Iran hard-liners warn Ahmadinejad he could be deposed

Iran hard-liners warn Ahmadinejad he could be deposed

The warning over the president's defiance highlights the rift among Iran's conservatives. Meanwhile, the government says Mousavi supporters can't gather at a mosque Thursday to honor protest victims.

By Borzou Daragahi

July 29, 2009

Reporting from Beirut — Political hard-liners warned President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Tuesday that he could be deposed like past Iranian leaders if he continued to defy the country's supreme religious leader.

The implied threat was the latest evidence of the rift within Iran's conservative camp and could serve to further sap the authority of a president already considered illegitimate by reformists.

The Islamic Society of Engineers, a political group close to parliamentary speaker Ali Larijani, warned in an open letter to Ahmadinejad that he could suffer the same fate as Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, who was deposed in 1953 in a CIA-backed coup with the acquiescence of the clergy.

The letter also cites the experience of President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, who was ousted in 1981 and fled the country after he fell out with the Islamic Republic's founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Both leaders had been elected by huge margins.

"It seems you want to be the sole speaker and do not want to hear other voices," the group's letter says, noting that recent actions by Ahmadinejad have frustrated his own supporters. "Therefore it is our duty to convey to you the voice of the people."

Meanwhile, Iranians braced for another round of clashes between protesters and security personnel after the Interior Ministry rejected a request to allow supporters of opposition figure Mir-Hossein Mousavi to gather at a large Tehran mosque on Thursday. The protest is meant to commemorate those slain in the unrest that followed Ahmadinejad's disputed reelection victory over Mousavi and two other challengers in June 12 balloting.

In response to the permit denial, Mousavi's supporters began circulating routes for unauthorized marches and candlelight vigils to mark the religiously significant 40th day after the deaths of those killed at June 20 demonstrations, including Neda Agha-Soltan, whose slaying, captured on videotape, drew worldwide condemnation.

Dozens have been killed since the election and hundreds arrested, most recently including Ali Maqami, a campaigner for reformist candidate Mehdi Karroubi, who was arrested at his home Monday and taken to Tehran's Evin Prison, news websites reported.

Lawmaker Kazem Jalali said 140 prisoners arrested during the unrest had since been released and that only 200 remained in Evin, far below the number estimated by international observers.

"Those who were released had committed lighter offenses," he said, according to the semiofficial Iranian Labor News Agency.

Human rights lawyer Shadi Sadr was freed Tuesday on $500,000 bail, according to reformist websites.

But other well-known Iranian political figures remained behind bars.

Officials said supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Monday ordered the closure of the Kahrizak detention center, described by some as Iran's Guantanamo because it was not under the control of the State Prisons Organization. According to a reformist website, it has been supervised by deputy national police chief and former Revolutionary Guard commander Brig. Gen. Ahmad Reza Radan. Witnesses told Mowjcamp.com that the facility lacked proper ventilation and that prisoners were beaten by ruthless interrogators.

"The closure of Kahrizak detention center had been decided before the election, but postelection events made it necessary to keep it open," Iran's prosecutor-general, Qorban Ali Dori-Najafabadi, told local news media. "Finally, the supreme leader was informed of poor sanitation and other problems for detainees, and he ordered its closure."

Amid the uproar, Ahmadinejad wrote a letter to the judiciary demanding "maximum Muslim leniency" toward those detained, acknowledging that the "duration of the detentions has been more than normal," a striking departure from the government's insistence all along that detainees were well treated.

While Ahmadinejad's reelection has angered supporters of the opposition, his postelection actions have also enraged fellow conservatives, in particular his attempts to buck Khamenei's order to dump a controversial vice president and his firing of Intelligence Minister Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei. "His reckless actions indicate quite well that the president does not understand what security challenges we are grappling with," lawmaker Parviz Sorouri told the Mehr news agency.

Conservatives are also bothered by Ahmadinejad's push to broadcast the confessions of detainees, local media reported.

His supporters see airing the confessions as a way to discredit and silence reformists and protesters, a tactic used extensively by hard-liners in the early 1980s.

But conservatives say televised confessions could prove politically explosive and appear dangerously out of step with the national mood. Several local news outlets said Mohseni-Ejei, along with state television chief Ezatollah Zarghami, clergy and judiciary officials, has been locked in a backroom fight with Ahmadinejad over the airing of such confessions.

Over the weekend, one lawmaker sternly warned authorities not to broadcast confessions obtained in prison.

