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Iranians Vote for Reformist Khatami
TEHRAN, June 9 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - President Mohammad Khatami scored a landslide victory in one of the most important elections in Iranian history Saturday, crushing his conservative rivals as Iranian voters gave him four more years to push for greater freedom and democracy.
Final results gave the soft-spoken cleric a staggering 77 percent of the vote, as Iranians emphatically rejected conservatives who have been fighting to retain their grip on the nation by bitterly opposing Khatami's reforms.
The interior ministry said Khatami won more than 21.6 million out of 28.1 million votes cast on Friday, leaving even the closest of the nine runners-up, conservative Ahmad Tavkaoli, well behind at around 16 percent.
But the ministry radically revised its participation figures from earlier in the day, saying 67 percent of eligible voters cast their ballots Friday after reporting early Saturday that 83 percent had done so.
The decisive mandate gives Khatami the support of the people to go into another four years of political battle with establishment conservatives who claim his reforms are leading the nation to ruin and are destroying the foundations of the Islamic republic.
The 57-year-old cleric, a hero to many in a nation where young people make up two-thirds of the population, has eased social pressures at home while working to restore Iran's image on the international stage.
He drew the world's attention to his often brutal struggle when he broke down in public last month, wiping tears from his eyes as he described the "heavy price" paid by his reform movement.
Khatami admitted he would rather not have sought another four years after his first term, which began with the hope of sweeping changes to Iran's Islamic system, ended with a fierce counter-attack from conservatives and hardliners.
Newspapers that flourished under his tenure were shut down wholesale by the courts, which locked dozens of reformists -- from ageing opposition figures to young students thirsting for change -- away in prison.
"This undoubted vote for reform is to be welcomed," a senior European Union diplomat told the French news agency AFP. "But the major risk here is that the aspirations of the youth cannot be satisfied."
Khatami believes the nation is ready for an "Islamic democracy" that combines the state religion with Western-inspired rights and freedoms, while conservatives charge he is simply leading the young away from Islam.
They also see their own popular support ebbing after 22 years of clerical rule, and supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the number one figure in the regime, has pressed the importance of the two sides coming together.
"Today the rivalry ends," Khamenei said as he cast his own ballot on Friday, adding that all votes supported the regime as well as the constitution -- the document which gives him virtually unlimited power.
Conservatives were already fighting back late Friday with allegations of vote fraud, casting an early shadow on Khatami's historic win, the largest margin of victory since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
"The people have found in your program the response to their aspirations and demands for the reforms and Islamic democracy you have laid out," said university chancellor Abdollah Jasbi, one of the defeated conservatives.
Friday's vote marks the fourth consecutive win for reformists, after crushing victories in municipal and parliamentary polls in 1999 and 2000, and Khatami's initial 1997 election.
Russia, whose growing military ties with Tehran have irked Iran's arch-foe, the United States, was among the first nations to congratulate Khatami on Saturday afternoon.
A Russian foreign ministry official told Moscow's Interfax news agency the win "lends confidence that the course of comprehensive cooperation between Russia and Iran declared during Khatami's visit to Moscow in the spring will be continued."
German President Johannes Rau, whose nation has close commercial but often strained political ties with Tehran, sent a message to Khatami saying the people had "confirmed your policy of strengthening democracy."
Washington struck a more cautious note, although the administration of President George W. Bush was to tell Congress it wanted the planned five-year extension of unilateral sanctions on Iran cut to only two years.
"Our practice is to try to avoid wherever possible getting involved in other people's elections and I think that applies particularly to Iranian elections," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said.
The United States broke off diplomatic relations with Iran after the hostage taking at the US embassy here in 1979 -- ironically led by conservatives who now form the core of Khatami's reform movement.
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