Disqualifying 1,000 candidates for Presidential election sham demonstrates clerical regime’s illegitimacy and lack of future
The mullahs’ Guardian Council disqualified more than 1,000 candidates for the upcoming presidential election sham, approving only six as being eligible to run All those disqualified had affirmed their loyalty to the velayat-e faqih system (the supremacy of clerical leadership) and many were among the regime’s most senior leaders in the past twenty-five years.
Candidates approved by the Guardian Council are among the most ruthless henchmen and criminals in Iran’s contemporary history and by any standard have committed crimes against humanity.
The leading candidate, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, has played the key role in the atrocities perpetrated by the clerical regime, including the execution of 120,000 political prisoners, the assassination of dissidents abroad and the chain murders of the 1990s in Iran. Former Majlis Speaker Mehdi Karrubi was among Khomeini’s confidants and openly endorsed Khomeini’s fatwa to massacre more than 30,000 political prisoners in 1988.
The other four candidates, the Revolutionary Guards ex-commander in chief Maj. Gen. Mohsen Rezai, former head of the state radio and television Brig. Gen. Ali Larijani, former commander of the State Security Forces Brig. Gen. Mohammad Baser Qablibaf, and Tehran’s mayor Brig. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, have long records in murdering and cracking down on the Iranian people.
Reiterating that elections in Iran were merely a means to solidify the reign of religious fascism, the Iranian Resistance’s President-elect Maryam Rajavi said, “The election farce is neither free, nor fair, nor legitimate.” “The Iranian nation rejects and boycotts election masquerades by the velayat-e faqih regime,” she added, calling on the international community and all governments around the world to declare the presidential election sham illegitimate and null and stand with the demands of the Iranian people for democracy and freedom.
Pointing to the candidates’ records, Mrs. Rajavi said, “Those who would try to portray Rafsanjani as pragmatic, or call Revolutionary Guards commanders as moderates in order to justify the policy of appeasement, are not merely mollifying the regime. They are staining their hands with the blood of the Iranian nation. No one can any longer find any justification for continuing the policy of appeasement or playing the reform game within this regime.”
Secretariat of the National Council of Resistance of Iran
May 23, 2005
