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| Syria-Lebanon-Iran |
| Iran opposition leader, wife visit slain man's family |
| 2009-07-15 |
| Reporting from Beirut — Iran's leading opposition figure and his wife emerged Tuesday night to pay their respects to the family of a 19-year-old man slain during recent weeks of violence, according to witnesses and reports on news websites. Mir-Hossein Mousavi and his popular wife, Zahra Rahnavard, visited the family of Sohrab Aarabi in Tehran, paying tribute to the teenager whose death and whose mother's desperate weeks-long quest to find her son have emerged as a symbol of the protest movement against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Photographs posted on the Gooya website showed the couple swarmed by supporters as they approached the family's home in the city's north-central Apadana district. Mousavi has been relatively quiet in recent days as authorities successfully put down protests that erupted when Ahmadinejad was declared the winner of their election faceoff last month. But Mousavi plans to forge a new reformist political front that would challenge the country's dominant conservatives, and will have most of the rights given to a political party, his top aide Ali-Reza Beheshti said Tuesday. "Establishing the front is on the agenda of Mir-Hossein Mousavi, and we will announce the relevant news in the near future," Beheshti, the son of a famous cleric, told the semiofficial Iranian Labor News Agency, or ILNA. Hundreds of thousands of Mousavi's green-clad supporters took to the streets last month in displays of civil disobedience, asserting that the June 12 election was rigged. Mousavi could build on the momentum created by the so-called green wave to create a formidable force. Reformists have tried for years to break through Iran's legal and political restrictions and fend off ideological challenges and accusations of complicity with the West to obtain and exercise power. The Islamic Iran Participation Front, a reformist political grouping, has been operating for years without gaining influence. Unlike a party, a front cannot call political rallies. But Mousavi's new organization could gain political muscle with the help of Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a powerful cleric who is a pillar of Mousavi's support. Rafsanjani said he would endorse Mousavi's plan for a "united moderation front," according to Mohammad Hashemi, his brother. "He had even formulated the charter to a certain extent, but this front did not materialize for certain reasons," he told ILNA. At least one prominent conservative, Habibollah Asgaroladi, head of the decades-old Islamic Coalition Party, endorsed the creation of a Mousavi-led political group. "Establishing a party to voice one's ideas and political perceptions is a wise move," he said, according to the website of the state-owned Press TV channel. |
| Posted by:Steve White |