Iranian opposition leader, MirHosein Mousavi says: “The starting point of what is going on in the streets of Tunisia, Sanaa, Cairo, Alexandria and Suez is the mass demonstrations of millions of Iranians in June of 2009 in Tehran.”
In a statement on Kaleme website Mousavi said the slogans being chanted in the streets of Egypt area reflections of “Where’s my vote?” chanted by Iranian crowds following the 2009 presidential elections.
“It is enough to compare the recent election procedures in Egypt with our own elections and the fact that the head of the Guardian Council in Iran says the millions of Green citizens of Iran are irrelevant to national elections.”
Iran’s presidential election of 2009 was challenged by the opposing candidates of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with allegations of vote rigging. Millions of Iranians took to the streets chanting “where is my vote?” but were put down with extreme state violence and sustained arrested that continue even today.
In the mean time, Islamic Republic authorities and state media claim the uprisings in the Arab nations are in fact a continuation of the 1979 Revolution in Iran.
MirHosein Mousavi, who was the chief opponent of Ahmadienjad in the 2009 elections, draws parallels between the oppression of social networks, the media and the internet as practiced in the past year by the Islamic Republic authorities and similar policies used by “collapsing systems” in the Arab world and the Middle East.
Mousavi describes the recent events in the Middle East as the “overhaul of oppressive regimes that hold the fate of all neighbouring nations in its clutches.”
Egyptian protesters are in their fifth day of protests today and are now demanding the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak.
“They refer to the anger of the Egyptian people but they do not say that this rage is the result of inefficiencies and corruption in the highest strata of the government and the waste of public treasury as well as stopping people from talking and breaking of pens and executions and executions and even more executions as well as using the gallows to ensure fear amongst the people,” Mousavi writes.
President Hosni Mubarak made promises of reform to Egyptians in a broadcast message today and called for the resignation of the government.
