TEHRAN: Iran’s supreme leader formally endorsed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for a second term as president on Monday in a ceremony that sought to portray unity among the country’s leadership but was snubbed by prominent critics of the disputed election.
At the ceremony, Khamenei prevented Ahmadinejad from kissing his hand. “Just like four years ago ... Ahmadinejad wanted to kiss his hand, but the leader prevented him from doing so,” the official IRNA news agency said. “So then he (Ahmadinejad) asked that he be allowed to kiss the leader’s shoulder and the request was granted by the leader with a smile,” IRNA reported.
The event was boycotted by two former presidents — Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami — as well as defeated pro-reform candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi, state media reported.
Also, no one from the family of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of the 1979 revolution, attended. Khomenei’s grandson, Hasan Khomeini, has supported the reformists. Reformist websites say he deliberately left Iran to avoid attending this week’s inauguration events.
“I am endorsing the presidency of this brave, hard-working and wise man as the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Khamenei said, in praise of Ahmadinejad who will be sworn in by Parliament on Wednesday.
He criticized Ahmadinejad’s opponents, saying “some elites failed (the political test of) the election,” state television said.
Iranian officials have denied any fraud in the June 12 election, in which Ahmadinejad was declared to have won 63 percent of 40 million votes cast against 34 percent for Mousavi, in the face of persistent objections by moderates and reformers.
After the ceremony hundreds of Mousavi supporters, some of them honking car horns, headed toward a central Tehran square to stage protests. But riot police deployed in force prevented any demonstration, witnesses said.
“The people were not very aggressive and left when police told them to,” a witness said. The Fars news agency said Karoubi briefly showed up with around 100 supporters at a key intersection in central Tehran.
Ahmadinejad’s landslide victory in the election was met with an outpouring of public anger and opposition complaints the vote was rigged. At least 30 people were killed and several thousand protesters rounded up, including reform figures and journalists. More than 100 people, including many prominent reformist political figures, are facing trial for allegedly supporting the postelection unrest.
The wife of a former Iranian vice president on trial said his televised confessions were forced. Fahimeh Mousavinejad told The Associated Press that her husband, Mohammad Ali Abtahi, seemed “disoriented” and was “no doubt” drugged when she visited him in jail two days before the televised start of the trial on Saturday. She suggested he may have also been drugged in court.
“I personally believe what he has gone through has made him speak the way he has,” Mousavinejad said in a telephone interview.