"Broadcasting confessions can only add to public awareness if they are made under normal conditions, not if they are extracted under irregular circumstances," Ali Motahari told Press TV, according to an article on the website of the state-owned broadcaster. "The arrests may have been legal, but the important thing is how individuals were treated during interrogation, whether Islamic code was maintained, and whether they suffered any emotional, psychological or physical pressure or not."

Human rights groups and former prisoners say authorities typically extract the videotaped confessions after holding detainees in solitary confinement or following grueling interrogations that sometimes include physical abuse. The prisoners are often told what to read. In recent years, many said during the interrogations that they were foreign dupes, only to disavow the remarks later.

daragahi@latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iran29-2009jul29,0,484157.story

Iran rises up

Iran rises up

Jun 18th 2009

From The Economist print edition

It looks increasingly as though the government will have to crack down or back down

AP

THE sight of a million-odd demonstrators on the streets of Tehran, the like of which has not been seen since the revolution that unseated the shah in 1979, is bound to stir the hearts of freedom lovers the world over. That is especially true when the chief butt of popular anger, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is a Holocaust-denying bully who seems bent on getting his hands on a nuclear weapon. Yet outsiders tempted to shout their support for the protesters should tread carefully for fear of achieving the opposite of what they intend.

After holding the country in a tight grip for 30 years, Iran’s clerical rulers are in disarray. The presidential candidate who was supposed to have come second in last week’s ballot, Mir Hosein Mousavi, seems likely, judging by all the chicanery, to have won (see article). The establishment is divided, with some stalwarts of the revolution siding with the demonstrators. Even the supreme leader, too spiritual to submit himself to popular ballot for the near-omnipotent post he has held for the past two decades, has become embroiled in the squalid electoral fray. He may ultimately even face the question of his, and the regime’s, survival.


No one can see into the back rooms of the clerical establishment or into the bunkers of the Revolutionary Guard. No one knows the real results of the vote. No one can predict how long the street protests will last or how ready the regime is to use force and the price it would pay in its own people’s blood. Yet something momentous has happened in a pivotal country in the most combustible part of the world. Having fatally misread its own people, Iran’s government must now decide whether to back down or to crack down.

The judgment of history
Iran is the fulcrum of an unstable region. If it behaved responsibly, the world would naturally look to it as the local power. Instead it meddles, often malevolently, with its neighbours.

That is not surprising, for it has been the victim of much meddling. The country has been buffeted between imperial rivals—Russian, Turkish, British and American—for more than a century. The West once took Iran’s oil for itself. Britain and America sabotaged its brief experiment with democracy in 1953, as Barack Obama admitted in his admirable speech to Muslims in Cairo earlier this month. A generation ago Iran was assaulted by an Arab army headed by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, leaving a million dead. Persian prickliness, even paranoia, is understandable. Iran feels ringed by the forces of what it sees as its main enemy—America. The eagerness of Iran’s rulers for a nuclear capability, which they swear is only for civilian use but which most outsiders reckon would lead inexorably to a bomb, is shared by nearly all Iranians, even those on the streets, as a national birthright in a hostile world.

But an external threat cannot justify the crass debauchery of the presidential poll. Iran is not a democracy, but its system, which combines unelected religious authority with a subordinate elected civilian one, was designed to give people a chance to let off steam from time to time within carefully set electoral limits. And today there is a head of steam to vent. The young are bored and rebellious and short of work, women are oppressed, bazaaris fed up with economic bungling. Even some clerics reject Mr Ahmadinejad for his populist brand of Islam.

For this election, the limits were set very narrow. The supreme leader, abetted by largely unelected councils, allowed just four out of more than 400 candidates to face the voters in the presumption that his populist incumbent protégé would stroll to victory. Instead those disparate groups of discontented Iranians united behind the main challenger, Mr Mousavi. The ballot-rigging turned that support into a mass protest against the system itself. Given that all four official candidates were sworn to keep the largely theocratic system going, the government’s performance was stupid as well as pernicious.

Iranian demonstrators are a determined lot. Before the shah’s fall, protests went on for months. But what happens now will be decided as much by the depth of divisions within the ruling clerical establishment as by the stamina of angry crowds. The clerics are faced with a desperate dilemma. By letting air into a system that has stifled even basic freedoms, yielding to the demonstrators could undo the regime; and yet to use force risks turning Iran into any other cheap dictatorship. A regime that has long sought to claim both legitimacy and a monopoly on power may soon have to choose which of the two it most desires.

