About Khordad

Khordad

Khordad was a Persian-language liberal reformist daily newspaper published in Tehran from December 1998 to November 1999. It was founded and published by Abdollah Nouri, a former interior minister and vice-president who was one of President Mohammad Khatami's closest allies, and its title invoked the 2nd of Khordad, the date in the Iranian calendar on which Khatami had won the presidency in May 1997 and which gave the wider reform movement its name. Khordad quickly became one of Iran's most popular and most outspoken dailies. It was shut down by the Special Court for the Clergy in November 1999, and Nouri was sentenced on 27 November 1999 to five years in prison and barred from journalism for five years, in a trial that gripped the nation. Its team then relaunched the paper's journalism as the daily Fath, which was itself banned in April 2000.

A Title That Named a Movement

Few newspapers have carried their politics in their name as openly as Khordad did. Khordad is the third month of the Iranian calendar, and the 2nd of Khordad corresponded to 23 May 1997, the day of Khatami's landslide election victory. The reform movement that formed around Khatami became known as the 2nd of Khordad Movement, and a daily called Khordad announced itself, before a single article was read, as that movement's paper. Reference works also noted the older resonance of the word, from Middle Persian Hordad and Avestan Haurvatat, meaning wholeness, but for Tehran readers in 1998 the meaning that mattered was the recent one: this was the newspaper of the election that had changed Iran, founded by a man who had helped to run it.

The paper's first editorial, reported by Agence France-Presse when the first edition reached Tehran newsstands on Thursday 3 December 1998, said that Khordad aimed to be the journal for men, women and children in Iran and for those beyond its borders whose hearts continued to beat for Iran, and that it wanted to promote the humanist values of Islam while remaining faithful to the aims of the revolution: independence, freedom and the Islamic republic. That formulation placed Khordad precisely within the reformist project. It did not present itself as an opposition paper seeking to overthrow the system, but as a paper arguing, from inside the revolution's own vocabulary, for freedom and humanist values within it. Its opponents in the Special Court for the Clergy later prosecuted exactly that argument as religious dissent.

Founder: From Interior Minister to Publisher

Abdollah Nouri was among the most senior figures to found a newspaper in the Khatami era. A cleric and a former senior official of the state broadcasting organisation, he had joined Khatami's cabinet as interior minister, the office responsible for internal security and for overseeing elections, until the conservative-dominated parliament forced him out in June 1998 through a censure motion amid the factional power struggle. He then served as vice-president for development and social affairs, a post that did not require parliamentary approval. French and American reporting at Khordad's launch described him as a close associate of the president, ousted by conservatives and now turning to print. The sequence mattered: a minister removed by parliament for allowing student demonstrations and for his reformist administration reappeared within months as the publisher of a daily, carrying his political argument from the cabinet room to the newsstand.

Nouri was both founder and publisher of Khordad and was described in court reporting as its publisher and editor-in-chief, personally answerable for its articles under Iranian law. The paper's editor Ali Hekmat also spoke for it publicly, for example warning in 1999 that proposed amendments to the Press Law would leave many independent newspapers unable to continue. Khordad was therefore never an anonymous commercial venture. It was the platform of a known political leader who was widely expected to lead the reformists into the February 2000 parliamentary elections, and who was believed to be a front-runner for Speaker of the Majlis. That expectation hung over everything the paper published and over the trial that destroyed it, which press-freedom observers widely viewed as an attempt to sideline Nouri before those elections.

Launch and Early Form

The first edition of Khordad hit Tehran newsstands on 3 December 1998. Agence France-Presse described it as a twelve-page colour newspaper with a print run of around 100,000 copies, figures that placed it from its first day among the capital's serious mass titles rather than among the small intellectual journals. It appeared in a crowded and brilliant season of the Tehran press. That same December, Sobh-e Emrooz, run by intellectuals and political leaders close to Khatami, also appeared, while Jalaipour's chain had already produced Jameah and Tous and was about to produce Neshat. Khordad stood apart from that chain in ownership and in character: it was not a successor title sheltering under a reserve licence, but a new paper built around a national political figure, and it behaved accordingly, as an advocate rather than only as a newsroom.

Contemporary assessments agreed on its standing. The Iranian press survey literature and later reference works described Khordad as one of Iran's most popular dailies and the country's most outspoken advocate of reform. Its popularity and Nouri's own standing reinforced each other: he was described in scholarly writing of the period as the most popular political figure in Iran after Khatami himself, and the paper gave that popularity a daily voice. In a media system where broadcasting remained under conservative control, a popular politician with a popular newspaper was a combination his opponents had strong reasons to break up, and the legal instrument that could reach a cleric-publisher, the Special Court for the Clergy, was the one eventually used.

Coverage: Reform, Rights and the Chain Murders

Khordad played a crucial role, together with Sobh-e Emrooz, in denouncing the assassinations of intellectuals and political dissidents that took place in late 1998, the killings remembered as the chain murders. Middle East Research and Information Project reporting recorded that the two papers forced the government to admit that agents of the Ministry of Intelligence had been involved in the killings, one of the most consequential journalistic achievements of the era. A newspaper less than a month old in December 1998 was thus already helping to compel the state to acknowledge crimes by its own intelligence agents. That record explains both the loyalty Khordad commanded among reformist readers and the determination of the complaints later assembled against it, which included grievances from security bodies among the plaintiffs in Nouri's case.

