President without powers

Mr. Khatami has enough weapons to fight with. What Iranians want to know is if he still has the will. KESAVA MENON on the hardliner-moderate face-off.

IRAN'S PRESIDENT, Syed Mohammed Khatami, has to seek a fresh mandate from his people in May 2001 by when he will be close to finishing his four-year term. While the mental make-up of Iranian society has certainly been stirred and shaken over these four years, Mr. Khatami has not been able to achieve very much that is concrete and his more popular measures have been nullified by his conservative opponents.

It was at the beginning of this week that Mr. Khatami made his most public pronouncement of the frustrations that had beset his term in office. ``I must admit that after three years and a half as President I am aware that the head of the state does not have adequate prerogatives to do his job. The President is not capable of stopping the violations of the Constitution or ensuring its implementation. Failure to implement the Constitution weakens democracy and threatens to stir up tension. Among the important structural things we must do is to remove ambiguities so that the President can do his job with total authority and with the support of the legal power.''

Such mild language is characteristic of Mr. Khatami who has probably spent more time restraining his supporters from pressing extreme demands than in combating the conservative establishment to get those demands fulfilled. Nevertheless, these statements, made at a conference on the Constitution, denote a change in Mr. Khatami's fundamental approach. The President's powers are severely circumscribed by a system wherein a Supreme Cleric ultimately wields all power and has henchmen posted at all nodal points of authority. But for three and a half years, Mr. Khatami has hardly ever publicly challenged the structure, preferring instead to work within it, tinkering with it where he could and trying to bring change through persuasion.

That approach had run its course and Mr. Khatami's patent inability to deliver had enthused his conservative opponents and disillusioned his followers and apparently even the President himself. A little over a month ago the talk in Teheran was that Mr. Khatami was on the point of throwing in the towel. But for now he appears to have decided that for whatever it is worth, and without deviating in a major manner from his mild and persuasive ways, he will at least say what needs to be said. From their initial response to Mr. Khatami's remarks it appeared that the conservatives had calculated that there was not much fight in the man.

The head of the Iranian judiciary, a person who has posed as a relative neutral despite heading the institution that has led the conservative campaign for the last three and a half years, was the first to respond to Mr. Khatami's challenge. Although he did not mention the President by name the conservative head of the judiciary, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Sharoudi, said that any questioning of the existing constitutional structure was merely an attempt to advance the interests of a particular political faction.

There is little doubt that Ayatollah Sharoudi would not have been so bold if he did not have the backing of the conservative establishment and especially of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Syed Ali Khamenei. While Ayatollah Khamenei has never gone so far as to totally undermine the President's position he has still taken the decisive action to curb some of the bolder initiatives taken by the Khatami administration. Those who have watched him over the years are convinced that Ayatollah Khamenei is instinctively a hardcore conservative. But they also believe that he has a strong streak of pragmatism in his personality. Ayatollah Khameni's dilemma is that he knows that a Khatami presidency is necessary as a valve for the growing frustration and anger against the clerical establishment among the Iranian public. But Ayatollah Khamenei is also the central figure in a conglomeration of interests which will suffer if Mr. Khatami is actually allowed to carry forward the reforms that he has promised.

The conservatives lack a single figure who can come anywhere close to matching Mr. Khatami in popularity. At present, their only recourse is to chip away at his standing and also perhaps to try and erode his will to contest.

So far, they have gone about frustrating him at every turn and, as Ayatollah Sharoudi's statement about the unlikelihood of judicial reform shows, are going to continue denying him the opportunity to make meaningful change. As the momentum towards the elections picks up, they are bound to step up their attack on other fronts. The supposed moral looseness of the reform camp is bound to be one of the main planks of the conservative campaign.

Another critique they could have levelled against the reformers was that they had neglected economic reform and instead whiled away their time chasing unnecessary political and social change. It is, however, difficult to make this charge stick at this period of unprecedentedly high oil prices and the benefits this has brought to the Iranian economy.

Neither can the conservatives deny that it was the availability of the Khatami dispensation that led to a major improvement in relations with the European Union, cracked the wall of suspicion between Iran and the U.S. and caused by and large the end of Iran's isolation.

Mr. Khatami has enough weapons with which to fight. What Iranians would like to know is whether he still has the will.

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