The unbridled euphoria that greeted Hojjatol-Eslam Mohammad Khatami’s impressive victory in the 1997 presiden tial elections is now history; the adoration and reverence that he received as a national hero on that occasion long gone.1 The seismic excitement generated by his reformist pledges has gradually turned into public cynicism and political apathy. The “new era” that the dapper, smiling and soft-spoken candidate promised to launch has yet to dawn. Under his leadership, Islamic dogmatism and dictation, with its hegemonic and discriminatory character, was to be replaced by a culture of dialogue and tolerance. Under a kinder, gentler and all-inclusive faith, the Islamic Republic’s adversaries (moaned) were expected to become loyal opposition (mokhalef), and the ongoing opposition was to transform into supporters (movafeq).
In an ironic twist, this virtual nirvana has turned out to be a fairy tale. In Khatami’s seventh year in office, most of his early supporters now seem to have turned into a fierce opposition, and a majority of the old loyal opposition have become open adversaries. In a fairly recent poll among Iran’s university students, 72 percent of the respondents believed that the president’s promised reform is over. According to the same poll, 38 percent of the participants wanted him to resign – up from 24 percent a year earlier.2 Another national poll showed that support for the president dropped from more than 75 percent in 1998 to 43 percent in 2002.3 Latest press reports put his popularity rating at its lowest point ever.
During his visit to the earthquake-devastated Bam region in late December 2003, the frustrated president was reportedly booed and boycotted by the grieving survivors.4 The people who used to carry his picture in their wallets are now throwing away his publicity leaflets. And the modicum of prestige and respect he still enjoyed among his die-hard followers was further dissipated by his humiliating submission to the supreme leader (rahbar) in February 2004, when he consented to hold a flawed parliamentary election – despite his earlier vows never to engage in any balloting that was not “competitive, free and fair.”5
This review attempts to search for answers as to why this so-called “worship symbol and beacon” of Iran’s renaissance has become a virtual non-entity – a “forlorn and increasingly inconsequential figure.”6 The intention here is not to evaluate Khatami’s overall performance as president, to discuss positive changes that occurred on his watch, or to blame him for all that ails this ancient land. The goal is to trace his fading political star and to highlight the reasons for the abject disillusionment of his old admirers.
A BREAK WITH THE PAST
At the time of his landslide triumph in 1997, and to a far lesser extent even after his equally impressive reelection in 2000, Khatami was widely held to be the theocratic regime’s ultimate savior. The post revolution generation was visibly angry with the ruling clerical oligarchs who had brazenly denied political freedoms, legitimate rights and legal immunities guaranteed by the 1979 constitution. Khatami’s attractive campaign platform – although neither iconoclastic nor overly ambitious – promised to revive and honor the revolution’s ideals of political pluralism, social justice, human dignity, equality of economic opportunity, anti-corruption and bureaucratic reform. In a series of statements and in his first inaugural address, he presented the central elements of his administration: the supremacy of the rule of law and the need for a vibrant civil society – thus challenging almost all the arbitrary acts of the Islamic Republic in the previous 19 years.
The new president’s enlightened agenda was enthusiastically embraced by the so-called “second of Khordad Coalition” (named after the day of his first election). The coalition consisted of some 18 different factions, adhering to one or more aspects of the president’s platform: politicized students and young first-time voters, women, pro-democracy liberals, human-rights activists, aspiring secularists, reform-minded clerics, disadvantaged economic strata and a critical mass of voters seeking change. Every one of these groups regarded Khatami as its own ardent advocate. Every one also expected him to support, promote and carry out his agenda according to its own preference.
Students and politicized youth hoped to find a freer and less austere sociocultural environment, without obtrusive interference in their daily lives by the morality police or the Islamic do-gooders. They wanted nonpreferential admission to colleges and universities, competent and non-ideological instructors, and unobstructed access to the Internet. Women were seeking their rightful place in a male-dominated society; deliverance from a strict official dress code (hejab); and the elimination of unjust discrimination against them in inheritance, child custody, divorce rights, work, marriage and family disputes. Pro-democracy groups and intellectuals anticipated greater freedom of speech and assembly, a reasonably free press, strict observance of civil liberties as detailed in the constitution, and the ultimate devolution of the Council of Guardians as the slaughter house of liberal legislation. Human-rights activists wanted an end to arbitrary arrest and detention and physical mistreatment, a strict adherence to due process (habeas corpus guarantees), trial by jury in open court, the right to defense counsel and improvements in prison conditions. Secular groups saw the new president as an enlightened cleric who might allow a more liberal interpretation of the scripture and a courageous leader who might condone a referendum to revise the constitution and eliminate the velayat-e faqih (rule by a supreme theologian).
Young clerics were looking for Khatami’s leadership to eliminate the fundamentalists’ monopoly in interpreting the Quran, and to enforce the constitutionally sanctioned limitations on the powers of the rahbar. Private entrepreneurs looked for the abolition of public and private monopolies, elimination of bazaar mafias, a new and enforceable commercial code, and the creation of a level playing field for commerce and industry. Unemployed job seekers wished to see a speedy economic revival and new opportunities for decent work. The urban poor coveted the long promised Islamic social justice to improve their lot. And change seekers voted for Khatami because they disliked his discredited conservative rival and hoped the new president would deliver on his promise to break with the past.
While there were many early doubters as to whether the candidate was capable of meeting their high expectations, the majority opinion held that he was likely to succeed in reforming the repressive and decaying regime. And while many wondered if he was really a conservative reformer (or a reformist conservative) parading as a liberal, the bulk of voters were convinced that if anyone could be a force for the better, it would be he. In the prevailing climate of hope against hope, most people wanted to believe that Khatami was, as Newsweek put it, a man eminently poised to “reconcile modern democracy and Islamic culture.” As a now-disenchanted admirer put it: “Khatami was our Napoleon with a book in his hands instead of a sword; [he] was the answer to the prayers of those of us who wanted change without bloodshed, [an] evolutionary answer to the angry words of reaction and revolution.”7
VOTERS’ REMORSE
Mohammad Khatami, like all decent, well-intentioned and hard-working but unsuccessful politicians, has tended to blame his declining popularity on forces beyond his control and inherent to “the system.” Yet he would be hard pressed to find even a small minority of his early backers to grant him this line of defense and exonerate him of the responsibility for his self-inflicted wounds.
