TEHRAN, 4 October 2004 — Iran’s parliament dealt a fresh blow to the government of President Mohammad Khatami yesterday by voting unanimously to impeach his accident-prone transport minister.
Deputies in the Majlis, controlled by a coalition of hardliners and conservatives, accused Ahmad Khorram of corruption and failing to tackle mounting carnage on the nation’s transport system and blasted him for awarding an airport operating contract to a foreign consortium.
Of the 258 deputies present in the 290-seat Majlis, 188 voted in favor of sacking the minister, 58 against and the rest were undecided. The result of the vote was greeted with a loud cheer of “Allahu Akbar” (God is Greatest) from many MPs.
Khorram, who took over the portfolio after fellow reformist Rahman Dadman died in a plane crash four years ago, is the first minister in Khatami’s embattled government to be ousted by the new parliament.
The new speaker of the Majlis, Gholam Ali Hadad-Adel, said the move did not mean deputies were embarking on a purge of the moderate executive.
The second and final term of Khatami and his government ends in June 2005.
“Whatever the decision of the Majlis, it does not mean that we do not want to work with this government,” he said prior to the vote — even though several deputies said afterward that Khorram was only the first of several who could go.
Khatami, currently on a state visit to Algeria, had stood by Khorram.
Throughout the day, deputies bombarded Khorram with complaints over mounting road accidents, plane crashes, overspending and mismanagement. Conservative MP Ali Ahmadi complained that in the current Iranian year, which began on March 20, road accidents were already up 24 percent.
Khorram was accused of “tarnishing the Islamic Republic of Iran’s reputation” after he handed a $200-million airport contract to Turkish-led consortium Tepe-Akfen-Vie.
Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport was shut down in May by the Revolutionary Guards, who said the contract was a threat to national security because the operators were foreign and also had business dealings with Israel. According to several deputies, Khorram had shown an “unnecessary inclination toward foreign companies.” Deputies voted last week to give themselves a veto power over the contract.
Another MP, Mohammad Reza Mir Tajedini, blasted what he said was a “waste of public funds”, noting the inauguration ceremony for the airport in February had cost 18 billion rials ($205,000).
Khorram was also accused of forking out nearly $3,200 for an office desk.
And female MP Fatemeh Adjorlou said a high turnover of management at the Transport Ministry had led to “a rise in accidents, including that of Neishabour”.
In February, 289 people were killed and hundreds of others injured when rail wagons loaded with an explosive cocktail of fuel, fertilizer and industrial chemicals rolled away from a station and crashed in Neishabour in northeast Iran. Khorram apologized after the disaster, but resisted pressure to step down.
In a one-and-a-half hour presentation of his record, the minister refuted the allegations and asserted that the country’s development was impossible without foreign investment. “People don’t ask us to walk anymore, they ask us to run.
“And without international resources, it is impossible,” asserted the minister, who has linked the campaign against him to hard-liners hostile to foreign investment that threatens their own business interests.
