Iran Feature: Has the Revolutionary Guard Admitted that Presidential Vote was a Fraud? (Sahimi)

Muhammad Sahimi writes for Tehran Bureau:

Seven leading Reformist political figures have filed a lawsuit against several commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for their intervention in Iran's rigged presidential election of June 12, 2009, and its aftermath. The seven plaintiffs include four members of the Organization of Islamic Revolution Mojahedin (OIRM) -- Behzad Nabavi, Mostafa Tajzadeh, Dr. Mohsen Aminzadeh, and Fayzollah Arabsorkhi -- and three members of the Islamic Iran Participation Front (IIPF) -- Dr. Mohsen Mirdamadi, Dr. Abdollah Ramezan-Zadeh, and Mohsen Safaei-Farahani. They describe in their lawsuit how the Guard commanders planned the election "victory" of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad long in advance and what they did in order to achieve their goal. The OIRM and IIPF are the two leading Reformist political groups to have been outlawed by the judiciary. All seven plaintiffs were arrested almost immediately after the election. After Stalinist-style show trials, they were all given long jail sentences.

Nabavi served in the government in the 1980s, and was deputy speaker of the 6th Majles (parliament) from 2000 to 2004. Tajzadeh was deputy interior minister in the first Khatami administration. Aminzadeh was deputy foreign minister and Arabsorkhi was deputy agriculture minister in both Khatami administrations. Mirdamadi, one of the three main leaders of the students who took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in November 1979, was chairman of the National Security Committee of the Majles in 2000-4, and is currently secretary-general of the IIPC. Ramezan-Zadeh, formerly governor-general of Kurdistan province, was chief government spokesman in the second Khatami administration. Safaei-Farahani was a Majles representative from Tehran in 2000-4.

The basis for the lawsuit is a speech given by a hitherto little-known but high-ranking Guard officer, Sardar (commander) Moshfegh, who is linked with the Guards' intelligence unit and is deputy director of intelligence for the Sarallah military base. Moshfegh delivered the speech in question to a group of clerics in Mashhad last fall. Quoting from the speech, the plaintiffs point out how their arrest warrants were requested by the Guard command center in Sarallah several days prior to the election. Nabavi and others have previously said that when the security forces arrested them, the warrants were dated before the election.

The lawsuit also describes how Moshfegh bragged about the Guard commanders' plans for subverting the campaigns of the Reformist candidates long before it was even known which individuals would run; what the Guards did to disrupt the work of Mir Hossein Mousavi campaign's 40,000 volunteer election monitors on the eve of the vote; and how they eavesdropped on the internal discussions of the campaigns of Mousavi and the other Reformist candidate, Mehdi Karroubi. A fundamentalist blogger, Mohammad Javan Akhavan, who claims to be an engineering student, has posted Moshfegh's speech (available in Persian here and here).

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