Call for probe into ayatollah’s leadership

A GROUP of former reformist lawmakers appealed to a powerful clerical body in Iran to investigate Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s qualification to rule in an unprecedented challenge to the country’s most powerful man over the post-election crackdown.

The former lawmakers’ appeal was to the Assembly of Experts, a body of clerics that under Iranian law has the power to name the supreme leader and, in theory, to remove him — though such a move has never been attempted. There was no response from the assembly to the letter.

But even if the call is ignored and is only symbolic, it was the most direct challenge to Khamenei yet in the turmoil that has embroiled Iran since its disputed June 12 presidential election. The letter breaks a major taboo among Iran’s political classes against overtly targeting Khamenei, whose position at the top of the political-clerical hierarchy has long been unquestioned. The letter, reported in opposition websites, came from a group of former lawmakers, most of them from the reform camp. The reports did not say how many signed the letter.

In it, they denounce the crackdown, in which hundreds of protesters and opposition politicians were arrested and, the opposition says, 69 people were killed.

They also denounced the trial that began this month of 100 politicians and activists accused of seeking to topple the Islamic Republic through the wave of protests that erupted over the election. The letter calls it a “show trial” and a “Stalinesque court” and said Kahrizak prison — the facility on Tehran’s outskirts where alleged abuse of prisoners took place — was worse than the US prisons at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.

The former lawmakers said the supreme leader is responsible for forces that carried out the crackdown and under the constitution “the supreme leader is on the same level as the rest of the people before the law”.

The former lawmakers “demand a legal probe on the basis of article 111 of the constitution, which is a responsibility of the experts assembly”, the letter said.

Article 11 says that if the supreme leader “becomes incapable of fulfilling his constitutional duties”, he will be dismissed. The letter was addressed to Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a powerful former president and cleric who heads the assembly. Rafsanjani has sided with the opposition in the election crisis, but accepting to investigate the supreme leader would likely be too dramatic a step for him to take. Around two-thirds of the 86-member assembly are considered Khamenei loyalists and would oppose such a move.

There was no sign opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, who claims to have won the election, backs the letter, but it comes at a time when the clerical leadership have been deeply embarrassed by the claims of torture and abuse against prisoners.