President of Iran concedes defeat on reforms

TEHRAN, Iran -- Iran's beleaguered president conceded defeat Wednesday in his long struggle to reform a system stacked in favor of hard-line Islamic clerics, saying he was abandoning efforts to salvage two key bills that sought to expand presidential powers and limit the authority of an unelected conservative body.

Mohammad Khatami, once hailed as the leader of a hugely popular reform movement, warned Iranians not to expect too much from the presidency, accusing his rivals of relegating the office to a position of little influence.

Acknowledging the failure of the pillars of his presidency, Khatami conceded that two key reform proposals designed to check the powers of hard-liners were dead.

One of the bills sought to increase presidential powers in order to stop constitutional violations by conservative clerics. The other would have barred the hard-line oversight body, the Guardian Council, from disqualifying parliamentary and presidential election candidates.

"I withdraw the bills and declare that I have met with defeat," Khatami told reporters after a Cabinet meeting.

"Let the people know who is their president and what powers he has so that they keep their expectations accordingly," said Khatami, whose second four-year term ends in June 2005.

Khatami lashed out at the Guardian Council, an unelected body that vets all legislation, as harming Iran's theocracy, the product of the 1979 Islamic Revolution that toppled a Western-backed monarchy.

The Guardian Council rejected the parliament-approved bills about a year ago, saying they were unconstitutional and against Islam. Khatami acknowledged Wednesday there would be no breakthrough in working out acceptable legislation and said efforts to do so were finished.

"I am withdrawing (the presidential powers bill) so that the few powers that the president has now are not eliminated," Khatami said.

In his seven years as president, Khatami has been at loggerheads with Islamic hard-liners who have clung to power despite their unpopularity.

Soon after his election, he surprised his opponents by engineering modest reforms that relaxed the country's strict Islamic laws and allowed greater media freedoms.

But after Khatami's second-term victory in 2001, the hard-liners bulldozed his reforms, shutting down more than 100 liberal publications and detaining dozens of activists and writers for criticizing hard-line clerics.

Khatami's main challenge has come from Iran's unelected supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whom hard-liners look to for leadership. Khamenei has the last word on all state and religious matters and appoints the Guardian Council.

The Guardian Council, which as well as vetting all legislation also oversees elections, disqualified thousands of reformist candidates for last month's parliamentary elections, including many incumbent lawmakers.

Reformists then boycotted the vote in protest, saying it was rigged to allow them no chance of winning, and hard-liners easily retook control of the Majlis, or parliament.

Without the parliament, Khatami and his Cabinet lost a key bastion of support.

He has also lost the tidal wave of popular support that thrust him into the presidency in 1997, and was responsible for his re-election in 2001. Khatami's soft-spoken, non-confrontational attitude won him great popularity, but now those same qualities are criticized by many Iranians who regard him as a weak president who failed to stand up to the hard-liners.

"Reforms have failed, because of the existence of an authority with absolute power (supreme leader)," political analyst Saeed Ale Agha said in an interview. "The weakness of the reformists and the frustration of the people is proof of this failure."

Khatami said the Guardian Council was even refusing to recognize even the constitutional powers granted to the president, supposedly second only to the supreme leader.

"The bills I presented, unfortunately, met the strong wall of the Guardian Council. The council even breached its own definite view that the president is responsible for implementing the constitution," he said.

Khatami repeatedly has told the hard-line judiciary that imprisoning writers without trial or trying their cases in closed sessions violates the constitution, but his words have been ignored.

"People should know that in the view of some (the Guardian Council), the president is not Iran's No. 1 official after the supreme leader," he said. Rather, he added, the council views the president merely as a coordinator among other institutions.

As for the panel's own role in the Islamic republic, Iranians have a different idea of what the Guardian Council should be, Khatami said.

"The people want a supervisor or policy-maker, but they don't want a custodian," he said.