It has been a year since the leaders of Iran’s opposition Green Movement were placed under house arrest. BBC’s Persian’s Mehrzad Kohanrouz looks at how their absence has affected opposition supporters and gauges their mood. It was February 2011, and the Arab world was in turmoil. As the regimes first in Tunisia and then Egypt fell, Iranian opposition leaders saw a chance to revive their own short-lived “Tehran spring”. Two years earlier, Iranian security forces had crushed protests which erupted after the disputed presidential election. The two candidates who lost out to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the controversial poll decided it was time to make a move. Continue reading the main story “Start Quote The Green Movement is alive and successful because it moved beyond the Islamic Republic’s ideology” KavehEmail to BBC Persian Mir Hossein Mousavi, a former prime minister, and Mehdi Karroubi, a former speaker of parliament and senior cleric, applied for official permission to hold a rally in support of the Arab protesters. Their request was refused, but on 14 February thousands of people across Ira… >>>