In his first two years in office, Khatami’s governing style was to prove his unconditional loyalty to the rahbar, maintain a workable but shaky relation with the conservative fifth Majles, and solicit time and patience from his restless constituents. During the customary political honeymoon, his hesitant drive for change was grudgingly accepted by a large majority of voters as part of his on-the-job training. Some incremental openness – a relaxed social climate, a semblance of cultural renaissance in publications and motion pictures, increased access to satellite dishes and computers in recreational cafes, and freer discourse in academic circles – also persuaded the young and the restless to accept the president’s argument about the “tedious process” of democratization. Khatami’s initiative in the arrest and imprisonment of the so-called “rogue” elements within the Ministry of Intelligence further enhanced his standing with the voters.
As time went on, a series of retreats from the reform battles, and repeated capitulations to the wishes of the rahbar and other reactionary clerics, began gradually to erode his prestige and to increase the public’s doubts about his fighting spirit. Time and again he tried in vain to mollify the crowd by repeating his oath to honor his campaign promises and pleaded with them to be a bit more patient, arguing repeatedly that democracy is not an event but a process. But the growing magnitude of unmet expectations, and Khatami’s own aversion to rocking the clerical boat, resulted in an implosive combination of disillusionment and despair.
Failing to push forward promised reforms or to stem the tide of popular discontent, the president was finally forced to admit to a friendly crowd toward the end of 2000: “I declare after three years as president that I do not have sufficient powers to implement the constitution, which is my biggest responsibility.”8 On another occasion, he added, “My repeated warnings against violations of the constitution have been ignored.”9 These admissions of political impotence, instead of generating new sympathy for him, largely backfired. By telling the public that he had been unable to reform the system “without a shift in the balance of power,” he inadvertently demonstrated his own failure as a leader.10 On numerous subsequent occasions, he complained that his entire first term was plagued by “a crisis every nine days.” Yet he never bothered to mention the nature of these crises or identify the crisis instigators. And he never explained why he had failed to foresee or deal with those challenges. Responding to his repeated laments concerning this “tunnel of crises,” one of his critics faults him for never “handling those crises with anything bordering on competence.”11 More to the point, he never fully explained to voters why he decided, against the wishes of some of his closest advisers, to seek reelection if the first four years had been beset by so many failures.
As dissatisfaction began to run deep, due to his continued surrender to conservative groups at every turn, his early admirers and members of his loosely cobbled constituency gradually began to leave him one after another. Each of the old allies had its own reasons to withdraw its support. In retrospect, it was the collective disillusionment of his core constituents and their successive desertion that sealed his fate and turned the superstar of 2004 into a bit player in mid-2004.
A STEADY FALL FROM GRACE
The first group of voters to become disenchanted with the new president was the youth. Khatami owed much of his unexpected 1997 victory to student associations. They were the first to endorse him, embrace his reformist agenda, welcome his refreshing promises, ardently campaign for him, and adopt him as their political and spiritual leader. Ironically they also have been the first to rebel against him for his failure to live up to his promises.
The first blow to the students’ loyalty came in July 1999, when a peaceful demonstration against the court-ordered ban of a pro-Khatami newspaper – Salam – was brutally crushed by an unholy alliance of the extremist Islamic vigilantes (Ansar-e Hezbollah), the right-wing Basij militia, and a few armed security agents while the local police stood by. During a bloody battle between victims and club-wielding attackers, there were shouts of “Khatami, where are you when your sons are being killed?” and “Where is the rule of law?” The president’s initial reaction was merely to condemn the assault as a “bitter and intolerable incident.” After this vacuous expression of sympathy, he changed his tune when “non-students” joined the melee. He called the demonstrators’ slogans “demagogic, provocative, socially divisive and a threat to national security.”12 This strong condemnation of those who were rebelling against repression and brute force baffled everyone. The issue became even more a reflection of the president’s unhelpful position when a reporter asked him, “What have you done for Salam?” and he dryly replied, “What can I do?”
After the summer rebellion was swiftly quashed by law-enforcement agencies with the arrest and detention of some 1,400 demonstrators, the battered students in Tehran and Tabriz universities were hauled into court and many sent to jail. Their attackers, who stormed their dormitories, savagely beat them, vandalized their rooms, and caused at least one death, were perfunctorily tried in closed courts and acquitted one after another – with only one lowly security guard convicted of stealing an electric shaver from one of the student dorms!
Anger and frustration reached a new high a year later when there was no positive response shown by the president towards a rally marking the first anniversary of the July demonstration. Organized by the Daftar-e Tahkim-e Vahdat (Office to Consolidate Unity) – the largest organization of Muslim university students, claiming more than half a million members on 60 campuses – the rally generated a frenzy with the crowd shouting: “Khatami, show your power or resign” and “Khatami, this is our final notice.”13 Thus for the first time, the president himself became a direct target of student protests. Subsequently, some radical student groups urged the population to boycott Khatami’s reelection in June 2001 unless he agreed to conduct a national referendum on the future of the Iranian regime – a move endorsed by prominent clerics, including Grand Ayatollah Montazeri and the Ayatollahs Taheri and Saneii.
