Lone Cleric, Mehdi Karroubi, Emerges to Defy Iran’s Leaders - NYTimes.com

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By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — A short midlevel cleric, with a neat white beard and a clergyman’s calm bearing, Mehdi Karroubi has watched from his home in Tehran in recent months as his aides have been arrested, his offices raided, his newspaper shut down. He himself has been threatened with arrest and, indirectly, the death penalty.

His response: bring it on.

Once a second-tier opposition figure operating in the shadow of Mir Hussein Moussavi, his fellow challenger in Iran’s discredited presidential election in June, Mr. Karroubi has emerged in recent months as the last and most defiant opponent of the country’s leadership.

The authorities have dismissed as fabrications his accusations of official corruption, voting fraud and the torture and rape of detained protesters. A former confidant of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and a longtime conservative politician, he has lately been accused by the government of fomenting unrest and aiding Iran’s foreign enemies.

Four months after mass protests erupted in response to the dubious victory claims of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the opposition’s efforts have largely stalled in the face of unrelenting government pressure, arrests, long detentions, harsh sentences, censorship and a strategic refusal to compromise.

But for all its success at preserving authority, the government has been unable to silence or intimidate Mr. Karroubi, its most tenacious and, in many ways, most problematic critic. While other opposition figures, including Mr. Moussavi and two former presidents, Mohammad Khatami and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, are seldom heard now, Mr. Karroubi has been unsparing and highly vocal in his criticism of the government, which he feels has lost all legitimacy.

Last week, a special court for the clergy began to consider whether Mr. Karroubi, 72, should face charges. His response, in a speech to a student group that was reported on a reformist Web site, was withering.

“I am not only unworried about this court,” he wrote. “I wholeheartedly welcome it since I will use it to express my concerns regarding the national and religious beliefs of the Iranian people and the ideas of Imam Khomeini, and clearly reveal those who are opposed to these concerns.”

Despite such provocations, Iran’s conservative leadership has so far not arrested him, apparently fearful of making a powerful symbol of a man so closely associated with the founding of the Islamic republic.

“His potential arrest is an acid test of the internal meltdown of the upper echelon of the regime and the final breakdown in its legitimacy facade,” said Hamid Dabashi, a professor of Iranian studies at Columbia University. “We had heard that revolutions eat their own children, but his seems to be a case of revolutionary parricide.”

Mr. Karroubi works from a villa on a quiet street in Tehran that ends at a rundown palace once occupied by Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. It is one of the many symbols of his standing among the revolutionary elite. He was jailed nine times by the shah and spent years in prison, where he grew close to inmates of widely different political persuasions: nationalist, socialist, Islamist, said Rasool Nafisi, an Iran expert based in Virginia.

“These forced companionships, Karroubi wrote in his autobiography, made him aware of the pain of the others, and relieved him from sectarian behavior,” Mr. Nafisi said.

After the overthrow of the shah, Ayatollah Khomeini put Mr. Karroubi in charge of the Imam Khomeini Relief Committee and the Martyrs Foundation, two of the nation’s most important and wealthiest institutions. He also served twice as speaker of Parliament, where he earned a reputation as a conciliator; served on the powerful Expediency Council; and was appointed adviser to the subsequent supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

So it was hard for the leadership to brand him an enemy of the state when he posted on his Web site last month an impassioned, unyielding and damning letter to the nation, written in response to the judicial finding that his allegations of the rape of imprisoned protesters were unfounded.

“The ugliness has reached the point that instead of the perpetrators and propagators and people behind this oppression, it is Mehdi Karroubi whom they want to put on trial,” he wrote. “I take refuge with you, oh God, from these catastrophes which some are causing and are not only a disgrace to the Islamic republic, but a disgrace to Iran.”

Mr. Karroubi’s disenchantment with the revolution he helped create began not with the elections in June, but with the balloting that brought Mr. Ahmadinejad to office four years ago. Mr. Karroubi was a candidate then, too, and late into the night after the polls closed, he was running second, behind Mr. Rafsanjani.

A few days later, he talked about election night during an interview in his villa, still angry and surprised at what had happened. He said he had gone to sleep and when he woke, he was in third place, behind Mr. Ahmadinejad and out of the race.

Mr. Ahmadinejad won a runoff, and Mr. Karroubi wrote an open letter of protest to the supreme leader charging vote fraud. There was no investigation, however, and Ayatollah Khamenei chastised Mr. Karroubi. He dropped his protest, but quit the Expediency Council and started his own political organization, the National Trust Party.

