a law decreeing separate medical treatment for men and women, despite fierce opposition from interest groups. Women’s organizations opposed the law out of fear that women would be poorly treated; doctors argued that the law was impossible to implement; reformist newspapers objected that the debate diverted the Parliament’s attention from more pressing issues. Ultimately the legislation passed, but without a mechanism to enforce it. Some critics charged that the passage itself served to degrade the authority of law, since a law that was impossible to implement was a law begging to be broken.

The problem of implementing laws, in fact, has plagued the Islamic Republic from the beginning and is most apparent not in Iran’s Parliament but in its judicial system. Despite its sworn mission to enforce justice according to the Islamic legal code, or the sharia, the court system in the Islamic Republic has always been politicized. Its administration has long been in the hands of conservatives who have allowed vast room for interpretation, improvisation, and abuse. However much other institutions were being remolded by the popular pressure for reform, the judicial system remained a backwater where conservatives tried to manipulate the results—with considerable success. Yet even here, pressure for change was building.

In the two years leading up to the parliamentary election, the conservatives used the judicial system to strike back at two of Khatami’s important allies within the clerical-political establishment—the popular mayor of Tehran and an even more respected member of Khatami’s cabinet—securing convictions that rendered them ineligible to compete in the election. But in doing so, the conservatives also ended up expanding the battle for reform, exposing the judiciary’s vulnerability to public indignation and criticism. These trials made public what everyone already knew, that in Iran citizens were not guaranteed due process or fair trials and that arbitrary arrest and detention were common.

The trials also exposed deep fault lines within Iranian society and aroused deep resentments over how the courts were being used by the clerical establishment to serve its political ends. The press covered the trials critically, making themselves vehicles for expressing public outrage over the political prosecutions. And then, the voters used the parliamentary election to register another rebuke to the system—one that the clerics could no longer ignore.

The first time I ever sat through a trial in Iran was in the summer of 1979, a few months after Khomeini’s return home. I had stumbled on a makeshift courtroom in a remote part of the Iranian province of Kurdistan, where the Kurds were fighting a bloody rebellion against the new regime. Khomeini sent tanks and troops to smash it. He also sent his chief prosecutor, Sheikh Sadegh Khalkhali. Prison was not an option. At the time I met Khalkhali at his temporary headquarters in the army barracks in the town of Saqqez, he was two weeks into his job and had already ordered the execution of at least seventy-eight people. Nine of these were soldiers who had refused to fire on Kurdish rebels. Nine others accused of beheading a group of Revolutionary Guards at a hospital were lined up against the hospital wall, blindfolded. The executioners tied their necks to the bars of the windows and shot them dead.

I asked Khalkhali about his mission. “I have fire in one hand and water in the other,” he said. “I have to kill the killers and make peace too. I just want the killers to know I am powerful.”