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Friday
Dec182009

Latest Iran Video: Mehdi Karroubi Interview with BBC (17 December)

A rather strange "interview" of Mehdi Karroubi on BBC's flagship news programme Newsnight last evening. The correspondent, Jon Leyne, frittered away the first minutes talking about how "extraordinary" it was that Karroubi was able to speak to a Western media outlet, surfing on the cleric's own words about the Iranian regime's clamp-down on communications.

In fact, Karroubi has been interviewed by the Los Angeles Times and Le Monde in recent weeks, so the situation is more complicated than presented here. The regime will allow a window for Karroubi to speak to the "outside" world; it is his profile inside Iran that is of more concern to them. So Leyne's "headline" on the interview --- that this was just Ayatollah Khomeini speaking to the Western media on the eve of the 1979 Islamic Revolution --- seems to be hyperbolic.

The second half of the clip is better, with Karroubi's (too-brief, as edited by the BBC) reflections on the abuse of detainees, as well as his comments on President Ahmadinejad and the possible emergence of a "radical" Green Movement.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocw2tB0G3jM[/youtube]

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