“Ahmadinejad is trying to change the perception the middle classes have of him inside Iran,” said Amir Mohebbian, a political strategist who has good relations with Iran’s leaders. “He’s telling them: ‘I am not radical like the clerics. I am like you.’ ”
The controversy over the hikers was the dominant backdrop as Ahmadinejad headed to New York on Monday to participate in the annual United Nations General Assembly meeting at U.N. headquarters, where he is scheduled to speak Thursday.
Ahmadinejad told representatives of The Washington Post and NBC News last week that Shane Bauer and Joshua Fattal, two 29-year-olds who have been jailed in Iran for two years on espionage charges, would receive a “unilateral pardon” and would be home “within days.”
The next day, Iran’s judiciary, which is led by Shiite Muslim clerics who once supported Ahmadinejad but now oppose him, reacted angrily, stressing that Ahmadinejad did not have the authority to free the men. The judiciary postponed the release, demanding $1 million in bail. On Sunday, the men’s release was delayed again because one of the judges whose signature is required on the bail paperwork is on vacation.
Underscoring its unwillingness to compromise, the judiciary also refused to allow a delegation of U.S. religious leaders and American Muslims to visit Bauer and Fattal, even though Ahmadinejad had invited them to come to Iran to help return the two to the United States.
The delegation included Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, archbishop emeritus of Washington; the Right Rev. John Bryson Chane, Episcopal bishop of Washington; Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR); and CAIR’s chairman, former North Carolina state senator Larry Shaw.
The group left Iran on Monday morning after six days of sightseeing and meetings with religious and political leaders, but without obtaining access to Bauer and Fattal. The two were arrested with a third American — Sarah Shourd, who was released on medical grounds last year — as they were hiking near the border between Iraq and Iran in July 2009. Bauer and Fattal were convicted of spying last month in a closed trial and sentenced to eight years in prison. Their families and the U.S. government have called the espionage charges bogus.
The struggle over the hikers’ case underscores Ahmadinejad’s increasing status as a rebel within Iran’s leadership. His new role escalated publicly in April when he clashed with Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, over the forced resignation of a key minister. Since then he has been embroiled in public fights with the country’s ruling clerics, who say that Ahmadinejad and his inner circle of advisers are plotting to undermine their influence.
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