Iran's Supreme Leader Khamenei warns 'meddling' Western leaders

Martin Fletcher | July 07

THE Iranian Supreme Leader, assailed by some of his country's most prominent clerics and detested by millions of his ordinary citizens, has received a boost from an unlikely quarter: Joe Biden.

One day after the US Vice-President said that the US would not stop Israel bombing Iran's nuclear plants, Ayatollah Khamenei launched a fierce attack on "meddling" Western leaders, designed to rally his fractured people.

"We warn the leaders of those countries trying to take advantage of the situation: beware! The Iranian nation will react," the Ayatollah declared in a televised speech yesterday.

"The leaders of arrogant countries, the nosy meddlers in the affairs of the Islamic Republic, must know that even if the Iranian people have their differences, when your enemies get involved, the people ... will become a firm fist against you."

Tehran has backed the warning with action against foreign interests in Iran: a locally hired employee at the British Embassy, Hossein Rossam, has been arrested and faces charges of threatening Iranian national security.

Yesterday the French Foreign Minister confirmed that a French woman academic had been arrested last week on spying charges.

Ayatollah Khamenei said that interventionist comments by outside countries would have a "negative impact" on future relations with Iran; a not-so-veiled threat at a time when the West is anxious to resume negotiations to halt the Islamic Republic's nuclear program.

In recent days a succession of powerful clerics - the Grand Ayatollahs Yousof Sanei, Hossein Ali Montazeri and Jalaleddin Taheri, the former President Mohammed Khatami and the defeated presidential candidate Mehdi Karoubi - have openly challenged the Supreme Leader by refusing to accept the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

On Saturday the influential Association of Researchers and Teachers of Qom challenged the "victory" over Mir Hossein Mousavi. Yesterday the association's leader, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Mousavi Tabrizi, urged Mr Mousavi to form a political party to fight for justice. Analysts expect more clerics to speak out now they have been given a lead.

Plenty of hardline clerics still back Ayatollah Khamenei and Mr Ahmadinejad, and they control key bodies such as the Guardian Council - but the dissident clerics do matter.

Many were close to the late Ayatollah Khomeini, father of the Islamic Republic, and have impeccable revolutionary credentials. They can mobilise hundreds of thousands of followers. Their statements raise the morale of the battered opposition and further erode Ayatollah Khamenei's legitimacy.

"This is the first time so many clerics have refused to accept the leader's word," said one Iranian analyst. "His legitimacy has been destroyed, and he either has to rule by force alone or lose face and back down."

Ayatollah Khamenei, 69, was President from 1981 to 1989, and was the compromise candidate to succeed Khomeini when the Supreme Leader died in 1989. He has increasingly allied himself with hardliners and backed Mr Ahmadinejad in the presidential election of 2005 in the hope that he could be easily controlled.

"The Supreme Leader is supposed to remain above the political fray, but Mr Khamenei has shown himself to be partisan - at considerable cost to his office and himself," said the analyst.

Source: The Australian

Iran clerics declare election invalid and condemn crackdown

July 6, 2009 | Martin Fletcher

Iran’s biggest group of clerics has declared President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election to be illegitimate and condemned the subsequent crackdown.

The statement by the Association of Researchers and Teachers of Qom is an act of defiance against the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has made clear he will tolerate no further challenges to Mr Ahmadinejad’s “victory” over Mir Hossein Mousavi.

“It’s a clerical mutiny,” said one Iranian analyst. “This is the first time ever you have all these big clerics openly challenging the leader’s decision.” Another, in Tehran, said: “We are seeing the birth of a new political front.”

Professor Ali Ansari, head of Iranian Studies at St Andrews University, said: “It’s highly significant. It shows this is nowhere near resolved.”

The association’s statement also shows how deeply the political establishment is divided, and the extent to which the Supreme Leader now derives his power from military might, not moral authority. It makes it much harder for the regime to arrest Mr Mousavi and other opposition leaders.

At the weekend a top aide to Mr Khamenei demanded that Mr Mousavi and other opponents be tried for “terrible crimes”, and the elite Revolutionary Guards accused them of “trying to overthrow the Islamic establishment”.

