The Iranian parliament yesterday approved a draft bill which challenges the Islamic Republic's revolutionary ideology and policy.
The bill aims to attract foreign investment to boost the country's troubled economy. The legislation is intended to assure firms their investments will be protected and their assets will not be nationalised. Foreign companies, who dominated the economy during the reign of the Shah, were nationalised after the 1979 Revolution. Since then Tehran has been reluctant to sacrifice its economic independence by allowing foreign firms to return. However, the bill includes an article which bans the granting of monopolistic privileges or concessions to foreign companies.
Opponents claimed the bill endangers Iran's independence and national security. Those speaking in favour argued that foreign investment would create employment, produce growth and enhance productivity. With Iran's unemployment running at 20 per cent and rates of growth and productivity falling, the country desperately needs major injections of foreign capital. Since reformist President Muhammad Khatami took office three years ago he has greatly improved Iran's attractiveness to foreign firms investing in the oil and gas sector but major changes are required in the areas of taxation, labour legislation and repatriation of profits. Until the reformists captured the Majlis (parliament) in spring of this year, reforms were blocked by conservative clerics committed to the status quo.
Now that the investment bill has passed its first reading, it will have to be adapted and adopted by parliament and then submitted to the conservative-dominated Council of Guardians which could declare it "unIslamic".
However, growing popular demands for jobs and improvements in the standard of living make it all the more difficult for the conservative clerics to continue obstructing the reforms set out in last year's five year plan.
This bill was the second major challenge mounted this week by the reformist Majlis majority. An earlier bill forbids the security forces from entering university campuses as they did last summer, sparking rioting which left one student dead.
It would seem that Iran's reformists have decided to confront the conservatives on a range of issues with the object of breaking their grip on the levers of power.
