President Mohammad Khatami warned Iran's ruling clerics on Wednesday against taking an anti-democratic "path of extremism" that he said risked alienating people from Islam and the Islamic Republic.
In a speech celebrating the 25th anniversary of the revolution that overthrew the shah and brought Shiite Muslim clerics to power, Khatami said the country faced three possible paths to the future. The first, he said, is to imitate the West while denying the religion, culture and identity of Iranians.
"The second choice is the path of extremism," he said to a crowd that seemed uninterested, "which does not take into account the needs of our time, the demands or the votes of the people."
Proponents of that path, he said, "oppose freedom and democracy in the name of religion, as though their model is what we saw in recent years in Afghanistan, which was detestable and violent."
"I believe the country's prosperity and freedom of people lies within the third path, which emerged in the recent years under the name of reforms," he said.
He hinted that he believed in that path, even if he could not fulfill the promises he had made to supporters, many of whom have grown disillusioned in recent years.
His speech came 10 days before scheduled parliamentary elections, which reformers vowed to boycott after a panel of hard-line clerics disqualified thousands of candidates, most of them reformers. Some 130 reformist members of parliament, 80 of whom were banned from running again, have resigned in protest.
But resistance among reformers seemed to evaporate this week after Khatami bowed to an order by the supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and announced that the elections would go ahead.
"We expected the government to act more firmly and to take a decisive position before Mr. Khamenei intervened and put the government in a corner," said Mohammad Reza Khatami, the president's younger brother and the leader of the major reform party that boycotted the elections. "It seems that the president did not want to use his legal authority over this matter because he was afraid that the situation would get worse."
Divisions among reformers became evident this week after a small group who had been given approval to run began to gear up their campaigns. The group, called the Coalition for Construction and Development of Iran, is led by the speaker of parliament, Ayatollah Mehdi Karroubi.
The coalition is an eclectic group, with a list of candidates that includes Ali Hashemi, a brother of former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, and Jamileh Kadivar, the wife of Ataollah Mohajerani, a former reformist minister who was forced to resign. The former president, who heads the powerful Expediency Council, has often used his influence against reformers.
"What is important is that society should move toward reforms and construction," the coalition's spokesman, Mostafa Nassiri, said.
While the reformist resistance seemed to crumble, hard-liners called on their supporters to turn out Wednesday in a show of strength before the elections.
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