Rebels With a Cause.

IRAN'S YOUNG PEOPLE ARE LEADING A MOVEMENT TO OVERTURN A HARD-LINE GOVERNMENT

Wrapped in long black chadors, cloaks that cover their hair and the shape of their bodies--but with their sneakers peeking out impertinently from underneath--the young women in Tehran's Shirody Sports Stadium scream out the name of their hero.

"Khatami! Khatami!" they yell, invoking the name of Iranian President Mohammed Khatami. "Khatami, we love you!"

From across the basketball court, a legion of young men in blue jeans and casual shirts take up their chant, stamping their feet and thrusting their fists into the air with the same loud excitement. "Greetings to Khatami!" they yell. "Yes, we love you!"

President Khatami was not physically present in the cavernous stadium for this mid-February campaign rally, which like all public events in Iran seated unmarried men and women separately so as not to offend the religious authorities. But he was present in spirit. This 51-year-old Muslim scholar breaks the tradition of stern Iranian rulers with his gentle smile and his talk of increasing his people's personal freedoms. And he has given many of the country's young people an opportunity to be heard about the future of their nation.

In return, they have enthusiastically granted the President a mandate for change, along with the adulation usually reserved in the West for rock stars and movie idols. Iran's youth, who can vote at age 16, have helped transform the political landscape in this often-dreary and straitlaced nation. This happened first in May 1997, with the surprise landslide election of Khatami, and then on February 18, with the election of a reformist parliament.

A SWEEPING VICTORY

When the votes were counted in the first round of voting last month, the reformers had won 73 percent of the seats. In Tehran, the capital, 29 of 30 parliamentary seats were won by pro-Khatami candidates. Most political analysts predict that this commanding majority will allow the government to relax many of the restrictions imposed by previous, conservative-dominated parliaments in the fields of culture, economy, and law.

"Our youth culture has become politically mature," says Ali Reza Haghighi, an Iranian journalist who actively supports Khatami. "They are making history."

The demands of Iran's young people may not seem extraordinary, but they amount to a rebellion against the system. Young people say they want the insular economy to open up to the outside world and so create decent jobs for the legions of university graduates. They want the freedom to choose whatever movies and videos they wish to see, to read a variety of political opinions, and to practice their Islamic religion according to their hearts and not the orders of the government.

"We want the pro-Khatami faction to help him accomplish his program," explains Bentolhoda Jamshidi, 19, a theater student at Tehran University who came to the stadium pep rally with a photo of the president taped to her head scarf. "We don't expect everything to happen right away, since there are still a lot of pressure groups that won't make it easy for him. The most important change that could happen is a more open political atmosphere--something to give us the space to breathe."

Iran has become a country of young people chafing under the stifling rules that a clique of hard-line religious leaders have imposed for more than 21 years. Of its 60 million people, 45 million are younger than 25 years old. A whopping 14 percent of the population are high school students. That means that the majority of Iranians were not born or were small children at the time of the Islamic revolution in 1979 that changed the country from a monarchy to a theocracy ruled by religious clerics.

OPPOSITION TO THE SHAH

Before the revolution, Iran was ruled by a shah, or king. Fewer than half of all Iranians could read or write. Economic power was in the hands of a wealthy elite. In the name of modernization, the shah had outlawed the chador, the traditional covering that Iran's conservative Muslim clerics say all women should wear.

Led by the anti-Western cleric, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and carried out by Iran's restless students of that time, the revolution created a new order aimed at replacing all that Khomeini declared to be "nonreligious" and making the powerless powerful. But the new constitution they created gave supreme power to a senior Muslim cleric--first Khomeini and now his successor, Ayatollah Ali Khameini. Although the president is the nominal head of government, the supreme religious leader controls the military and security forces, as well as foreign policy. Special clerical courts can jail journalists and others who criticize the system. Vigilantes, authorized and paid by the religious hierarchy, can arrest women whose clothing they deem un-Islamic and young people who possess banned Western music.

Khatami offers a different vision of how government should operate. He wants to create the rule of law, meaning that the courts and the police that now operate independently of the President must be made responsive to the elected government. And he favors increased personal freedoms.

SIGNS OF CHANGE

A taste of what might come is already evident in the streets of Tehran and other big cities. Since Khatami's election, dozens of new newspapers featuring articles critical of the system have sprung up. There are Internet cafes where men and women sit side by side surfing the Web, heedless of the government censors who try to control the news from the outside world. Many young women now go out in coats that reach only to their knees, showing off their tight jeans, and wear their scarves far back on their heads to display their hair.

"I don't care about ideology and all that kind of thing," says Mohsen Ahmedi, 20, who peddles black-market Western medicines on a street near Tehran's 250-year-old bazaar. "I just want to have a normal life, to travel and see things, to have access to what other people in the world have."

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RELATED ARTICLE: THE COUNTRY IRANIANS LOVE TO HATE

Few Americans spend a lot of time thinking about Iran these days, but in Iran the opposite is true: whether at bitter government-organized rallies in which the crowds chant "Death to America," or at theaters with up-to-date U.S. movies, Iranians suffer a love-hate obsession with the world's only superpower.

Sometimes the contradictions can be found in the same person. "How can you shout, `Death to America!' when you're wearing blue jeans?" asks one 21-year-old woman at a recent anti-American rally, pointing to young women wearing jeans beneath their chadors.

Iran's ambivalent relationship with the U.S. has roots deep in Iranian history. In 1953, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency backed a coup that overthrew an unfriendly government and installed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as Shah, or ruler, of Iran. Pahlavi instituted land and education reforms and expanded women's rights. But he also used his dreaded secret police force to suppress dissidents opposed to his rule.

In 1979, opponents of the shah began mass demonstrations. The shah fled, and an Islamic cleric, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, seized power. In November, after U.S. President Jimmy Carter allowed the shah to enter the U.S. for medical treatment, Iranian militants seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and took 52 American hostages. Khomeini called America "the Great Satan." The hostages weren't released until January 1981.

In 1985, President Ronald Reagan authorized secret arms shipments to Iran, hoping that Iran would use its influence in the Islamic world to free hostages held by Islamic militants in Lebanon. The Reagan administration used the profits from the weapons sales to support rebels in Nicaragua, in violation of a Congressional ban. When the scheme came to light, the so-called Iran-Contra scandal led to charges of lying to Congress against high officials in the Reagan administration.

Khomeini died in 1989, and Iran slowly began to loosen up. The moderate President Mohammed Khatami, elected in 1997, has even hinted at a willingness to restore diplomatic relations with the U.S. But the U.S. says it won't normalize ties with Iran until the country drops its support for terrorist organizations and halts its efforts to build nuclear weapons.

Many Iranians say America still hasn't learned the lesson of the embassy takeover more than 20 years later. "Our message was that Iran wanted to be independent," says Abbas Dasht, a lawyer who as a teen participated in the embassy takeover. "So there cannot be any question of setting conditions for us now."

SUSAN SACHS is a New York Times correspondent based in the Middle East.