Richard Beeston
timesonline.co.uk

Mir Hossein Mousavi makes an unlikely rebel leader. He is white-haired, soft-spoken and pale-faced. He was pulled out of retirement for one last campaign and looks like it. If he boarded a crowded London bus, he would probably be offered a seat.

What the Iranian authorities misjudged, however, when they rigged the vote in last month’s elections and returned President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power with an absurd landslide victory, was the character of the man they expected to accept defeat and bow out gracefully.

Yesterday Mr Mousavi counter-attacked by denouncing the crackdown on dissent and urging his supporters to continue their protests against the regime. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Mr Ahmadinejad may have the full might of the Iranian state at their disposal, but they will have to move carefully against their stubborn foe.

Mr Mousavi is no pro-Western liberal. He was a key figure in the Islamic revolution of 1979. He is best remembered for running the country’s economy successfully through the bleak years of the Iran-Iraq war.

Like many of his countrymen and women, he does not like being pushed around, bullied or having his intelligence insulted by people he regards as his intellectual inferiors. His wife is even less diplomatic. His support extends to millions of ordinary Iranians and among powerful figures in the political and clerical hierarchy, including two former presidents. This is now a fight to the finish. Iran faces a long and painful war of attrition, pitting the hardliners against Mr Mousavi’s green revolution. The regime will hope that the show of force will wear down the opposition, as it did ten years ago during student protests. Mr Mousavi hopes that June’s demonstrations were the opening salvo of a new revolution that will sweep the leadership from power just as the Shah was dethroned 30 years ago.

The outside world has few easy options. It cannot be seen to condone Mr Ahmadinejad’s stolen victory, but neither must it be seen to meddle in Iran’s internal affairs.

Iranians must decide for themselves who their leaders should be. After all, that was the whole point of the presidential elections in the first place.

Mir Hossein Mousavi declared today that he considered the new government "illegitimate", two weeks after he was defeated by the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in Iran's disputed presidential election.

In a statement posted on his website the moderate leader also called for the release of detained "children of the revolution" – a reference to the scores of reformist figures arrested since the 12 June poll.

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The man who has been orchestrating the crackdown on journalists and demonstrators since 12 June 2009, Tehran prosecutor general Said Mortazavi, has had a long career as a human rights predator.

It is Mortazavi who issues the warrants to the intelligence ministry and prosecutor’s office agents who arrest “suspects”. He prepares the prosecution cases, drafts the indictments and oversees interrogation. On the basis of past experience, we believe he participates actively in interrogation sessions.

Born in 1967 in the small town of Meybod, in the eastern province of Kerman, he went to secondary school before joining a militia created by Ayatollah Khomeiny in the 1980s. He began studying law at Tafat free university in Kerman province in 1985 without sitting an entrance test, taking advantage of a quota reserved for militiamen and the relatives of martyrs.

At the same time, he worked for two years as Tafat deputy prosecutor before becoming the head of the justice department in the province. His links with the “Motalefeh” current, a conservative wing of the regime with a great deal of influence within the judicial system, played a key role in his rise in the state apparatus. He was named as president of the 9th chamber of the Tehran court in 1992.

During a “media spring” that was made possible by the reformist Mohamad Khatami’s election as president in 1997, the ambitious Judge Mortazavi became the scourge of the pro-reform newspapers, acting at the Supreme Leader’s behest. After presiding Tribunal 1410, dubbed the “press tribunal” for having suspended hundreds of newspapers since April 2000, Mortazavi was appoint Tehran prosecutor general on 20 May 2003.

Prosecutor and, ironically, law professor at the Tehran faculty of journalism, Mortazavi’s persecution of the media has resulted in the suspension of dozens of newspapers and the jailing of many journalists, often tried behind closed doors and held in solitary confinement for months, as was confirmed by a UN delegation that included special rapporteur for freedom of expression Ambeyi Ligabo.

UN Human Rights Commission special representative Maurice Copithorne was told by a senior official in 2002 that Mortazavi was one of four judges being investigated by a judicial disciplinary court on suspicion of committing serious crimes. Copithorne had proposed at the time that he should be immediately relieved of his duties pending a decision by this court.

Mortazavi reportedly uses every kind of psychological and physical pressure and harassment when he conducts interrogations. His use of mistreatment has been confirmed several times.

Mortazavi is blamed for Iranian-Canadian photo-journalist Zahra Kazemi’s death in custody on July 2003. Arrested while photographing the families of detainees outside Tehran’s Evin prison on 23 June 2003, Kazemi was tortured during interrogation and died as a result of injuries to the head.

“Two official Iranian investigations confirmed that Mortazavi ordered the illegal arrest and detention of Ms. Kazemi that resulted in her torture and death,” Canadian foreign minister Lawrence Cannon said on 26 June. He also said there had been reports that Mortazavi falsified documents to cover up his involvement in her case. Canada continues to press Iran to carry out a credible investigation into her death.

