Five men hanged in Gonabad

Hamshahri daily, Aug. 7 - Five Afghans, tried and condemned to death on drug trafficking charges, were hanged yesterday in Gonabad, Khorassan province.

Iranian's face to be burnt

Reuter, Tehran, Aug. 5 - An Iranian court ordered a man's face burnt with acid for staging an acid attack on a young girl whose father would not let them marry, a newspaper said on Tuesday...

Under Iran's Islamic laws of Qesas (Retribution) someone causing bodily harm can be punished by having a similar injury inflicted by judicial authorities.

Tougher punishment for drug trafficking

IRTV, Aug. 9 - The Council for the Exigency of the State convened today. At the end of the meeting our reporter interviewed Hashemi Rafsanjani, the council's President on the outcome of this meeting.

Rafsanjani: Two subjects were on the agenda. There was a case of disagreement between the Majlis and the Council of Guardians on the question of joining the International Convention on Transportation. We approved the decision by the Majlis. The other question dealt with revision in the law of combating drug trafficking...

The Judiciary and the State Security Forces believed that the law is not sufficient for the present circumstances and must be revised. This was dealt with in the commission which is headed by Mr. Yazdi, head of the Judiciary. They had suggested serious revisions in the law, including harsher punishments for people who trade in drugs... The general outlines were reviewed today and decision made to go ahead with tougher measures. I believe that in future sessions, we will discuss and make decisions on the items which need to be revised.

Rafsanjani's record

Mobin magazine, Aug. 7 - Although many factories, refineries, dams and energy plants were created as a result of the industrial growth, the gap between the rich and poor continued to widen, encouraged by a culture of consumption and tendencies towards luxury life and aristocracy...

Profound class differences and the widening gap between the poor and the rich are the hallmark of crisis in the social sector. In Greater Tehran, where the municipality is endeavoring to create a suitable Islamic pattern, expensive glass towers are built one after the other. Meanwhile, many families lack any shelters and are forced to live in the streets. For many of them, the head of the family has to sell his kidneys to provide for rent and deposit...

Iranians oppose nuclear plants

Salaam, Aug. 6 - A call from a reader: Had the government spent all the billions of dollars and rials it has spent since the beginning of the revolution on the preserving and protecting the nuclear plant in Boushehr, on creating water and gas power plants, at least several energy plants could had been built in the past 18 years.

Khatami's cabinet faces many obstacles

AFP, Tehran, Aug. 9 - Various factions in the Iranian regime are openly opposing one another on the formation of the government of the new President, Mohammad Khatami, on the eve of its introduction to the Majlis. Islamic radicals who have dominated Iran's political life since 1979, have been accusing the conservatives since several days ago of putting pressure on Khatami to change his mind about appointing "revolutionaries" to his cabinet....

Conservatives, who hold the majority in Majlis and control most of the regime's institutions like the state-run radio and television, want to place their favorable figures in key positions. Several radical newspapers condemned last week Hassan Habibi's reinstatement in his post as first deputy to the President. On Saturday, Salaam called on Khatami to "remove the obstacles which prevent him from introducing a strong government." It wrote: "Khatami must fulfill the demands of the electorate."

The radicals believe that the right-wing Islamic conservatives are trying to isolate them by threatening to refrain from giving vote of confidence to "the ministers who would create problems." Several newspapers closely affiliated with Khatami have written that in this way it seems that Mohammad Moussavi Khoeiniha, one of the renowned figures among the radicals, has been removed from the list as the Minister of Intelligence under pressure from the conservatives. Bahman weekly affiliated with the government explained that "the problems regarding the Intelligence Minister have not yet been resolved and this Ministry still does not have any ministers."

The conservatives have threatened that they will not give a vote of confidence to the moderate Ata'ollah Mohajerani, as Minister of Culture, and Abdollah Nouri, a radical representative considered for the Interior Ministry. There is strong bitterness among the radicals. Several moderate personalities affiliated with Rafsanjani have openly accused the Judiciary - affiliated with the conservatives - of launching a propaganda campaign against the figureheads of the moderate faction. Several moderate figures, including Rafsanjani's brother, said: "The recent arrests made among the colleagues of Tehran's mayor, Gholamhossein Karbaschi, could be interpreted as a political move."

Salaam, Aug. 9 - Some considerations and restrictions have compelled Khatami to give up his candidates for sensitive positions in some of the ministries, sufficing to introduce persons of lower priority. This problem along with the pressures imposed by the majority of the parliament have forced Khatami into forming a weak cabinet.

