All praise is due to Allah, the Lord of the Worlds, and peace and greetings be upon our Master and Prophet, Ab-il-Qassem Mohammad, and upon his Immaculate and Infallible Household, especially what remains with Allah on earth.
Almighty Allah said in His book, "Those to whom the people said: Surely men have gathered against you, therefore fear them, but this increased their faith, and they said: Allah is sufficient for us and most excellent is the Protector. So they returned with favor from Allah and (His) grace; no evil touched them, and they followed the pleasure of Allah; and Allah is the Lord of mighty grace." (3: 173, 174)
Dear brothers and sisters! The senior officials and executives of the Islamic Republic! You are quite welcome to this meeting. God willing, we will have a very beneficial meeting.
Mr. Khatami's remarks were very good and indicated lofty motives. I hope his statements, especially the first part of them that referred to the lifestyle of the Commander of the Faithful, Imam Ali (peace and greetings be upon him), will be kept in mind and be always a lesson to us.
The main purpose behind this meeting is, in the first place, to create harmony and congruity. If similarity of views on various issues is also achieved, so much the better. But even if there are some differences of opinion on certain issues, harmony and concord will help to bridge over these differences.
Harmony will be achieved more easily with remembrance of Allah. The remembrance of Allah will turn on a light in the heart of man and make it shining. It will remove grudge, hatred and self-conceit from the heart. It will create an anchor for wavering and anxious hearts, helping them to become calm and self-confident.
The remembrance of Allah is easy for clean hearts, but it is difficult for those that are tainted with impurities. Someone with a heart filled with worldly desires such as thirst for power or amassing a fortune or filled with jealousy and hatred for others or self-conceit will never be allowed to enter the divine sacred sanctuary, unless he cleanses his heart.
In the sacred sanctuary of the remembrance of Allah, the unclean heart is not allowed to enter. We should cleanse our hearts. If a heart is made fragrant with the remembrance of Allah, undoubtedly his supplications will be replied. No supplication is without a divine reply.
Today, we need to clean our hearts and make them fragrant with the remembrance of Allah, especially those of us who carry heavy responsibilities. If we strengthen our relationship with the Almighty, our performance will improve and more ways will become open to us. We will have a clear mind and a bright horizon will be ahead of us. Therefore, this is the first step to take, and I hope Almighty Allah will help us to do so.
My dear ones! Today I feel that in our country, as it was also mentioned by Mr. Khatami, there are numerous potentials and bright horizons. Of course, there are also some problems. The potentials should be realized and those problems should be resolved.
However, under the present circumstances, what I think is the most important is harmony and congruity among officials and executives. The atmosphere should not be disturbed. If Almighty Allah helps the officials of the Islamic Republic to achieve harmony - this does not necessarily mean to be of the same views and opinions but it means avoiding quarrels and hostilities - many problems will be solved. The Islamic revolution and system have provided a very favorable opportunity for self-purification as well as improving the atmosphere of the country. This opportunity should be utilized in an optimum manner.
Nevertheless, some efforts are being made to portray certain minor issues as major demands of the people. But in fact the main demands of this nation are not these issues. What the people actually want is that the officials should try to find ways to strengthen the system, improve performance of government organs, solve their problems, elaborate on the ideals and objectives of the system and utilize the great faith, motivation, innovation and capabilities of this devoted nation to achieve those objectives. Of course, each one of us shoulders great duties and responsibilities in this regard and should try to perform them in the best possible way.
What I would like to mention today is that how we can remove flaws and shortcomings, counter corruption and, in the virtual sense of the word, conduct reforms in the country. This question is very important and deserves careful attention from all those who are interested in the fate of this country and nation.
Today, the issue of reforms is being brought up in the country, and it is one of the main issues. In other words, many individuals are talking about reforms or making efforts in this regard. But what are reforms? What is the best way to conduct reforms? What are the priorities of reforms? These are very important questions.
Another important and relevant question is, what is the enemy seeking to achieve by giving special prominence to the issue of reforms in Iran in its propaganda? What is the reason for the fact that the propaganda of certain international circles, which have never displayed any goodwill toward the Iranian people, has currently been focused on the issue of reforms in Iran?
Are there any reasons for corruption, tyranny, degeneration and deteriorating condition in this country for over half a century except Britain's influence and domination in the first stage and U.S. domination of this country in the second stage?
Who established dictatorship in this country? Who promoted and spread corruption in the public or private sector in our country? Who tried to weaken morality and human values for some fifty years? Who brought Reza Khan to power? Who staged the coup in this country on August 19, 1953?
