PARIS - On
December 6, outgoing Iranian President Mohammad Khatami
went to Tehran's main university on the occasion of
Students National Day - named after three engineering
students killed in demonstrations during president
Richard Nixon's visit to Tehran decades ago - and for
the first time in three years he faced thousands of
angry, frustrated students chanting "Daaneshjoo
bidaar ast, az Khatami bizaar ast" (Students are
alert and loathe Khatami).
It seems the failed reformist's era
has come to an end, as the event was the "the most difficult" Khatami had
faced since his election as president eight years ago,
thanks mostly to students and youngsters of both sexes,
who make up more than 70% of Iran's population of over
70 million.
"Bridges have been broken between
us and him since several years ago, but also we
knew that he could not give satisfactory answers to the
students," said Abdollah Mo'meni, a leader of the
Daftar Tahkim Vahdat (Office for Consolidating Unity),
the largest and most popular Iranian student
organization.
"It was good that they [pro-conservative and
basiji - volunteer - students] organized the
meeting, for if it had been the independent and
dissident students, the outcome would have been more
disastrous," he added, referring to the stormy and at
times violent atmosphere of the encounter. Angry
students from the ranks of those who had supported
Khatami over the years, and paid a heavy price, shouted
slogans, sometimes insulting, against him, such as "Khatami
traitor, Khatami, shame, shame."
Khatami's speech, which lasted for more than an hour and
was repeatedly interrupted by warm applause from
students affiliated to the unelected organs of the
establishment controlled by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on
the one side, and vehement protests from pro-democracy
elements on the other, contained nothing new except the
fact that, for the first time, the embattled president
also denounced some of the reformists for his demise.
In elections this year, the reformists
were routed, with conservatives taking the majority of
seats in the majlis (parliament). With his second
term due to end next June, Khatami, who was elected on a
wave of hope that he could introduce reforms, has failed
to deliver.
"The obscurantists who insist that
democracy is against Islam and also those of the
reformists who have repeated past mistakes by
politicizing everything both contributed to the failure
of the reforms," Khatami told the students.
Nevertheless, most Iranian political analysts,
even those who have cut ranks with him, agree that the
meeting has no precedent in any country of the region,
except Israel, and this in itself is a major and
important achievement of Khatami's years of power.
"What happened at Tehran University on December
6, 2004, could well be the last service that Mohammad
Khatami renders to this nation and its people," said
Mas'oud Behnoud, a pro-reform journalist who escaped
Iran for London two years ago after serving a
three-month jail term.
"The picture of the
president who stares directly at angry students and
hears their shouts, including the harshest and most
humiliating ones, has no precedent in the political life
of Iran nor any other country of the region, most of
them strangers to the idea of democracy," he pointed
out.
When asked by a female student why he had
systematically bowed to the demands of the conservatives
who opposed his reforms, Khatami observed calmly that he
had not retreated "even one centimeter" from his ideals,
but bowed to the system of the Islamic Republic, saying
"my aim had never been to change the system".
This point is central to understanding the
fall of Khatami from a zenith of popularity to an abyss
of unpopularity, for while he was banking on
the possibility of uniting Islam and democracy, or fire
and water, the 20 million to 27 million who voted for him in
the 1997 and 2001 presidential elections were expecting,
if not a change in the regime, certainly bold reforms
in a system where all the powers are concentrated in the
hands of one man who, as the representative of God on
Earth, sits above everything, including the laws of the
constitution, and therefore cannot be held responsible
for human considerations.
"The long queue of
those who in the past eight years have been sacrificed
in the battle between the reformists and the
conservatives for power, were assassinated, disabled,
imprisoned or went into exile, is the best reason
explaining the exceptional unpopularity of Mr Khatami,"
said Behnoud.
The last time Khatami visited the
university was in 2001, when the hopes for reform were
still alive. Now the dreams have evaporated as Khatami
has continued along the path of bowing and retreating,
all the while the hardliners have tightened their grip
and are now bound to take control of the presidency, the
last bastion still held by the reformists.
Newspapers in Tehran described the "sad event"
of the university speech as the last meeting of the
"architect of reforms with his supporters", but did not
lament the fate of the man who, willingly or not, opened
a new, somehow happy page in the grim history of the
Islamic Republic and briefly gave Iranians their lost
pride.
"While Iranians used to enjoy respect and
prestige among both Muslims and the international
community worldwide, they are now treated as an evil
country due to the fanatic religious fundamentalists who
will not let reforms be implemented," Khatami lamented.
Ever since the Iranian Revolution of 1979,
which overnight turned the republic from a pro-West
nation considered Washington's "gendarme" in the
strategic region of the Persian Gulf into the staunchest
anti-West, anti-American and anti-Israeli government in
the world, Iranians, mostly the 3 million to 4 million who fled
the newly established mollarchy, began to identify
themselves as "Persian" rather than "Iranian" in order
not to be identified with the Islamic Republic and its
revolutionary and Islamic excesses.
However,
it took the same people a few months into Khatami's
first term of presidency to recover their
"Iranianity", feeling almost proud of their smiling,
polite, mild-mannered intellectual president, described by
an admiring Western press as "moderate", while inside
the country a spring wind of tolerance was blowing,
giving birth to tens of independent newspapers, pushing
women's headscarves back a little, inviting young boys and
girls to walk hand-in-hand and allowing families to
watch foreign television programs on their little
screens at home. In short, a golden moment arrived for
many Iranians.
Whatever the reasons behind Khatami's dramatic failure,
whether weakness of character, shyness, unfitness
for such a battleground, that he was too
fragile facing dangerous animals, or more simply because
the clerical establishment dominated by hardliners was
not ready for such changes, the programmed death of the
reforms and the so-called "official reformists" led to
the escalation of demands from reforming the system into
a change of the regime, and a sustained call for
referendums as a new form for that end.
When
students chanted "referendum", Khatami responded, "This
is the first time in the recent history of this nation
that you stand opposite a government representative and
shout what you wish. If this government has not had any
other success, this one alone is a huge accomplishment."
Jamshid Barzegar, a political analyst for the
BBC's Persian service, commented, "The history of Iran
will remember Mohammad Khatami as someone who received
the warmest, almost unprecedented welcome, and was sent
away in the coldest possible way."
Safa
Haeri is a Paris-based Iranian journalist covering
the Middle East and Central Asia.
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2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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most difficult" Khatami had
faced since his election as president eight years ago,
thanks mostly to students and youngsters of both sexes,
who make up more than 70% of Iran's population of over
70 million. 
