Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is personally behind the alleged fraud in the June 12 presidential election, former Iranian president Abolhassan Banisadr claimed in Vienna late on Monday.
“Khamenei ordered the fraud in the presidential elections and the ensuing crackdown on protestors,” Banisadr said at a symposium marking the 20th anniversary of the murder of three Kurdish opposition leaders in Vienna.
“The regime is edging closer to the abyss and is holding on to power solely by means of violence and terror,” said Banisadr, who was Iran’s first elected president following the 1979 Islamic revolution.
The regime wanted to keep the population in a permanent state of uncertainty and fear and so systematic terror was institutionally organised and controlled by the regime and Khamenei, he added.
“They don’t want Iranians to be able to even think about protests in their own homes.”
Intellectuals and students were the main targets since they were regarded as the driving force behind the resistance, Banisadr continued. “Reformers and liberal pragmatists are to be wiped out.”
Islam played almost no role any more in the ideology of the regime and was now simply used as a “justification for violence, lies and oppression”, he said.
Khamenei and his “financial mafia are simply out for their own advantage”, while the general population lived in poverty.
Banisadr was in Vienna for a symposium on the 1989 murders of three leading Kurdish opposition figures: Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou, Abdullah Ghaderi-Azar and Fadel Rasoul.
Ghassemlou, the leader of the Democratic Party of Kurdistan — an Iranian opposition party outlawed by Tehran — was killed on July 13 1989.
Bani Sadr was elected president in January 1980 soon after the previous year’s Islamic Revolution, but he was ousted by revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in June 1981.
Banisadr has lived in exile in France since 1981. — AFP