April 15, 2016
Former presidential candidate Mehdi Karrubi, under house arrest since 2011, has written a public letter denouncing the conduct of the regime and, by implication, the conduct of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi.
Karrubi did not cite Kha-menehi by name, but the implication was clear.
Karrubi said the Shah’s regime had “used thugs” to overthrow Prime Minister Moham-mad Mossadegh in 1953 and to suppress the uprising launched by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1963. But the current “regime uses thugs every day across the country to attack the homes of religious authorities, religious and political figures who have been critical of the regime, embassies and artistic and cultural centers in the name of ‘values’.”
In perhaps his harshest sentence, Karrubi wrote, “How pitiful is this illusion of a potentate, who imagines he can decide which among God’s servants are high and which ones are low.”
He further wrote: “We must stand up against the idea of a regime with one single voice, made so by monopolizing unaccountable power.”
Karrubi also slammed the two terms of President Mahmud Ahmadi-nejad, which he described as the most corrupt government since the Constitutional Revolution” of 1906, meaning Ahmadi-nejad was more corrupt than the Pahlavi Shahs, a stark violation of official history.
In the letter, Karrubi also appealed to President Rohani for a court hearing where he could show the two elections Karrubi lost and Ahmadi-nejad won were rigged. He appealed to Rohani to ask “the despotic regime to grant me a public trial.” To call the Islamic Republic a “despotic regime” is unheard of.
Karrubi, a former speaker of the Majlis, said in his letter to Rohani that the Pasdaran, Basij and Intelligence Ministry together falsified the results of both the 2005 and 2009 polls that Ahmadi-nejad won.
The charge of falsified results in the 2009 election is long-standing, but the charge that the 2005 balloting was also corrupted is a new one. Ali-Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani was the runner-up to Ahmadi-nejad in that election.
Karrubi and fellow Reformist presidential contender Mir-Hossain Musavi, who has also been under house arrest since 2011, have been accused of stoking unrest after the 2009 polls.
But neither has been formally charged with anything. Khamenehi merely ordered them confined under house arrest and has ignored numerous proposals to either free them or put them on trial.
“The only path is reform and returning to the direction of the law,” Karrubi wrote in the letter, where he also said he did not think Rohani could end his house arrest.
Rohani, during his 2013 presidential campaign, spoke of freeing the two men, but has not taken up the issue since he took office. Rohani has no authority to release the men since they are detained on orders of the Supreme Leader.
Karrubi’s comment in his letter that “I do not believe it is within your power” to end the house arrest was supportive of Rohani who has been widely criticized for not pushing openly for the freedom of Musavi and Karrubi.