Mir-Hossein Mousavi ‘involved in massacre’, says report
Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the leader of Iran’s opposition green movement was involved in the massacre of more than 10,000 political prisoners in 1988, according to a report.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/7811996/Mir-Hossein-Mousavi-involved-in-massacre-says-report.html

Iran’s Green Movement Lie
by Shirin Sadeqhi

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/shirin-sadeghi/irans-green-movement-lie_b_825737.html

The Iranian people have been in the streets for decades. The big moments are crystallized in media memory — 1979, 1999, 2009, and now. There are people in the streets in Iran this week, as they were last week. They do not want an Islamic Republic of Iran. They want Iran.

In 2009, it was declared all across the international media that these people — young, old, men, women — are part of an organized movement called the Green Movement. “Iran’s Green Revolution” flashed across cable news networks and front pages worldwide.

Immediately, in the moments, then days, weeks, and now years of the discontent surrounding the election dispute, this green thing — the scarves, the flags, the color, the word — suddenly appeared in the protests and from the mouths of Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mehdi Karroubi and other figures who ultimately did not secure a win in the presidential election against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

And then the phrase “where is my vote?” appeared. In English. On placards and posters, and t-shirts, and buttons.

You haven’t seen any of this behavior in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen — anywhere where similar anti-government protests have taken place in the last month. It is not how people protest — they don’t get together and name their revolution, then color it, and choose a catchphrase for it, then pour into the streets to let everyone know.

It didn’t happen in Iran either.

The millions — and there were millions — who were in the streets in 2009 could care less about the Green Movement — in 2009 or today. They want rid of the Islamic regime — whether it is Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, or the old guard of Mousavi, Karroubi and the “Greens” who were and still are, so powerful in the Islamic establishment.

The Green leadership is a morally-compromised faction of the establishment — as any other element of the establishment — that wants power in an Islamic Republic of Iran, but cannot seem to get it or regain it because old friends have become new enemies in the regime.

As their individual histories and powerful political records have clearly reflected, they are not secular, they are not democratic, and they do not care about the inherent rights of the Iranian people, let alone see them as a priority.

For most Iranians, the Green Movement is what the international media is calling the massive mobilization to dismantle the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Even outside of Iran, if you attend rallies claiming to be of the Green Movement, many of them are actually rallies against the Islamic regime. Some of the speakers openly address the fact that the Iranians do not want more figures from that regime, they do not want the Green Movement’s leaders, they want the whole regime to be replaced with a government that is elected by the people.

And yet, the irony is that while so many Iranians say this, they know, and so does the US State Department and the UK Foreign Office and the other governments who support the Green leaders, that the Iranian people are so miserable, so trapped in a nation overtaken by Islamists and their massively powerful military and security complex, that they will accept the Greens.

Iranians will accept them — there is no other option anymore. The hope is that change — any change — will finally open the door to serious reform. In a poverty so deep as that which the Iranian soul has experienced in the last 32 years, hope is the only chance for survival.

But Iranians are not nearly as politically and internationally naïve as they were in 1979 and 1999. After the current Green Leader, former President Mohammad Khatami, crushed the student protests of 1999, refusing to support the students, many of whom died or suffered in the violent prisons of the Islamic Republic, everyone in Iran realized that the Islamic Republic’s establishment — a boy’s club of unshorn Islamists, many of whom are actually clerics — has not produced individuals who care about changing Iran into a government that represents the people.

In the last 32 years, any individual who displayed any loyalty to the people of Iran above the Islamic Republic has been eliminated. Anyone who could have been a sincere leader of the people — a person who valued inherent rights, a person whose religion did not supersede the people’s needs — that person was not allowed to live. So there remains no one powerful but those from the regime. The Green Leaders know this very well.

But what they don’t know — and the reason they shuffled into the background when they didn’t get the power they wanted — is that in this Internet age, in this age when Iranians are some of the most educated and knowledgeable people in the world, they do not need a leader to change their country. They are doing it themselves in the streets.

Listen to them this year as compared with 2009 — they are no longer merely denouncing Ahmadinejad — they are denouncing the system itself.

They have been shouting “down with the system”, “down with the velayat-e faqih.” Iranians have for millennia been of different tribes, religions and ethnicities but they have always survived as a nation. They do not want this ‘velayat-e faqih’ system — rulership of the supreme Islamic cleric, to put it simply — which is the foundation of power of the Islamic Republic establishment and the Green Leaders.

