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Montazeri slams Iranian clergy’s ‘absolute power’
Iran’s top dissident cleric Hossein Ali Montazeri on Saturday berated his country’s clergy for wielding “absolute power”, which he said was bad for Iran.
Just ask the Papal States...
“A government system cannot and must not be concentrated in the hands of one person,” Montazeri, 82, said in an interview with the weekly Welt am Sonntag to be published Sunday. “We need a collective government in which the people play a dominant role.”
He means without a clerical veto...
“The clergy’s absolute power is bad,” he added. Montazeri, one of just a few clerics who holds the rank of Grand Ayatollah, was once the designated successor to Iran’s Islamic revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, but was later placed under house arrest for five years in Qom.
That was shortly after absolute power corrupted Khomeini absolutely...

Posted by: Fred Pruitt 2003-11-09
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=21019