Mousavi: 'Green Movement made nation reconciliation possible'

GVF -- In a meeting with family members of the veterans of the Iran-Iraq war, Mir Hossein Mousavi pointed out the positive impact of the Green Movement on “unity and resistance until the desired changes were realised in the country.”

According to the Kaleme website, Mousavi said that the Green Movement had brought about “compassion and closeness” among different sectors of society and added that what was happening in the country “on a national scale” was a continuation of the long human chain from [Tehran’s] Tajrish square to the Rah Ahan square just four days before the 2009 presidential election. “With all our differences of opinion, beliefs, cultures and ethnicities, we will gradually cease to stutter and we will be able to converse with one another with more ease.”

“The political factions, which had previously been split up as a result of wrongful policies, are gradually coming closer together. They negotiate with each other and [can] sit at one [table]. What brings them together is their struggle for freedom, justice and reaching an understanding to protect the rights of the nation. The barriers drawn between ‘outsider’ and ‘insider’ are slowly fading away and instead there is interaction and dialogue.”

“Thanks to the people’s Green Movement, today more than ever before, the foundations have been laid for national reconciliation, amity and unity between various cultures, ethnicities, Shiites, Sunnis and all sectors,” Mousavi said during the meeting. However, he noted that “a certain group” in the country saw their own interests in “dividing and tearing apart” the people in the name of “fighting against the [so-called] soft war.”

“The corrupt movements that today, ridicule sacred [religious beliefs] in cyber space, are rooted in the billions of Tomans [millions of dollars] spent in the name of ‘cyber warfare’ and the ‘cyber army’,” Mousavi said. “In the same way that they [the authorities] transferred national media into divisive and one-sided ones with their meddling, they now want to contaminate the Green Movement’s cyber space with their viruses in order to weaken our Islamic nation’s trust in this beautiful window [of opportunity] that has been opened, but this conspiracy will have a reverse effect.”

The popular reformist leader expressed dismay over “corruption and oppression” in the Islamic Republic and added, “the establishment is unable to create the necessary changes within itself according to global and domestic changes, [and] this is natural, because the most effective element for achieving the desired changes is the people’s involvement in all affairs and a respect for their right to determine their destiny and their rights as citizens.” Mousavi also reminded those present that “oppression” was the equivalent of “destruction of a kingdom.”

The 2009 presidential candidate also compared Iran’s modern-day prisons with the dungeons of the Abbasid Caliphs Al Mansour and Harun al-Rashid (7-8th century), saying that even those who wishing to launch lawsuits against the hard-liners were being imprisoned, and the “slanderers and the bodies sponsoring them are out of the judiciary’s reach.”

In the end, the former prime minister argued, “it is the people’s votes that can save the country from its current crisis and return energy and liveliness to the public.”