Of course, much the same thing happened again in June, when Mr. Ahmadinejad supposedly won with 63 percent of the votes cast — including 71 percent of the votes cast in Mr. Karroubi’s home province, Lorestan.

If Mr. Karroubi had restricted his complaints to the vote tally, he might have been ignored. But he has gone far beyond that with his accusations that state security officers raped, sodomized and tortured men and women who were arrested for taking part in the protests. The allegations have unnerved the leadership, threatening its legitimacy and religious standing far more than images of the police beating protesters in the streets.

After the government dismissed those allegations last month, Mr. Karroubi was summoned to appear before a three-judge panel investigating his actions. He welcomed the invitation. “It will be a good opportunity for me to talk again about crimes that would make the shah look good,” he said, according to the Green Freedom Wave Web site.

As calls for his arrest grow louder, he remains defiant.

“If only I were not alive and had not seen the day that in the Islamic republic, a citizen would come to me and complain that every variety of appalling and unnatural act would be done in unknown buildings and by less-known people: stripping people and making them face each other and subjecting them to vile insults and urinating in their faces,” he wrote in his letter to the nation. “I said to myself, ‘Where indeed have we arrived 30 years after the revolution?’ ”

Iranian Cleric Mehdi Karroubi Predicts Opposition Will Topple Ahmadinejad

By Thomas Erdbrink
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, August 19, 2009

TEHRAN, Aug. 18 -- His newspaper was shut down Monday, and generals and hard-line clerics have called for him to be put on trial. Yet defeated Iranian presidential candidate Mehdi Karroubi says opposition to the government is growing by the day.

The white-turbaned Shiite cleric, who has held several senior government positions since the 1979 Islamic revolution, said in an interview Tuesday that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, along with the clerics and Revolutionary Guard commanders who support him, will be defeated by what he describes as a burgeoning movement of ordinary people, ayatollahs and lawmakers.

"In the streets, in the bazaars, at weddings and in mosques, everywhere you can hear people complaining about what has happened" since Ahmadinejad's disputed reelection June 12, Karroubi said. "This belief is growing at an extraordinary pace. Yes, people might be more cautious, since the situation in our country is dangerous, but their thoughts, their ideas have not changed."

The mass trial underway in Tehran, in which some of Karroubi's close advisers have linked him to a Western-backed plot to overthrow the country's leadership, is unprecedented, he said.

"The court has a special purpose. It is organized by the winners of the vote, and only their opponents have been put on trial," the 72-year-old cleric said. "But people will never believe these wide-ranging accusations of murders, bombings and espionage against more than 100 suspects."

While his fellow opposition candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, has issued a broad call for the full implementation of Iran's constitution, Karroubi has been pursuing violations of specific laws, urging an investigation into allegations of torture, deaths in custody and the rape of young detainees.

"Some of the detainees have reported that certain individuals have so severely raped some of the girls in custody that the attacks have caused excruciating damage and injury to their reproductive organs," he wrote in a public letter to a top cleric. "They also report that others have raped the young boys so violently that upon their release they have endured great mental and physical pain."

Parliament speaker Ali Larijani called last Wednesday for an investigation but a day later said Karroubi's allegations were unfounded and could be used by Iran's enemies. On Friday, prayer leaders nationwide -- all appointed by Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei -- denounced Karroubi, saying his accusations had undermined respect for the country's leaders.

"This was a letter with which America celebrated. It was a letter that was Israel's celebration," said Ahmadi Khatami, a leader of Friday prayers in Tehran. "The honorable judiciary said unequivocally that sexual assault, which this gentleman has alleged, is a lie."

But Karroubi refuses to back down. "I'm still pursuing the issue, and the propaganda has failed to change my mind," he said. Mousavi, who had been silent on the issue, released a public letter of support Tuesday, also accusing "establishment agents" of rape.

"I praise your courage and hope the other clerics join and strengthen your efforts," Mousavi's letter said, addressing Karroubi.

But Karroubi contradicted an announcement by Mousavi's aides Tuesday that he has joined Mousavi's new movement, the Green Path of Hope. "The results of our efforts are the same. We have no differences. But we follow our separate ways," Karroubi said, emphasizing that he wants to strengthen his own party, Etemad-e Melli, or National Trust, whose newspaper of the same name was shut down indefinitely by Tehran's prosecutor this week.

Born in the backwater province of Lorestan, Karroubi studied in the Qum Shiite seminary and was an early supporter of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic republic. He was imprisoned several times during the reign of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Western-backed former shah. After the revolution, he headed several religious foundations and was accused by some of embezzling funds, an assertion he denies. He was a two-term speaker of parliament and in 2005 ran unsuccessfully against Ahmadinejad.