The best of all possible worlds
Watching Iranians pour onto the streets to demand change, those in the outside world who wish Iran well must hope fervently that it comes. Iranians are too sophisticated to be ruled for ever by a clutch of old men in turbans. The regime has been illiberal and authoritarian. It is often vicious in its suppression of opponents and its disregard for human rights. Iran has the highest rate of judicial executions per head in the world. Women are second-class citizens. Even so, Iran is nothing like the totalitarian, mass-murdering regimes of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. However many votes he rigged, Mr Ahmadinejad has a big constituency behind him.

The West must tread carefully—as Mr Obama has done (see article)—in its response to Iran’s unfolding crisis. It should condemn abuses of human rights and electoral malpractice, but it should avoid taking sides. Given Iranians’ understandable hostility to outside interference, endorsing Mr Mousavi would only strengthen Mr Ahmadinejad. And whoever ends up running Iran, the West will have to talk to its leaders about its nuclear programme.

A new president and a kinder regime in Iran would be a valuable prize. It would lower the regional temperature. In Iraq, where Iran meddles, blood is still being copiously spilt, albeit far less so than a few years ago. In Palestine and Lebanon, both zones of Iranian interference, it could help tilt the protagonists towards compromise. It could even improve Afghanistan. So, as Iran splutters and seethes, the world must watch and wait—and keep its offer of goodwill on the table.

http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=13856262

Ahmadinejad vows to release official papers

Ahmadinejad vows to release official papers  

Move by Iranian president would be counterattack against challengers

The Associated Press

TEHRAN, Iran - Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatened Sunday to release internal documents on government affairs going back to the early 1980s in a direct counterattack against challengers who claim his policies have sent Iran into an economic tailspin and undermined the nation's standing in the world.

Ahmadinejad gave only a blanket warning that he would open the books on "political, cultural, social and diplomatic" issues, but it appeared part of his effort to thwart the accusations economic mismanagement hurled at his hard-line administration by his three rivals in the June 12 election.

The threat boosts the level of bitterness and recriminations between Ahmadinejad and the challengers, who have hammered the president on Iran's economic woes that include rising inflation and unemployment. They also alleged his fiery rhetoric and other stands — such as questioning the extent of the Holocaust — have left Iran more diplomatically isolated.

Fears of unrest

It also comes amid a spike in violence and insecurity that has raised fears that this election could bring levels of unrest that have been mostly absent from recent races.

Clashes erupted Sunday in the southeastern city of Zahedan, where a Sunni militant faction claimed responsibility for the bombing of a Shiite mosque last week that killed 25 people and injured 80. The state news agency said the fighting was sparked by rumors that a local Sunni cleric had been attacked.

A bomb was found on board an Iranian airliner soon after takeoff late Saturday, forcing it to return to the southwestern city of Ahvaz. Air guards chief Mohammad Hasan Kazemi called it a "sabotage attempt" apparently timed to show instability before the elections.

Thursday's bombing in Zahedan was claimed by a Sunni militant group with reported ties to Pakistan, Jundallah or God's Brigade. The group has been fighting a low-level campaign against Iran's Shiite leadership for years.

Pakistan's ambassador to Iran was summoned to Iranian Foreign Ministry over the incident, the state news agency reported. The area around Zahedan is also a main drug trafficking route.

Three men convicted of involvement in the bombing were hanged Saturday.

No bomb found

On Friday, gunfire on Ahmadinejad's campaign office in Zahedan injured three people.

Tehran deputy police chief, Col. Mohsen Khancherli reported a bomb threat Sunday at the Tehran city theater, though no bomb was ever found.

In his campaign speech Sunday, the embattled president threatened to reveal the misdeeds of past government even as his own are under attack.

"I have already pardoned the insults against me, but for the sake of the national interest and the nation's rights, I will present dossiers of the past three administrations before the nation and history," he told a gathering of teachers in Tehran, according to the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency.

"I will do that during television debates," he added. Candidates are scheduled to have one-to-one debates next week.

The past three governments would include the 1981-89 administration of former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi — who is the main pro-reform challenger to Ahmadinejad in the upcoming elections.

Earlier, Ahmadinejad posted a statement on his personal blog implying that his rivals were backed by "greedy despots and financial opportunists."

Iran's sagging economy is considered Ahmadinejad's most vulnerable flank after promising four years ago to boost Iran's fiscal standing and share its oil revenue with impoverished regions.

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