During these fifty years or so, who made every evil attempt to spread and encourage corruption and moral laxity and undermine ethical values and religious conviction of our nation?
Today, our youngsters have no idea of the condition of the press under the Pahlavi regime. But, of course, you remember. Who fostered or encouraged those corrupt publications and set models for them? Was it anyone except those powers that supported the former regime?
The main reason why we strongly oppose the U.S. arrogance and its domineering policies today is nothing but the fact that the United States for half a century destroyed all of our human, moral and natural resources. Who prepared the ground for this huge destruction? Who was involved in or led this process?
Now the same United States and Britain, their presidents and politicians and media, are defending and supporting what is called reforms in Iran! This should make any wise individual ponder over the motives behind their support. Any vigilant person should ask himself, what is the reason for U.S. and British support for what is called reforms in this country? This is a very important question about a serious matter.
As someone who has dealt with various issues and political currents ever since the beginning of the revolution, I am quite familiar with politicians and their words as well as the motives behind the propaganda of the international media. Considering this experience, I have now reached the conclusion that the United States has devised a comprehensive plan to subvert the Islamic system. This plan is an imitation of the plan that led to the collapse of the former Soviet Union. The U.S. officials intend to carry out the same plan in Iran, and there are enough clues in their selfish and often hasty remarks made during the past few years indicating that they aim to do so.
Therefore, it is clear that the U.S. officials have tried to adjust the plan that resulted in the downfall of the former Soviet Union to the conditions in Iran and intend to carry it out in this country as well. However, they have made certain mistakes, which is also due to the divine grace.
The enemy has made certain mistakes in its calculations. I am going to elaborate on these mistakes, but this will not help the enemy to rectify those mistakes, since their main problem is their wrong knowledge about realities in Iran, which has resulted in their wrong planning. This is why all their plans about Iran always end in failure.
For instance, they made every effort to support the Pahlavi regime and keep it in power, but because of their wrong knowledge about the Iranian people and the clergy and Islam, they failed to achieve their goal. This time also they are bound to fail.
Regarding the mistakes that they have made, their first mistake is that Mr. Khatami is not Gorbachev. Their second mistake is that Islam is not communism. Their next mistake is that the popular system of Islamic Republic is not the dictatorial regime of the proletariat. The fourth mistake is that the integrated Iran is not like the former Soviet Union, which was made up of different republics. And their next mistake is that they have underrated the pivotal role of the religious and spiritual leadership in Iran. I will expound more on these mistakes later.
I would like to briefly talk about the U.S. plan to disintegrate the former Soviet Union. Most of what I remember comes from my daily notes in 1991 about what was taking place in the Soviet Union. However, later I obtained further information through friends from certain important sources in Russia and elsewhere, which complemented my previous knowledge. It was really a great event!
When I call the plan to disintegrate the former Soviet Union a "U.S. plan", I should mention three points in this regard. The first point is that the "U.S. plan" does not mean other Western countries did not cooperate with the United States in this respect. In fact, the whole West including the European countries, especially Germany and Britain, fully cooperated with the U.S. in bringing about the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The second point is that we should not disregard the internal factors that contributed to the downfall of the Soviet Union, the factors that were exploited by its enemies in the best possible manner. What were those factors? Extreme poverty, heavy economic pressure on the public, severe intellectual suffocation, administrative corruption and bureaucracy were among the main factors. Certain ethnic factors were also involved.
The third point is that this U.S. plan was not of a military nature. It mainly relied on the media and means of mass communication such as radio, television, films, publications and other publicity means. Indeed, the media and cultural tools were effective to some fifty or sixty percent in bringing about this downfall.
My dear ones! You should take the issue of cultural aggression, which I first mentioned some seven or eight years ago, more seriously! It is no joke! Cultural onslaught is no joke!
Besides the role of the media and propaganda, political and economic factors also played some secondary roles. However, no military factor was involved.
But what was the actual plan? When Mikhail Gorbachev took office as General Secretary of the Communist Party in 1985, unlike the former old general secretaries, he was a young and intellectual figure. He raised the slogans of perestroika, in the first place, and glasnost, in the second place. Perestroika meant economic and political reforms, while glasnost referred to the policy of promoting social reforms and civil liberties like freedom of expression.
In the first couple of years after he took office, the media bombarded him with praise and admiration as well as suggestions and analyses. He was even chosen as Man of the Year by an American center! This happened in the Cold War era, namely the era when U.S. officials could not tolerate any success or achievements in the Soviet Union, the era when U.S. officials refused to recognize any positive realities in the Soviet Union and even spread negative propaganda against them!
