January 03-2014
The Majlis voted last week to take up a bill to look into moving the capital to some other city.
The vote came after the Rohani Administration announced it was firmly opposed to the entire idea of moving the capital.
The vote last Tuesday was not on approving the bill but on agreeing to take it up. The vote was 110 in favor and 67 opposed with 10 abstentions.
This was a vote on “first reading.” In the rest of the world, votes are not taken on first reading. In the United States, for example, a member of Congress simply files a bill and it is automatically part of official business. “First reading” simply means a bill is being introduced.
It wasn’t known how the 30 Majlis deputies from Tehran voted. They were presumably among the nay votes, but all votes in the Majlis are anonymous so there is no way to know how an individual member voted.
A few weeks ago, a Majlis deputy said a committee reviewing the issue had decided the capital should be moved to Arak. But the bill taken up last week does not name any location. It does not even make moving the capital a policy. It merely sets up a commission to study the issue, its costs and its benefits and to report back in two years.
Speaking on behalf of the Administration, the deputy to the president for parliamentary affairs, Majid Ansari, dismissed the whole idea of moving the capital as “not viable.” He said it would be far too expensive to move the capital and called it disruptive. “Can we forcibly relocate all civil servants and ministries to another place?” he asked.
The most recent country to move its capital was Germany, which in the 1990s shifted the government over a period of a few years from Bonn to Berlin. In recent years, Kazakhstan and Nigeria have also moved their capitals from the fringe to the center of their geography.
Hossain-Ali Amiri, the deputy interior minister for parliamentary affairs, said the government believes the bill violates Article 75 of the Constitution, which requires that all bills to raise expenditures identify the source of the revenues to be used. However, the bill taken up last week mandates only minor expenditures for the study commission.
The arguments for moving the capital center on Tehran’s congestion—severe pollution, rising crime, traffic jams and assorted other problems related to over-population. Opponents of the bill said it might reduce the population of Tehran by a few million of its 8.3 million people, but would leave an immense city behind while doing nothing to solve pollution, crime or traffic problems.
Some proponents of the bill argued that Tehran is far overdue for an earthquake, justifying a move. Critics asked why proponents of the bill wanted to abandon Tehranis to their deaths in an earthquake. Others said almost the entire country is an earthquake zone and moving wouldn’t save government employees. (Shiraz, which was briefly the capital of Iran under the Zand Dynasty from 1750 to 1781, is the only large city never to have suffered a major earthquake.)
Tehran became the capital in 1795 as the new Qajar Dynasty was taking power. More than 10 percent of the country’s population lives in Tehran itself while about 14 million or about 18 percent of the population lives within the metropolitan area.
Many opponents described the location of the capital as one of the core policies of the government and therefore under the control of the Supreme Leader and not the Majlis—although the Supreme Leader has never claimed exclusive control over the location of the capital despite decades of discussions about moving elsewhere—discussions that predate the revolution.
Majlis Speaker Ali Larijani opposed the bill as well, largely over the cost of moving. He also said the Council of Guardians was likely to veto the bill because the projected cost of the move was not included in the bill text.
The bill says Iran’s “political and administrative” capital is to be moved, but not its commercial and cultural activities. That would make Iran more like the United States and a handful of other countries (for example, Brazil, Canada and Australia) where all major activities from finance to film, from commerce to culture are not centered in the political capital.