Still later, on the eve of the so-called “University Day” in December 2001, open letters from the Islamic associations of 12 major universities took the president to task for his tacit support of the Special Clerical Court and his refusal to go along with a widely demanded revision of the 1979 Constitution.14 Defending his record and promising once again to be faithful to his reform agenda before a student audience at Tehran University in late 2001, the embattled president acknowledged that he had acted weakly, failed to help those who were wronged, or to defend the beaten and jailed students. But he added that he had never given up on his pledges. He asked the audience to realize that his hands were tied, and that he had only “limited powers.” Students responded by shouts of “No more words, we want action,” and “Potent action or resignation.”15
On the third anniversary of the July uprising, the customary meeting was held at Tehran University, with Khatami in attendance. Once more, he was greeted with shouts of “Khatami, Khatami, honesty, honesty.” As usual, he asked the audience to be calm and tolerant. He then embarked on a rambling and tedious lecture regarding the sanctity of the rule of law, pointing out how Socrates drank the poison in Athens in order to maintain respect for law and order. Student hecklers shouted back, “Forget Athens, change this place first!” A Western reporter who attended the session described the embarrassed president as “a defeated man, a tragic figure begging for sympathy.”16 By the end of 2002, an overwhelming majority of students had lost faith in Khatami’s capacity to change the system from within and decided to fight for “pure democracy” without the Islamic prefix.17 Unwilling to go along, Khatami drove his enraged teenage supporters to call for his immediate resignation.18
Khatami’s failure to appear at the “Student Day” events in December 2002 – for the first time since his 1997 election – reinforced the widespread opinion that he is unresponsive, if not insensitive. When there was no visible support from the president as students protested for a dozen days against the death sentence imposed on an outspoken professor charged with apostasy, some hecklers shouted, “Khatami’s silence is treason for the nation.”19 Many even believed that his resignation would help the reforms proceed better. In the summer of 2003, as hardliners intensified their crackdown on student activists, he received an open letter from students at Isfahan University asking him: “Why do you remain silent? What is the price for staying in power?”20 In late 2003, after the Interior Ministry refused to issue a permit for a demonstration marking “Student Day,” the Daftar-e Tahkim – the same vanguard group that had sponsored the meeting for Khatami’s declaration of candidacy in December 1996 – broke ranks with the Second of Khordad Coalition and chastised Khatami for not moving resolutely to block a legislative election he himself had called “unfair.” It asked its members to boycott the February 2004 Majles elections in order not to increase the power of “undemocratic institutions.”21 Later on, it condemned the president for “slaughtering justice, freedom and people’s rights” by conceding to hardliners.22 On the eve of the parliamentary elections, students’ chants became more strident and protests more irreverent. Hundreds of Tehran University students, demonstrating against the president’s retreat, shouted: “Khatami, shame, shame! If you still hear the people’s voice and care for them, resign.”23
Women were the next crucial constituents who lost faith in Khatami’s enlightened stewardship. Based on his campaign promises to redress their grievances, it was widely expected that the new president would have at least one or two women in his first cabinet and several others in the top ranks of his administration. Instead, they found him scared of the wrath of Islamic ideologues and unwilling to resist their political pressure. Eventually, he chose the insignificant post of “vice president for the environment” for one of his distant female relatives. No woman was given a governorship, an ambassadorial post or a mayoral position in a major city. And his female vice-president happened to be the former spokeswoman for the 1979 U.S. embassy hostage takers, a symbol of the ugliest blot in Iran’s modern diplomatic history. She was not what the women voters had hoped for.
Young women’s brazen defiance of the morality police despite actual and threatened harsh punishment resulted in a gradual relaxation of the denigrating dress code. Colorful head scarves, more daring makeup, tighter blue jeans, shorter coats, painted toenails and even Valentine’s Day celebrations were increasingly ignored by the police in Tehran’s wealthier sections and some vacation resorts.24 Yet, while their so-called “personal space” was widened, none of the women’s other expectations were squarely addressed. The “gender-related development index” established by the U.N. Development Program shows Iran’s overall rank falling to 86 (among 175 countries) from 84 two years earlier.25 According to the same source, the Islamic Republic’s “women in government” in high executive and legislative positions lagged behind their counterparts in such other predominately Muslim countries as Pakistan, Nigeria, Syria, Tunisia, Indonesia and even Mauritania. Still further, when, thanks to the efforts of some courageous female deputies, a limited number of pro-women statutes were passed by the reformist sixth Majles (but vetoed by the Council of Guardians), the president remained totally unresponsive. Above all, women’s personal security did not undergo fundamental changes for the better. By published reports, the number of runaway girls, suicides by immolation, divorce petitions and patients at depression clinics has been on the rise. According to a private study, one-third of Iranian women are abused by their husbands sometime during their lifetimes. In 95 percent of marital violence, the perpetrator is the man. More than 40 percent of murdered women are killed by either their husbands or boyfriends.26
Finally, insult was added to women’s injured morale when Khatami, after four days of silence, called the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize won by Iran’s Shirin Ebadi “purely political” and “not very important.”27 In addition to these ungallant remarks, the president advised her to wear the Islamic hejab during her acceptance ceremonies in Oslo.28 Echoing Iranian women’s disenchantment with the chief executive, Mrs. Ebadi, in turn, told an Arabic newspaper: “President Khatami has wasted all the historical chances given him, and the domestic reform movements have passed him by.”29 She later joined a chorus of unhappy women (including Ayatollah Khomeini’s own granddaughter) by asking the president “to make good on his threat to resign” once his sociopolitical reforms were thwarted by hardliners.30 She also decided not to vote in the 2004 Majles elections despite the president’s exhortation.
Political liberals, and those favoring freedom of expression and association, were the next group to break ranks. Their discontent extended from Draconian restrictions on the press to the lack of reform in almost all other political spheres. Press censorship in most of the last seven years has been both broad and dismal. Independent publications that flourished in the first two years – the so-called “golden age” of Khatami’s presidency – and served as a surrogate political party for him were shut down, one after another. The first blow came in mid-April 2000, when the rahbar accused some liberal publications of being “bases of the enemy.” Two days later, 16 pro-reform newspapers were closed down at once. The president simply stood by and said nothing. During the following months, several more papers were added to the list, and numerous publishers and editors were threatened with arrest and prison. Khatami, again, simply expressed regret that the constitution’s intent was not respected by the judiciary. Frustration reached a higher plateau when, in August 2000, the rahbar intervened with the reformist Majles and quashed the revision of the repressive press law. When the Majles speaker – a close ally of the president – took the bill out of the assembly’s agenda on the grounds that the rahbar’s order is irrefutable, Khatami did not even utter a whisper. The voters’ visible anger was then loudly expressed when one wrote: “Mr. Khatami, you are not an ordinary citizen who only expresses regret; you should stand against these illegal acts.”31
In the wake of his second-term inauguration in August 2001, the president told his restless supporters that freedom of speech, criticism and even protests within the law were the preconditions for quicker reforms.32 Yet, when a reporter pointed out that, despite his frequent free-press pledges, scores of newspapers had been shut down and their editors jailed, he unhesitatingly deadpanned: “How do you know that they were not guilty of violating the law?” After the reporter pressed him again as to whether censoring newspapers and jailing their editors was “legal,” he said defensively: “I am not a judge. Ask the judiciary.”33 And, while more than 2,000 Internet web sites were reportedly blocked by the government in December 2003, Khatami told a press conference in Geneva that the total was no more than 240 “immoral, pornographic and anti-Islamic” sites – knowing full well this was not true. The disappointment reached its peak, and Khatami’s reform promises were pronounced dead, as nearly 200 reformist publications were gradually banned, and scores of their publishers and editors were imprisoned while the president tacitly defended the judiciary by calling some of the banned papers “radical and out of hand.”34 According to Reporters Without Borders, “Iran holds the sad record of being the biggest prison for journalists in the Middle East.”35 The association’s October 2003 report counts the Islamic Republic among the world’s ten worst countries for press freedom. Iran’s rank dropped to 160 out of 166 countries, compared to 122 out of 139 in 2002.36 And the PEN Society’s resolution at its sixty-ninth international conference in Mexico City in November 2003 lists the Islamic Republic among the world’s top five governments in repressing writers and censoring publications.37
Khatami’s concessions to the fundamentalists, and his obvious backsliding on political reform proposals, caused further rifts with his liberal supporters. The initial breach came when his friend and popular cleric, Minister of Interior Abdullah Nouri, was impeached by the conservative dominated fifth Majles for being soft on demonstrators. The president humbly branded the ouster of his right-hand man as the “legislature’s legitimate constitutional right.” The second jolt followed, when another friend and one of his informal campaign managers, Gholam Hossein Karbaschi, was convicted on corruption charges by a court of questionable impartiality. All Khatami did was to wish that he would “eventually be exonerated through appeals” (which he never was). And when his moderate minister of Islamic Guidance (and hand-picked heir apparent) was forced to resign under hardliner pressure, he simply reacted by appointing him to a nondescript minor position without fighting back.
