Iran allows visitors to home of arrested cleric

THE AUTHORITIES have moved toward easing restrictions on Iran's top dissident cleric, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who has been under house arrest since 1997 for challenging the country's supreme leader.

An aide to Mr Montazeri said yesterday that security officials permitted the first visitors, including two leading conservative clerics, to enter the house in the city of Qom.

But he said Mr Montazeri, once the anointed successor to late revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had refused to see them, declaring he would not allow anyone to dictate who could visit and who could not. "He told them it was all, or no one," the aide said.

Mr Montazeri, one of Iran's most senior theologians, has taken on renewed prominence in recent months as reformers and conservatives within the clerical elite battle for influence within the Islamic republic.

Pro-reform forces grouped around President Mohammad Khatami, trying to strengthen civic institutions at the expense of the establishment clerics, say the velayat-e faqih, the system of clerical rule, must be subordinate to the law of the land.

Their conservative rivals look to the supreme clerical ruler as the source of ultimate political authority.

Since the death in 1989 of Ayatollah Khomeini, who united political and religious power, the debate has picked up speed, highlighted by President Khatami's landslide election in 1997 on a platform of civil society and the rule of law. (Reuters)