TEHRAN - A fire at Iran's fourth biggest refinery in the central city of Arak has killed five people and left an unspecified number injured, state-run Tehran radio said on Saturday.

It said a kerosene leakage on Thursday evening led to an explosion and a fire which was put out after two hours. The official news agency IRNA earlier said the fire was caused by a gas leak at the isomax unit of the refinery.

The agency said the fire broke out while the unit was being repaired. It did not indicate how overall production was affected or how long the unit would be closed.

A Monstrous Life, Israeli Radio, September 12 

Abbas Mir Hosseini, deputy from Zabol, in Sistan and Baluchistan province, harshly criticized the status quo in remarks made in the Iranian parliament before the official order.

He said: "What has badly hurt, depressed and concerned the people today is not the shortages, high prices, inflation, and economic problems, but a monster that has overshadowed their lives: the monster of injustice, discrimination, ignorance, embezzlement and abuse of government resources, lack of attention to their needs and the ill-treatment of the public by government bureaucracy ."

200,000-Plus Troops In Gulf War-Games, Reuter, September 20 

TEHRAN - More than 200,000 Iranian troops will soon take part in the final phase of war-games in the Gulf, a ground forces commander said on Sunday.

The exercises were aimed at using the experiences of Iran's war with neighboring Iraq from 1980-88 and passing them on to younger forces, the acting commander said.

Tehran newspapers reported earlier that airborne troops parachuted an armored reconnaissance vehicle from a C-130 transport plane at an altitude of 6,500 meters (21,325 feet) during the war-games.

Overview

... For all the optimism surrounding [Mohammed] Khatemi -- a former culture minister known for his relatively tolerant attitudes toward the outside world -- and the overwhelming popular mandate that swept him into office, few neighboring countries are rushing to embrace the new Iranian government.

Like Washington and other Western capitals, moderate and pro-Western governments in the Middle East remain deeply concerned over the continued influence of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, an arch-conservative who retains dominion over Iranian foreign policy and the allegiance of many lawmakers in parliament.

They also caution that any warming trend could be abruptly reversed if the United States determines that Iran had a hand in the truck bombing of the Khobar Towers housing complex near Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, that killed 19 American service personnel in June 1996...

"I cannot disregard the basic difficulties that his team could have in achieving a breakthrough on the core issues of the revolution," said [David] Menashri [a professor of Middle Eastern studies at Tel Aviv University and a scholar of Iranian politics]. "If there's one issue on which Khatemi is different, it's basically on culture, not foreign policy . . ."

Officials from pro-Western Arab countries espouse the same cautious view. "Okay, fine, he might be a moderate within the ruling structure of Iran, but is he a moderate" in any other context? asked an Arab diplomat from a Persian Gulf country. "Our approach to the Iranians has been that we really don't care what they say, we care what they do."

Arab governments accuse Tehran of trying to export its revolution through support for Islamic militant groups such as Hezbollah, or Party of God, whose military wing has been linked to terrorist activities worldwide and is the main Shiite Muslim force fighting Israeli troops in south Lebanon.

If the West and its regional allies seem reluctant to move too quickly to embrace the new Iranian government, that is largely because of their experience with Khatemi's predecessor, Hashemi Rafsanjani, who stepped down last month after two four-year terms. Though widely perceived as a moderate, Rafsanjani could not escape the suspicion that he, too, sanctioned terrorism after a German court concluded that Tehran had ordered the 1992 assassination of Kurdish opposition figures at Berlin's Mykonos restaurant.

... And some analysts caution that any changes in the relationship between Tehran and its traditional Arab rivals are still more cosmetic than substantive.

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