Salam, Aug. 7 - A call from a reader: Khatami's appointment of Mr. Habibi as his first deputy, contradicts his claims of forming a cabinet of new thinkers, ... Please convey to Mr. Khatami that he should explain to people. - On the choice of Mr. Habibi, the first deputy to the President, while he has a brilliant record in science and executive affairs and is a very respectable personality, the people who voted for Mr. Khatami expected extensive changes.

Choice of first deputy signals continued repression

NCR secretariat, Paris, Aug. 4 - Today, in his first and most important choice, Mohammad Khatami, the mullahs' new president, appointed Hassan Habibi as his first deputy. Habibi served eight years in the same post under Rafsanjani. As one of the leaders of Khomeini's anti-human regime, Habibi has been significantly involved in all of the regime's crimes in the past 18 years. Before being appointed as Rafsanjani's deputy in 1989, Habibi was the Minister of Justice. Tens of thousands of political prisoners were executed during his tenure. He was among the officials in charge of the massacre of 15,000 political prisoners in summer 1988.

Habibi was also the spokesman for Khomeini's Revolutionary Council in 1979 and his representative in the Council of Cultural Revolution which unleashed a brutal campaign to crack down on students in the 1980s. His appointment as first deputy, therefore, is a clear indication that hope for any reform in the mullahs' regime is but a mirage. Khatami is neither interested nor capable of bringing about any change.

No muting of hostility

The Washington Post, Aug. 3 - Mohammed Khatami, who becomes president of Iran today, can have a new and more cooperative relationship with the United States if he wants one, but so far there are no signs he does, according to senior Clinton administration officials...

Khatami is hardly a political outsider in Iran. He was culture minister in a previous cabinet -- in which capacity he reaffirmed the death sentence against British author Salman Rushdie -- and was one of only four among 238 presidential aspirants authorized to run by the ruling religious council. He has said nothing to distance himself from the anti-U.S. policies of the country's religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In his first post-election address to the nation July 19, he said nothing about foreign policy...

Change of Iran Policy?

Associated Press, Washington, Aug. 2 - Khatami's inauguration coincides with campaign by some U.S. Iran watchers, led by former high-level government officials, for a shift in U.S. policy from one of isolating Iran to engaging it....

American University's Amos Perlmutter says that Khatami's accession changes nothing. "There are no moderates in Iran any more than there were moderates in the Soviet Union before Mikhail Gorbachev," he says. Power, he adds, still lies with the "totalitarian, ideological clergy, whose hatred for the West, and especially the United States, surpasses all otherwise rational behavior."...

Iran's fifth president

Ad-Dastour, Jordan, Aug. 3 - The general impression in Iran and abroad and among the Western public is that the new Iranian president, Mohammad Khatami, is different from his predecessor, Ali Hashemi Rafsanjani, being more moderate and more liberal. It is believed that Iran will be more open, less isolated under Khatami and that it would see domestic and international reconciliation. This is actually a deception on the part of Iran which presents this image of its new president. Iran experts know that Rafsanjani was even more moderate, more pragmatist and more liberal in many regards and more prepared than Khatami to open relations with the West.

An Iranian Gorbachev?

Liberation, Aug. 4 - Will Mohammad Khatami become Iran's Gorbachev? While the transfer of power is being completed in Iran, this is the question which occupies Iranian intellectuals, liberal groups, and a large sector of youths....

Iranians who voted for this new president have all kind of expectations from him, more freedom, an overhaul of the economy burdened with unemployment and inflation,, social reforms, more rights for women, and dialogue with western countries...

The tasks before him are not only tremendous, but resemble more of a mission impossible. In fact, none of the government institutions are under his control....

There are virtually no guarantees that Mohammad Khatami who was groomed in Khomeini's system, would really materialize the hopes of the electorate. It is true that his liberal tendencies led to resignation in 1992 from his post as Minister of Islamic guidance and culture, ... but it is also true that he ran this giant ministry in charge of censorship and Islamic propaganda in the darkest years of the Islamic Republic. The English language daily, Iran News, wrote yesterday, "We do not have any doubts that Khatami is a follower of the Imam Khomeini, and that he would not think even for one moment of changing the foundations of the Islamic Republic."

Iran's protest gesture

Die Welt, Germany, Aug. 5 - Khatami, Iran's new president, has led to many fantasies...

The system is not monolithic, but dualistic in nature. The system does not recognize any division of power. Khamenei, the religious leader succeeding Khomeini who died in 1989, has wrested all power.

The President, the government and the parliament, are the executive organs one after the other....

Khatami's election will change nothing in this system, because the president does not have the instruments of power to change anything...

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