Iran Watch Canada: Now Look what the Islamic regime of Khamenei-Ahmadinejad does to its own people !?

Iranian Dissident Says Planned March Will Test Regime
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
Published: February 8, 2011

IRAN WATCH CANADA :Excerpts from The New York Times interview with Mr. Mehdi Karoubi, the past parliament speaker of the Islamic Republic regime and one of the current green movement leader:

For the Iranian opposition, events in Cairo mirror the post-election protest movement in Iran in 2009, not the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and could give new life to the Green movement for political reform, which Mr. Karroubi said had largely been battered into submission by government oppression.

“Any kind of event that involves the rise of the people and the fight against dictatorship in the Muslim world and in the Arab world is in our benefit,” said Mr. Karroubi, 72, speaking in Persian from his home, where he is largely isolated. “Next Monday will be a test for the Green movement — if the government issues a permit, there will be a huge demonstration and it will show how alive the Green movement is.”

“If they are not going to allow their own people to protest, it goes against everything they are saying, and all they are doing to welcome the protests in Egypt is fake,“ Mr. Karroubi said.

Mr. Karroubi, while conceding that public activism had faded in the face of a harsh crackdown, said the Greens were still working for the kinds of basic rights they have always sought: free elections, freedom of assembly and freedom of speech.
The movement has tried to highlight the incongruity between the Iranian government’s oppression at home and the fact that it welcomes political protests elsewhere.


The Web site of Mir Hussein Moussavi, the other main opposition leader, recently displayed two pictures side by side. One showed the Egyptian police beating a protester, while the other was a similar photo of Tehran security forces. The Egyptian protester was labeled “heroic“ while the one in Iran was an “agent of imperialism.”

Mr. Karroubi said he was living under near house arrest, with two or three cars full of guards outside his house for most of the day, turning many visitors away. He had not talked with a foreign journalist in about six months, he said, although he has occasionally answered questions via e-mail. For the video interview, he wrapped a headset around the back of his neck because it would not fit over his white turban.

Mr. Karroubi said he was able to plan the call for a protest with Mr. Moussavi because the two had met recently at a wake, but otherwise they have had limited contact. They have not decided yet whether a march through downtown Tehran should be silent, he said.

Should the young Egyptian protesters succeed in fomenting change, that would bring added pressure on the Iranian government, Mr. Karroubi said. It would mean that both Turkey and Egypt, the most populous states in the region, are more democratic than Iran.

“It will show that Iran has been left behind, that it has not gone forward with the principles of the revolution that everything should be based on the vote of the people,” he said.
Still, he noted that while a failure of Arab protests would be a setback for the Greens, the reform movement would still continue.

“It could have a bad effect in Iran, but not that strong,” he said. “We have our own demands and our own desire for freedom in our own society — we were promised freedom with the revolution and never got it.”
Artin Afkhami contributed reporting from Washington.
A version of this article appeared in print on February 9, 2011, on page A14 of the New York edition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/09/world/middleeast/09iran.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Mehdi%20karoubi&st=cse