A brouhaha kicked up by journalists over comments by opposition figure Mehdi Karroubi may be put to rest after the cleric-politician today issued an unambiguous denunciation of the disputed June 12 elections and subsequent crackdown.
“The more we go ahead, the more I’m convinced the election was massively rigged,” Karroubi said, according to his news website Sahamnews.org (in Persian). “I get new information every day, and it is regrettable to see certain officials tampered with people’s votes in this way.”
In the meeting with supporters, he later added: “I say it firmly that I’ll never compromise on the nation’s rights, notably the votes they cast in the ballot boxes. I’ll stand by the nation up to the end and I’ll try my best to remove the hurdles to a free and fair election.”
Earlier this week a hard-line Iranian journalist quoted Karroubi as saying he had accepted President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the leader of Iran’s current government because Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had so ordained it.
Some news outlets (perhaps eager to get the Iran story back into the news cycle after the Haiti disaster) rushed to interpret the secondhand remarks as explosive proof that Karroubi had somehow changed his stance on Iran’s current domestic political crisis.
“Karroubi had not budged at all,” one Tehran analyst told the Times. “Karroubi said that the government is the government of the system. So it does not imply he has recognized it. Unfortunately… >>>
