Will not Allow the Take-Over of the Experts Assembly

Roozonline - A few weeks after various reports appeared in Iranian media indicating that reformers and supporters of Rouhani’s administration had their eyes set on the next round of elections to the Assembly of Experts on Leadership – a body that is constitutionally charged with overseeing the country’s top leader and has the power to remove him – the current head of the assembly conservative cleric Ahmad Janati announced that the plans to “take over” the assembly deepen the responsibility of the council.

Speaking to a group of monitors of the assembly in the city of Mashhad, Janati said the elections to the Experts Assembly were very important because “a group is at this very moment planning to take it over, and so the members need to be awake and have insight so as to properly execute the responsibilities of the assembly.”

Janati referred to the debate over the 2008 elections and the protests that followed by saying that the Experts Assembly was “not penetrable” and described the responsibility of the body in these words: “There are currently between 300,000 to 400,000 individuals who monitor the work of the assembly so that if again a group of people attempt to declare that rigging had taken place in the election, like did during the sedition, young people would not believe them.” Sedition is the term Iranian authorities use for the protests against the rigged presidential elections of 2008.

“The only authority that can make decisions on the supreme leader is the Assembly of experts and if he loses his qualification it is the assembly that has the power to remove him or reduce his prerogatives. So now that some want to take over the assembly the duty of the members is greater than ever,” he said.

This expression of threat from reformers by Janati comes just a few months after he declared in the city of Rasht that political hardliners were active to take over the assembly. He said, “Some are making plans for the Assembly of experts. We must be careful so that they do not succeed in their evil goals.”

Khabar Online, a news website belonging to Hossein Entezami, the deputy minister of Islamic guidance in Rouhani’s administration and someone who is close to Majlis leader Ali Larijani, also publicly said that the Assembly of Experts was the new “battleground for hardline principlists and reformers.” He said that reformers had embarked on a strategy of taking over institutions “one by one,” and had specific plans to win the seats in the Majlis and the Assembly of Experts. “Grooming unknown individuals and preparing the groundwork for returning the leadership of the Assembly to its former chairman Hashemi Rafsanjani are perhaps the most specific goals of reformers.”

Rafsanjani himself had responded by saying that he intended to encourage Rouhani and seyed Hassan Khomeini to run the Assembly elections.

Such news has brought forth responses from the hardline principlists. Raja News for example, which is close to the Steadfast Front belonging to the principlists wrote that the “dangerous events of some political groups” to influence the Assembly of Experts’ elections needs to be seriously responded to.

This website quoted the supreme leader of the country ayatollah Khamenei who is reported to have said that the Assembly of Experts was off limits to political infighting but that it was a forum for work for God and the principles of the Islamic revolution. He also said it was their duty to neutralize the inimical propaganda of the enemies. He even accused some local media, without naming any, of being accomplice with the enemies of the country by spreading lies. “I warn them not to get close to the periphery of the Assembly of Experts and pursue these issues and debates in other forums,” he warned.

By Arash Bahmani