The diplomatic twists and turns on the fatwa have proved as complex as the plot of a Salman Rushdie novel, finds Margaret Vaughan

ONE Valentine's Day morning, a man in a baggy tweed jacket went out to do a television interview and never went home again. For nine years Salman Rushdie has not possessed a front-door key. He lives under sentence of death with a

million-pound bounty on his head.

The author of The Satanic Verses has been a hunted man since the late Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced him a dead one; the revered religious hardman of Iran issued the fatwa, a religious death threat, on February 14, 1989. The writer was condemned to death for alleged blasphemy against Islam. The fatwa said any Muslim in a position to kill Rushdie had a duty to do so.

Since then Rushdie has had round-the-clock police protection which he describes as ''like trying to move with lead boots on''. Since then a Japanese translator of the offending book has been stabbed to death, an Italian translator has been injured in a knife attack, and the book's Norwegian publisher has been shot and wounded.

Despite suggestions that the official Iranian position has softened, and in spite of more and more ''surprise'' appearances where Rushdie pops up flanked by minders with lumpy jackets, there is no clear evidence that the fugitive can even contemplate a return to normal life, whatever that might be after a decade spent in hiding from assassins.

Rushdie remains sceptical. ''My own attitude is wait and see. People seem very eager to believe that change is taking place, on very scant evidence,'' he has said, and more than once.

At the weekend he made another of his frequent ''surprise'' appearances, at a Berlin conference on persecuted writers, where he laid into the European Union for its failure to take a tough diplomatic stance against Tehran over the years. Rushdie lauded Britain's new Government for adopting a harder line (he has dined with Tony Blair and met and been photographed with Robin Cook), but attacked the German Foreign Minister for refusing to heed his pleas for help in lifting the fatwa because: ''He said he could not deform German foreign policy for the sake of one person.''

It's not hard to see why his confidence in staying alive remains as shaky as must his memory of the way home. On May 1, the Iranian Foreign Ministry issued a statement which was broadcast on the Republic of Iran Network 1. It referred to the statements made by British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook on relations between the EU and Iran, and regretted that he had chosen to raise Rushdie's case: ''This position by Britain, as the current president of EU, at a time when one should be moving towards strengthening co-operation between the EU and the Islamic Republic of Iran, is a sign of support by the European side for the war of civilisations and its confronting the world of Islam.'' Hardly a ringingly

confidence-inspiring declaration.

Cook himself has said the world should not be lulled into a false sense of security by the more moderate tone emanating from Iran since President Mohammed Khatami was elected a year ago. Evidence has yet to be offered that Iran has given up on developing nuclear weapons and ceased support for terrorists.

The Tehran government has said Muslims would be entitled to kill Rushdie - claiming the fatwa is irrevocable - but says it will not actively seek to do so.

Britain, for its part, says relations with Iran cannot be fully restored until the cancellation of the edict. Stalemate.

Strip away the diplomatic flummery and you are left wondering whether anything much has changed to inspire hope of an end to a tale with a plot which has become as dense and complex as Rushdie's richly intricate novels.

Iran wants improved ties with the EU as a vital part of its battle to end US efforts to isolate the Islamic republic. The EU opposes a US law which seeks to punish firms investing more than $20m a year in Iran's oil and gas sectors.

In February, the EU lifted a ban on Ministerial meetings with Iran which was imposed after a German court ruled last year that Iranian leaders had ordered the killing of four Kurdish dissidents in a Berlin cafe.

Even should there be some kind of clarifying of the circumlocutions in negotiations with Iran, that wouldn't necessarily end the matter. Muslim leaders around the world continue to voice fury at Rushdie, and support for the fatwa. In April, for instance, the leaders of five major Russian Muslim organisations announced they might ''take appropriate steps'' against the Limbus press publishers in St Petersburg who plan to publish The Satanic Verses in Russian. They made their threats openly at a news conference in Moscow. The chairman of the Union of Muslims of Russia and Duma called the possible publication ''an insult and a direct challenge to 20 million Russian Muslims''. And he stressed that the death sentence stood: ''Nobody can guarantee that several persons will not be found in Russia who will find it necessary to carry out the bidding of Imam Khomeini with regard to the editors and translators

of the Russian edition.''

Also in April, Muslims in Malaysia accused Rushdie of wanting to prolong the war by seeking new readers of the book, which remains banned in many countries, including India where he was born. The attack followed news that a paperback edition of the book is now in prospect.

Meanwhile, in the same month, came reports of hints from a senior United Nations official that Iran was considering new moves to break the deadlock. Maurice Copithorne, the UN's special human rights investigator for Iran, told a news conference in Geneva that he had been told that ''some progress might be possible at some time''. The previous week he had criticised Iran for refusing a written guarantee not to seek to carry out the death threat.

The previous month, UN human rights commissioner Mary Robinson met the Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister and emerged to say the Iranian government opposed the fatwa. Iranian television immediately refuted this, saying there was no change in policy. But the Iran Daily then quoted a Foreign Ministry official, saying Tehran would not support the fatwa. What was going on?

The conflicting signals might reflect a power struggle between political reformers and the fundamentalist religious leaders. Then again, it might not.

The twists and turns in the plot continue. Rushdie continues to live with the uncertainty of a future life and a succession of burly minders. It might be a picaresque life, it might not be that great a kind

of life. But as Rushdie himself wryly acknowledges, it is better than no life at all.