Beyond the murders investigation, Khordad gave space to arguments that challenged the clerical establishment's monopoly on religious and political interpretation. It published Mohsen Kadivar, the reformist cleric whose articles favouring the separation of politics from religion and comparing aspects of clerical rule unfavourably with the Shah's regime led to his own imprisonment for eighteen months in April 1999. The United States State Department's human rights reporting summarised the later indictment as alleging that Nouri had published anti-Islamic articles, insulted government officials, promoted friendly relations with the United States and given illegal publicity to the dissident cleric Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri in Khordad's pages. In his trial defence Nouri upheld the constitutional right of a variety of groups and theologians to present their views in his newspaper, which stated the paper's editorial philosophy as clearly as its first editorial had: a daily in which Iranians of differing views could argue in public.

Pressure Through 1999

Khordad published through the most violent and contested year of the press opening. In January 1999 it was among the papers attacked and threatened in the wave of intimidation recorded by the Committee to Protect Journalists. In July 1999 the closure of the daily Salam triggered student protests that became the largest anti-establishment demonstrations since the revolution, and the conservative parliament passed the first reading of amendments designed to tighten the Press Law, against which Khordad's editor Ali Hekmat warned publicly. Through the autumn the question was no longer whether the judiciary would move against Nouri's paper, but through which court. Because Nouri was a cleric, his case belonged to the Special Court for the Clergy, a body overseen directly by the Supreme Leader, not provided for in the constitution and operating outside the ordinary judiciary, whose legitimacy critics across Iran debated throughout 1999.

The trial opened in November 1999 on a 44-page indictment. The prosecutor was Mohammad Ebrahim Nekounam and the judge Mohammad Salimi, with defence counsel Mohsen Rahami. Amnesty International recorded twenty charges, including insulting government officials, while other reporting listed defaming the system, disseminating false information and propaganda against the state, insulting religious leaders and religious dissent, all based on articles published in Khordad. The plaintiffs included the Committee to Revive Moral Guidance, an intelligence unit of the security forces, the Student Basij and a conservative weekly's managing editor. Nouri was given days, not weeks, to complete his defence: the judge ended proceedings on 11 November before he had finished, allowing ten days for a written text, and the jury found him guilty of fifteen of the twenty charges on 17 November.

The Defence That Gripped the Nation

What made the Khordad case a national event was Nouri's defence. The Committee to Protect Journalists wrote that during the trial Nouri transfixed the nation with a poignant self-defence in which he sharply criticised the clerical establishment and called for more freedom in Iranian society. Voice of America reporting added that he used the trial as a platform to argue that Iran should consider improving relations with the United States and reducing the power wielded by the clergy, and that he lashed out at the court for trying to keep him out of office. Amnesty International recorded that he claimed the Special Court for the Clergy was unlawful and incompetent to try his case. Scholarly accounts preserved his constitutional argument that, under Article 107, the Leader was equal to all the people of the country in the eyes of the law, with rights and duties and no powers above those the constitution created, and therefore not above public criticism.

The defence was published as a book in Tehran in 1999 under a title rendered as The Hemlock of Reform, or Poisoning Reform, so the closing of the newspaper produced, paradoxically, one of the era's most widely discussed political texts in a different form. Khordad's final public act was therefore not an edition but a courtroom argument for the freedoms the paper had practised: plural theology, criticism of clerical power, openness toward the United States and equality before the law. The verdict answered that argument directly. On 27 November 1999 Nouri was sentenced to five years in prison, fined, barred from practising journalism for five years and disqualified from the February 2000 elections, and Khordad was ordered to close. He was jailed in Tehran's Evin Prison, and the Committee to Protect Journalists wrote to the Supreme Leader on 30 November calling for his release and for the ban on Khordad to be lifted. Neither happened on the timetable the paper's readers had hoped for, although Nouri was eventually pardoned by Ayatollah Khamenei in October 2002.

Succession by Fath

Khordad's newsroom did not disperse. The same team of journalists that had published Khordad relaunched its journalism as the daily Fath, led by publisher Yadollah Eslami, with figures including Emadeddin Baghi on its editorial board and Ali Hekmat, Khordad's editor, speaking as Fath's editor in interviews of the period. A BBC summary headline of the moment put the succession plainly, announcing Fath to replace the banned Khordad headed by the jailed former minister. Dozens of journalists and writers gathered at Khordad's building to mark the first anniversary of its print debut even after its closure, a sign of the loyalty the title retained. Fath carried the team's work into the February 2000 reformist election victory and was then banned in the general crackdown of April 2000, its licence definitively withdrawn on appeal in July 2001. Khordad's story thus had the same double ending as the other great titles of the period: a court closed the name, and the journalists continued until a wider crackdown closed the continuation as well.

Closure and Legacy

Khordad ceased publication in November 1999 and never returned. In under a year it had helped force an official admission about the intelligence ministry's role in murdering dissidents, published the clerical critics of the clerical state, survived threats, and ended in the most consequential press trial of the Khatami years. Historians of the period treated Nouri's conviction as the clearest demonstration that the judiciary could remove not only a newspaper but a leading candidate from an approaching election by prosecuting his journalism. The paper's name outlived it in the name of the movement it had served, and its record remained a standard reference in human rights reporting on Iran: the United States State Department, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Committee to Protect Journalists all preserved detailed accounts of its closure. For Tehran, Khordad remained the daily that showed how completely, in 1998 and 1999, a newspaper could become a political institution in its own right, and how completely it could be dismantled when that institution threatened the wrong election.