However, all of a sudden, Washington adopted this kind of attitude toward Gorbachev, and the great praise and encouragement expressed by the West deceived him. I would not say that Gorbachev took power through support received from the West or the CIA, as some claim in the world. I have seen no evidence of this, and I do not know what was actually behind the scenes. But what is certain is that Gorbachev was deceived by the great acclaim, enthusiasm and encouragement expressed by the West, and he wrongly trusted the United States and other Western countries. Gorbachev has written a book entitled "Perestroika, the Second Revolution". In this book, one can easily notice the signs of his having been deceived by the West.
When Gorbachev raised the slogans of perestroika and glasnost, these slogans greatly influenced the suffocating atmosphere dominating the Soviet Union at that time. I think it was nearly in late 1990 or early 1991 that Gorbachev abolished the travel permit, which was until then needed to travel from one city to another. This occurred some 73 years after the formation of the Soviet Union. This was one of the measures taken by Gorbachev in the area of glasnost.
Gorbachev raised the slogan of glasnost at a time when there was no freedom of expression in that country. This is why the Russians were almost surprised at this slogan! The fact is that there were only few publications in the Soviet Union, the main one of which was the daily Pravda. Even a Russian writer who had criticized certain principles of socialism, not all of them, had been barred from leaving the Soviet Union for many years.
Under such circumstances and in this kind of atmosphere, Gorbachev raised this slogan. However, he made certain mistakes, and I will later refer to some of his mistakes.
After some time, the symbols of Western culture such as Western dress or McDonald's restaurants started arriving in the Soviet Union. In those days, I noticed in some U.S. magazines like Time and Newsweek that the opening of McDonald's restaurants in Moscow had been called an important event, and these restaurants themselves were described as the pioneers of Western or American culture in the Soviet Union!
After two or three years, another political figure called Boris Yeltsin emerged on the political stage of the Soviet Union, and he played a crucial role. The role that he played was that he kept insisting on a faster pace of reforms. If a more prudent politician than Gorbachev had been in power, he could have conducted those reforms over a period of some 20 years without running into any problems, as it had earlier occurred in China. But Yeltsin, who was fully supported by the U.S. and other Western media, became the leading radical opponent of Yeltsin, as he was impatient with the slow pace of reforms. The Western media also portrayed him as an intellectual and reformist politician.
Consequently, in the presidential election that was held in Russia in 1990, the first election in some 73 years, Yeltsin who was the only candidate was elected President of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991, he was elected President of the Russian Federation.
With the election of Yeltsin as president, the U.S. plan to disintegrate the Soviet Union obtained a faster pace. A short while after Yeltsin's inauguration on June 14, 1991, the U.S. president George Bush announced that the Soviet Union should recognize the independence of the three Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. Otherwise, Bush said, the United States would not fulfill its promise of extending financial assistance to Russia! Here, there is a clear instance of the actual U.S. motives behind its financial aid to other countries!
However, soon afterwards, Yeltsin declared that he recognized the independence of these three Baltic states!
Two months later in August 1991, a suspicious military coup was staged in Moscow that was clearly aimed at making Yeltsin's role more prominent. During the event, certain U.S. media like CNN and others gave special coverage to Yeltsin. I saw a CNN footage showing Yeltsin standing on a tank among a group of people, shouting that he would not submit to those staging the coup! Then he went to the Duma, or Russian Parliament, and took refuge there.
The surprising point is that those behind the coup did not arrest Yeltsin, who was at hand in the Duma, but they went to the Crimean peninsula and arrested Gorbachev, who was spending his vacation there!
Furthermore, following extensive coverage given by Western media to this so-called coup, the media after three days reported that those responsible for the coup had been arrested while there were asleep! What was the outcome of this coup? The only result was that Yeltsin, who was the second most important figure in the Soviet Union until then, practically became the most prominent politician!
A short while later, the republics of the Soviet Union began to claim independence one by one. For instance, Ukraine said that it wanted independence. Gorbachev opposed this demand, but Yeltsin accepted it. After a couple of days, Gorbachev also expressed his agreement, mostly because of the pressure from the West and its media! This also happened with regard to other republics of the Soviet Union.
Finally, in December 1991, Gorbachev resigned from his post as General Secretary of the Communist Party, and this signaled the dissolution of the party and collapse of communism.
This was the U.S. plan that was successfully carried out in the Soviet Union over a period of four or five years and led to the downfall of this superpower.
Now U.S. officials aim to carry out a similar plan in the Islamic Republic, but they have made serious mistakes in this regard, as realities in this country are very different from what they have in mind!
