Will Mr. Khatami run? by Sadegh Kabeer

By Sadegh Kabeer

In Tehran, the question, Will Mr. Khatami run?, seems to be the question on everyone’s lips. Various activists, prominent reformist politicians and sympathizers have broadcast their entreaties, pleading with the former president to return to the political fold. Thus far he has been steadfast in his refusal to give the game away and has only been willing to state publicly that “either Mir Hossein [former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mossavi] or myself will run”.

The anticipation is such that an organization by the name of Mowj-e Sevom has even been established with the more or less explicit aim of lobbying Mr. Khatami to announce his candidacy. The prospects are not as bright as many might have hoped, but there is still chance for those of us who count themselves between the so-called Principalists, on the far-right of the political spectrum, and Iranian émigrés in Washington biding their time until the “next” revolution, that will never come. Though many Iranians were disillusioned with the pace of reform in the course of his second term, nostalgia quickly set in and a yearning for the days of Khatami is alive and well in Tehran today (particularly amongst the student population).

Khatami has thus far resisted, and previously insisted that Iranian politics is far too inclined toward "hero-worship" and the "personality cult", and therefore astutely perceived the problem of linking his fate to that of the broader movement. In fact, Khatami has been vehemently criticized for not appointing a clear successor prior to his vacating the presidency. But then for the great mass of Iranians there was always a clear difference between Khatami and former President Hashemi-Rafsanjani, who famously lost to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the second round of the presidential elections back in 2005. Unlike Hashemi-Rafsanjani, who is by many, whether true or not, deemed irremediably corrupt and as constituting part of the ruling establishment, Khatami never conceived of himself as an Iranian kingmaker - a role that Hashemi-Rafsanjani has planned in the past and will almost certainly play again, if he's still around, when Ayatollah Khamenei passes the metaphorical torch to the next Faqih or Supreme Leader. Especially so, since Hashemi-Rafsanjani was elected in 2007 to the much coveted post of chairman of the Assembly of Experts, the Majles-e-Khobregan, the body that will appoint the next Supreme Leader, and which is put to the public vote every six years, albeit exclusively comprised of foqaha, Islamic legal experts.

As Khatami recognized, a reform movement bound to his personal charisma and charm rises with his victories, but is also bound to slip into oblivion upon his exit. Without a conventional party system (as opposed to a myriad of factions), or institutionalized power, such as that held by the conservatives in the form of the Faqih or judiciary. Khatami's appointments to the interior ministry, at one point a bastion of the reformists, have been rapidly overturned by Ahmadinejad's government, and of course even while in power it’s commonly opined, to some extent rightly so, that he was thwarted by murky figures lurking in the shadows at every turn. The Supreme Leader, unelected Guardian Council (Shura-ye Negahban) and conservatively minded judiciary are a tightly-knit bunch often to the point of their differences being indiscernible – a political reality which has often been inimical to change, though efforts at the local and grassroots levels have continued to make waves in Iranian society.

And despite his often overt support of the Principalist factions, it should also been borne in mind that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei is also capable of distancing himself from the political fray, so as to avoid blowback from unpopular decisions and rulings made by the judiciary.

The arrival of Ahmadinejad on the scene put paid to the idea that "civil society" had triumphed and that an ineluctable period of glasnost had been set in motion, compelling the mercantile-bourgeois republic to transform itself from the inside. The Fukuyamean-post-ideological triumphalism quickly ran out of steam (somewhere after Mr. Khatami’s first term), and as a result pundits have been quick to dismiss the reform movement in favour of coining a new dynamic i.e. the Principalists split between a fundamentalist-populist faction and rightwing-pragmatic faction, embodied to various extents in the personalities of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Mohammad-Baqir Qalibaf, Mohsen Rezaei and Ali Larijani.

These factions of course exist, but the commentaries have underestimated the impact of Khatami's legacy simply because he wasn't their much awaited and frankly quite stupidly anticipated, Iranian Gorbachev! There was never going to be a "velvet revolution" and the misguided clinging to any such phantom merely distracts from the prospect of fomenting more meaningful changes within Iranian society at the grassroots level. Such a prospect has been dismissed by virtually all serious analysts – ex-CIA man, Robert Baer in his recent book, The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower, repeatedly despairs of the delusions homesick exiles have spoon-fed to Washington officialdom, delusions, which in his view have only gone to ensure that Iran shores up its position as the Persian Gulf's regional hegemon, while the United States looks on impotent and dejected in the aftermath of the Iraq and Afghanistan quagmires.

For those of us who have eschewed such Chelabi-esque flights of fancy the roles of "civic agency" and "organic intellectuals" remain indispensable for the contestation and delegitimation of tired and ossified dogmas and manifest in the courageous activities of the women's movement, student movement and labour movement. This triumvirate of Iranian civil society is in a sense the concrete perpetuation of Khatami's intellectual legacy (though I am by no means arguing that it owes its presence and voice to that legacy), which furnished Iranian society with a new lexicon, which stressed the rule of law, civil society, the republican element of the constitution and human rights, echoed and pushed for by a briefly unmuzzled press.

Though a huge swathe of Iranian intellectuals had long attempted to courageously propagate such a vision, it was only Khatami who was able to set such a precedent in a way that only an individual from within the system could. In a certain respect, intellectuals have it easy (though they do have an important role to play); no responsibility, little accountability, no need to compromise or barter one's ideals away under pain of compulsion i.e. the process of drafting, ratifying and implementing policy. Now is certainly not the time to count Mr. Khatami out, it’s still early yet, and Mehdi Karrubi is the only one thus far to confirm his candidacy in the presidential elections due to take place in June of this year. Either way he will continue to play a significant role on the domestic and international stages, even if not in the corridors of power.