KHAMENEHE'I FURTHER COMPLICATED PRESIDENT’S OATH TAKING CRISIS
By Safa Haeri, IPS Editor with reports from Tehran
PARIS 6 Aug. (IPS) Ayatollah Ali Khamenehe'i further complicated Sunday the dispute between the Legislative and the Judiciary by ordering the Expediency Council to see into the matter.
The Assembly for Discerning State’s Interests, or the Expediency Council (EC), the highest arbitration body in the theocratic Iran, is to sit down today in a extraordinary session to debate the crisis that led to the unprecedented decision of the leader of the Islamic Republic to postpone the President’s oath taking in the Majles, or the parliament.
Hojjatoleslam Mohammad Khatami was to take oath Saturday, but after the
Majles rejected twice all but one of the candidates proposed by the Judiciary as
new jurists to the twelve-members GC, the leader ordered the House to delay the
swearing in ceremonies sine die, invoking "ambiguities" in the
Constitution that stipulates members of
the GC must be present at the function, without specifying whether it means all
the members or not.
Mr. Khamenehe'i’s controversial order reached the Majles hours after the Speaker, Hojjatoleslam Mehdi Karroubi had announced that Mr. Khatami would take oath as scheduled, meaning that there was no constitutional obstacle to the event.
It was the second time in the past year that the leader had directly interfered in the internal affairs of the reformist-dominated Majles, taking the side of the Judiciary he controls. Last August, Mr. Khamenehe'i had ordered lawmakers to stop at once debating a bill aimed at revising a very unpopular law limiting the freedom of the press.
"Given the fact that the Islamic Consultative Council (Majles) has not reached a quorum over the election of the lawyers to the Guardians Council and due to the constitutional ambiguity (thereof), it is required the swearing-in ceremonies are postponed until the legal ground is reinstated", Ayatollah Khameneh’i said in his short letter to the Speaker.
The today session of the EC was called after Mr. Khamenehe'i had urged Sunday the Assembly’s Chairman Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani to review the row between the two antagonists powers and inform him of the decision for last arbitration, paving the way for Hojjatoleslam Mohammad Khatami’s official inauguration.
But analysts unanimously observed immediately that past experience has shown that the EC or the leader had always favoured the conservatives over the reformists when called for arbitration
The leader’s decision to refer the dispute to the EC shows that after a short spat during which he had swung to the side of the embattled President, he has come back among his folks, meaning the conservatives, some of them having "defected" him to side with the former president Hashemi-Rafsanjani as the new flag-bearer of the anti-reform extremists.
Jurists and experts said the leader’s first decision to postpone the oath taking had no legal grounds, as on several occasions in the past, the GC had made decisions without the presence of all its members.
Pointing out that the confirmation of new GC jurists had nothing to do with the oath taking, Mr. Ahmad Salamatian, a respected Paris-based political analyst accused Mr. Khamenehe'i of having created the present crisis "deliberately" in order to further weaken the Majles.
"Referring the dispute to the EC after having triggered it translates an effort aimed at giving the EC more influence and place the Majles under the EC’s tutorship instead of solving the crisis", Mr. Salamatian noted in an interview with the Persian service of Radio France Internationale.
Mr. Mohammad Mehdi Khalaji, an independent journalist and commentator who also lives in Paris said that from the outset, the conservative’s had orchestrated the constitutional scenario in order to give Mr. Khamenehe'i an occasion to decide in place of the Majles.
"By rejecting, rightly though, the jurists suggested by the Judiciary Chief, the reformist law-makers have also raised against Mr. Khameneh’i himself, not only weakening further the position of the leader, but also damaging his personal credit and power, reducing him to the lamed leader of one unpopular faction", he commented to the Persian service of the BBC.
The battle between the Judiciary and the Legislative worsened on Sunday after the Iraqi-born Ayatollah Mahmood Hashemi-Shahroodi cold shouldered a compromise offered by Mr. Karroubi calling for the formation of a special delegation, made of representatives of the Judiciary, the Legislature and the leader, to settle the difference in order to enable the parliament "to hold the swearing-in of the president as soon as possible".
Replying to the Speaker's letter on the issue of dispute, Mr. Hashemi-Shahroodi said uncompromisingly that Majlis should end the row by electing two out of the four lawyers he has already introduced to the parliament, adding that he was unwilling to change the list of the candidates, which he had submitted to parliament.
The 225 deputies present in parliament unanimously rejected all the candidates on Shahroudi's list, including the Judiciary’s spokesman Hojjatoleslam Mir Mohammad Sadeqi and except Mr. Ibrahim Azizi, during a special Saturday afternoon session on the ground that they are unknown, not qualified and belonging fully to one political current, meaning the conservatives.
"We are not duty bound to vote for every person who is introduced," speaker Karrubi told parliament on Sunday. "In such a case, voting would be meaningless."
The 12-member Guardian Council, comprising of six senior clerics appointed by the leader and six jurists elected by the Majles, supervises the strict conformity of laws passed by the parliament with the Islamic canons and wets all candidates to different elections.
Khatami, the Islamic Republic’s fifth elected president, won the June presidential elections with a landslide of 77 percent of the vote against nine other mostly conservative challengers.
"At the heart of the matter is a struggle between one person empowered with unlimited, absolute powers in the one hand and elected institutions on the other, creating such an ubuesque situation where the President’s swearing in ceremonies attended by hundreds of Iranian and foreign dignitaries and members of the press is being hostage to that autocratic person’s ego to have the Majles at his feet", pointed out another commentator asking for anonymity. ENDS OATH TAKING CRISIS 6801