TEHRAN: Defeated Iranian presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi yesterday rejected authorities’ proposals for a partial recount of votes from this month’s election and repeated his demand the entire ballot be annulled.
Iran’s top legislative body, the Guardian Council, had offered to recount 10 percent of ballot boxes from the June 12 vote in the presence of senior officials representing the government and opposition.
“This kind of recount will not remove ambiguities ... There is no other way but annulment of the vote ... Some members of this committee are not impartial,” Mousavi said in a statement posted on his website.
Another beaten candidate, pro-reform preacher Mehdi Karoubi, also rejected the partial recount offer in a statement on his site.
The development came after Iran’s top political arbitration body, the Expediency Council, called on all candidates to cooperate with the panel supervising the partial recount on the orders of the Guardians Council, ISNA news agency said. One of the defeated candidates, Mohsen Rezai, said he was prepared to serve on the panel and urged fellow losers, Mousavi and Karoubi, to join him. Guardian Council spokesman Abbasali Kadkhodai earlier said none of the candidates had named representatives to the recount panel as an evening deadline passed. “As far as I know and as far as the media have said, they have not forwarded the names of their representatives who are supposed to be part of the panel to supervise the recount,” Kadkhodai told the Mehr news agency. The authorities meanwhile applied steady pressure on Mousavi to fall in line as one of his erstwhile supporters denounced him and another was barred from leaving the country.
The official IRNA news agency reported yesterday that Tehran has banned Abolfazl Fateh, head of Mousavi’s media office, from leaving Iran. Fateh said the ban would not change his political stance, adding he was barred from leaving Iran because of his role in postelection developments. “Such pressures cannot push people like me to change our political stances,” he told IRNA.
Iranian authorities have used a combination of warnings, arrests and the threat of police action over the last week to drive mass rallies off Tehran’s street with smaller gatherings dispersed with tear gas and baton charges. State media have said 20 people were killed in violence since the election. The editor of a newspaper that campaigned for Mousavi accused him yesterday of “causing” the deaths of Iranians in the protests. Amir Hossein Mahdavi, 27, told reporters gathered at ISNA news agency he was also a member of the Islamic Revolution Mojahedeen Organization, one of the key reformist groups that backed Mousavi in the poll.
“Now that Mousavi’s stirring statements have caused the killing of some compatriots, he is trapped” by his misjudgment, said Mahdavi, who edited Andisheh No, a four-page newspaper dedicated to covering the moderate candidate’s campaign.
