Hardline Iran

From Lebanon’s Daily Star:

Iran’s dominant conservatives have been rolling back the tentative liberalization of reformist President Mohammad Khatami since winning control of Parliament in disputed polls earlier this year, but it remains unclear how far right they will take the Islamic Republic. Since the February elections, won by hard-liners after most moderates were barred from standing, Iran’s right-wing has implemented a tough crackdown on social vices, pressed on with silencing dissident voices and stalled key foreign investors lured by Khatami’s brand of Islamic glasnost. “They are trying to wipe away everything done by the previous Parliament, whether political, social, cultural or economic,” said Elaheh Koulaie, a former reformist MP. Koulaie, a women’s rights activist, was part of the reformist majority that held the Iranian Parliament from 2000-04. The assembly managed to change the political tone of the country, even if most legislation was blocked by the Council of Guardians Council, a hard-line-run vetting body. The council eventually barred most reformists from contesting the February polls, handing an easy win to right-wingers. Khatami and a handful of his Cabinet are isolated as the few moderates still in office. “The new Parliament rejected the bill on equality for inheritance that we voted through the first time around. They also removed an article from the fourth five-year plan on gender equality,” Koulaie said. The shift to the right has also been visible on the streets. In recent months, police have been spearheading a crackdown on “badly veiled women” – in other words, females showing off too much of their shape or hair, and one of the most tangible results of Khatami’s seven-year-old presidency. “We ask for the respect of Islamic values cherished by people, and not for the following of Western models,” said Javad Arianmanesh, a new conservative MP who is deputy head of the Majlis Cultural Commission. “We distinguish between a cultural invasion and cultural exchange. In a cultural exchange we select what is appropriate, but we utterly reject cultural invasion since it targets our indigenous culture and wants to alienate our people, especially the youth.” Concerning satellite TV, which is banned, and the Internet, he said such “mediums of communication are not fully pure and are run by media giants controlled by Zionist capital.”