WHERE ARE Mehdi Karroubi and Mir Hossein Mousavi? Both leaders of Iran’s opposition and their wives, Fatemeh Karroubi and Zahra Rahnavard, notionally all under house arrest, have disappeared, their families say, following raids on their homes by security forces on February 24th. According to Karroubi’s website, a senior adviser to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad commanded the forces that abducted him. But the government refuses even to acknowledge the detentions.
There is every reason to fear for their lives. Both men are former loyalists who turned against the regime and earned the bitter hatred of Ahmadinejad when they stood against him in the 2009 poll that led to his disputed re-election. Responding to calls from parliament for their arrest and execution – MPs chanting in unison “Mousavi, Karroubi should be hanged!” – the authorities had put the two men and their wives under “complete” house arrest after anti-government protests on February 14th, the first such demonstration for a year. Now they have vanished, like other extrajudicial “disappeared”, presumably into the black hole that is the brutal Iranian prison system. International pressure must be brought on Tehran to free all four or to allow them to respond before a fair trial to the ludicrous charges being made against them.
While praising the Egyptian and Tunisian events as Islamic uprisings in the tradition of Iran’s own 1979 revolution, the Ahmadinejad regime has demonstrated its real feelings about people power by batoning demonstrators off the streets. And yesterday again, a heavy presence by security forces on the streets of Tehran prevented any response to calls by opposition groups to mark International Women’s Day.
As the crackdown continued Iran’s hardliners yesterday also consolidated power after former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani stepped down from his post as head of the country’s most powerful clerical committee, the Assembly of Experts, the body charged with choosing or dismissing Iran’s supreme leader. President from 1989 to 1997 and Iran’s great survivor, he had fallen out with the Ahmadinejad clique who increasingly dominate all aspects of Iranian life. He had expressed some sympathy with opposition protests following the election, has supported improving relations with the West, and has tried to play a bridging role between hardliners and the opposition. Another brick in the Ahmadinejad bunker.