The reformists’ bill of indictment against the president also contains several other counts. As the head of the National Security Council, for example, Khatami did not object to Grand Ayatollah Montazeri’s house arrest, but also silently went along with the council’s conservatives in extending it for five years. He chose not to press for the prosecution and punishment of some flagrant malefactors protected by influential clerics. He showed scant concern for vote rigging in Tehran’s parliamentary elections in 2000. He went along with the arrest and prosecution of the so-called “religious nationalists” – the followers of Khomeini’s first prime minister – on questionable charges of “disturbing public opinion.” As part of a crackdown on political activists, more than 40 members of this group (including a former interior minister) were tried behind closed doors in 2002 and sentenced to long prison terms, along with some of their defense lawyers. And the president stood by when the constitutionally sanctioned immunity of Majles deputies was violated by the judiciary, and one of the outspoken members was actually sent to jail for criticizing the regime in a speech on the Majles floor. Pro-democracy groups were miffed at Khatami for still other “betrayals.” When the presidential candidate spoke of “civil society” in his campaign speeches, his reformist allies believed it to mean nongovernmental organizations, social clubs, free labor unions, neighborhood councils, trade associations, business roundtables and other secular entities serving as a shield between powerless individuals and a powerful government. The disenchantment emerged when Islamic ideologues quickly twisted the concept and equated it with the seventh-century “mandiat-o-nabi.” In an early conference on “Civil Society in the Islamic Republic,” Khatami’s principal ally and pseudo-liberal minister of Islamic Guidance claimed that the first civil society was set up by Prophet Mohammad. And a theology lecturer in Qom insisted that any “liberal” civil society that promoted freedom of thought or religious pluralism would be in conflict with Islam.”38 Soon after, the president himself unabashedly backed down from his initial position by claiming that his idea had always been an “Islamic” civil society based on “Islamic moral values.” By this change of language, according to a Muslim analyst, he voted for a “communal society” (i.e., the theocratic constitution) over a civil society (i.e., a parliamentary democracy).39
Enlightened clerics and Islamic reformation advocates were the fourth group to be disillusioned by Khatami’s position on theocratic oligarchy during his first 100 days in office, when he emphatically expressed his allegiance to the concept of velayat-e faqih as the transcendental principle of the Islamic regime. He renounced seminarian dissenters, who considered this concept an aberration in centuries of Shia tradition. He also rejected Grand Ayatollah Montazeri’s religious edict that, in Islam, no single clergyman (e.g., the rahbar) has the right to make decisions for the entire nation and dismissed other top-ranking Islamic theologians who found no precedents for this concept in either the Quran or other authentic religious sources. He unwaveringly maintained that the velayat issue was no longer subject to debate in the context of Sharia jurisprudence since it was already embedded in the Iranian constitution and considered “irrevocable.”
During Khatami’s seven-year tenure, reform-minded clerics and his early supporters and collaborators such as Abdollah Noori, Mohsen Kadivar and Yousef Eshkevary (who all subscribed to the possibility of fresh interpretations of the Quran according to changing time and place) were tried by a Special Clerical Court and sentenced to various prison terms. The lay theologian Abdol-Karim Soroush, who advocated a novel interpretation of religiosity, was also incessantly harassed by the Islamic paramilitary Basijis and stopped from delivering speeches at various gatherings. Hashem Aghajari, a history professor and a close devotee of the president who openly called for an Islamic Protestantism, was tried on charges of apostasy and is now in prison pending appeal. In the face of these glaring injustices, all the president did was to call the trials regrettable. Ayatollah MusaviTabrizi, a former chief prosecutor of the Revolutionary Court, told reporters, “Khatami had 22 million votes; it is unacceptable for him to be so timid. One way or another, he has to stand up for the people.”40 And Grand Ayatollah Montazeri told an Australian reporter, “All Khatami does is to deliver speeches.”41 Younger clerics and many Qom seminary students and graduates, such as Hossein Khomeini, the grandson of “the revolution’s father,” similarly expressed dismay regarding the president’s rigid and retrogressive stand. Aghajari described “Khatami’s tragedy” as no longer being able to blame external forces for his lost opportunities.42
Human-rights activists are by far the largest group distancing themselves from Khatami, due to the Islamic Republic’s deteriorating human-rights record during his presidency. Capital punishment in the form of hanging and beheading for crimes ranging from murder, rape and drug trafficking to running a brothel; stoning to death for adultery; amputation of fingers for theft; blinding for a victim’s loss of sight; public flogging for drinking; arbitrary arrest and long solitary confinement for vague charges of threatening national security; torture to coerce confessions; lack of access to counsel; and disappearances have placed Iran at the top ranks of human-rights violators.43 With 250 reported executions and 23 cases of stoning to death during a twelve-month period, Iran has reportedly outranked all other countries in the world on a per capita basis.44 Some of these abuses have even been denounced by conservative clerics.45
Some of the greatest setbacks to Khatami’s ambitious humanitarian agenda have been caused by various conservative dominated courts, rogue elements within the security forces, and Islamic goon squads that have defied the country’s own constitutional safeguards. He has witnessed his presidency plunging into one embarrassing incident after another without being able to help the frustrated and demoralized victims. Ironically, on the eve of the year 2001, which the U.N. General Assembly, at Khatami’s request, designated the year of a “Dialogue of Civilizations,” more than 300 revelers were arrested by the morality police in their private homes for breaking Islamic rules against drinking and dancing. And in the first week of the same year, 11 women were lashed, two thieves had their fingers cut off, an adulteress was condemned to death by stoning, and a drug trafficker was hanged in public.46 There was not a whisper from the president against these barbaric acts. Altogether, during the seven years of Khatami’s presidency, four opposition writers have reportedly been assassinated, 400 political dissenters sent to jail, and 4,000 student protesters have been arrested – many sent to prison. Khatami has acknowledged these violations by merely expressing sorrow and anger.
