Tehran, August 18: Iran’s top reformist leaders are all joining the “Green Path of Hope,” a political movement created to challenge the ruling system after a government crackdown crushed massive street protests.
The movement was created by Mir Hossein Mousavi, the top opposition candidate in disputed June 12 presidential elections.
Ali Reza Beheshti, a top aide to Mousavi, said Tuesday that former president Mohammad Khatami and defeated reformist candidate Mahdi Karroubi are joining the movement.
Beheshti is quoted in several reformist websites as saying that the “Green Path of Hope” will be a rallying point for the opposition to continue its campaign against the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which it calls illegitimate.
Two prominent Iranian opposition activists have been hospitalized, one after being beaten by his jailers for refusing to attend trial, the other from a nine-day hunger strike, a reformist news Web site reported Tuesday.
Feizollah Arabsorkhi, a prominent member of a reformist political party, was severely beaten by his jailers at Evin prison when he wouldn’t attend his trial, the Iran Green Wave Camp Web site said.
He was sent to Tehran’s Baghiatollah-al-Azam military hospital, controlled by the Revolutionary Guards, an elite military unit that led the crackdown against protesters.
Ahmad Zeidabadi, a journalist and former student leader, is also in poor health after being forced to break his hunger strike on Monday, added the site. He stopped eating after his Aug. 8 court appearance.
Zeidabadi leads a group of reformists who were once members of Iran’s largest student organization, the Office for Fostering Unity.
The two activists are among more than 100 prominent opposition supporters on trial since Aug. 1 in Iran on accusations of plotting to overthrow the clerical leadership through the protests that broke out after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s disputed June 12 re-election.
The defendants at the mass trial include a former Iranian vice president and other former senior government officials linked to the country’s pro-reform movement, French and Iranian-American academics, employees of the British and French embassies, and an Iranian-Canadian reporter for Newsweek magazine.
They are charged with plotting a “soft revolution” against the Islamic theocracy. The opposition denies the accusations and dismisses what it calls a “show trial.”
Some of the defendants have given televised confessions during their court appearances, though rights groups say such admissions are likely coerced.
The opposition says the crackdown on the demonstrations killed at least 69 people. The government has confirmed 30 people have died in the country’s worst unrest since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
The opposition says some of them died in prison from beatings and other abuse. Senior police and judiciary officials have tried to calm public outrage by acknowledging that some detainees were beaten by their jailers but claimed that the three known deaths that occured at Kahrizak prison, on the outskirts of the capital Tehran, were due to illness.
-Agencies