So as you watch the new protests — these demonstrations that were inspired by recent Arab revolts which were in turn inspired by Iran’s earlier demonstrations — remember this: the Iranian people do not want the Islamic Republic, whatever shade it comes in.

They want a government of the people, for the people, and by the people. When the Green Leaders win the power they have sought for years — and they will eventually win — they will not be off the hook, because the people want real change, not another game of musical chairs.

Khomeini fatwa ‘led to killing of 30,000 in Iran’ By Christina Lamb, Diplomatic Correspondent 12:00AM GMT 04 Feb 2001 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/1321090/Khomeini-fatwa-led-to-killing-of-30000-in-Iran.html

CHILDREN as young as 13 were hanged from cranes, six at a time, in a barbaric two-month purge of Iran’s prisons on the direct orders of Ayatollah Khomeini, according to a new book by his former deputy.

More than 30,000 political prisoners were executed in the 1988 massacre – a far larger number than previously suspected. Secret documents smuggled out of Iran reveal that, because of the large numbers of necks to be broken, prisoners were loaded onto forklift trucks in groups of six and hanged from cranes in half-hourly intervals.

Gruesome details are contained in the memoirs of Grand Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, The Memoirs of Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, one of the founders of the Islamic regime. He was once considered Khomeini’s anointed successor, but was deposed for his outspokenness, and is now under house arrest in the holy city of Qom.

Published privately last month after attempts by the regime to suppress it, the revelations have prompted demands from Iranian exiles for those involved to be tried for crimes against humanity. The most damning of the letters and documents published in the book is Khomeini’s fatwa decree calling for all Mojahedin (as opponents of the Iranian regime are known) to be killed.

Issued shortly after the end of the Iran-Iraq war in July 1988 and an incursion into western Iran by the Iranian resistance, the fatwa reads: “It is decreed that those who are in prisons throughout the country and remain steadfast in their support for the Monafeqin (Mojahedin) are waging war on God and are condemned to execution.”

It goes on to entrust the decision to “death committees” – three-member panels consisting of an Islamic judge, a representative of the Ministry of Intelligence, and a state prosecutor. Prisoners were to be asked if they had changed loyalties and, if not, were to be executed. Montazeri, who states that 3,800 people had been killed by the end of the first fortnight of executions, includes his own correspondence with Khomeini, saying that the killings would be seen as “a vendetta” and would spark opposition to the regime. He wrote: “The execution of several thousand prisoners in a few days will not have positive repercussions and will not be mistake-free.” The massacres, which came just before the Lockerbie bombing, were seen as a sop to the hardliners at a time when Khomeini was already in failing health and the battle for succession had begun between fundamentalists and moderates. He died the following year.

According to testimony from prison officials – including Kamal Afkhami Ardekani, who formerly worked at Evin prison – recently given to United Nations human rights rapporteurs: “They would line up prisoners in a 14-by-five-metre hall in the central office building and then ask simply one question, ‘What is your political affiliation?’ Those who said the Mojahedin would be hanged from cranes in position in the car park behind the building.” He went on to describe how, every half an hour from 7.30am to 5pm, 33 people were lifted on three forklift trucks to six cranes, each of which had five or six ropes. He said: “The process went on and on without interruption.” In two weeks, 8,000 people were hanged. Similar carnage took place across the country. Many of those in the ruling council at the time of the 1988 massacre are still in power, including President Mohammed Khatami, who was the Director of Ideological and Cultural Affairs.

“The massacre may have happened 12 years ago, but the relevance is that these atrocities are still happening”, said Mohammad Mohaddessin, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Iranian National Council of Resistance (NCRI), the main opposition group, who was in London last week to present evidence to MPs. The NCRI has prepared files on 21 senior members of the regime whom it alleges were “principal protagonists of the massacre”, including Mr Khatami and Ayatollah Ali Khameini, Iran’s “Supreme Leader”. Mr Mohaddessin will travel to New York to present the files to the UN and call for a tribunal to try them for crimes against humanity. Mr Mohaddessin said human rights abuses were continuing in Iran despite the election of Mr Khatami, who “presents himself as a reformist”.

“What’s New on the Iran 1953 Coup in the New York Times Article (April 16, 2000, front page) and the Documents Posted on the Web” By Professor Mark Gasiorowski
19 April 2000 http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB28/

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