The reality is that the situation in Iran has by now moved beyond the technicalities of the electoral procedures; people’s move has forced the situation into one of a crisis of legitimacy for the regime.
The Iranian people sensed a deep fracture within the ruling establishment - something that was clearly expressed in astonishing language and tone, in the televised-for-the-first time live debates between the candidates - and they have ceased their chance to use the divide between their rulers to their own advantage.
The people may have taken to the streets under the excuse of the elections, and may have been encouraged by the rhetoric of the ‘reformist’ camp in favor of some breathing room in the suffocating political and cultural atmosphere imposed on them, but they have forced the debate further. They are openly, and in millions across the country, questioning the legitimacy of the establishment, represented at the moment by Ahmadinejad. The people, in short, have moved beyond Mousavi and the reformists, but are still willing to go along with the tactics formulated by reformist leaders; for the moment.
We will see how things unfold. Most likely, a heavy hand is just around the corner, trying on some spiked gloves. For the time being, though, hundreds of thousands of people in Iran are opting not to ‘bite the bullet’ and move on, but to make a movement and, even, take bullets. A much more courageous stand that generates a lot more inspiration!
Salute!
Reza Fiyouzat can be reached at: rfiyouzat@yahoo.com
He keeps a blog at: http://revolutionaryflowerpot.blogspot.com
Iran : Students grill Moussavi about the 1988 massacre of political prisoners
Wednesday, 06 May 2009
Students grill Moussavi about the 1988 massacre of political prisonersNCRI - Students from the University of Babolsar (northern Iran) raised questions about the role of the Iranian regime’s former prime minister, Mirhossein Moussavi, in the 1988 massacre of political prisoners during his visit to the university on Monday, May 4, 2009.
When Moussavi dodged their questions, students quickly retorted by chants of “Mirhossein, give us an answer about 1988.”
Moussavi, who acted as the mullahs’ prime minister when Ruhollah Khomeini reigned as the regime’s Supreme Leader, has announced his candidacy for the mullahs’ upcoming sham presidential elections.
On Monday, one of the students asked Moussavi about kangaroo trials that issued judgments in the span of a few minutes and led to the execution of thousands of political prisoners in 1988. The student added: At the time, you were the prime minister. You were the third most powerful person in the country. What do you have to say now about your silence back then when all this was taking place? Was your silence a sign of endorsement? We want to stress again that you should explicitly respond to this question.
However, Moussavi refused to address the question directly, and as he was leaving the arena, students chanted, “Mirhossein, give us an answer about 1988.” Students also shouted slogans against other regime officials, in addition to Moussavi.
Some of their chants included, “Students die, but will never surrender,” “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: The source of discrimination and corruption,” and “Detained students must be released.”
Babolsar University students also carried placards reading, “Detained students must be released,” and “Freedom of the press is our inalienable right.”
In the course of the 1988 massacre, which is a clear example of a crime committed against humanity, more than 30,000 political prisoners, many of whom had already finished their sentences, were sent to the gallows for merely supporting, sympathizing with or being members of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI.MEK). They were executed group after group in accordance with the religious decree (fatwa) issued by Ruhollah Khomeini, the mullah regime’s founder.
http://ncr-iran.org/content/view/6314/1/
1988 executions of Iranian political prisoners
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
17th anniversary of the executions at Khavaran cemetery, one of the burial places used for the mass graves.
1988 executions of Iranian political prisoners (Persian: ۱۳۶۷ اعدام زندانیان سیاسی در تابستان) refers to the systematic execution of thousands of political prisoners across Iran by the government of Iran, starting on 19 July 1988 and lasting about five months. The main targets were the members of the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (PMOI), although a lesser number of political prisoners from other leftist groups were also included such as the Tudeh Party of Iran (Communist Party).[1][2]
The killings have been called “an act of violence unprecedented in Iranian history — unprecedented in form, content, and intensity.”[3] Estimates of the number executed vary from 8,000[4] to 30,000.[5][6]
Great care was taken to keep the killings secret, and the government of Iran denies their having taken place, but with the large scale of the operation word leaked out from survivors. Explanations offered for why the prisoners were killed vary. Perhaps the most common is that it was in retaliation for the 1988 attack on the western borders of Iran by the PMOI Mujahedin, although this happened after the executions had begun and does not explain the executions of members of other leftists groups who opposed the Mujahedin invasion. [7]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1988_executions_of_Iranian_political_prisoners
He (Mousavi) was also deeply involved in the arms-for-hostages deals with the Reagan administrations in the1980s, and was close to Manuchehr Ghorbanifar, one of the central figures in the arms-for-hostages deals.
Mousavi’s premiership also coincided with the bloodiest period of post-revolutionary internal violence against the people in Iran. Not only was the country engulfed in a World War I-type of high-fatality military conflict for eight years (which required active-to-the-point-of-forceful recruiting of people to send to the fronts), the new regime was also going through its consolidation; a period that has historically included eradication of internal opponents. During this period, thousands of dissidents were jailed, tortured and executed in summary executions after phony ‘trials’.
