Iran Election Crisis Intensifies: Basij Call for Mousavi Prosecution

1 July 2009 :: staff

The government-linked Basij militia has called for the prosecution of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, alleging that he is responsible for inciting violence in the streets that resulted from clashes between demonstrators and security forces. Mousavi has repeatedly urged his supporters to behave within the law and to practice non-violence; the violence seen since the 12 June election appears to have been consistently the result of security forces attacking unarmed civilians, some demonstrators, some not.

In a letter to Iran’s top prosecutor, the Basij militia organization alleges Mousavi is guilty of no less than 9 offenses against the state, including ”disturbing the nation’s security”. If prosecuted and convicted, Mousavi would face prison time, a sign to some that the Basij letter may be part of an orchestrated effort by the pro-Ahmedinejad camp, possibly including supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamene’i, to justify the long-term imprisonment of the nation’s most popular opposition politician.

The Basij militia themselves are implicated in the exercise of random acts of brutality against civilians, including the shooting death of Neda Agha Soltan, whose last moments of life as she bled to death from a gunshot wound to the chest were filmed and circulated widely online. The young woman’s death galvanized international condemnation of the government’s use of violence and aggressive tactics to disperse demonstrators and intimidate the opposition.

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Eyewitnesses from the scene of Neda Soltan’s shooting are reported to have identified the shooter, tackled him and taken his Basij militia ID. The Basij have been used throughout the election dispute by the government to interfere with demonstrations and to raid locations where the government suspects the demonstrations were being organized, including university dormitories, private homes and even —according to some accounts— places of worship.

The Basij letter stretched the bounds of legal authority in accusing Mousavi of crimes even the Basij admit he probably never committed: “‘Whether he wanted to or not, Mr. Mousavi in many areas supervised or assisted in punishable acts,’ said the Basij letter, which also accused Mousavi of bringing “pessimism” into the public sphere.”

Pessimism is not a crime in Iran, and some observers believe the letter is a thinly veiled threat of violence against the opposition leader, should he persist in his criticisms of the election process. Mousavi, for his part, today declared that he views the new Ahmedinejad government as “illegitimate”, due to the allegedly coordinated and nationwide fraud that occurred in the presidential election.

Demonstrators have persisted in their attempts to show mass support for Mousavi’s allegations and to demand a new, more transparent democratic electoral process. But staging the huge rallies seen in the early days of the election dispute has been hard, amid an increasingly intense security crackdown. According to the National Council of Resistance of Iran:

Uniformed and plainclothes agents of the regime’s police were out in force across the capital Tehran and other cities on Tuesday to prevent any anti-government protests from forming. We received numerous reports that agents brutally attacked small gatherings, beating and arresting people.

In various districts of Tehran people in groups of several dozen tried to gather in major squares such as Vanak, Sadeghieh, Tajrish, Enqelab and Vali-Asr but encountered large numbers of repressive forces.

Mousavi has also demanded the immediate release of all political prisoners detained in the government’s crackdown on opposition protests. Mousavi said in an online statement that the security crackdown was “tantamount to a coup”, as the government is using military force to deny opposition supporters their constitutional rights to free assembly and to call for justice.

Former president and prominent reformist politician Mohammad Khatami today denounced the government’s brutal response to protests and suggested the 12 June election was rigged. With 20 people believed killed by security forces so far, Khatami questioned the government’s response to dissent: “If you want to calm the atmosphere, why are you carrying out mass arrests? Oppressing people will not help end the protests”.

The former president also says the government is denying those detained their constitutional due process rights, including the right to see an attorney and to challenge their detention in court, writing “why are their legal rights as citizens not preserved, why don’t they have access to a lawyer, why are they not tried in a court, why haven’t they been charged?”

Khatami also suggested the government is attempting to use arrests to coerce false confessions that help it make the argument it must use force to stop the opposition allegations from being thoroughly investigated. Specifically, he took issue with the government’s apparent plan to air taped ‘confessions’. “Obtaining confessions in front of cameras is a useless old method … confessions under pressure are not valid”, wrote Khatami.

More reporting on Iran’s election crisis, from Café Sentido:

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