TEHRAN, Iran — President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for the prosecution of Iran’s top opposition leaders Friday, backing hard-liners pushing for escalation of the postelection crackdown.
Ahmadinejad’s speech reflected the increasing bitterness of what has become Iran’s most tumultuous political crisis in decades.
Although there were calls for unity in the weeks after the disputed June presidential election, the confrontation between the clerical leadership and the opposition has begun to look increasingly like an all-or-nothing fight.
Hard-liners in the leadership paint the entire reform movement as a tool of foreign enemies bent on overthrowing the cleric-led Islamic Republic. The opposition counters that the ruling system is losing its religious and political legitimacy because of the harshness of the post-election crackdown.
More than 100 prominent opposition politicians and activists have been on trial on charges of seeking to topple the clerical leadership through a “velvet revolution.” But so far, the top rung of the opposition — Mir Hossein Mousavi, who claims to have won the June 12 election, and his allies Mahdi Karroubi and former President Mohammad Khatami — have not been touched.
This week, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei seemed to rule out such arrests, saying he saw no evidence the top opposition leaders were “stooges” of foreign enemies.
Powerful forces, however, are pushing for their arrest, including senior hard-line clerics in the ruling establishment and commanders of the Revolutionary Guard. For the first time, Ahmadinejad joined their calls in a speech before a crowd of thousands at Tehran University ahead of weekly Friday prayers.
He said those on trial were “second-tier” elements who had been misled into organizing postelection protests in support of Mousavi. They should be treated with “Islamic mercy,” he said, while those higher up should be punished.