I feel great regret that Mr. Khatami, a very noble character who is totally committed to Islam and the revolution, has been compared by some Western media with Gorbachev! The fact is that Gorbachev did not have a strong belief even in the principles of Marxism. He did not approve of the system and structure of the Soviet Union as a whole. He himself had implicitly expressed this on several occasions. But our president has strong belief and conviction in Islam and the system of the Islamic Republic.
Besides, Islam is not Marxism. Communism or Marxism was not the belief of the general public in the Soviet Union, but it was only the ideology of the Communist Party, which had nearly 10 or 15 million members, while the country's population was around 300 million. Furthermore, even for the party members, the privileges that they enjoyed were more important than their ideology.
Islam is the religion of people, it is loved by people. It was for the sake of this religion that the devoted people of Iran sent their beloved children to the war fronts and did not mourn when their children achieved martyrdom, but instead praised the Almighty!
It was Islam that motivated the great Iranian nation to stage an Islamic revolution under the leadership of Imam Khomeini and establish an Islamic system in this country. Today, any vigilant and intellectual Muslim in any part of the world feels proud that the flag of Islam has been hoisted in Iran.
The next point is that the Islamic system is not similar to a communist regime. Once I told Mr. Khatami that no systems in the world, not even the Western democracies in the United States or France or elsewhere, could claim that they are as popular and as reliant on public as our Islamic system. For instance, in the recent presidential elections in the United States, less than fifty percent of the electorate went to the polls. But in the several presidential or parliamentary elections held so far in the Islamic Republic, over seventy percent of those entitled to vote have cast their votes.
It should also be mentioned that unlike the former Soviet Union, Iran is an integrated country, and its integration is, first of all, due to the religion of Islam and, in the second place, due to its history, culture, customs and traditions. Besides, the religious and spiritual leadership also plays an important role in preserving this integration.
The main task of the leader is to safeguard the Islamic system and revolution. Administering the affairs of the country has been entrusted to government executives, but it is the responsibility of the leader to supervise the performance of different government organs and make sure that they function in line with Islamic tenets and principles of the revolution.
Even under the former regimes, senior clerics and ulema were greatly respected by the Muslim people of Iran, and their directives and guidelines had a great influence on the general public. For instance, although before the victory of the Islamic Revolution, Imam Khomeini was not the official leader of this country, he was still the spiritual leader of the Iranian nation. This is why when he was arrested by the former regime in 1963, the Iranian people staged massive demonstrations in different cities in protest against his arrest and thousands of them were brutally massacred by order of the Pahlavi regime on June 5 of that year.
This kind of leadership did not exist in the former Soviet Union. If there had been such a leader in that country, he would have stopped extremists like Yeltsin and allowed the process of reforms to go forward at a rational pace. This would have prevented the collapse of the Soviet Union.
I believe reforms are necessary in our country. In fact, reforms are part of the religious and revolutionary nature of our system. If reforms are not conducted regularly, the system will deviate from its path and degenerate. Moreover, in the absence of reforms, certain social maladies like unfair distribution of wealth, poverty and brain drain will prevail. Therefore, reforms are quite essential, but some points should also be taken into consideration in this regard.
The first point is that reforms should be clearly defined, both for the officials and for the people. This definition is necessary in order to make it clear that where reforms are going to lead. In other words, we should prepare a blueprint for the reforms that we would like to conduct in our country so that Western paradigms may not be imposed on us under the guise of reforms, as it happened in the Soviet Union.
The next point is that reforms should be guided and supervised so that they may not go astray. For instance, it may be possible to do something successfully in ten years, but if efforts are made to do it in two years, irretrievable damage may result. Therefore, supervision over the process of reforms is quite necessary. It is also important to prevent radicals and extremists who act like Yeltsin from influencing the reforms process.
Another point worthy of mention is that reforms should be conducted within the framework of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic. In other words, reforms should not seek to undermine the Islamic, revolutionary and national principles that are enshrined in the constitution.
Finally, it should be stressed that reforms should be coordinated in all areas. In other words, they should go forward at an equal pace in all political, economic and social areas. It is clear that in some areas like economy it is difficult to conduct reforms at a fast pace. It is also difficult to achieve fair distribution of wealth, eradicate poverty and improve the condition of the underprivileged or reform the administrative structure in a fairly short period of time.
The reason why I stress that economy has priority is because economic reforms require much more time and energy and proceed at a relatively slower pace. But in the area that was called glasnost under Gorbachev, things are much easier to do, as it is possible to issue licenses for 20 newspapers in one day!
Reforms in all areas should be conducted at an equal pace. Otherwise, certain serious problems will arise, and some of these problems will not be so easy to solve.