In one ominous event, at the conclusion of the Iran-Iraq war, in the summer of 1988, according to human rights organizations in and outside Iran, between two and five thousand political prisoners were summarily executed. Among the executed were some who had served their sentences, or could qualify for early release. But, in a deliberate move to ‘clean up’ the political prisons, the government (headed partly by Mousavi) pushed for rushed executions of thousands of these prisoners.
Robert Fisk’s World: In Tehran, fantasy and reality make uneasy bedfellows
Fantasy and reality make uneasy bedfellows, but once they are combined and spread with high-speed inaccuracy around the world, they are also lethal. Sham elections, the takeover of party offices, a massacre on a university campus, an imminent coup d’état, the possible overthrow of the whole 30-year old Islamic Republic, the isolation of an entire country as its communications are systematically shut down.
I am reminded of Eisenhower’s comment to Foster Dulles when he sent him to London to close down Anthony Eden’s crazed war in Suez. The secretary of state’s job, Eisenhower instructed Dulles, was to say “Whoah, boy!” Good advice for those who believe in the Twitterers.
But few news organisations have the facilities or the time or the money to travel around this 659,278 square-mile country – seven times the size of Britain – and interview even the tiniest fraction of its 71 million people. When I visited the slums of south Tehran on Friday, for example, I found that the number of Ahmadinejad supporters grew as Mousavi’s support dribbled away. And I wondered whether, across the huge cities and vast deserts of Iran, a similar phenomenon might be discovered. A Channel 4 television crew, to its great credit, went down to Isfahan and the villages around that beautiful city and came back with a suspicion – unprovable, of course, anecdotal, but real – that Ahmadinejad just might have won the election.
Does U.S. poll rule out fraud in Iran?
Authors of heavily-quoted poll changed their conclusion to support validity of Ahmadinejad landslide
Western media, along with thousands of Iranians protesting around the world, have formed a rough consensus over the six days since Iran’s Presidential Election that Ahmadinejad’s victory was the result of widespread fraud. However, a recent Op-Ed in the Washington Post references a rare public opinion poll in suggesting that the election may indeed have been fair. While there is not enough information to determine whether or not the election was rigged, this poll certainly doesn’t rule out the possibility. If only because the poll’s authors concluded prior to the election that the very same data predicted a relatively close vote. Yet today, those same authors are claiming that their figures demonstrate the validity of Ahmadinejad’s landslide victory.
Taking Sides in Iran
By Robert Parry
June 18, 2009There are lots of good reasons for wishing that the bombastic Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will be toppled by the political struggle playing out on the streets of Tehran, but there is still that troubling question of whether he actually won the election.
Many in the Western news media clearly have taken sides, favoring the more urbane Mir-Hossein Mousavi and the green-clad demonstrators protesting the official election results that show Mousavi losing to Ahmadinejad by a 2-to-1 margin.
Channel 4
Iran Electoral Chaos Energizes Neoconservative Hawks
by Daniel Luban (source: Anti War.Com)
Friday, June 19, 2009As U.S. President Barack Obama attempts to navigate the treacherous currents of the ongoing political crisis in Iran, he faces a heated attack on his right flank from neoconservatives and other right-wing hawks, who are urging him both to offer unequivocal support to the protesters supporting moderate presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi and to scuttle his planned diplomatic engagement with Tehran.
information of Mousavi’s premiership and the execution of communists, socialists and other dissidents have been very recently scrubbed on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir-Hossein_Mousavi
Mir-Hossein Mousavi is the reformists’ leading candidate and challenger to incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 2009 Iranian presidential election. Mousavi is not well known. But to call him a liberal is likely an overstatement. As Iran’s prime minister during the Iranian Revolution’s most formative years (1981-1989) he was a hard-liner closely allied with then-president Ali Khamenei, the current Supreme Leader, and a “firm radical,” as The Economist described him in 1988. Still, Mousavi’s 20-year absence from Iranian politics and his recent emphasis on moderation has the West, and young Iranians, beguiled.
Reformer or Chameleon? :
References to Mousavi as a “reformer” and a “moderate” have been oddly reflexive in the Western press, and particularly the American press. The characterizations are at best premature, and likely outright fabrications—unless Mousavi himself has disassembled his ideology and reconstructed it of more moderate parts.
That seems unlikely.
Mousavi’s more patrician tone and sharper intellect distance him from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and seduce a young generation that never knew his radicalism and apologies for terror and bloodshed. But his policies and ideology, his faithfulness to the Islamic revolution, his economic policies, and his anti-Americanism are all of a piece with Ahmadinejad’s. His election to the Iranian presidency may signal a change in tone, but not a change in policies.
