World Notes IRAN

With halting steps, the pallid but ever fierce Iranian leader Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, 86, last week stepped out of his long seclusion. He appeared at the Jamaran mosque outside Tehran, where he made a speech to mark the eighth anniversary of the Shah's overthrow.

The aging Ayatullah's hermetic existence had fueled rumors recently that he was near death. He had not been heard in public since November. But last week Khomeini gave a clear and steady 17-minute talk exhorting his followers to defeat Iraq in the bitter gulf war. Said he: "Almost every day, many children and old men see their homes fall in on them. But as soon as they clamber from the rubble, they speak of the need to make war until victory."

A United Nations report last week showed another side of Khomeini's revolution. It charged that the government had executed at least 7,000 opponents. On that subject the Ayatullah had nothing to say.