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Khatami Is No Champion Of Rights

By Nosrat Hosseini
Iranian Women’s Association 
 Melbourne - “Dialogue of Civilisations” is the theme for former Iranian president Mohammed Khatami’s talks in Australia, sponsored by La Trobe University’s Centre for Dialogue.

 
This is ironic, since Khatami is the last person who should be talking about dialogue, religious coexistence, or human rights in general.

It would be a tragic oversight for him to give a lecture without being questioned on the legacies of his own record on human rights and religious freedom.

 
The media tags Khatami as “moderate” and a “reformer”, but his tenure as president, from 1997-2005, and in other positions of authority, made clear he is neither.
 
Most notably he was the minister for culture and Islamic guidance during the infamous massacre of political prisoners in 1988, in which at least 30,000 people were killed.
 
As president, he gave the order to suppress protesting students in 1998. When he went to the University of Tehran 10 years later, students there chanted “Death to Khatami”.
 
Khatami approved plans to carry out terrorist and missile attacks on the bases of the Iranian opposition, the People’s Mujaheddin Organisation of Iran (PMOI).
In 1998 there was a series of murders and disappearances of Iranians who had been critical of the regime, known as the “chain murders”.
 
The victims were injected with potassium, shot in staged robberies, victims of deliberate car accidents or stabbed. They included more than 80 writers, translators, political activists, ordinary citizens and poets.
 
Zahra Kazemi, a Canadian photojournalist was arrested, brutally raped, tortured and murdered by the Iranian regime in July 2003.
 
Many newspapers were banned on Khatami’s orders. Religious minorities (including Jews, Christians, Sunni and Sufi Muslims, Baha’is and Zoroastrians) faced systematic harassment, discrimination, incarceration, torture and even execution. Reformers, students, labour activists and journalists were persecuted for “insulting Islam”.
 
At a speech in 1999, Khatami said: “Whoever accepts the Constitution must also consent to the principle of the Absolute Supremacy of the Clerics. Such a person would then be one of us and a citizen of the Islamic system, and the system is obliged to defend their legitimate rights.”
 
In other words, only those Iranians who accept the supreme authority of an unelected man should be afforded civil rights.
 
The world has been so focused on Iran’s nuclear program and sponsorship of terrorist organisations, it has been effectively distracted from concentrating on and condemning Iran’s systemic human rights abuses.
 
Decent people will find the very idea of receiving him in this country unacceptable; doing so under the pretext of culture and on university premises is inconceivable.