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Radiofarda – More details have been revealed about the last meeting between Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the leader of Iran’s Green Movement, Mir Hossein Mousavi.
The meeting took place a day after the 2009 controversial election that officially led to the victory of incumbent President Mahmud Ahmadinejad.
In the meeting Mousavi asked asked Khamenei to appoint an impartial party to review the voting process and count the votes to decide if the official election result was correct, according to Mousavi’s former aide.
Mousavi, Ahmadinejad’s main challenger, had dismissed the official results as engineered and rigged and had called for the vote to be nullified. Khamenei firmly stood by Ahmadinejad and rejected Mousavi’s claims.
Immediately after the hasty announcement of the official results, tens of thousands of people in Tehran poured into the streets in support of Mousavi, chanting, “Where is my vote?”
In attempt to rein in Mousavi, Khamenei arranged a meeting with him, which was taped.
However, the meeting was a non-starter. More people rallied behind Mousavi, kicking off five months of anti-Khamenei demonstrations across Iran.
The protests, branded “sedition” by Khamenei, were brutally suppressed, and Mousavi and his wife, Zahra Rahnavard, as well as another challenger, former speaker of the parliament Mehdi Karroubi, were extrajudicially confined to their houses after they called for demonstrations in solidarity with the so-called Arab Spring.
Khamenei and his close allies insisted that the 2009 election had been fair and transparent and accused Mousavi, Rahnavard, and Karroubi of sedition and rebellion against the Islamic establishment.
In a recent development, timed with the publication of a new book about the 2009 controversial presidential election, Khamenei’s office circulated a two-minute footage on its website of the supreme leader at a gathering of clergymen on July 20, 2009, in the midst of protests against Ahmadinejad’s re-election.
In the meeting Khamenei mocked Mousavi’s stance on the election results. He also accused him of inciting people to revolt.
The circulation of the allegedly doctored footage was immediately challenged by Mousavi, who called on Khamenei to publish the uncensored footage of the meeting in full.
Mousavi stopped short of revealing the details of his meeting with Khamenei.
Radio Farda’s Noushin Seyyed Hosseini talked with Mousavi’s former adviser, Ardeshir Amir-Arjmand, who currently lives in exile in Europe.
“A day after the election, on Sunday, the meeting was held to assess Mr. Mousavi’s comments on the ‘rigged results’ and Khamenei’s remarks defending it,” Amir-Arjmand said.
“Mr. Mousavi proposed a body or person picked by Khamenei be assigned to look into the election procedure and count votes in a transparent way. If it was decided that the election was rigged, Mr. Mousavi demanded, it should be nullified and held again.”
Amir-Arjmand said Mousavi even insisted that if Khamenei had personal reservations about him, he would voluntarily bow out of the competition.
Mousavi also maintained that the priority was to protect electoral principles, said Amir-Arjmand. “Nevertheless, Mr. Khamenei had not attended the meeting to address the problem alongside Mr. Mousavi. He was there to ‘dictate’ a solution to the problem. Therefore, the meeting was not constructive,” he added.
According to Amir-Arjmand, Khamenei said the Guardian Council (GC) would look into the election’s validity. “But the GC, not being impartial (supporting the incumbent), was itself a part of the problem,” he said.
“Khamenei had arranged the meeting merely to caution Mr. Mousavi and impose his will on him,” he added.
Amir-Arjmand said the only way to prove who is right is the publication of the uncensored footage of the meeting in its entirety. Kept in the archives of the supreme leader’s office, it has remained unpublished “for nine long years simply because they do not have a valid response to the public opinion and people’s demands.”
It remains to be seen whether Khamenei will accept Mousavi’s request. “The next step will be decided by Mousavi,” Amir-Arjmand said. “Khamenei should also release the uncensored footage of his meeting with representatives of the 2009 presidential candidates” — a meeting that Amir-Arjmand attended as Mousavi’s representative.