He admitted to reporters and to the U.N. human-rights representative in late December 2003 that there were scores of political prisoners in Iran – some with “highly unjust” sentences. But his position was only a “wish” to see a day when there would be none.47 He further infuriated human-rights defenders by eulogizing a prison warden (known as the “butcher of Evin”) and a confessed executioner of several hundred political prisoners (known as “the hanging judge”) by calling them “soldiers of Islam.”
While on many occasions he repeated that the rights of minorities in Iran are fully protected, subsequent events proved otherwise. His campaign pledge, for example, to allow a Sunni mosque to be built in Tehran has turned out to be a mere election ploy, and the single existing Sunni mosque in Mashad has, under false pretenses, been turned into a park.48 Worse still, in apparent deference to the conservative camp, he made an astonishingly illiberal turn by complaining to Xavier Solana about the U.N. condemnation of the Islamic Republic for human-rights violations by declaring that U.N. standards do not and should not be expected to prevail everywhere!49
During Khatami’s tenure, the European Union, the U.N. Human Rights Commission, Amnesty International, the U.S. State Department, the British Foreign Office, Middle East Watch and other humanitarian organizations have all censured Iran for human-rights violations. In all but one of the past seven Khatami years, the U.N. General Assembly has condemned the Islamic Republic for cruel, inhumane and degrading punishments. According to the U.S. State Department’s Annual Human Rights report, the Islamic Republic’s poor record worsened further in 2003.50 The Islamic Republic has not yet signed various international conventions on the “Elimination of Racial Discrimination,” “Discrimination Against Women,” abolition of “Torture and Other Cruel and Inhumane Punishment” and “Freedom of Association.”51
Secularist groups whose ultimate goal was the separation of religion from the government gave up all hope in Khatami’s stewardship fairly early in the game, when the president closed the door on any change in the theocratic regime. These groups, which clamored for a national referendum to revise the constitution, pointed not only to its anti-democratic, xenophobic, discriminatory and repressive aspects, but also to its lack of effective sanctions for non-observance of its own provisions. Nevertheless, they found Khatami adamantly labeling any demands for constitutional revision “tantamount to treason,”52 a charge that he repeated on many other occasions. Pluralistic-democracy advocates, who object to the Islamic emphasis on the priority of individual obligation and duty over individual rights and civil liberties, have denounced the president’s mantra of “Islamic democracy” as oxymoronic and designed only to put a gloss of modernity and new-worldliness on the fusion of mosque and state. One of the regime’s early architects also now believes that Khatami’s “Islamic democracy” would lead to a “despotic order.”53
The secularists’ ultimate break with the president came in late 2002, when the rahbar reiterated that “religion is the main condition for the legitimacy of the [Iranian] regime,” and Khatami echoed the sentiment by referring to them as a “group unjust to our people” because “they are seeking a kind of democracy that is disharmonious with our national, religious and cultural identity.” He further rejected secularism, claiming that “Iran is trying to present a pattern in which the principles of both religion and democracy are kept.”54 With 45 percent of respondents in a recent poll rejecting the fusion of state and mosque, the group finally concluded that Khatami’s unrelenting effort to institutionalize his Utopian vision of Islamic democracy is a major part of the problem and an insurmountable obstacle to democratic secularism.
Disadvantaged economic groups have taken Khatami to task for his lack of attention towards improving the economy. They find his promises to downsize the bureaucracy, end private and public monopolies, create a level playing field for business entrants, eradicate poverty and achieve social justice still unfulfilled. Improvements in certain economic indices during his tenure are attributed to the rising price of oil as a temporary solution for the country’s economic ills. The early dissatisfaction of businessmen and private investors with the president’s handling of the economy came to the surface barely a year after his 1997 inauguration, when he failed to come up with a remedy for what he had described as a “sick” economy.55 Under pressures from various vested interests, he surrounded himself with a team of ministers, advisers and managers from a roster of committed Islamist apparatchiks with little regard to their competence or willingness to promote his promised reforms.
