Iran Live Coverage: Regime Explains --- Talk of "Free Elections" Is "Sedition"

0748 GMT: Almost two weeks ago, the Supreme Leader set down a marker for June's Presidential contest. While Iran had the free-est elections in the world, someone who spoke of "free election" only aided the Islamic Republic's enemies.

Some people apparently did not get the message. Former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, in particular, gave a barbed response that it was "the Iranian people (implication: not the Supreme Leader) who paved the way to free elections". The Supreme Leader's representative, Ali Saeedi, complicated matters by indicating that the "duty" of the Revolutionary Guardsd was to "engineer" the elections.

Confused?

Commander Yadollah Javani, the head of the Political Bureau of the Revolutionary Guards, has stepped in with the lead article the lead article in the Guards’ weekly newspaper, Sobh-e Sadegh. He answers the question, “Is the Slogan of ‘Free Election’ the Code of Another Sedition?”

In 2009 the biggest and most complex conspiracy against the Islamic Revolution and the established religious regime in Iran took place. In this complicated conspiracy, alongside global arrogance under American leadership and the anti-revolutionary movement, forces with a revolutionary past and [once] possessing immense responsibilities in the Islamic regime active participated.

This conspiracy entered the country on the stage of sedition. The approaches of the movement, claiming to be Reformist, pursued political power and adopted a strategy for obtaining executive power in the 2009 election --- at any price and with the use of any possible means, tool, and method....

Now that we are on the verge of the 11^th Presidential election, is it possible in the course of this election another conspiracy and sedition will occur?... Is it possible that the slogan of “free election”..., proclaimed by some of the domestic political spectrum and accompanied by foreign anti-revolutionaries, is the beginning of a road that will result in another sedition in the 2013 election?...

When the election in Iran is free in the framework of the law and is healthy, why do a number both inside and outside, repeat "the free nature of the election" in the form of a slogan? Does the regime want to hold an unfree election?

(hat tip to Eskandar Sadeghi Boroujerdi for translation)

Just as interesting as Javani's effective admission that the Guards fear a repeat of protests of 2009 is his naming of possible culprits in the "free election/sedition" conspiracy. Rafsanjani gets special mention for his comments just before the last Presidential vote, when he warned of manipulation of ballots:

The repetition of the same kind of views with respect to the election and the creation of suspicion regarding its health, was the introduction for the scenario of fraud and expressing that great lie and street campaigns that damaged the security of the country and the credibility of the Islamic regime.

Others named by Javani for inappropriate comments: former President Mohammad Khatami; former Minister of Interior Abdolvahab Mousavi Lari; reformist cleric Ali Akbar Mousavi Khoeiniha; the son of the late Shah, Reza Pahlavi; and  resdient Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. 

from EA WorldView: EA Iran

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