Despite
repeated landslide election victories, President Mohammad Khatami's efforts at
reform have been severely hampered by the checks on his power that are written
into the Iranian constitution. He
was propelled to power when he received 70 percent of the vote in 1997, capturing
the support of women and young people and beating the candidate that the country's
conservative  clerics
favored. In 2001, Iranians reelected him -- by a wide margin -- to a second and
final term that ends in 2005. Scholars
like Ramin Jahanbegloo of the Cultural Research Bureau have said Khatami's election
changed the relationship between the religious conservatives and reformist politicians.
"[Khatami's
election gave reformers] an opportunity to ease restrictions on books and newspapers
and to improve Iran's relations with the West and the Arab neighboring countries,"
Jahanbegloo said at a January 2003 talk at the Woodrow Wilson International Center
for Scholars. The
Iranian constitution makes Khatami accountable to the un-elected supreme leader
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, severely limiting his ability to capitalize on such movement
toward reform. In Iran, the supreme leader, not the president, controls the military
and makes final decisions on security matters. Iran's parliament must confirm
the president’s cabinet ministers, but the supreme leader can influence
those decisions. Since
Khatami took office, hard-liners have used their control of unelected bodies --
including Iran's powerful Guardian Council and the judiciary -- to block reform
legislation, shut down more than 100 liberal publications and detain dozens of
pro-reform activists and writers. The
slow pace of reform during Khatami's presidency has caused frustration for many
liberals, including prominent philosopher Dr. Abdolkarim Soroush, who expressed
his disappointment in a 2003 letter to the president. "The
peaceful and democratic uprising of the Iranian people against religious dictatorship
in May 1997 was a sweet experience. ... But your failure to keep the vote and
your wasting of opportunities put an end to it and disappointed the nation,"
Soroush wrote. Khatami's
hopes of implementing reform dimmed in 2003 when the Guardian Council, which vets
all parliamentary legislation, rejected two key reform bills the president proposed.
The two pieces of legislation would have limited the Guardian Council’s
powers and the other government bodies whose membership the supreme leader largely
determines. After
the council blocked the changes, Khatami said he would resign if that was popular
will. In recent years, he has repeated that he is powerless to prevent conservatives
from violating the constitution and acting against reforms. Despite
his power limits, Khatami has moved Iran toward more open relations with the West,
and in 1999 became the first Iranian president to visit Europe since the Islamic
revolution. Since then he has made several more trips to Europe and also visited
Japan and India.
Khatami was
born in 1943 in Ardakan, a village in the central Iranian province
of Yazd. His father, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khatami, was a respected
religious leader and friend of Ayatollah Khomeini. Unlike many
other clerics of the time, Khatami's father allowed his family
access to a range of outside views and information through books
and news, according to ABC News.
Khatami received
his B.A. in philosophy from Isfahan University in the mid-1960s
after first studying theology at Qom Seminary. He then went on
to receive an M.A. in education from Tehran University.
According
to an official profile, his interest in politics was sparked while
he was a student at Isfahan University. During that time, he was
active in the Association of Muslim Students, working closely
with Khomeini's late son, Ahmed Khomeini, to organize political
and religious debates.
Khatami
understands the importance of cultural ties. Before Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution,
he lived in Germany, where he headed up an Iranian cultural mission. He speaks
English and German, as well as Arabic and his native Farsi. In
1982, he became culture minister, and later tangled with hard-line clerics who
pushed him from office in 1992 out of concern that he had gone too far in easing
government restrictions on the arts.
Some observers
attribute his decisive victory in the 1997 presidential election
to his positive views on Iran's future and his promises for real
change.
"He didn't
just charm me, he charmed the whole country -- and that's why
he was elected in 1997 in that stunning victory," Elaine
Sciolino, a writer on Iran for The New York Times, told the BBC
in 2001.
President
Khatami is a hojatoleslam, or a middle-ranking cleric. Married
in 1974, he has two daughters and a son.
-- Compiled by Karyn Schwartz and Maureen Hoch for the Online NewsHour
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