In a crackdown on bloggers in 2004, Mortazavi used videoed confessions as a way to pressure some of those detained. As a result, Omid Memarian, Shahram Rafihzadeh, Rozbeh Mir Ebrahimi, Javad Gholam Tamayomi were all forced to accuse themselves of grotesque crimes they had never committed.

One of these bloggers, Rafihzadeh, the daily Etemad’s arts and culture editor, who was arrested on 7 September 2004 and released two months later, told Reporters Without Borders: “Mortazavi played a key role in the bloggers affair, both during the interrogations, in which he did not hesitate to use torture, and in the staging of the confessions, which he dictated himself.”

Rafihzadeh continued: “After we were released, we were summoned to Mortazavi’s office and he threatened to organise an ‘interview’ with the Fars News agency that all the media would attend. These forced confessions were as important as the actual trial. I remember that Mortazavi threatened us one day, saying, ‘The next time it will be 20 years if you don’t do what I say. And don’t forget that road accidents happen quickly in Iran, either to you or your family.’

“In these confessions, he wanted us to denounce journalists and pro-reform politicians. He also insisted a great deal that we talk about the Zahra Kazemi case, asking us to say that ‘Kazemi was invited to Iran by one of the reformist politicians’. He wanted to use our confessions to cover up his own involvement in the case.”

Another blogger, Omidreza Mirsayafi, who was arrested on Mortazavi’s orders, died in prison in suspicious circumstances on 18 March 2009. At the time, Reporters Without Borders called for an immediate investigation into his death.

Nowadays, the authorities, above all Mortazavi, are using the same methods now against those who have been arrested.

Reporters Without Borders

Iran said on Wednesday that 20 people were killed and more than 1,000 arrested in the wave of protests over the disputed presidential poll as the authorities kept up the pressure on the opposition.

"No policeman was killed in the Tehran riots but 20 rioters were killed," Iran's police chief Ahmadi Moghaddam said.

"Police arrested 1,032 people in the recent riots. Many have been released and the rest are being prosecuted in Tehran's public and revolutionary courts," he was quoted as saying by the Fars news agency.

Iran has warned the opposition it will not tolerate further protests after the powerful election watchdog the Guardians Council on Monday upheld the re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and dismissed complaints of fraud.

And hardline clerics rounded on Ahmadinejad's defeated rival Mir Hossein Mousavi, warning him to stop his campaign and accusing him of being "anti-revolutionary."

Tehran and other cities across Iran were roiled by a wave of opposition demonstrations over Ahmadinejad's June 12 election victory, triggering the worst crisis since the Islamic revolution in 1979.

But the opposition campaign appears to be waning in the face of a widespread crackdown by the authorities which have moved quickly to put down public demonstrations and rounded up scores of reformists and political activists.

The foreign media also remains banned from reporting from the streets under tough new restrictions imposed in the violent election aftermath.

Iran also halted the publication on Wednesday of a reformist party newspaper after its defeated presidential candidate Mehdi Karroubi said Ahmadinejad's re-election was invalid and that he did not consider his government legitimate.

Etemad Melli, owned by the party of the same name, is one of the few reformist publications to have survived a crackdown under Ahmadinejad's rule.

However, it chief editor Mohammad Ghoochani is among scores of reformist leaders and journalists detained in the wake of the disputed election.

Fars also said that three local British embassy remained in custody out of nine who were originally detained on allegations of stoking the unrest, an action that further exacerbated tense relations between Tehran and London.

Britain and its Western allies, accused by Iran of meddling in the election protests, have demanded the immediate release of the staff, with London dismissing as baseless the charges they were involved in the rioting.

A defiant Ahmadinejad on Tuesday hit out at world powers over their response to the unrest which has shaken the foundations of the Islamic regime and seen unprecedented criticism of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

But he cancelled a visit to Libya on Wednesday, where he was due to have a addressed a summit of African leaders in seaside town of Sirte at the invitation of Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi.

Supporters of Mousavi, Ahmadinejad's closest rival who won just 34 percent of the vote compared to 63 percent for the incumbent, also remained defiant, reiterating a demand for the cancellation of the vote.

But the 12-member Guardians Council warned defeated candidates that its decision on Monday to uphold official results giving the hardline incumbent a landslide victory were no longer subject to challenge.

And the reformist Combatant Clerics' Assembly said while it supported the right to protest against the result "escalating tensions and street protests are not the solution."

Hardline clerics also called for the authorities to sustain their crackdown on the protesters.

One cleric Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, even referred to Mousavi -- who was premier in the 1980s and a close aide to late revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini -- as being "anti-revolutionary and against the regime."

Uniformed agents of the Iranian regime’s State Security Forces on Tuesday caught damaging people’s property in central Tehran in a bid to spread fear among the local population and quell dissent.

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