Back to Brief on Iran
TEHRAN - Last year Iran's football team was in France for the World Cup, now Khatami is off to Paris on Wednesday….
Iran's politicians have expressed fears that French authorities will allow protests organized by the People's Mujahedeen, Iran's leading armed opposition force.
"France must understand that their presence and their propaganda in France are unacceptable. It has a bad effect," the governor of the southeastern Sistan Baluchestan province, Mahmud Hosseini told AFP.
At Mullahs’ Request, France Refuses Entry for Thousands of Iranian Dissidents, Reuters, October 26
PARIS - France has re-established defunct border controls to prevent Iranian dissidents from entering the country during a visit by Mohammad Khatami beginning on Wednesday, the Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday.
The opposition National Council of Resistance of Iran said thousands of would-be protesters had been turned back at French borders in recent days.
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Anne Gazeau-Secret said Paris had asked neighboring Italy and Germany to suspend Schengen zone free-movement accords from October 23 to 29.
News agencies in Paris received a steady stream of telephone calls on Tuesday from people saying they were Iranians prevented from entering France from various neighboring countries.
The callers said they had planned to join demonstrations called by the National Council of Resistance which said it expected 10,000 people to rally in Paris against Khatami. Council spokesmen showed up at news organizations to give details of cases where would-be demonstrators were turned back, saying police had used force in many cases including against U.S. and Canadian-passport holders seeking to enter France.
They said dozens of busloads of sympathizers had been turned back at France’s borders with Germany, Italy, Switzerland and Luxembourg starting on Sunday.
Telephone callers to Reuters in Paris
included a man who said he spoke for 50 ethnic Iranians with Norwegian
passports who, he said, had sat down outside a French border patrol office
at the Belgian border where they had been blocked.
Upcoming Trial of Khatami’s Key Ally, The New York Times, October 24
TEHERAN - … Abdullah Nouri… has been spending much of his time in recent days closeted with his lawyers…
Nouri is a confidant of… Khatami, probably Khatami's most important ally. Both men are Muslim clerics with political pedigrees that go back to the Islamic revolution of 1979, when they were trusted lieutenants of… Khomeini…
Nouri… and Khatami… are considered apostates by extreme Islamic conservatives, some of whom have threatened publicly to kill those they consider "enemies of Islam." Khatami goes nowhere without an elaborate security entourage...
At his trial, Nouri will face the most serious charges leveled against any Muslim cleric since the Islamic takeover. He has been accused of using Khordad, his newspaper, to insult the Muslim Prophet, Mohammed, and his direct descendants, the imams who are Shiite Muslims' principal saints. He is accused as well of… "propagating" in support of Iran seeking friendly ties with its two main adversaries, the United States and Israel…
The battle over who can run in the parliamentary elections is not likely to be settled before January, when nominations close. Much may depend on the attitude of… Ali Khamenei, the country's supreme religious leader, who has sweeping executive powers that far exceed Khatami's. Earlier this month, Khamenei, hitherto considered the conservatives' main standard-bearer, stunned the country by calling Khatami a "pious man" and urging conservatives not to block his efforts for "the rebirth of Islam."
Iranians were left to wonder whether
Khamenei had a change of heart, or made the speech to allay reformers'
concerns while conservatives work through bodies like the clergy court,
the press court and the Guardians' Council to consolidate their power.
The indictment of Nouri, less than two weeks after Khamenei's speech, has
done little to encourage optimism that the religious leader was sincere…
High Court Rejects Ex-Mayor's Appeal, Reuters, October 25
TEHRAN - Iran's supreme court has undercut a bid to release Tehran's former mayor, jailed after a graft conviction, newspapers reported on Monday.
The daily Arya said the supreme court reversed an appeals court ruling that cut to six months Gholamhossein Karbaschi's two-year jail term, effectively freeing him after time served.
But a swift prosecutor motion led the supreme court to overrule the appeals court on Sunday, according to Arya and other newspapers.
Karbaschi, a key ally of Mohammad Khatami, was jailed in May for embezzlement after a politically charged trial. He has appealed his conviction.