Can Khatami justify the high hopes? The president-elect, who takes office in August, has little room to maneuver. He has no power base in the army or the security forces, and his allies are a minority in the conservative Iranian Parliament. Although a mullah himself, he made enemies in the Islamic clergy during his 10 years as culture minister, when he encouraged a freer press and slightly more daring books and movies. This profile as an embattled reformer, together with Khatami’s warm smile and supposed fluency in English and German, led some Iranians to compare him to Mikhail Gorbachev. ““Could a true son of the revolution inadvertently lead the nation into total revisionism?’’ mused a Western-trained computer scientist in Tehran. He had no answer, but he did know one thing: Khatami was the first Iranian political candidate with his own Web site (www.khatami.com, if you read Persian).
If Khatami wants to reach out to the West, he wasn’t showing it last week. At his first press conference, he said that improvement in U.S.-Iranian relations would ““depend on changes in the attitude and positions of the U.S.A.’’ President Bill Clinton, meanwhile, hailed the election as a ““hopeful’’ sign, but hastened to add that Tehran should stop backing terrorists and trying to acquire nuclear weapons if it wants to be friendlier with Washington. Iran will likely remain the favorite whipping boy of the U.S. Congress - especially if Tehran turns out to have plotted the bombing of Al-Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia last year, which left 19 Americans dead. But Gary Sick, a senior research fellow at Columbia University, says ““the classic image of Iran - that there are no moderates, that this is a closed, impossible system - has been seriously challenged.''
That would be good news for Maryam Akhondan, 23, a graduate student in Tehran. ““By voting for Khatami, I want to change Iran’s image,’’ she says. ““Not all Iranians are fanatics. Not all Iranians are terrorists, as you think in the West.’’ Young people, who also voted for Khatami in overwhelming numbers (the legal voting age is 15 in Iran), are eager for more contact with the outside world. Writer Shahla Lahiji remembers that when Khatami was culture minister, the works of Czech author Milan Kundera, a bitter critic of totalitarianism, were allowed to be published. After Khatami was forced out in 1992, Kundera couldn’t be reprinted. ““We aren’t expecting the hijab to be lifted the very next day,’’ says Lahiji, referring to her shapeless robe and head scarf. Like millions of other Iranian women, she just wants a little breathing room.
