TEHRAN: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accused Barack Obama yesterday of behaving like his predecessor toward Tehran and said there was not much point in talking to Washington unless the US president apologized.
Obama said Tuesday he was “appalled and outraged” by a postelection crackdown and Washington withdrew invitations to Iranian diplomats to attend Independence Day celebrations on July 4 — stalling efforts to improve ties with Tehran.
“Mr. Obama made a mistake to say those things ... our question is why he fell into this trap and said things that previously (former President George W.) Bush used to say,” the semi-official Fars news agency quoted Ahmadinejad as saying.
“Do you want to speak with this tone? If that is your stance then what is left to talk about ... I hope you avoid interfering in Iran’s affairs and express your regret in a way that the Iranian nation is informed of it,” he said.
Defeated presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi meanwhile said that threats and pressure would not stop him from pursuing his campaign to scrap the results of the disputed election. “I won’t refrain from securing the rights of the Iranian people ... because of personal interests and the fear of threats,” he said in a statement on his newspaper website, Kalemeh.
Mousavi said he had come under pressure to “give up my demand for the election to be canceled” after he lodged a formal complaint over Ahmadinejad’s re-election and called for a new vote.
But the 67-year-old, who was premier in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution, said he would resist the pressure. “I cannot say that white is black and black is white. We should be honest. The solution is not that I say something which I don’t believe in.”
The ex-premier said he was ready to show how those who violated the election process “stood beside the main instigators of the recent riots and shed people’s blood on the ground.”
Newspapers reported yesterday that Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani and over 100 MPs refused to attend a victory dinner party hosted by Ahmadinejad. “Apart from 70 members of the revolution faction, which backs Ahmadinejad, only 30 other (conservatives) turned up,” the reformist Etemad Melli newspaper said, adding that 100 boycotted the event.
“Ali Larijani and his deputies were not there,” conservative MP Javad Arianmanesh was quoted as saying of the Wednesday evening’s event.
To add to the establishment’s discomfort, dissident preacher Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri warned that continued suppression of opposition protests could threaten the very basis of the Islamic republic.
“If Iranians cannot talk about their legitimate rights at peaceful gatherings and are instead suppressed, frustrations will build up which could possibly uproot the foundations of the government, no matter how powerful,” Montazeri said in a statement. It was the latest broadside fired against the regime by Montazeri, who was once tipped to take over from the father of the revolution Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini but fell out with the late leader before his death.
