Ahmadinejad takes over Iran's hottest seat By Safa Haeri
Aug 5, 2005
PARIS - Islamic Republic Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has officially confirmed new, but already-embattled, President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, who took office Wednesday with his country facing a serious crisis of confidence in the international community as well as political insecurity and social troubles at home.
A gunman on a motorcycle on Tuesday shot dead Hassan Moghaddas, the judge who was in charge of the case of Akbar Gani, an outspoken journalist who is openly calling for the removal of Khamenei from office. And several provinces are in turmoil over cultural rights, notably in the Kurdish northwest, the oil-rich Khouzistan in the southwest, and Sunni-dominated Sistan and Balouchistan bordering Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The new president has no experience in politics except for a few years as governor of a remote province and more recently as Tehran mayor, a position he won with only 12% of the vote. Despite his relative inexperience, the 49-year-old Ahmadinejad will have to juggle several potentially explosive situations, starting with the controversial nuclear issue that has quickly developed into a major international crisis since last week. Tehran surprised the world, particularly the United Kingdom, France and Germany (the so-called EU-3) by suddenly announcing it will resume operations at its Uranium Conversion Facility. Activity there was suspended last year as the EU-3 and Iran tried to work out a deal to end the country's non-peaceful nuclear programs.
The reaction from the EU-3 was blunt. "The Iranian nuclear issue is very serious and may trigger a major international crisis," French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy warned a day after Iran's move. He added that if the country did not go back on its decision, then "Iran will be, I would say, in a purely unilateral position. We are proposing, we Europeans, an extraordinary meeting as soon as possible of the International Atomic Energy Agency's board of governors to ask the international community to say and to spell out very strongly and firmly to the Iranians that they have to return to the negotiating table."
French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin echoed those feelings, telling an independent French radio station that Iran must abide by the deal with the European Union's Big 3 to suspend its nuclear program or face UN Security Council sanctions.
"Iran must honor the commitments it has made," he said. "These commitments are commitments suspending all activity, conversion, treatment and enrichment of uranium. The international community will be forced to draw conclusions ... with consensus, with dialogue. And the Security Council will be called on if Iran refuses to comply."
He took a similar position to that of the United Kingdom, the current chair in the revolving presidency of the 25-member European Union, which earlier advised Tehran to avoid "unnecessary measures" that would trigger a major crisis "at a time that we are near to a positive conclusion".
The response from Tehran was ambiguous, insisting that it would open the Uranium Conversion Facility, situated near the central and historic city of Esfahan, but with the presence of international inspectors. The inspectors are required to install new monitoring devices, a process that would take at least a week, according to the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which was officially informed Monday of Iran's intentions.
At the core of the standoff between Tehran and the EU-3 is the Iranian complaint that the Europeans had promised to offer by the end of July a "final and comprehensive proposal" of incentives in return for Iran ceasing non-peaceful nuclear activities.
Aware of new President Ahmadinejad's political handicaps, his detractors describe him as a "dangerous fascist extremist", leading the Western media to brand the him an "ultra conservative". The decision to resume some nuclear activities just two days before he took the oath of office and before the end of the mandate of the outgoing president Mohammad Khatami seems to have played into his detractors' hands.
In his confirmation speech, Ahmadinejad, who once presented himself as the "street sweeper of the nation", avoided mention of the nuclear controversy, reiterating his electoral campaign promises to "be the servant of the people and Islam, fight injustice, responding to most urgent needs of the poor and safeguard interests of the nation". Those were the very populist slogans that on one hand helped him defeat predicted election winner Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani while on the other frightening many Iranians, particularly women and the youth who feared he would slash the limited social and cultural freedom they enjoyed under Khatami.
Ahmadinejad, Iran's sixth president, was supported during his electoral campaign by many hardline clerics as well as the elite Revolutionary Guards and Basij militias. An austere, simple-living and faithful Muslim civil engineer who fought on the front lines during the devastating eight-year war against Iraq, he takes office at a time of increasing instability.
In his short statement, Ahmadinejad refrained from attacking any country directly, even Israel, which ruling Iranian ayatollahs have said must be eradicated from the earth. He instead called for a "world free of weapons of mass destruction".
Supreme Leader Khamenei, meanwhile, did not hesitate to lambaste the "Great Satan of America", saying Iran "would not pay tribute to any power". "The arrogant Americans say they do not accept our democracy. Our answer is that we too, we do not like their democracy, which is tied to international Zionism and capitalism."
Dr Mansour Farhang, an Iranian scholar and former diplomat teaching international politics at New York University, summed up Ahmadinejad's challenge: "All along his electoral campaign, the new president insisted that he would restore Islamic justice, fight corruption and solve people's most urgent needs, meaning food and jobs for millions of unemployed, mostly the young and despaired generation, but he never provided any concrete program explaining how he would inject blood to an economy paralyzed by odd communistic regulations, that survives thanks to the billions generated from a booming oil prices."
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing.)
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
