Rafsanjani Cuts Hard-Liners Out of Iran Cabinet

Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani moved abruptly Saturday against hard-line opposition, dumping his prime political rival as interior minister and bringing in new, moderate faces.

Rafsanjani’s refusal to retain Ali Akbar Mohtashemi as the minister in charge of police and revolutionary committees came in the face of a parliamentary petition to keep him on, according to a report of the Iranian national news agency monitored here.

The report said that 138 parliamentary deputies, a thin majority of the 270-member assembly, signed the petition to retain Mohtashemi, a strict fundamentalist reputed to have firm ties to the Hezbollah (Party of God) movement in Lebanon. Hezbollah factions hold the 14 Western hostages there, Western intelligence officials say. There was no indication what, if any, effect the change would have on the hostages.

Throughout last spring, in the months before the death of Iran’s revolutionary leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the pragmatic Rafsanjani was locked in a rivalry with Mohtashemi and other hard-liners for political power in Iran. Passing over the interior minister for reappointment was a bold and potentially explosive political move.

Rafsanjani had already engineered a reorganization of government that gave him expanded powers in the presidency to which he was elected July 28. The revamped structure also eliminated the position of prime minister, held by another rival, Hussein Moussavi, who now, like Mohtashemi, is out of a job. Also passed over for reappointment was Security and Intelligence Minister Mohammed Mohammedi-Reyshahri.

According to the news agency report, the deputies’ petition pointed out that the “presence of powerful personalities in the future Cabinet is inevitable.” In advocating Mohtashemi’s retention, the petition made note of the “sensitivity of the arrogant world”--the United States--to developments in Iran.

A spokesman for the Moujahedeen opposition, speaking by telephone from Baghdad, Iraq, said that the session was stormy, according to the group’s reports from Tehran. He also said that Iran’s new spiritual leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was consulted on only three of Rafsanjani’s appointments and that one of those was the interior post.

According to the Tehran reports, ministerial appointments will have to be confirmed by the Parliament, which took on a more hard-line character in the last national elections.

Rafsanjani’s choice for interior minister, disclosed after the petition was read in Parliament, is Abdullah Nouri, who was once Khomeini’s representative to the Revolutionary Guards, the elite military units charged with defending the government. In the late stages of the eight-year war with Iraq, Rafsanjani was acting commander of the guards.

Nouri is a representative from Esfahan and a Muslim clergyman, and he headed the parliamentary planning and budget committee.

In all, more than half of the Cabinet ministers were dropped in favor of new men. Many of Rafsanjani’s choices are technocrats, apparently selected to help the new president in his avowed No. 1 priority, reviving the war-devastated economy.