What appears to be an unconfirmed report at this point is saying that the opposition candidate for president of Iran has been arrested by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi was reportedly arrested Saturday following the reformist’s defeat at the polls by hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Supporters of Mousavi, the main challenger to Ahmadinejad, have responded to the election with the most serious unrest in Tehran in a decade and claim that the result was the work of a dictatorship.
There have been a number of contradictory reports from Iran, in large part due to the heavy restrictions imposed on the media in the Islamic Republic and in particular on foreign reporters.
Mousavi’s arrest was reported by an unofficial source, who said that the presidential contender had been arrested en route to the home of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Pro-reform Mousavi has denounced the election as rigged and vowed he will not accept defeat. He and key aides could not be reached by phone Saturday.
There are also reports of severe unrest in the streets of several Iranian cities and even some reports of deaths.
Quite frankly, I have no clue which source to believe right now. It is very confused and very conflicted news that I am seeing thus far. But it looks a lot like Ahmadinejad just pulled off what amounts to a coup masked as an election. If Mir Hossein Mousavi was really arrested, I’d say that pretty well amounts to proof that Ahmadinejad stole the election.
Not just Ahmadinejad, but the mullahs who really rule the joint. They rigged the last election to put Ahmadinejad into power (over Rafsanjani), and this is more of the same. Moussavi isn’t much of a reformer (it’s really just a difference in shade of fascist), but he has the support of the large swaths of the Iranian population that hates the mullahs and the wreck they’ve made of Iran. They can’t tolerate a president who has a base of power other than them. Hence, it’s yet another episode of Chicago-in-Tehran.
I don’t know. To my mind things finally are starting to look better in Iran. If people can wake up to the fact they are actually in bondage in that country (and it looks like the youth is doing exactly that) then there can be hope. Let’s face it, ALL the elections in Iran are “fixed” to some degree – but now people can see that the mullahs dont even follow their own supposed “rules.”
My greatest fear is that this will not spark larger protests and we will see nothing but a Tiananmen Square type crackdown.
Violence to promote liberty over tyranny is sometimes necessary.