Iranian opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi is pictured at his sister's home as the family receives condolences for the death of his nephew Seyed Ali Habibi-Mousavi, on Dec. 28, 2009, in Tehran. (Arash Ashourinia/AFP/GETTY IMAGES)
Mousavi, whose nephew was among the eight shot dead by police during protests on the Shiite Muslim festival of Ashura on Sunday, said that he would not renounce his accusations of fraud in regard to the June re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
“I am not unwilling to become a martyr like those who made that sacrifice after the election for their rightful national and religious demands,” Mousavi said on Kaleme.org Web site in his first statement since the deadly clashes on Sunday. “My blood is no redder than theirs.”
He added that an order to arrest and kill him would not “solve anything.”
He said: “Supposedly you calmed things down through your arrests, violence, threats, and closure of newspapers and other media. What appreciation does that show for the change in public opinion about the Islamic republic?”
The statement comes after dozens of protests over the disputed re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in June. Mousavi, a reformist candidate who was widely touted to win the election, has kept largely silent as increasingly violent clashes between demonstrators and police have threatened to destabilize the country.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, has accused demonstrators of being lackeys of Western powers. Mousavi dismissed the accusation in his Jan. 1 statement.
“We are neither Americans, nor Britons. We have sent no congratulations cards to the leaders of major powers,” Mousavi said, in mocking allusion to a card the Iranian president had sent in 2008 to Barack Obama following his election as U.S. president.
“We are loyal to the constitution,” Mousavi added, dismissing accusations that the opposition’s protests against Ahmadinejad’s re-election have turned into a campaign to topple the Islamic regime.
“We want an honest and compassionate government that considers diversity of opinion and the popular vote to be opportunities, not threats. We consider invasion of people’s privacy, interrogations, ransackings, newspaper closures, and restrictions on what is published to be violations of the constitution,” he said.
To resolve the crisis, Mousavi proposed that “the government announce it will be directly accountable before the nation, parliament, and the judiciary and not demand unconditional support regardless of its shortcomings or weaknesses.”
The fourth candidate in the June election campaign, the former Revolutionary Guards chief Mohsen Reza, said that Mousavi’s comments were “constructive.” According to the Iranian ISNA news agency, Reza has written to Khamenei to ask him to broker a “new start” between the demonstrators and the government.
The hardline cleric Ahmad Khatami slammed Mousavi’s statement as a new provocation.
The ISNA news agency quoted him as saying, “There is no crisis in the country, and you are creating a crisis. Stop it!”
