This week, at start of the fourth mass trial of opposition supporters in Tehran, an Iranian prosecutor read another indictment accusing leading reformist politicians and an Iranian-American scholar named Kian Tajbakhsh of plotting to overthrow Iran’s government.
Iran’s judiciary continues to insist that the protest movement that began after the June 12 presidential election was not a spontaneous outpouring of disgust but part of a plot intended to bring about what the regime calls a “velvet revolution,” aided, they say, by foreign governments and the billionaire financier George Soros.
While Iran’s ruling cleric, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei did concede on Wednesday that it “has not been proven” that the post-election protests were foreign-led, he also reiterated the theory that opposition supporters did not flood Iran’s streets in the days after the election was declared a landslide victory for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad because they believed the count was rigged. As my colleague Michael Slackman reports, Ayatollah Khamenei told a group of university students in Tehran, “There is no doubt that the events were planned” in advance of the election.
Leaving aside the fact that there appears to be no real evidence, save for what appear to be forced confessions, that such a plot existed, it is striking that the leaders of Iran’s Islamic Republic appear to be obsessed with the peaceful transfer of power that took place in Czechoslovakia in 1989. To start with, the comparison is extremely unflattering to those in power. After the fall of the Berlin wall, the Czechoslovak Communist regime was so unpopular that it crumbled in a matter of days when it became clear that enforcing its will through violence against peaceful demonstrators was no longer an option.
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