Iran’s Hard-Line Rulers Trying to Silence Khatami

Far ahead of Iran’s June 12 presidential election, the country’s ruling hard-liners are taken steps to obstruct the bid of Mohammad Khatami, the reformist who announced his candidacy on Feb. 8.

According to his supporters, the powerful hard-liners, the true rulers of Iran, have blocked two websites promoting Khatami, Yaari News and Yaari, which were actually set up last summer in anticipation of his candidacy. They said that the websites could not be viewed from inside the country although they were accessible outside Iran. Khatami’s own campaign website, Khatami, was still accessible.

During his eight years as president, from 1997 to 2005, Khatami gained a reputation as serious reformer. He made dialogue with the West, particularly with the United States, one of his highest priorities and, indeed, there was a very slight thaw in the icy-cold relations between the United States and the Islamic Republic during his eight years in office. One of Khatami’s first actions as president was granting an interview on CNN calling for increased cultural exchange between the two countries though he never really promoted the idea of reopening diplomatic ties.

As a moderate, reformist president, he was also very popular with the Iranian public, relaxing many of the harsh restrictions on daily life that had been imposed on the country immediately following the revolution of 1979. Women stopped covering their hair while in public and many shops began openly selling alcohol. Young men and women weren’t afraid of holding hands in publics.

But the country’s ruling hard-liners weren’t very pleased with the rapid westernizing his policies were leading to and took many steps during his two terms in office to either slow or outright overrule many of his attempts to relax some of the restrictions. The hard-liners regularly arrested many of Khatami’s allies and shut down newspapers that endorsed his views. When he won re-election in 2001, supreme leader Ayatolla Ali Khamenei was visibly reluctantly to officially declare him the winner of the election.

Since his time in office, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been the darling of the country’s ruling elite. He has embodied the true spirit of terror and hate that the Khameini and his followers like to see in an Iranian president. Therefore, it passes anyone’s logic that Khameini and the hard-liners will do all they can help keep their little puppy Ahmadinejad in office.