Reformers Hold Firm - TehranBureau\The Nation

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Reformers Hold Firm
By ROBERT DREYFUSS | 6 July 2009

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Efforts by the Ahmadinejad-Khamenei regime to silence the opposition clearly aren’t working yet. The street protests, brutally suppressed, have quieted. But the political opposition continues to build.

Most important, none of the oppositionists are backing down. Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mehdi Karroubi, and former President Khatami have all continued to press their challenge to the regime. According to a reformist newspaper in Iran, Etemad-e-Melli, Mousavi is planning to organize a political party that can carry the movement forward. (There are, in Iran, no real political parties. In the election, although Mousavi ran with the support of the reformist establishment, students, the business class, women, and other constituencies — including many clerics — he did not have a political party to support him, with offices in cities and provinces and a staff.)

Mousavi also laid out a detailed challenge to the fraudulent, June 12 presidential election, in a 24-page document issued Saturday. He pointed out that the interior minister, who counted the votes, and the head of the Guardian Council, who certified the bogus result, are both close allies of Khamenei and Ahmadinejad who’d endorsed the president’s reelection. He noted that the commanders of the Revolutionary Guard had said they wouldn’t accept anyone but Ahmadinejad. And he charged that twenty million extra ballots were printed. Amid charges that he is a traitor and threats to arrest him, Mousavi’s latest moves show that he isn’t giving up.

Meanwhile, Rafsanjani — reportedly still busily rallying clerics to support an effort to overturn the election — met in public with relatives of those arrested in the regime’s post-election crackdown, a defiant act that raises his profile.

And Khatami issued a blistering statement about the fraud and the subsequent crackdown: “Many people voted because we called for a high turnout. With this result and the way of confrontation (with post-election protests) you can be sure that even us (reformers) cannot ask people to take part in the next election. …

“If you want to calm the atmosphere, why are you carrying out mass arrests? Oppressing people will not help end the protests. If these people have committed crimes, why are their legal rights as citizens not preserved, why don’t they have access to a lawyer, why are they not tried in a court, why haven’t they been charged?”

And he blasted the circus-style “confessions” by those under arrest: “Obtaining confessions in front of cameras is a useless old method. Confessions under pressure are not valid.”

Most stunning, and widely reported, is the fact that a leading clerical body in Qom, Iran’s religious capital, issued a strong statement calling the election a fraud. The statement, from the Association of Researchers and Teachers of Qom — a mainstream group that includes many reformists in its ranks — said: “Candidates’ complaints and strong evidence of vote-rigging were ignored. … Peaceful protests by Iranians were violently oppressed. Dozens of Iranians were killed and hundreds were illegally arrested. The outcome is invalid.”

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More: http://tehranbureau.com/reformers-hold-firm-iran/

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