Content area
Full Text
In a well-publicised and eagerly anticipated appearance before the Iranian Majlis (national assembly) on 1 1 March 2001, President Mohammad Khatami delivered a "state of the nation" address, covering his first four years in office. The unusual and unprecedented venture was intended to provide the president with an opportunity to defend his performance record and to answer those who had castigated his as a "do nothing" administration.
The long, unstructured and diffuse speech, however, turned out to be largely a saga of Khatami's trying experiences with his idealist followers on the left and his fundamentalist opponents on the right. In a largely contemporaneous delivery (and the promise of a full report at a later date), the beleaguered president defended his role as a servant of God, saviour of the Islamic Republic, promoter of "religious democracy" and protector of the people's constitutionally guaranteed liberties.' While his unrelenting critics dismissed the speech as the "mountain laying a mouse", and his loyal supporters praised it as a candid account of his four-year struggle for reforms despite a new political crisis "every nine days", an objective assessment of the Khatami administration's overall record remains to be made. This short review deals with the economic side of the picture.
Of the two-hour-long speech, no more than twenty minutes were devoted to economic matters. And even in this relatively brief reference, the president's account of the situation was selective, fragmentary and altogether defensive. In a desperate appeal to fairness and reason, Khatami tried to show how things were better now compared to four years earlier when he took the helm. Admitting that the people's lot was still far from satisfactory, and that he felt their pains and sufferings, he underscored the sorry state of the economy that he had inherited in 1997 and called attention to the concrete achievements made during his presidency. In a well-calculated move to gain the nation's sympathy, Khatami recited with great pride such accomplishments as taming inflation, reviving economic growth, creating more job opportunities, promoting non-oil exports, producing budget surplus and positive current account, reducing foreign and domestic debts, financing energy projects, obtaining new foreign export credits and bank loans, lowering investment risks, signing bilateral co-operation agreements with trade partners, and turning the overall economic...