Iranian president will go ahead with Feb. 20 elections

TEHRAN, Iran -- President Mohammad Khatami said he will obey orders from Iran's supreme leader to hold legislative elections on Feb. 20, but warned they would not be fair because thousands of reformist candidates have been disqualified.

In a joint letter sent to Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Friday, Khatami and Parliament Speaker Mahdi Karroubi wrote that the government would hold the elections as scheduled only because Khamenei had ordered it to do so, but that people would have little motivation to vote.

The letter was sent to Khamenei late Friday. An official in the president's office, who spoke on condition of anonymity, divulged its contents to The Associated Press on Saturday.

Reformists, however, have pledged to boycott the elections.

The crisis erupted after the 12-member Guardian Council disqualified more than 3,000 pro-reform candidates, provoking strong protests from liberal lawmakers. The council subsequently reinstated about 1,100, but reformists said that was insufficient.

Postponement rejected

Khatami had earlier vowed to only hold elections that were "competitive, free and fair," and had called for a postponement of the vote, which was rejected.

The official said Khatami would release a statement explaining his new position to the nation in the coming days.

Reformist university teacher Hamid Reza Jalaipour said Khatami's decision to back down has created a rift in the reform camp.

"Reformers want Khatami to live up to his promise of not holding sham elections under any circumstances. Khatami should not turn into an instrument in the hands of hard-liners," he said.

The letter accused the council of jeopardizing the elections' integrity.

"The Guardian Council has barred most of the prominent names from the Feb. 20 election, undermining the necessary competition," the official quoted the letter as saying.

Iran's largest reformist party, Islamic Iran Participation Front, has said it would boycott the elections. The party is led by the president's younger brother, Mohammad Reza Khatami, who is deputy speaker of parliament and one of those barred from the election.

The letter followed an order by Khamenei that a reformist-led ministry review the disqualifications, which was seen as a compromise effort to resolve the standoff over the vote.

But reformist lawmakers said Thursday that after the ministry reinstated about 600 candidates, the Guardian Council struck all but 51 names from the list, effectively sabotaging the review process.

On Khamenei's recommendation, the council added another 149 names to the list on Friday, the official in the president's office said.

Reformists accuse hard-liners of exploiting the disqualification process to try to fix the elections in favor of the conservatives. Hard-liners have denied this and said the disqualified lacked the qualifications to stand. But the disqualified include 80 members of the outgoing parliament.

Reformists won control of the parliament in 2000 for the first time since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. But hard-liners have used their control of unelected bodies such as the Guardian Council to thwart attempts to liberalize Iran's political system and relax its strict Islamic social code.