AYATOLLAH ALI Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader, has urged Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to remove his newly appointed first vice-president, in an embarrassing “order” to the president, a senior Iranian cleric said yesterday.
Ahmad Khatami, Tehran’s conservative Friday prayer leader, who supported the president’s “landslide” re-election, said Mr Ahmadinejad had no other choice but to “abide by the supreme leader’s view immediately”.
Some parliamentarians have said Mr Khamenei, who is supposed to have the last word in all state affairs, wrote a letter to the president last weekend urging him to remove Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, his close ally, from the post, which is essentially that of a right-hand man to the president and a position that enjoys significant authority.
It is unprecedented for a head of government to defy the supreme leader in public, yet Mr Ahmadinejad has so far shown no sign of retreating and has insisted that Mr Mashaei’s opponents do not know him well. In a defiant move, the government’s website published the official letter announcing Mr Mashaei’s appointment on Thursday. This came after a grand ayatollah in the holy city of Qom, for the first time in the three-decade history of the Islamic republic, issued a religious decree declaring the appointment of Mr Mashaei “illegitimate”.
Mr Mashaei was at the centre of controversy last year when he said the government’s position was one of friendship towards the Israeli people. He had to take back his words after Mr Khamenei intervened to rule out any such stance.
Reformists have suggested the president’s decision to promote Mr Mashaei was a tactical move aimed at distracting attention from the opposition, which has called for a campaign of civil disobedience against the “illegitimate” government after rejecting the June 12th election results as fraudulent. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009)