[Mb-civic] FW: Ebrahim Yazdi to Run for President ?

[Golsorkhi]

------ Forwarded Message
From: Samii Shahla <shahla at thesamiis.com>
Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2005 09:50:35 -0500
Subject: Ebrahim Yazdi to Run for President ?

Khaleej Times

Leading Iranian secular dissident to run for presidency
  (DPA)

8 March 2005


  TEHERAN - Leading Iranian secular dissident Ebrahim Yazdi said on
Tuesday that he would conditionally run for the presidency in elections
slated for June 17.

³Certain conditions must be first met for preparing the grounds for
decent political work,² Yazdi told reporters at a press conference.

The candidate of the Freedom Movement Party named the release of all
political prisoners, securing press freedom and increasing the power of
democratically-elected bodies as the main conditions for his
nomination.

³We must win the people¹s trust and if the rulers insist on continuing
the same course as in the parliamentary elections (in February 2004),
they will commit a severe strategic mistake both internally and
externally,² warned the US-graduated Yazdi, who was foreign minister in
the early phase of the 1979 Islamic revolution.

In the 2004 parliamentary elections, more than 2,000 candidates from
the reformist wing were simply disqualified by the clergy, resulting in
an easy win of the conservative wing.

During his eight-year tenure, President Mohammad Khatami, who cannot
run for a third term, has failed to realize Yazdi¹s demands.

The main hurdle for Khatami and his reformist supporters for
implementing an Islamic democracy has been the influence of so-called
²appointed bodies², consisting mainly of conservative clerics.

These bodies are not democratically elected but appointed by Supreme
Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has the final say on all state
affairs.

The two main appointed bodies opposing Khatami¹s reform movement in the
last eight years were the senate-like Guardian Council and the
judiciary.

While the Guardian Council is constitutionally authorized to veto
parliamentary bills, the judiciary has the power to close down
newspapers and arrest journalists and dissidents on charges which
reformists consider as not clearly specified in the law and therefore
not legal.

The hottest candidate for succeeding Khatami is the 70-year-old former
President Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, challenged only by reformist
candidate Mostafa Moein.

Political observers believe that, considering the crisis over the
nuclear dispute with the European Union and the United States,
Rafsanjani is the only candidate who could lead the country in what are
expected to be upcoming turbulent times.
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http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/middleeast/
2005/March/middleeast_March219.xml&section=middleeast&col=



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