The middle and lower classes lost patience with Khatami when they found their zealous anti-shah demonstrations, their human and material sacrifices during the Iran-Iraq War, and their campaigning for a supposedly reformist candidate rewarded by a widening income gap with the get-rich-quick elite and the mafia bosses in control of the economy – the so called “millionaire mullahs.” According to a recent report, the top 10 percent of Iranian society earns 30 percent of national income, compared to only 1.5 percent by the bottom ten; and it consumes 20 times as much.56 A political activist claims that during Khatami’s presidency, the people’s living costs have gone up 2.4 times while wages and salaries have lagged behind.57 Explaining his switch to one of Khatami’s presidential rivals in 2001, a disgruntled voter complained that “the middle and working classes of our society have suffered the most during the president’s first term.”58 In a recent poll by the Iranian Students News Agency, a group of academic economists expressed dismay over the shrinking Iranian middle class and a further polarization of the economy between the very rich and the very poor. One respondent claimed that, in the last five years, some 50 percent of the middle class have joined the ranks of the poor.59
Unemployed workers, low-wage laborers and the disenfranchised masses who served as part of Khatami’s political foot soldiers also were dealt a mental blow when their 1999 support of protesting students was denounced by the president as the work of “hooligans, traitors and provocateurs.” On the eve of his second term, mass layoffs of workers in privatized state entities and several defaults on wages by new private employers greeted him with angry shouts. Rallies by hundreds of factory workers in conjunction with “illegal” strikes sparked frequent clashes with the police and a considerable number of casualties.60 The low voter turnout in his second run for office (67 percent compared to 83 percent four years earlier) probably reflected the country’s lingering economic malaise. The strike by 200,000 teachers in early March 2004, complaining of low salaries and demanding pay equality with other government employees, has been the latest example of the malaise.61
In short, the president chose the path of least resistance while the misery index (a combination of double-digit inflation and unemployment) plagued the economy and further handicapped the poor and the jobless. In the words of a businessman and early supporter: “We are now certain that we are going nowhere with Khatami despite his good intentions.”62 Another early supporter, who decided to run against him in the 2001 presidential elections, blamed the president for neither appointing a real reform cabinet, nor seriously pursuing needed economic reforms. In this challenger’s view, Khatami’s resolve to avoid confrontation and bloodshed cost him the sympathy of the majority who were behind him, while his conservative opponents showed no such restraints and followed their own agenda without qualms.63
The change seekers’ bill of indictment against the embattled president is a long one: He did not vigorously press for the prosecution of “chain murderers” and their instigators, and remained passive in the face of injustices inflicted on students. He fired his two favorite ministers under hardliner pressure, and when his nearest and dearest political allies were beaten up by thugs, removed from office, forced to resign, or put on trial and imprisoned, he did not raise a finger to help. He let the free press be muzzled on trumped-up charges, drove away his allies by occasional derogatory statements, consented to work with a cabinet imposed on him by the conservative faction, and caved in at every turn to secure the rahbar’s pleasure instead of heeding his constituents’ expectations. When two of his nominees for cabinet positions were rejected by his own supporters in the “reformist” sixth Majles, he did not try to defend their case. One of his own cabinet ministers ran against him in the 2000 presidential election and criticized his platform and policies; yet he was retained in the new cabinet at his old post!
A common complaint by all these groups, and dwarfing all their allegations, however, is the charge that, despite his repeated promises to step down if he was stymied in his reform efforts, he nevertheless clings to power at all costs. First, toward the end of his first term, he hinted that he might not run again unless the conservative cabal ceased to obstruct his agenda. But he decided to run. Then, in 2002, he proposed two bills to the Majles to increase his own power to stop political trials and reduce the vetting power of the Guardian Council in arbitrary disqualification of electoral candidates. Without these two bills, he said, he could not carry out his responsibilities as president. Yet, when the bills were vetoed by the Council, he decided not to follow through on his implied threat to resign. In fact, witnessing defeat after the seventh Majles elections in early 2004, he later asked the outgoing assembly to return both bills. Finally, when some 130 deputies, four vice-presidents, six cabinet ministers and 27 provincial governors resigned or threatened to quit in protest against arbitrary blacklisting of some 3,600 reform candidates for the seventh Majles, he asked them for restraint and advised them to let the legal review of disqualified cases proceed before taking drastic action.64 He then put his honor and prestige on the line by telling them, “If we are to go, we will all leave together.” 65 Yet, when the review process failed to reinstate most of the reform candidates (and some 87 incumbent deputies in the sixth Majles, including his own brother), he did not budge. A prominent reformist deputy who was among the disqualified said: “If he had resigned before, we would not be in this position now;”66 another reproached him for “failing to prepare for necessary confrontation.”67 When asked later if he would resign in the face of further political harassments by the conservative establishment, he matter-of-factly replied, “I am not a fighter; I am a man of logic and against conflict.”68 Interestingly enough, this non-confrontational trait that now baffles his early supporters was very clear from the start. It was highlighted as a negative factor in a critical essay six years ago (right after his 1997 election), in which he was described as “a thinker and not a fighter,” thus having only limited chance for success.69
A PORTRAIT IN TIMIDITY
Khatami’s disillusioned supporters criticize him for a lack of courage, self confidence and resolution bordering on cowardice. Yet these are the same early admirers who were willing to be seduced by the candidate’s charming demeanor and Delphic speeches. They thus have no reason to be surprised that their hero has turned out to be a non-combatant. Khatami’s political career was an open book at the time he was induced to seek the presidency – somewhat reluctantly. He never pretended to be an iconoclast. During the shah’s reign he was a stealth revolutionary. Of all the 1979 revolution’s standard bearers, he was the only one who served in the shah’s army as a junior officer (and presumably took the armed forces’ required oath of allegiance to the monarchy). Of all the current leaders of the Islamic Republic, he is the only one who conspired against the shah, yet he was never caught and did not go to prison. And of all the approved presidential candidates in 1997, he was by temperament, training and public service the least hawkish contender. His brief membership in the first Majles and his rather long tenure as the minister of culture and Islamic Guidance were marked by quiescence and caution. And at the first serious attack on him by conservative Majles deputies for being soft on liberal writers and film producers, he chose to quit his ministerial post and seek refuge in the National Library rather than meet his adversaries head-on.
His faithful admirers at home and abroad initially referred to him as “a rebel with a cause.” But, in reality, he was never a rebel and had no cause different from that of his conservative masters.70 His transparently cautious, relaxed and optimistic mien clearly showed that he was not a crusader. Did voters choose to ignore the overwhelming evidence that he was not the most suitable man for the job within their rules of engagement? Or did his early supporters consider him to be a born-again adventurer, or at least not risk-averse? No matter what the answer may be, Khatami’s plunging credibility among voters and his increasing isolation from once-committed supporters beg plausible explanations.
In retrospect, four factors seem to have been responsible for his plight: a noninspiring and submissive personality, a flawed and faith-based political philosophy, a defeatist governing strategy, and a choice of inefficient tactics. Personally, he had neither the anti-establishment religiosity of Ali Shariati nor the xenophobic, anti-Western fervor of Jalal Al-Ahmad – the two pre-revolutionary idols of Iran’s awakened but aimless youth. As an agent for change, too, he possessed neither Mohammad Mossadeq’s nationalist halo, nor Ruhollah Khomeini’s magical appeal – two men with a gift for mass mobilization. His long, didactic and repetitive speeches on democracy and civil society sounded trite to the cognoscenti, boring to the young and uninteresting to the masses. His tenacious attachment to his job at all costs made a mockery of his reformist pretensions. His frequent references to the seventh-century governing style of Prophet Mohammad and Imam Ali show that, like most Utopian dreamers, his vision for the future was overshadowed by a naive attempt to recreate the past.
