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World Jewish News
Khamenei: No chance Iran elections were rigged
19.06.2009
Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Friday demanded an end to the street protests that have shaken the Islamic Republic since a disputed presidential election a week ago and said any bloodshed would be their leaders' fault.
He defended Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the rightful winner of the presidential vote and denied any possibility that it had been rigged, as Ahmadinejad's opponents have asserted.
"If there is any bloodshed, leaders of the protests will be held directly responsible," Khamenei declared in his first address to the nation since the upheaval began.
"The result of the election comes from the ballot box, not from the street," the white-bearded cleric told huge crowds thronging Tehran University and surrounding streets for Friday prayers. "Today the Iranian nation needs calm."
He said any election complaints should be raised through legal channels. "I will not succumb to illegal innovation," he said, in an apparent reference to the street protests, which have few precedents in the Islamic Republic's 30-year history.
"It's a wrong impression that by using street protests as a pressure tool, they can compel officials to accept their illegal demands. This would be the start of a dictatorship," Khamenei said.
Defeated reformist Mirhossein Mousavi has called for annulment of the election result, which showed Ahmadinejad the winner with nearly 63 percent of the vote to 34 percent for his closest challenger.
Iran's top legislative body, the Guardian Council, is considering complaints by the three losing candidates, but has said only that it will recount some disputed ballot boxes.
Khamenei: Foreign powers meddling with Iran democracy
During his sermon on Friday, Khamenei condemned what he said was interference by "some foreign powers" in this month's election and rebuked them for giving Iran "advice on human rights."
"After street protests, some foreign powers ... started to interfere in Iran's state matters by questioning the result of the vote. They do not know the Iranian nation. I strongly condemn such interference," Khamenei said.
"American officials' remarks about human rights and limitations on people are not acceptable because they have no idea about human rights after what they have done in Afghanistan and Iraq and other parts of the world. We do not need advice over human rights from them," he added.
The spiritual leader accused Iran's enemies of trying to "discredit" the Islamic establishment by questioning the results of the elections.
Khamenei praised Iranians for taking part in the election and called it a a "magnificent show of responsibility" of the people to determine the fate of their own country.
"This election was a political earthquake for [Iran's] enemies and a celebration for its friends," Khameini told the vast crowd. "This election showed religious democracy for the whole world to see."
He reminded citizens that all presidential candidates had been fighting to join the same government, that created by the Islamic revolution.
"The enemies [of Iran] are targeting the Islamic establishment's legitimacy by questioning the election and its authenticity before and after [the vote]," Khamenei told the vast crowd.
Khamenei told the crowd that it would have been impossible under law of the Islamic Republic to fix the election results and declared Ahmadinejad's victory "definitive."
He urged supporters of Mousavi to curb their protests, declaring that candidates must pursue vote complaints from within system and not through street demonstrations. Khamenei also called on Iranians to unite behind hardliner Ahmadinejad, whose foreign and domestic policies he called most similar to his own.
Mousavi's supporters, however, have responded to Khamainei's call for unity by holding huge rallies of their own in defiance of an official ban.
Ahmadinjead supporters - chanting slogans and holding posters of Khamenei, Ahmadinejad, and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei, the father of the 1979 Islamic revolution - packed streets outside the University of Tehran where the supreme leader delivered his prayer sermon.
"Don't let the history of Iran be written with the pen of foreigners," one flyer said, reflecting official Iranian anger at international criticism of the post-election violence.
Khamenei to Mousavi: Accept results of leave Iran
The supreme leader reportedly gave defeated reformist presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi an ultimatum this week to either accept the disputed results of the recent elections, or leave the country for exile.
Khamenei had earlier instructed Mousavi to stand beside him as he uses his prayer sermon to call for national unity, according to The London Times.
The reformist candidate did not accede to this request and his supporters have so far ignored Kahmeini's call to support Ahmadinejad, holding huge rallies in defiance of an official ban.
Khamenei's speech follows a sixth day of protests by Mousavi supporters.
On Thursday, hundreds of thousands of protesters wearing black and carrying candles filled the streets of Tehran again, joining Mousavi to mourn demonstrators killed in clashes over Iran's disputed election.
The massive protest openly defied orders from Iran's supreme leader, despite a government attempt to placate Mousavi and his supporters by inviting the reformist, and two other candidates who ran against hard-liner Ahmadinejad, to a meeting with the country's main electoral authority.
Many in the huge crowd carried black candles and lit them as night fell.
Others wore green wristbands and carried flowers in mourning as they filed into Imam Khomenei Square, a large plaza in the heart of the capital named for the founder of the Islamic Revolution, witnesses said.
Ahmadinejad released a largely conciliatory recorded statement on state TV Thursday, distancing himself from his past criticism of protesters, whom he compared to dust and sore losers after a soccer match.
"I only addressed those who made riot, set fires and attacked people," the statement said. "Every single Iranian is valuable. The government is at everyone's service. We like everyone."
Khamenei, meanwhile, has urged the people to pursue their allegations of election fraud within the limits of the cleric-led system. Mousavi and his followers have rejected compromise and pressed their demands for a new vote, flouting the will of a man endowed with virtually limitless powers under Iran's constitution.
The unelected body of 12 clerics and Islamic law experts close to Khamenei has said it was prepared to conduct a limited recount of ballots at sites where candidates claim irregularities.
Mousavi, who has said he won the election, says the Guardian Council supports Ahmadinejad and has demanded an independent investigation, as well as a new election.
Global response
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Friday that a speech from Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in which he attacked foreign powers for questioning Iran's election results, was disappointing.
"The speech was disappointing," Merkel said at a news conference in Brussels
Meanwhile, the U.K. called in its Iran's ambassador on Friday to complain about comments about the British made during Khamenei's speech.
Rasoul Movahedian, Tehran's envoy to London, has been summoned to meet Mark Lyall Grant, political director at the Foreign Office, a Foreign Office spokeswoman said.
She said Lyall Grant would complain over Khamenei's comments on Friday when he attacked the British as being "sinister."
The British government was understood to be preparing a "diplomatic statement" in response to the Iranian allegations.
By Yossi Melman and Zvi Bar'el, Haaretz Correspondents and Haaretz Service
Источник: Haaretz
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