Analysis: Call for harmony strikes note of discord in Iran
Mir Hossein Mousavi had called on his supporters to protest until a second election was ordered
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Friday, 19, Jun 2009 04:33
By Matthew Champion.
Never before have Friday prayers at Tehran University attracted such attention.
Not only was Iran's supreme leader making a rare appearance to deliver the sermon, but it came during the biggest political crisis in the history of the Islamic Republic.
Before the address, delivered before thousands and broadcast live by Iranian state television and around the world, the question had been how Ayatollah Ali Khamenei could steer clear of a stunning volte-face in his backing of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and avoid alienating hundreds of thousands of people marching through the streets of the capital on a daily basis chanting "death to the dictator".
In the end he decided not to.
Full story: Ayatollah says Ahmadinejad is the president
The ayatollah, who as his title suggests has the final word on everything in the Islamic Republic, came down on the side of the incumbent president more explicitly than anyone predicted.
"There is 11 million votes' difference," he said to the waiting ears of a nation.
"How one can rig 11 million votes?"
Unfortunately for the Iranian authorities that is exactly what Mousavi supporters are asking. The former prime minister is yet to respond to his supreme leader's call for protests to end immediately and all Iranians to unite behind their elected president, Ahmadinejad.
The president was in the front row of the many in Tehran University to hear the ayatollah deliver his sermon. Mousavi may have been present but, tellingly, state television did not cut to him and the supreme leader refrained from mentioning him by name.
His bid to end the discord that has divided the country since last Saturday is an ambitious one.
Ayatollah Khamenei described the four candidates in last week's election as "brothers", insisting they were all partners in the continuation of the Iranian Revolution.
The election was not a dispute, in the eyes of the ayatollah, but a celebration of Iranian unity and religious democracy; a chance to rejoice in what he claimed was the highest-ever turnout in a major election (85 per cent).
The key question now is whether the hundreds of thousands - some say millions - of people who have taken to the streets demanding a new election will accept their supreme leader's version of events.
Celebrating a high turnout is all well and good, but Mousavi supporters will claim it is more important the crosses they put in the boxes were attributed to the right man.
One thing that is certain from today's sermon was that the ayatollah is more than happy to entrench Iran's western isolation.
Who was really to blame for the turmoil on Iran's streets and in its politics? Zionists, according to the ayatollah, who also found time to brand the British government and its mouthpiece the BBC as the "most evil" of Iran's enemies.
If the ayatollah has his way, some things will never change.
It's now up to Iran's pro-Mousavi, green-clad youth to determine whether this will always be so.