In June, when he ran again, on an agenda of expanded women's and civic rights, he received so few votes, according to the official tally, that he came in last even in his home province.

For the government, he said, a downward spiral looms.

"This group succeeded in grabbing power, but can they solve the problems? Satisfy the people? Have good relations with the world? Solve unemployment?" he said. "Problems will not be solved, and people will be more unhappy. This is one of the consequences of the election."

Special correspondent Kay Armin Serjoie contributed to this report.

Iran Tries to Suppress Rape Allegations

By ROBERT F. WORTH and NAZILA FATHI

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Iran’s clerical leadership on Friday stepped up a campaign to silence opposition claims that protesters had been raped in prison, with prayer leaders in at least three major cities denouncing the accusations and their chief sponsor.

The accusations of rape — usually a taboo subject in Iran — have multiplied and provoked strong reactions in the days since a reformist cleric and presidential candidate, Mehdi Karroubi, broached the subject last weekend. His allegations added fuel to an already volatile debate about prison abuse in the wake of Iran’s disputed June 12 election.

Also on Friday, a group of reformist former lawmakers issued an extraordinary statement on opposition Web sites in which they denounced the government’s harsh tactics and appealed to a powerful state body to investigate the qualifications of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Although it was not clear who had endorsed the statement, or even if all of the lawmakers were in the country, it appeared to be the most direct challenge to the supreme leader’s authority yet in the unrest following the election.

With a renewed volley of opposition accusations in the air, a fundamentalist cleric, Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, called Mr. Karroubi’s claims of prison rape a “total slander against the Islamic system” and demanded in a sermon at Tehran University on Friday that Mr. Karroubi be prosecuted. “We expect the Islamic system to show an appropriate response to this,” he said.

Prayer leaders in Qum and Mashad delivered similar diatribes. Friday Prayer sermons usually reflect talking points given out by the office of Ayatollah Khamenei.

The speaker of Iran’s Parliament, Ali Larijani, had already dismissed Mr. Karroubi’s claims as “sheer lies” this week, saying an inquiry ordered days earlier had found no evidence that protesters detained in the demonstrations that followed the election had been raped.

Even before the rape claims emerged, hard-line political figures and clerics had been calling for the arrest of Mr. Karroubi, along with the leader of the opposition, Mir Hussein Moussavi, and former President Mohammad Khatami. In the course of a mass trial of reformists that began earlier this month, prosecutors have accused all three men of being linked to a conspiracy to topple Iran’s government through a “velvet revolution.”

But Mr. Karroubi appeared to be undaunted, and he pressed ahead with more claims of jailhouse sexual abuse in a statement posted on his party’s Web site late Thursday. He said he had received testimony from former prisoners that they had seen other detainees “forced to go naked, crawling on their hands and knees like animals, with prison guards riding on their backs.” Others told of watching as fellow prisoners guilty only of marching and chanting slogans were beaten to death, Mr. Karroubi said.

“Insults and criticism won’t make me silent,” Mr. Karroubi said, after dismissing Mr. Larijani’s quick investigation of the abuse claims as meaningless. “I’ll defend the rights of the people as long as I live and you can’t stop my hand, tongue and pen.”

The statement by the reformist former lawmakers appeared to be the strongest public attack yet on Ayatollah Khamenei. Long unquestioned, Ayatollah Khamenei’s status as a neutral arbiter and Islamic symbol has suffered since he prematurely blessed the election that many Iranians believe was rigged. In recent weeks, some protesters have begun chanting “death to Khamenei” — a phrase that was almost unimaginable before — and the same words have appeared in graffiti on buildings in Tehran.

The authors of the statement made their appeal to the Assembly of Experts, a clerical body that has the power to appoint the supreme leader and, in theory, to dismiss him. The statement is unlikely to have much impact beyond angering conservatives, who control many seats in the 86-member Assembly.

The former lawmakers praised Mr. Karroubi for publicizing the rape accusations and angrily dismissed the mass trial of reformists now under way as a Stalinesque show trial. They also echoed opposition complaints about the brutality of the crackdown that followed the protests.

A day before the statement appeared, one member of the Assembly of Experts, Ali Mohammad Dastgheib, wrote his own letter calling for the group to hold an emergency meeting, opposition Web sites reported.

“I am calling honestly and for the benefit of the country that the Assembly of Experts should convene an open meeting and look into people’s complaints, as well as those of Mr. Moussavi and Mr. Karroubi,” Mr. Dastgheib wrote.

Robert F. Worth reported from Beirut, Lebanon, and Nazila Fathi from Toronto.