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Today's NY Times
February 2, 2004
One-Third of Iranian Parliament Quits in Protest
By NAZILA FATHI

EHRAN, Feb. 1 — More than one-third of Iran's Parliament resigned Sunday to protest a sweeping ban on candidates running in the parliamentary election later this month. The defiant move threatened to plunge Iran's political system into chaos.

One by one, angry lawmakers who have held a three-week sit-in at the huge Parliament building, marched up to the podium and handed their resignations to the speaker. In an emotional statement read aloud during the session of Parliament on Sunday and broadcast live across the nation on Iranian radio, the members who resigned accused powerful conservatives of seeking to impose a religious dictatorship like that of the Taliban, who were overthrown by American-led forces in Afghanistan.

"We cannot continue to be present in a Parliament that is not capable of defending the rights of the people and that is unable to prevent elections in which the people cannot choose their representatives," the statement said.

There has been continual tension in Iran between reformers — the president and much of the Parliament — who are pressing for greater religious and cultural freedom, and religious conservatives, who control the judiciary and security services.

Mohammad Reza Khatami, the leader of the main reformist party and the brother of Iran's reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, was among those who resigned. He warned of a conservative coup supported by the military.

The resignations were a move typical of the brinkmanship that marks Iranian politics, to try to get the hard-liners to back down three weeks before a crucial election that will determine the future of the reform movement in Iran.

The student news agency ISNA reported that a pro-democracy Iranian student group said Sunday that it had sought permission to hold public demonstrations on Wednesday to protest the ban, a move that could provoke a clash with riot police officers and vigilante groups.

The mass resignation coincided with what was supposed to be a day of national celebration, the 25th anniversary of the return to Iran of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini from exile in France. The cleric led a popular Islamic revolution that brought an end to the 2,500-year monarchy and ushered in an Islamic Republic.

The resignations came a day after the president announced that his negotiations with senior religious officials had failed to resolve the crisis.

Last month, the hard-line Guardian Council barred more than 2,000 candidates, including 87 current members of Parliament, from competing for the 290-seat assembly in elections scheduled for Feb. 20.

The council ignored an announcement by the Interior Ministry, which is under the president's supervision, that it intended to postpone the election, and even an order by the supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to reinstate the candidacies of the current members of Parliament.

The number of members who resigned had reached 123 by Sunday afternoon. The move, which is likely to intensify the fight between reformers and their hard-line opponents, was unprecedented in the country's parliamentary history.

The members who resigned continued their sit-in in the afternoon, calling again for the decision barring the candidacies to be reversed and for the elections to be delayed.

The speaker of Parliament, Mehdi Karoubi, said he and Mr. Khatami had appealed once more to Ayatollah Khamenei to intervene and help end the crisis. Ayatollah Khamenei has the final word on all state matters.

Among those who resigned was the deputy speaker of Parliament, Behzad Nabavi. Several prominent women among the members also resigned. "An election whose result is clear beforehand is treason to the rights and ideals of the nations," said Rajabali Mazroui, another member of the group.

Mr. Khatami, the brother of the president, said the Guardian Council had killed opportunities and left them no other solution.

"Even if all those disqualified are reinstated today, there will be no time for competition," he said. He called the elections "illegitimate" under the present structure of the ruling establishment, and said, "This is the end of the reform movement."

If the hard-liners hold the elections, he added, "it will be a full-fledged coup with the help of military forces and confirmation that it is illegitimate."

Under the law, Parliament must approve the resignations and can reject them if they would deny the body the two-thirds quorum it needs to operate. But those who resigned said they would refuse to take part in the sessions even if their resignations were refused.

Many of the allies of Ayatollah Khomeini during the 1979 revolution are reformist politicians today, and they contend that today's hard-liners have gone against the tenets of Ayatollah Khomeini.

They recall his emphasizing the republican nature of his government and saying that "the criterion is the people's vote."

"From the day we held the referendum in 1979," Ayatollah Khomeini "insisted on an Islamic Republic — not a word less and not a word more, he kept saying, said Mr. Karoubi, the Parliament speaker. "He repeated this until he died."

"Now we see that a couple of old men want to run the country," he added, referring to the council.

The Guardian Council, whose six clerics are handpicked by Ayatollah Khamenei and six Islamic lawyers appointed by the judiciary, took over screening of election candidates after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989.

"The whole dilemma is because of this contradiction in the Guardian Council's role," said Ibrahim Yazdi, secretary general of the opposition party, the Freedom Movement, who was once a close aide to Ayatollah Khomeini. "The only solution to resolve the matter is for the Guardian Council to return to its former role and just supervise the elections."

The dispute has raised questions about whether the revolution has moved toward its goals and democracy 25 years later.

As many as 28 provincial governors threatened to resign, and a dozen cabinet ministers said they were determined to quit if the Guardian Council did not back off from its decision, which they called undemocratic.

President Khatami hinted Saturday that his government would call off the vote if it could not hold elections that were both competitive and free.