Majlis’ Third Day of Deliberations on Rowhani’s Cabinet Designees

Rooz Online

The Iranian parliament, the Majlis, continued its deliberations over Hassan Rowhani’s proposed cabinet nominees for the third day yesterday. This session had more interesting issues related to peripheral issues not related to the content of the debates. The Speaker of the assembly repeatedly called on the representatives to keep the order of the house, be courteous, and pointed out to the numerous grammatical mistakes in the sentences of the speakers.

In a related development, the ministry of intelligence issued a clarification statement over the remarks made earlier by Ishaq Jahangiri in the Majlis, according to which the ministry has provided its responses to the questions that Mr. Rowhani raised regarding the nominees.

One observation that emerged from yesterday’s debate was that the word “sedition”, which is regularly used by regime loyalists against those who protested the official results of the 2009 presidential election, was used much less frequently than it had been in the two earlier sessions. The number of opposing comments against cabinet nominees Akhoondi and Hojjati turned out to be much less than expected during the actual voting.

In the first day of the debate on the cabinet nominees, principlists, the conservative hardline loyalist group used the term sedition more than 1,600 times during their speeches and remarks over the candidates. This trend resulted in the deputy speaker’s request that journalists leave the session and a warning on the use of the message, which brought some results and the frequency of its usage dropped.

Another feature of yesterday’s debates was the challenges that were made over Mostafa PourMohammadi, the nominee for the ministry of justice. Prior to the session and based on earlier comments, it was expected that he would have a hard time getting the necessary votes for his confirmation, something that he himself acknowledged. But it turned out quite the opposite. When his own turn to speak came, he declared that he had been under the impression that he would have a smooth day for his vote because he had been the choice of all the three branches of government. He said he was surprised at the volume of criticism against him.

An interesting point was that Mehdi Kootchakzadeh, a member of the conservative and pro-Ahmadinejad faction known as the Jebhe Paydari – Steadfast/Resistance Front joined the opponents of PourMohammadi. He had been mostly absent in the earlier two sessions of the Majlis but this time accused PourMohammadi of financial corruption.

This accusation however was not new as PourMohammadi had been accused of embezzlement of 18 billion Toman (a US Dollar is about 3,200 Toman in the open market) when he was the minister of the interior. Majlis deputies repeated these charges yesterday.

In his presentation and defense, PourMohammadi compared himself to the one of the first leaders of the Islamic republic, Mohammad Beheshti, who was also the first minister of the judiciary and even claimed that a court had ruled him innocent of the charges. Turning to Kootchakzadeh, he said that if he was right in that there was corruption and injustice in Ahmadinejad’s administration then he would accept all the charges against him. In his talk, he said that he intended to become the “Mr. Justice“ of Ira, a remark that was immediately picked and rapidly spread in the blogosphere. Rowhani’s inclusion of PourMohammadi’s name in his to-be-cabinet also brought forth strong attacks on liberal and human rights groups because of his role the execution of political prisoners in the summer 1988 on the eve of Iran’s acceptance of UN Security Council resolution 598 that ended the 8-year Iran-Iraq war, and also his role in the murder of Iranian intellectuals knows as the serial murders. PourMohammadi defended his role in attacking dissident media and said he was proud of his record.

The other issue in yesterday’s debates was the wide incorrect use of the Persian language. A Majlis speaker who was speaking against Akhoondi, for example, made some serious grammatical mistakes in his speech.

During the debates, Majlis representatives present in the hall repeatedly got up from their seats when other representatives spoke in favor or against cabinet nominees. The Speaker of the Majlis on a number of occasions warned representatives to remain seated but some continued to occupy the seats of the cabinet ministers who at the time were at the podium, thus denying them their designated seats.

Majlis representatives engaged in loud chants of support or opposition when representatives spoke in favor or against the nominees, disrupting the scheduled activities. Some of the comments by the nominees brought attention to those present. For example, Ali Rabii, the designee for the ministry of labor said that the many of the retirement funds in the country had gone bankrupt. Ghorbani who spoke against Nematzadeh, the designee for the ministry of industry and mines, said that the high pollution of Tehran’s air had resulted in the doubling of the number of abortions and the thirty percent rise in children’s afflicted to asthma.