A senior member of the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, who currently is a political prisoner, Abolfazl Ghadyani, issued a statement, in which described the recent protests as being the most widespread since the revolution and considered Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as the main culprit in catalyzing the protests.
Ghadyani said to the Radio Zamaneh Website, “Just as experts and those sympathetic to this land had predicted implicitly and explicitly, because of economic corruption and inefficiency of Velayat-e Faqih and suppression of legitimate civil and political freedoms, the deprived and abandoned people are at end of their rope. Institutions supervised by Khamenei have actually 60% of Iran’s economy in their own possession and are immune from audit and accountability; they are looting public properties and national wealth.” He added, “To stay immune from accountability, he has created the most corrupt and obedient judicial system in Iran’s contemporary history and has suppressed, intimidated and restricted the media and its critics. To sustain his despotic rule, Khamenei has crushed Iran’s economically productive class, forcing talented young people to emigrate from their motherland.” Furthermore, he said, “Khamenei’s totalitarianism and his endless greed for power have changed political stability in this land into an impossible dream, destroying the grounds for productive investments. Khamenei, without public consensus, has spent the wealth of this oppressed people in Syria and other places for keeping corrupt dictators in power and luring people close to him. This black record and endless love of power and position leave no room for change in Khamenei’s manners, and according to the clear stipulation of Article 27 in the constitutional law, this is people’s natural right to protest this person’s despotism and demand their denied rights.” He ended, “Apart from the blame of Khamenei and his followers, I think there has been another failure, which has played an effective role in the manifestation of these protests as such. Unfortunately, it must be said that reformists whose interpretation of political activities, at least currently, is based on surrendering and yielding are partly to be blamed for the current conditions. Unfortunately, this interpretation of political activities has resulted in increasingly retreating in front of violations of a despot against the rights of the nation, and to justify such retreats, strange justifications have been created.”