Khatami’s leitmotif of Islamic democracy, as his faith-based philosophy, has been hollow, self-contradictory and largely deceptive. Not only is the Islamic Republic’s constitution, but Islam itself, widely considered to be incompatible with democracy.71 It is paradoxical, due to the impossibility of merging an autocratic regime based on the will of God with a pluralistic system run by the will of the people. And it is deceptive because, when he repeatedly declared that “Iran belongs to all Iranians without exception,” he must have been fully aware of the patent falsehood of his statement; the Islamic Republic’s constitution explicitly discriminates against women, religious minorities, atheists, free thinkers and apostates – to name a few.
Khatami’s defeatist governing strategy is reflected in his incessant emphasis on “the rule of law” as the sole guiding light of his administration. Quintessential as this principle is in a pluralistic secular society, it became the unintended albatross of his presidency. In Iran’s clerical oligarchy – headed by a self-proclaimed representative of God on earth, based on an anti-democratic constitution, handicapped by the subjugation of its elected legislature to the will of a few non-elected clerics, and enforced by an antiquated and politicized judiciary – the “law” has a hollow ring. It embodies neither constitutional mandates nor duly enacted Majles statutes; it represents irrefutable edicts of the rahbar, capricious opinions of the Council of Guardians, arbitrary decisions of the appointed Expediency Council, or haphazard verdicts of the chief judge’s henchmen. As a result, many of the injustices and violations of civil liberties committed prior to 1997, and always officially attributed to “rogue” elements within the regime, have since been sanctioned with a veneer of legality. Those civil-rights abuses are now carried out by the verdicts of incompetent, pliant or corrupt judges presiding over “duly constituted” courts. The “rule of law” has now been turned on its head, and become an instrument of repression.
Khatami’s second biggest strategic blunder has been his decision to take the high moral ground of serving as the “president of all the people” rather than the head of a political party or even the leader of a movement. In the first three years of his presidency, the Iranian people were enthusiastic about civil society and a strong pro-reform political party. Yet the new president neglected to make use of this popular sentiment. His reputed contempt for politics and politicians prevented him from realizing that the presidency is a political job! He could have started a political party and been its leader; but he is said to believe that the country was not yet ready for that.72
In his tactics, Khatami tried to appease religious fundamentalists by giving them verbal support on some theological issues in the hope of obtaining reciprocal backing on urgent government reforms. However, each concession on his part emboldened the ideologues to further block his initiatives. Voters wanted Khatami to face the hardliners with clenched fists and were ready to back him up. Instead his belief in the power of reason, dialogue and consensus led him to conclude that reform could be achieved without friction. He did not realize that resistance-free reform was a chimera, and that in order to remain relevant he must win. As a result, he was forced to retreat, abandon his trenches, and be encircled by his enemies.73 Some of his doggedly loyal defenders hoped that, by the end of his first term, he would shed some of his earlier political naivety and would act differently in his second term.74 As it turned out, his behavior in the second term was even less daring and resembled that of “a frustrated figurehead rather than a catalyst.”75
KHATAMI’S PERSONA
Perhaps a fair way to portray Mohammad Khatami is what Benjamin Franklin said of John Adams: “He means well for his country, is always an honest man, often a wise one, but sometimes and in some things absolutely out of his senses.”76 As uncharitable as the latter description may sound to his dwindling true believers, it is precisely such inexplicable behavior that has systemically sapped both his personal popularity and presidential credibility. During the last seven years, Khatami has tirelessly preached the virtues of democratic governance, the rule of law, human dignity, social justice, civilized dialogues and mutual understanding. Yet he could offer his supporters neither a distinctively fresh ideology nor an effective political leadership. He has proved to be a hesitant standard bearer and a reluctant reformer. In the words of an astute observer, “His world was the library, not the street.” By clinging to his sermons about principles being “coupled with patience, moderation and prudence,” he took the wind out of his own reform sails. And, while people craved action, he fed them slogans. He often used firm language, but his actions were never as firm as his talk.77 In mid-January 2004, for example, he called the wholesale rejection of the seventh Majles candidates by the Council of Guardians “unacceptable” and added that, “when it comes to the elections and defending people’s rights, the president is firm and will not forget his oath.”78 Yet, when the Council and the rahbar largely refused to heed his pleas for reconsideration, he not only obediently agreed to go along, but openly urged people to go to the polls, and cast his own vote. Despite an almost universal condemnation of the elections as rigged, he said: “Whatever the result, we must accept it.”79
Echoing a sentiment widely held by the opposition at home and abroad, a critical analyst holds that Khatami “revealed himself not as a fighter for democracy, but rather as a fig leaf for the ruling clerics with the task of intercepting and neutralizing the democratic opposition.”80 Another harsh critic has come to the conclusion that the president was acting “as a safety valve for the hardliners at home, and their acceptable face abroad.”81 Other analysts go so far as to say that mainstream conservatives tacitly supported him because it was an “insurance policy” for the preservation of the Islamic regime.82 In a recent poll by the National Institute for Public Research, nearly half of the respondents believed that Khatami should candidly tell the public why he has failed to move forward.83 Instead, reluctant to confront the hardliners head-on in the political arena, he has resorted to curse-like condemnations. For example, after the conservatives’ decisive victory in the seventh Majles elections, he resorted to such stupefyingly banal statements as, “Those who are tuned to the will of the nation will survive and those who stand against the people are doomed to extinction.”84 Or, “Those who oppose the people through the misuse of religion, science and even culture will be judged mercilessly by history.”85
WHAT PLACE IN HISTORY?
Mind reading is a hazardous exercise bordering on quackery. Yet it would not be difficult to guess Mr. Khatami’s self defense for the last seven years. He knew by instinct and experience that his open challenges to the rahbar and other theocratic oligarchs could have two possible outcomes. If his defiance was not backed by massive popular support similar to that in Indonesia, Yugoslavia, Georgia and elsewhere, he would face the same fate as Abolhassan Bani Sadr – the first post revolution president, who was impeached and dismissed, going into hiding to save his life. And if his standing up to the rahbar or to other entrenched vested interests triggered a bloody popular uprising that could end clerical rule, he would never forgive himself for causing the demise of a regime he had intended to save. His disillusioned supporters find this rationale an unpatriotic attempt to save the theocratic oligarchy instead of serving Iran’s true national interest.
