Mr. Khatami’s comments amounted to a bold challenge to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has dismissed the opposition’s claims that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s landslide victory on June 12 was rigged, and has ordered protesters to accept it.
It is unlikely that Iran’s hard-line leaders will accept the referendum proposal. But the fact that Mr. Khatami proposed it at all suggests a renewed confidence within the opposition movement.
That movement received a powerful boost on Friday when an influential former president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, told a gathering at Tehran that the government had lost the trust of many Iranians, and he called for the release of the protesters arrested since the election.
His speech at Tehran University brought vast crowds of opposition supporters into the streets of the capital, where they chanted antigovernment slogans and clashed with police officers in the largest demonstration in weeks.
Mr. Khatami on Sunday praised Mr. Rafsanjani’s speech and said a referendum would help achieve Mr. Rafsanjani’s goal of restoring trust, reformist Web sites and the BBC’s Persian service reported. He said it should be carried out by an independent body, like the Expediency Council, an arbitration group that is headed by Mr. Rafsanjani.
“If the majority of people accept the situation, we also will accept it,” Mr. Khatami said, Web sites reported.
The referendum proposal coincided with a possible sign that the government was willing to make some concessions. Mr. Khatami was visiting a group of family members of opposition figures who had been arrested since the election, and while there, the arrested men called their relatives from prison for the first time, in what appeared to be a coordinated gesture.
Mr. Rafsanjani traveled over the weekend to the northeastern city of Mashad to discuss the postelection political crisis with high-ranking Shiite clerics. The move was likely to fuel rumors that Mr. Rafsanjani is building clerical support for the opposition. Two of the clerics Mr. Rafsanjani was meeting have declined to congratulate Mr. Ahmadinejad on his victory and may already be sympathetic to the opposition’s claims that the election was rigged for Mr. Ahmadinejad.
Mr. Rafsanjani’s reception in Mashad contrasted strikingly with that of Mr. Ahmadinejad, who was snubbed by at least one top-ranking cleric during his own visit two days earlier.
On Saturday, the government released on bail an employee of the British Embassy in Tehran who was arrested last month and accused of fomenting postelection street protests, Iran’s state-run Press TV reported. The employee, Hossein Rassam, was the head of the security and political division at the embassy, the station reported. Eight other embassy staff members who were arrested had been released.
Although some Iranian conservatives have criticized Mr. Rafsanjani for his speech on Friday, more have made stinging criticisms of Mr. Ahmadinejad over a controversial cabinet appointment made public on the same day. The president named as his first vice president Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, who angered hard-liners by saying in 2008 that Iranians are “friends of all people in the world — even Israelis.” Mr. Mashaei, whose daughter is married to the president’s son, also angered clerics in 2007 when he attended a ceremony in Turkey in which women performed a traditional dance.
On Saturday, Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, a prominent conservative, called the appointment of Mr. Mashaei “completely unbelievable” and said to promote him was to “ridicule the highest religious authorities.” Other conservatives made similar comments, including figures in the Basij militia. Kayhan, a newspaper close to Ayatollah Khamenei, called the appointment a “mistake” that would “no doubt provoke strong opposition.”
Although many conservatives criticized Mr. Ahmadinejad in the past, especially over his economic policies, most supported him during the protests of the past month. Only now, as he begins to name his new cabinet, have differences begun to emerge again.
Also on Sunday, Iran’s Jahan News reported that Iranian security forces had foiled an effort to assassinate both Mir Hussein Moussavi, the main challenger to Mr. Ahmadinejad, and Mehdi Karroubi, another candidate in the presidential election, both of whom have called the June 12 vote fraudulent. The report attributed the information to unnamed sources and claimed the would-be assassins were from the Mujahedin-e Khalq, a militant group that seeks to overthrow the Iranian government.
