Word: iranians
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...insists, all his idea. On Nov. 4, 1979, Asgharzadeh, then a radical 24-year-old engineering student, led a furious mob down Taleghani Street in Tehran, crashed through the U.S. embassy's gates and began a 444-day siege that not only humiliated America but also cemented a new Iranian political order. But these days, Asgharzadeh is a changed man. At 44, he is a yuppie-ish politician with a seat on Tehran's municipal council, and he is frequently denounced by hard-liners. He has shaved his beard and clearly prefers cracking jokes to raising a clenched fist. Puffing...
...difficult time. In 1993, he spent eight months in solitary confinement for criticizing the clerics' failure to abide by democratic practices set down by the nation's 1979 constitution. Yet he has remained a leading strategist in Khatami's new Participation Party and is one of the architects of Iranian detente with the West. In 1998, ignoring the howls of the hard-liners, Abdi traveled to Paris and met with former hostage Barry Rosen, achieving a reconciliation of sorts. A sign of Abdi's influence: last summer's student riots began with a protest against the closing of his newspaper...
...There may be serious limitations on Iran?s electoral process, but within those limitations there?s a real struggle for power between groupings committed to dramatically different visions of Iranian society," says TIME correspondent William Dowell. "Second to Israel, Iran may still be the liveliest republican democracy in the Middle East." Even though the conservative Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini ? who controls the security forces, the broadcast media and the religious bodies that vet laws passed by parliament and candidates running for election ? is appointed for life by a closed group of clergy, he still depends to some extent...
...theologians and closing down reformist newspapers. More ominously, scores of liberal writers and intellectuals have been assassinated by shadowy groups, some of whom were traced back the Intelligence Ministry. The political infighting has intensified in the prelude to next year?s election. Observers believe the sudden arrest of 13 Iranian Jews last month on charges of spying for Israel was a conservative attempt to paint Khatami into a difficult corner, while the ban on the liberal newspaper Salam, which sparked off the unprecedented six-day protest movement, was part of the mullahs? plan to stack the electoral deck in their...
...move to snuff out the largest protest movement seen in Iran since the revolution. Although he risks alienating some of his most committed supporters by backing away from the protesters who carried his portrait through the streets, Khatami knows from experience that conservative crackdowns tend to drive the broader Iranian public toward the reformist agenda. And with parliamentary elections looming next May, a conservative backlash may work in his favor in the long term. Besides, his only alternative may have been political martyrdom...