In other developments, David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, said yesterday that he expected the eighth of the nine British Embassy employees arrested ten days ago to be released soon but a lawyer representing the ninth — a political analyst named Hossein Rossam — said he would be charged with threatening national security.

Mr Miliband expressed “cold anger” at the way the nine had been treated.

The regime freed Iason Athanasiadis, an Anglo-Greek journalist arrested on June 19. However, a lawyer for Maziar Bahari, a Canadian-Iranian journalist working for Newsweek, said he faced charges of “instigating riots and acting against national security”. The Association of Researchers and Teachers is based in Qom, the clerical nerve centre of Iran, and includes many leading ayatollahs with impeccable revolutionary credentials and big personal followings.

The association did not support a candidate in the election, but has now lined up firmly behind Mr Mousavi. In a rebuke to the regime it declared on its website: “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.”

It called on other clerics to speak out, demanded the release of all those arrested in the past three weeks, and directly challenged the authority of the Guardian Council, a body of 12 senior clerics that has openly backed Mr Ahmadinejad and his patron, Mr Khamenei. “How can one accept the legitimacy of the election just because the Guardian Council says so?,” it asked.

On Wednesday, a day after the Guardian Council said that the election result was final, Mr Mousavi talked of forming a new political grouping to fight an illegitimate government.

With the popular former president Mohammad Khatami and Medhi Karoubi, another defeated candidate, challenging the Government’s legitimacy, and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, another former president, pointedly meeting the families of those killed in street demonstrations, that coalition is beginning to take shape.

“The fact that anyone dares to condemn the election when people were calling for Mousavi and Karoubi’s heads is remarkable,” said the analyst in Tehran. “It shows there is depth to Mousavi’s support. They have not been bullied into silence, there are factions forming and this is not over.”

Mr Mousavi issued a 25-page paper detailing election abuses ranging from the printing of 14 million extra ballot papers to bribes to ballot boxes containing not a single vote for him even in his hometown.

Mr Miliband expressed fury at Mr Rossam’s detention. The charge that he had helped incite the protests had “absolutely no basis”. Mr Rossam, 44, was “an honourable, patriotic Iranian, who has been working in a completely open and transparent way for the UK”.

The European Union’s member states have protested to Iran and will consider tougher measures if Mr Rossam is not released this week. British officials are also hoping for a strong statement from Wednesday’s G8 summit.

Source: Times Online

Iran's top electoral body rules out vote annulment

Reza Pahlavi, Iran's former crown prince, becomes emotional as he talks about the uprising in Iran over the disputed presidential election, Monday, June 22, 2009, at the National Press Club in Washington. Reza Pahlavi, who was forced into exile with his father, the shah, during the 1979 Islamic revolution, has been a leading advocate of a campaign for civil disobedience against the clerical regime that has used violence to shut down mostly peaceful demonstrations.

Jun 23

By KARIN LAUB

CAIRO (AP) - Iran's top electoral body said Tuesday it found "no major fraud" and will not annul the results of the presidential election, closing the door to a do-over sought by angry opposition supporters alleging systematic vote-rigging.

Iranian government officials have repeatedly suggested that a revote is extremely unlikely. However, Tuesday's announcement by Iran's top electoral body, the Guardian Council, was the clearest yet in ruling out a new election.

The announcement on Iran's state-run English language Press TV is another sign the regime is determined to crush the post-election protests - the strongest challenge to its leadership in 30 years - rather than compromise.

Government warnings to the protesters have intensified.

Ebrahim Raisi, a top judicial official, confirmed Tuesday that a special court has been set up to deal with detained protesters. "Elements of riots must be dealt with to set an example. The judiciary will do that," he was quoted as saying by the state-run radio. The judiciary is controlled by Iran's ruling clerics.

In recent days, Iran's supreme leader has ordered demonstrators off the streets and the feared Revolutionary Guards has threatened a tough crackdown. At least 17 people have been killed in near-daily demonstrations, including at least one that drew hundreds of thousands.