Fairly or not, Mohammad Khatami has been called a compromiser, an appeaser, a collaborator and an apologist for the regime. Yet he is probably still the least disliked leader of the Islamic Republic’s nomenklatura. And he certainly is not “the most cowardly leader in Iran’s long history,” as one of his merciless critics has charged.86 Short of producing a miracle in the next few months of his lame-duck presidency, he may still be remembered in the history books as a kind of Islamic Don Quixote. But he may never rise to the level of a black-turbaned Mossadeq.87
1 See The Guardian, January 19, 2004.
2 The Christian Science Monitor, December 18, 2003.
3 Financial Times, September 25, 2002.
4 Arab News, January 2, 2004.
5 See Radio Free Europe, February 10, 2004.
6 Newsweek, February 18, 2004.
7 Setareh Sabeti, “I Accuse Mr. Khatami,” Iran Mania News, January 5, 2002.
8 International Herald Tribune, December 1, 2000.
9 Press Conference, September 2, 2002.
10 See “Iran Analysis,” The Stratfor Foundation, September 6, 2002.
11 Ahmad Sadri, “Challenging the Government of God,” The Iranian, December 15, 2002.
12 Iran Times, July 16, 1999.
13 The Guardian, July 10, 2000.
14 Iran Enrooz, December 22, 2001.
15 Reuters, December 22, 2001; Hamshahri, December 22, 2001.
16 Joe Klein, “Who is Winning the Fight for Iran’s Future,” The New Yorker, February 18-25, 2002.
17 Iran Press Service, November 25, 2002.
18 Reuters, December 11, 2003; Radio Azadi, “Iran Report,” December 17, 2002.
19 Financial Times, November 21, 2002; and BBC News, January 28, 2004.
20 See msn.com, February 18, 2004.
21 The New York Times, December 7, 2003; and Yahoo News, January 21, 2004; See also The Associated Press, February 15, 2004.
22 The Washington Post, February 20, 2004.
23 Iran Times, February 13, 2004.
24 See The Washington Post, January 15, 2004; and The Wall Street Journal, February 12, 2004.
25 See UNDP, Human Development Report 2000 and 2003.
26 Iran Emrooz, December 19, 2003. See also the letter to Amnesty International by Iranian female journalists in Iran Emrooz, March 7, 2004.
27 Iran Times, October 17, 2003; and Iran Farda, October 14, 2003.
28 Kayhan, December 24, 2003.
29 Iran Times, October 31, 2003.
30 The Guardian, January 19, 2004; The New York Times, February 15, 2004.
31 Star Ledger, May 16, 2001.
32 Asia Times, July 15, 2001.
33 Iran Emrooz, August 10, 2001.
34 For a litany of these charges, see Iran Khabar (Internet) January 1, 2002.
35 RFE/RL “Iran Report,” December 5, 2001.
36 Iran Times, October 24, 2003; see also Reporters Without Borders, Iran – Annual Report 2004 (May 2004).
37 Iran Times, December 12, 2003.
38 Elm va Jameeh, October 1999.
39 M. S. Husseini, in Al-Hayat, January 31, 2004.
40 “Khomeni’s Children,” msnbc.com news, December 15, 2002.
41 Iran Times, December 19, 2003.
42 Radio Farda, February 15, 2004.
43 For a detailed description of numerous human rights violations, see the annual reports of Amnesty International, www.amnesty.org; and U.S. State Department’s latest report, www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/2003/ 27927.htm.
44 Radio Azadi, September 20, 2002.
45 See statement by Ayatollah Nasser Makarem Shirazi as reported in The Scotsman, August 17, 2001.
46 Cf. Iran Emrooz, January 9, 2001. 47 Radio Farda, December 24, 2004. 48 Asia Times, December 16, 2002.
49 Radio Farda, January 12, 2004. See also the report of U.N. Human Rights representative, Ambeyi Ligabo, on Iran’s conditions, E/CN.4/2004/62/ADD.2, dated January 12, 2004.
50 See Iran: Voices Struggling to be Heard, U.S. State Department, April 2004.
51 UNDP, Human Development Report 2000; see also Iran Times, April 2, 2004.
52 See Jahangir Amuzegar, “Khatami’s First-term Presidency,” SAIS Review, Winter-Spring 2002; and Iran Farda, December 2, 2003.
53 See Akbar Ganji in Iran Emerooz, November 22, 2002.
54 Iran Mania, September 10, 2002.
55 Cf Jahangir Amuzegar, “Khatami and Iranian Economic Policy at Mid-term,” The Middle East Journal, Autumn 1999.
56 Iran Times, December 12, 2003.
57 Hamshahri, January 31, 2004.
58 Asia Times, June 15, 2001.
59 Radio Azadi, September 16, 2002.
60 Agence France Presse, July 16, 2001.
61 See Radio Farda, March 9 and 10, 2004.
62 The Arab News, July 21, 2002.
63 Info Net, May 23, 2001.
64 Voice of America, January 16, 2004; and Radio Farda, January, 14, 2004.
65 The Economist, January 15, 2004.
66 The Independent, February 8, 2004.
67 The Telegraph, February 21, 2004.
68 Al Hayat, February 8, 2004. See also The Guardian, January 22, 2004.
69 See Jahangir Amuzegar, “Iran Under New Management,” SAIS Review, Winter-Spring 1998.
70 See Geneive Abdo in International Herald Tribune, December 1, 2000.
71 See Akbar Ganji in Iran Emrooz, September 17, 2002.
72 Saeed Hajjarian in his interview with Radio Azadi, November 2, 2002.
73 Ghassem Sholel Sadi, quoted in Iran daneshjoo.org, May 24, 2002.
74 BBC News, August 9, 2001.
75 Newsweek International, February 18, 2004.
76 Gordon Wood in a review of Gore Vidal’s book, “ Inventing a Nation,” The New York Times Book Review, December 14, 2003.
77 The New York Times, January 15, 2004.
78 Middle East Economic Survey, January 19, 2004.
79 The New York Times, February 21, 2004.
80 The World Socialist, September 6, 2002.
81 BBC News, June 10, 2001.
82 The Christian Science Monitor, June 7, 2001.
83 Iran Emrooz, Sepember 30, 2002.
84 The Washington Post, February 2, 2004.
85 Yahoo News, February 8, 2004.
86 Ahmad Sadri in The Daily Star, February 6, 2004.
87 In an Internet survey conducted in 2000 to name “the Iranian of the century,” only 10 percent of the respondents listed Khatami, while 42 percent chose Mossadeq. See The Iranian, January 8, 2000.
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