Iran's hardliners tighten their
squeeze By Safa Haeri
PARIS -
As a Persian proverb says, "Never two without three."
After receiving two hard and insulting slaps in one week
by the conservative-controlled majlis, or parliament,
beleaguered Iranian President Mohammad Khatami suffered
a personal blow when one of his closest allies and
oldest friends decided to leave the cabinet.
Hojjatoleslam Mohammad Ali Abtahi, the vice
president in charge of parliamentary and legal affairs,
announced on Monday that he had submitted his
resignation from the government and was waiting for the
president to accept it.
A jovial middle-rank
cleric with an unusual sense of humor and a penchant for
sarcasm, Abtahi, who is in his 40s, explained that he
had not been able to fulfill his job of coordinating the
actions of the government with the new majlis, one that
he had sharply criticized when it came into power in May
thanks to the mass rejection of reformist candidates by
the leader-controlled Council of the Guardians, a
12-member body empowered to vet all candidates for
elections in the Islamic Republic.
"For some
time I have reached the conclusion that given the
differences between my political viewpoints and those of
the parliament, I cannot fulfill my responsibilities,"
the outspoken Abtahi told the semi-independent students'
news agency ISNA, referring to his previous attempts at
leaving the government weeks after the inauguration of
the new parliament.
A fearless critic of
the hardliners with whom he often clashed, Abtahi was
the first official to disclose that
Canadian-Iranian photographer Zahra Kazemi had been murdered in
custody after her arrest in June 2003, triggering a series
of head-on confrontations between the leader-controlled
judiciary and the executive branch of government.
Abtahi's decision came a day after the
majlis, during its October 3 session, impeached by a
large majority Road and Transportation Minister Ahmad
Khorram, charging him with mismanagement, corruption,
abuse of power, a spate of road and air accidents and
favoring foreign firms in handing out government
contracts.
The impeachment, considered a hard
blow to the embattled president, was seen by most
analysts, including Abtahi, as addressed not to the
minister but to Khatami himself, and aimed at giving
the so-called reformists their last shot.
The ousting of Khorram, the
first minister to be impeached by the hardline majlis, took
place while Khatami was in Algiers, the first leg of his
tour of Algeria, Sudan and Oman, triggering a wave of
harsh criticism, including among his own followers,
accusing him of "betrayal".
Critics
said that Khatami decided to leave the country to
escape the difficult task of personally defending
Khorram, also accused by the army of having endangered
the nation's security by awarding a foreign
firm, the Austrian-Turkish consortium Tepe Aftken-Vie (TAV),
the handling rights of all services at the half-built
Imam Khomeini International Airport (IKIA).
Inaugurated officially in May, the US$500
million IKIA had to be closed to air traffic just hours
later by the armed forces, which suspected that TAV had
contracts in Israel, the existence of which the Iranian
ruling ayatollahs do not recognize.
The closure
raised many questions, above all who ordered warplanes,
one Russian-made MiG-29 and one aging Phantom F-14, to
seal the capital's airspace and escort incoming
international flights to other airports, including one
in Esfahan, central Iran.
Under the Iranian
military command structure, such decisions are made by
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who, as the leader of the Islamic
Republic, is also the supreme commander of the armed
forces. "The question is simple: if someone except
Khamenei can order military planes [to] take off, this person
can also have access to the atomic button, the day the
regime has its nuclear weapon," warned one political
observer.
Similar charges were leveled
against the minister in charge of the awarding of a contract
to TurkCell, the Turkish company that won the bid to
become Iran's second mobile-telephone operator.
Parliament's fist major affront to the now
virtually powerless president was dealt on September 26
when lawmakers adopted a bill that forced the government
to seek the authorization of the hardline-dominated
majlis for all major contracts with foreign firms.
Significantly, it was made retroactive to include the
deals with both TAV and TurkCell. However, after
officials informed the majlis that the cancellation of
the agreements would cost Iran billions of dollars in
damages and compensation, the majlis decided to exclude
the Turkish firms.
This row broke on the eve
of an official Khatami visit to Ankara, so cabinet
decided to postpone the trip until the majlis has made
up its mind on the controversial law, which a visibly
angry president had described as "unjust and against the
constitution", a law that not only paralyzes the actions
of the government but also discredits Iran in the
international arena and scares away the very few foreign
investors willing to risk their money in Iran.
"This law, even though adopted with a tiny
majority, would leave no respect for the president of
this country. Will it not tell the world that one cannot
sign any deal with the government of Mr Khatami? With
all the enemies, the atomic problem and international
economic pressures against Iran, will not the smoke of
paralyzing the government and humiliating the president
and his cabinet in the face of the world got directly
into the eyes of the Iranian people?" Abtahi asked,
writing on his personal Internet weblog www.webnevesht.com.
Government spokesman Abodollah
Ramazanzadeh confirmed that Abtahi had discussed the issue of
his resignation with Khatami, but added that he did not
know whether the president had accepted it or not. But at the same
time, he hinted that Khatami himself intended to stay in
office until the end of his second and final term, due
next May.
Abtahi served with Khatami
when he was placed in charge of a Shi'ite mosque
in Hamburg before the start of the Islamic Revolution of
1979, and has remained with him ever since, following
Khatami in the now-hardline daily Kayhan, then in the
Islamic Culture and Guidance ministry, in the National
Library and finally in the presidency, where he held the post
of the president's secretary during Khatami's first
term from 1997-2001, before being made a vice president.
Analysts say Abtahi's confrontation with
the majlis had reached a critical point, and even if he
had not resigned, lawmakers would have forced Khatami to
boot out Abtahi, one of their most hated opponents.
Though Khatami has seen other close friends and
confidants, such as Hojjatoleslam Abdollah Nouri, his
first Interior minister, and Ayatollah Mohajerani, in
charge of Islamic Culture and Guidance, forced to leave
the cabinet, the loss of Abtahi will cause Khatami to
lose even more public respect, pundits predict.
According to observers, what the hardliners
are doing is drying the roots of the reformism movement,
and sowing in their place the seeds of neo-conservatism,
a movement best embodied in Ayatollah Ali Akbar
Hashemi Rafsanjani, the head of the Assembly for Discerning
the Interests of the State (ADIS, or Expediency Council),
and Hojjatoleslam Hassan Rohani, the powerful secretary
of the Supreme Council on National Security and Iran's
senior negotiator on the country's controversial atomic
project.
Safa Haeri is a Paris-based
Iranian journalist covering the Middle East and Central
Asia.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd.
All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for
information on our sales and syndication policies.)