In recent days, members of the Revolutionary Guard, the Basij militia and other Iranian security forces in riot gear have been deployed across Tehran, preventing any gatherings and ordering people to keep moving. A protest of some 200 people Monday was quickly broken up with tear gas and shots in the air.

In a boost for the embattled regime, Russia said Tuesday that it respects the declared election result, which the Iranian government described as a landslide victory for hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The U.S. and many European countries have refrained from challenging the election outcome directly, but have issued increasingly stern warnings against continuing violence meted out to demonstrators.

Ahmadinejad's main challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, has charged massive fraud and insists he is the true winner.

However, the Guardian Council found "no major fraud or breach in the election," a spokesman, Abbas Ali Kadkhodaei, was quoted by Press TV as saying. "Therefore, there is no possibility of an annulment taking place."

The 12-member council has the authority to annul or validate the election. On Monday, it said in a rare acknowledgement that it found voting irregularities in 50 of 170 districts, including vote counts that exceeded the number of eligible voters. Still, it said the discrepancies, involving some 3 million votes, were not widespread enough to affect the outcome.

Iran has 46.2 million eligible voters, one-third of them under 30. The final tally was 62.6 percent of the vote for Ahmadinejad and 33.75 percent for Mousavi, a landslide victory in a race that was perceived to be much closer.

According to an analysis by the British think tank Chatham House, the huge margin went against the expectation that the record 85 percent turnout would boost Mousavi, whose campaign energized young people.

Ahmadinejad won crucial backing from Russia on Tuesday, with the Foreign Ministry in Moscow saying it respects the declared election result. In a statement on its Web site, the ministry said that disputes about the vote "should be settled in strict compliance with Iran's Constitution and law" and are "exclusively an internal matter."

Russia, a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, has longtime political and economic ties with Iran where it is helping build a nuclear power plan at Bushehr. In his only trip abroad since the vote, Ahmadinejad traveled to Russia last week for a conference where he was seen prominently shaking hands with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.

Many Western democracies, including the U.S., have criticized the way in which the Iranian government has dealt with the widespread protests, and renewed Iranian government threats of a crackdown have heightened concerns.

In New York, U.N. Secretary Ban Ki-moon urged an "immediate stop to the arrests, threats and use of force," U.N. spokeswoman Michele Montas said Monday.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has called on Iran to recount the votes, but stopped short of alleging electoral fraud. French President Nicolas Sarkozy has been outspoken in his criticism of Iran's response to the demonstrations, but said doors must remain open to continue talks on the country's nuclear program.

In contrast, China, Venezuela and some other developing countries tended to be supportive of the Iranian government, whose nuclear activities, alleged involvement in terrorism and influence in regional conflicts have alarmed the West for years.

After a huge opposition rally a week ago, protests have become smaller, but demonstrators have been more willing to confront Iranian troops.

On Monday, Tehran riot police fired tear gas and live bullets to break up about 200 protesters paying tribute to those killed in the protests, including a young women, Neda Agha Soltan, whose apparent shooting death was captured on video and circulated worldwide. Witnesses said helicopters hovered overhead.

Caspian Makan, a 37-year-old photojournalist in Tehran who identified himself as Soltan's boyfriend, said she had not been deterred by the risk of joining protests. "She only ever said that she wanted one thing, she wanted democracy and freedom for the people of Iran," he told an Associated Press reporter during a telephone call from Tehran.

Severe restrictions on reporters have made it almost impossible to independently verify reports on demonstrations, clashes and casualties. Iran has ordered reporters for international news agencies to stay in their offices, barring them from reporting on the streets.

A number of journalists have been detained since the protests began, though there have been conflicting accounts. The Paris-based Reporters Without Borders put the figure of reporters detained at 34.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists said 13 were still in custody, including Newsweek correspondent Maziar Bahari.

The Iranian government must release all journalists and halt "unreasonable and arbitrary measures that are restricting the flow of information," the committee said. "Detaining journalists for reporting news and commentary indicates the government has something to hide."

Source: My Way News