Moderate cleric wins key role in struggle for Iran

Iran's new parliament elected as its Speaker yesterday a former revolutionary cleric who is about to find himself plunged into the heart of the increasingly bitter battle for the country's destiny.

Iran's new parliament elected as its Speaker yesterday a former revolutionary cleric who is about to find himself plunged into the heart of the increasingly bitter battle for the country's destiny.

The struggle for Iran has now moved into parliament, the majlis, and rarely can a parliament have found itself so pitched between the people and the powerful. The newspaper offices that were the hub of President Mohammad Khatami's reform movement are silent and empty. The country's leading journalists and intellectuals have been locked up - or, in one case, shot down in the street.

On the university campus, the students, Mr Khatami's ardent supporters, maintain an uneasy calm. All have been silenced - the journalists andintellectuals by hardline courts or the gun; the students kept off the streets by the fear that hardline vigilantes will use protests as an excuse for bloodshed.

All eyes are now on the majlis. Mr Khatami may have lost the press, but he has gained parliament, where reformers have an overwhelming majority after February's elections.

"The students are very angry about what's going on," says Ali Saeedi, who took part in a student protest last week that turned ugly when hardline vigilantes turned on the demonstrators. "If this sort of thing continues," he says, "we will take it on to the streets, even if they attack us like they did last July [when at least one student was killed]. But the students will calm down if parliament keeps its promises."

Hamid Jalaiepour, whose newspaper Asr-e Azadegan was closed by the courts, is more optimistic. "Parliament will have the newspapers reopened in a month," he says. "A new press law will be the first Bill it passes."

On the streets, too, the people are waiting for parliament to deliver. There can be few populations in the world so politically aware.

If leading reformers are to be believed, the majlis means to deliver. Newly elected MPs are talking about dismantling the entire power base of the hardliners. They are talking about changing the law to make judges less powerful - the courts are one of the hardliners' most potent weapons - and overturning election laws that allowed the hardline Guardian Council to vet candidates and disqualify leading reformers in February's elections.

It is into the middle of these great expectations that Mehdi Karroubi steps as Speaker - a job that Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former Iranian president and the hardliners' choice, was eyeing for himself until last week. But late in the day Mr Rafsanjani saw that he could never win the chair, and resigned. He is seen on the streets as the leader of the hardliners - but, in truth, he was a public figurehead used and discarded by the men in the shadows, who would not dare to test their own popularity by standing in an election.

Mr Karroubi is not the man people were talking about as Speaker in the heady euphoria of February's election win. Then, people were looking to Mohammad Reza Khatami, brother of the President, who came first in the prime Tehran constituency. But the choiceof the moderately pro-reform Mr Karroubi over diehard reformers such as Reza Khatami is not the capitulation it may seem. It is a more subtle choice than that - and Iran is nothing if not subtle.

With his strong powerbase in the Iranian establishment, Mr Karroubi is better able to withstand the onslaught the hardliners have unleashed against reformers than people such as Reza Khatami, whose power lies only in their popularity. When President Khatami was asked to stand for office in 1997 - the election that changed Iran's history - it was Mr Karroubi's promise of support that made him accept.

Moreover, with his high mullah's rank of hojatoleslam, Mr Karroubi is better able to argue with the hardliners on points of religion than the laymen who dominate the new majlis.

But the choice of Speaker is just the first step. Everything now lies ahead for Iran's reformist parliament.

Ominously, the leading reformist MPs, who have until now made a point of mixing with the people, are applyingfor parliamentary bodyguards. This week it was revealed that an assassination attempt onthe President was foiled recently. And one image is still fresh in everybody's mind -that of Saeed Hajarian, one of the driving forces behind the reform movement, lying severely wounded on a Tehran pavement, shot by unknown, would-be assassins.